Theory of Forms

In the poem “I Knew a Man by Sight”, the author Henry David Thoreau describes how two strangers that never talked before met in their life and became best friends. The speaker of this poem might be the author Thoreau himself since it’s written in first person point view, however, the event that Thoreau describes is two strangers meeting in multiple places such as the speaker’s house and a lane 3 miles away from his house and how they became best friend. The poem has a rhyme scheme pattern of…

Throughout this unit I read several poems that portrayed freedom in various different ways. These poems all showed aspects of freedom in one way or another. To be more specific, the poems that I really thought depicted freedom are “Dream variations” and “I too” by Langston Hughes. In addition to those is the poem “Sympathy” by Paul Laurence Dunbar. The poem “Dream Variations” written by the poet Langston Hughes shows many examples of the desire for freedom. For instance, this poem mainly is…

The Way We Were When I was a kid, I used to pretend I was an agent, on a top-secret quest to stop the mal-intentioned leader of a powerful nation from detonating a bomb or winning a war, completing the final step in a somehow lethal trade agreement. In my imagination, there was no evil too big overcome, no plot too complex to be thwarted, no genius too clever to be out-smarted. And I was always the one to stop him, to figure everything out at the last minute and save the world. As an…

Synopsis: A journey through the narrators St. Louis. Response: The stream of conscious like flow of this poem works so well with the form in creating movement. I felt as though I was following along as the narrator recanted their memories of the streets. One of my favorite stanzas is; “ cars loaded wit families / fellas from the factory / one or two practical nurses / black / become our trenches / some dig into cement wit elbows / under engines / do not be seen / in yr hometown / after sunset we…

In the poem “The Red Wheelbarrow”, William Carlos Williams uses both imagery and word order to create a picture in his reader’s minds. The first initial picture that is formed, in my opinion, is of a farm setting; readers can visualize a red wheelbarrow, wet, with white chickens around it. However, if we take a closer look at the words, we are be able to see a much more elaborate representation than just an ordinary farm scene. Williams’s placement of particular words, in this poem, is just as…

Remembrance and Recognition. As Camara Laye once said “all dancers have a cumulative tendency because each beat of the Tom-Tom has an almost irresistible appeal. Soon those who were just spectators would dance too.” People enjoy learning about others and even expressing what their own lives are like. All of the stories, which take place in Senegal and Guinea. Given the region, the writing is different than America’s poetry. The poems in question are “Prayer to the Mask, Letter to a Poet,…

The poem With rue my heart is laden by A.E. Houseman is conveying the past and future. Though the poem might be short, it is split into crucial and profound events in the author’s life as he refers to his memories, as claimed, “For golden friends I had”. This quote reveals that the poet is remembering all his friends as he uses past tense language, “had”. By the use of “had”, we can assume that the poet’s friends are pasted away or not his friends any more. The poet not only states his memories,…

This poem is a revelation. When beginning to read this poem, you are hit early on with many questions just after reading the title, We wear the mask. You begin to ask, who is we? What is significant about this mask? Why are they wearing a mask? I’ve read this poem numerous amounts of times and I believe I have finally developed my meaning of it. Dunbar’s poem has many themes and symbols, such as hypocrisy, pain and suffering, society, race, and lies. This is a rondeau poem written in iambic…

Both poems refer to Breughel’s, a Dutch painter’s piece of art, the Landscape with the Fall of Icarus. William’s choice of title is the same as the painting’s while W. H. Auden names the museum. The painting – and thus the poems – illustrates the famous ancient Greek legend about Icarus and his father, Daedalus. According to the myth Icarus did not pay attention to Daedalus’s warn, flew to high and the sunbeam melted his wax wings. Icarus fell into the sea and drowned. This is the moment which…

I never saw, but I know… “I never saw a Moor-”A moor, an unseen object to man, but one the poet Emily Dickinson chooses to title her poem. What is this unseen object called a moor? Webster’s Dictionary describes a moor as “A tract of open, peaty, wasteland, often overgrown with heath, common in high latitudes and altitudes where drainage is poor; heath.” There are many terms that Dickinson uses within this poem that maybe unknown and uncertain to some, but they hold a deeper meaning within the…