Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802 By William Wordsworth
1.
a) Never did sun more beautifully steep | Never had there been a more beautiful sunrise; never had the sun been in such a beautiful position.
b) In his first splendour, valley, rock, or hill; | The first things to be touched by the sunrise’s brilliance are the valleys, rocks and hills.
c) Ne’er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep! | the speaker has never been so deeply at peace.
d) The river glideth at his own sweet will: | the river (under the bridge) appear to be running to its own pace, peacefully.
e) Dear God! the very houses seem asleep; | the sunrise shines in the early hours of the morning, so everything seems still and quiet (including the houses).
I believe that this poem is written in Pyrrhic trimter (3 feet of X X /) however in line 2 the speaker seems to steer away from this rhyme scheme in order to draw attention to the blandness of someone who cannot recognize the beauty of the sun.
2. Splendour, noun. The OED defines Splendour as, “Great brightness; brilliant light or lustre.” It also links the word to wealth, pomp and parades. I believe that the speaker deliberately uses this word to link the celebratory aspect of a sunrise. Watching the sun come up is like going to a parade with vast riches and positive emotion. It is also interesting to note that when the speaker uses the word “splendour” in line 10, he also personifies the sun by giving it the pronoun “his”. This is interesting because it shows how magnificent a sunrise is: it is not some innate scientific phenomenon but instead a lively gift.
3. The image of the “smokeless air” in line 8 really resonated with me. This image is important because I feel like the speaker is trying to show a lot of different sound that comes with a sunrise. While the brilliance of a sunrise is splendous and might feel loud or overwhelming (like the speaker alludes to in lines 10-12), the sunrise occurs in the morning when all is quiet and still. The image of the smokeless, clear air makes me think of a clear morning where everything is still quiet and beautiful. The houses themselves still seem “asleep” (more personification) because everything is so quiet and still.
4. I believe line 9 ‘Never did sun more beautifully steep’, is the most important line in the poem. This is because the speaker shows how personable this experience was for them; they had never witnessed such a beautiful sun. While the speaker talks a lot about how the sunrise is beautiful itself, the fact that this line separates a specific sunrise from others, shows the importance of personal experience and makes the audience feel envious they were not there to witness this beauty. This being said, I like how the speaker says this line in the past tense (using “did”), showing that there could be sunsets which are more beautiful in the future.
5. The title of the poem: Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802, shows the personal aspect of the piece as I was talking about. This shows where the speaker was when they witnessed this sunset, peacefully perched on a bridge, during the late summer/early fall, overlooking their surroundings.
6. I think that this poem would be a light bronze color. As the speaker spoke the poem, this color would shift and become lighter and lighter until it reached a goldish aura. This is because like a sunrise, the poem becomes more intense as goes on. The speaker uses harsher punctuation (like exclamation points) and stresses more syllables at the end of the poem making it more grand and “loud” as I explored earlier. I think that this poem would be performed on an alto saxophone because this brass instrument emulates a human voice, singing lowly in the morning. This song would first be played soft and low, perhaps a F or E note, and then move up to a C/B by the end. Like the shift in color, this shift in sound would emulate the evolution and spectacular-ness of a sunrise.
7. I believe that the central idea of the poem is that a sunrise is an emotional experience that resembles a living thing. As the sun rises, things start slow and steady but it is impossible to ignore its beauty. It gently breathes life into everything it touches, slowly starting the day waking all that it shines down on. The more beings and objects this wonderful creation touches, the more intense the experience becomes. This is shown in the speaker’s diction. In the beginning of the poem the focus is quiet aspects of setting (how it is like a doth garment, silent and bare). By the end of the poem, the speaker is highlighting how the sunrise has an immaculate ability to turn all hearts still as it breathes life into the day.
8. This poem was written during the Regency Era in England. During this time there was a large focus on the growth of the fine arts and architecture: specifically, the beauty of both of these developments. It makes sense that the poem was written in this era because it focuses a lot on combing the achievements of mankind with the beauty of nature. In line six, the speaker talks of ships, towers and domes (all man made creations), and how the sun emulates these technological advancements. Nevertheless, there is nothing more beautiful than when the sun shines down onto other natural creatures such as a valley or hill (lines 9,10).
9. The last line of the poem reads, “And all that mighty heart is lying still!” My question is: why do our hearts lay still when there is a sunrise? If no one but a fool could ignore the sunrise, what does it mean that while we are witnessing such beauty our hearts rest?
“I, Being born a Woman and Distressed (Sonnet XLI)”, Edna St. Vincent Millay
(1)
I, being born a woman and distressed
– The speaker was born a woman.
By all the needs and notions of my kind,
– The speaker is upset or agitated by what is needed as a woman and what is expected of women.
Am urged by your propinquity to find
– The proximity of another pushes the female speaker to a certain feeling.
Your person fair, and feel a certain zest
– The feeling is admiration of the other’s body and excitement.
To bear your body’s weight upon my breast
– This excitement spawns from feeling the other’s body on top of her.
For most of the poem, each line has ten syllables, and the poem is in pentameter. However, the ninth, tenth, eleventh, and thirteenth lines have eleven syllables, where a shift in tone occurs. I have italicized the stressed syllables in the first line. The poem appears to mostly have trochees.
(2) The most important word is “fume”, which is derived Latin and French roots. This word concerns the body, life, and yet something also transparent, fading, and vaporous, like the fleeting moment of passion that is the subject of the sonnet.
(3) The fifth line of the poem—“To bear your body’s weight upon my breast”—makes clear the physicality of the poem. It draws within the mind the image of two bodies intertwined and deeply aware, involved, with each other—but not the minds or the hearts of the two.
(4) The ninth line of the poem—“Think not for this, however, the poor treason”—features a shift in scansion as well as tone. The speaker begins to make plain here that the physical, sexual, interaction occurring will not further develop into a romantic or even platonic relationship.
(5) The poem takes the first line as its title, which fixes attention solely on the poem itself and its contents. Otherwise, the poem is simply numbered as another sonnet, likely one of many by Millay.
(6) I think of this sonnet as a reddish pink, especially considering the “blood” imagery within it. A tuba might play this; the speaker is unflinching and almost heavy-handed in tearing apart their momentary lover.
(7) As with many sonnets, this poem focuses on love. However, it is a purely physical love, unlike the emotional and romantic loves that often concern sonnets. This sonnet also gives autonomy and power to its female speaker, allowing for female sexual pleasure, unlike depriving her of it as do many sonnets that a woman their subject.
(8) According to the Academy of American Poets, the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay was a feminist, taught from a young age to be ambitious and self-sufficient, and openly bisexual. She wrote on topics of female sexuality and feminism and gave popular readings and public appearances.
(9) How does “I, Being born a Woman and Distressed (Sonnet XLI)” by Edna St. Vincent Millay frame female sexuality?
“What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why” – Edna St. Vincent Millay
1. “Thus in the winter stands the lonely tree,
Nor knows what birds have vanished one by one,
Yet knows its boughs more silent than before:
I cannot say what loves have come and gone,
I only know that summer sang in me
A little while, that in me sings no more.” (9-14)
Paraphrase: Like a tree in the winter that does not know which birds have left but notice that they are gone, [the speaker] cannot say who it was they loved, just that they loved many before and now have no one to love.
The poem is written in Iambic pentameter (u / u / u / u / u /) with no irregular beats.
2. Forget, v.: to lose remembrance of; to cease to retain in one’s memory.
This poem centers around the speaker’s failure to remember the men they have loved and engaged with before. The word ‘forgotten’ appears in the second line of the poem [“What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why, / I have forgotten, and what arms have lain” (1-2)] highlighting the speaker’s forgetting as a central aspect of the poem from the start. Echoes of the word appear later in the poem [“unremembered boys” (7), “I cannot say what loves” (12)], further highlighting how the speaker’s forgetting of these encounters creates a melancholic picture of a life.
3. “but the rain
Is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh
Upon the glass and listen for reply” (3-5)
The idea that these lost and forgotten loves are ghosts that come back to seek the speaker’s attention and yet are still rebuffed is very striking. The speaker feels some remorse about these boys, as they still seem to haunt the speaker’s memory, yet they are faceless, unnamed, as the speaker does not seem to care enough about them to remember beyond their existence any specific facts.
4. These three lines are also the most important in the poem, as they present a somewhat bleak outlook and contextualize the space around the speaker to give the world an atmosphere. The breaking of “but the rain / is full of ghosts tonight” splits the most important image and emphasizes ‘ghosts,’ showing that the loves past still haunt the speaker. ‘Ghosts’ is a stressed syllable, further emphasizing this position.
5. The title of the poem is the first line. Likely this is because the poem was otherwise unnamed; this is possibly in deference to an older tradition of naming sonnets as numbered units instead of with true titles, and simply referring to them by the first line to differentiate, as is done with Shakespearian sonnets.
6. This poem would be a bluish-grey; something dark and like the night, though almost reminiscent of rain or cloudy skies of winter. The poem is melancholic, and I feel that this color would support that. The poem would be played on an oboe; oboe is often used in orchestral pieces and ballets to represent a melancholic tone.
7. The sonnet form is often used for love poetry; Millay’s use of the form turns that tradition onto its head by presenting the love in a melancholic and almost negative way. By using a form that has a specific and recognizable history, Millay can play with breaking down the perceived conventions of the form with content while still maintaining the hallmarks of a sonnet (meter/rhyme) to fit the poem into a recognizable canon.
8. This poem was first published in Vanity Fair in 1920. Millay lived and worked in Greenwich Village after her graduation from Vassar College in 1917, writing poetry and plays as well as becoming involved in local theatrical pursuits. Millay, who was openly bisexual often wrote about love between women; this poem, published in the same year as her collection “A Few Figs and Thistles”, details female sexuality and presents Millay (when read as the speaker) as a sexually open woman whose dalliances with men subvert the common ideology of the woman as a homemaker.
9. Much of Millay’s work centers around female liberation and sexuality, as well as her own very open bisexuality. How does this poem recognize this personal history while still remaining open to any that read it?
1.
I cry your mercy—pity—love!—aye, love! (Pleading for love)
Merciful love that tantalizes not, (Love that comes easily, without pain or struggle)
One-thoughted, never-wandering, guileless love, (Love that is simple and straightforward)
Unmasked, and being seen—without a blot! (Love that is clear and unobscured)
O! let me have thee whole,—all—all—be mine! (Yearning for love)
The poem is written in iambic pentameter.
2.
Love – According to the OED, love originates from the Old English word “lufu,” of Germanic origin, which dates even further back to both Sanskrit, “lubhyati” (desires), and Latin “libet” (it is pleasing). All of the origins of love can be associated with the desire that Keats expresses in this poem.
3.
I am really fascinated by the image of love as a physical thing, love being compared to an object, potentially a living thing, in the sense that it can be physically seen, that it can come around to someone, and even perform actions.
4.
I would have to cite the fifth line, “O! let me have thee whole,—all—all—be mine!” as the most important because of how it cements the significance of love.
5.
“I cry your mercy-pity-love! -aye, love!” as the title line suggestions how subject to the power of love Keats is in writing this poem.
6.
I think this poem would represent red because of the color’s association with love and romantic undertones, and I also think that if it were played out in a song then it would be performed to the sound of a violin.
7.
The meaning is a call to the subject of the poem, Keats’ love interest, to respond to his cries for love and to love him back.
8.
This poem was written by John Keats, an English Romantic poet who lived a short life of only 25 years, with his work spanning the early 1800’s, in a time period where other such poets were gaining prominence. It is important to note that this poem was dedicated to a woman named Fanny Brawne, the love of his life, who eventually became his fiance before his death to tuberculosis.
9.
What would the understanding and appreciation of this poem be if the historical significance was changed, for example, if the plea on John Keats’ part was one of unrequited love?
Scansion:
I love thee to the level of everyday’s ( I love you every minute of my day )
Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light ( even when it’s at night )
I love thee freely, as men strive for right ( I love you bravely and nothing can stop me)
I love thee purely, as they turn from praise. (I love you unconditionally)
I love thee with the passion put to use (I love you faithfully and it will last forever)
In my old griefs, and with my childhood’s faith
The poem is dominated by the iambic pentameter, which consists of 10 beats and 5 feet.
Diction:
In this poem, the repetition of the word “love” seems to be the most prominent word that echoes around the poem. Yet, the word “how” in the title plays an essential role in leading the whole poem. Besides referring to “in what means”, it also means “to what degree” and “at what rate”. What we comprehend beyond its common meaning, the title of the poem is not just asking “in what ways do I love you?” but also–“to what extent do I love you?”
Imagery:
“I love thee to the level of everyday’s, Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light” The line creates an image of the shifting between day and night, between sunshine and candle-light. Such image is very beautiful in a way that expresses the endless love for another person. No matter day or night, love never stops. The image created in the beginning is a setup for the end of the poem, in which it says “I shall but love thee better after death.” These two lines is compelling while demonstrating the depth of love being expressed by the speaker.
Syntax:
“How do I love thee. Let me count the ways.” is the most important line in the poem. It sets the tone of the poem when indicating the counting begins. Counting requires attention and carefulness. As the speaker uses the word “count”, it shows the speaker’s deliberation about this question, which attracts the audience’s full attention to the following lines of the poem.
Title:
The title summarizes the poem by simply asking a question: how do I love you? The poem is overall responding to this inquiry. The title is very appealing that lures the curiosity of the audience. After reading the poem, one can refer back to the title and feel the overall idea resonating in the poem: love you during day and night and even more beyond death.
Synesthesia: The poem would be the color red since red shadows the strong and unresistant passion within the human mind. If it were set to a musical score, it would be written for the piano. As the speaker refers to nighttime, the most common instrumental pieces at night would be the piano pieces, which are quiet and soothing.
Content/Form Relationship:
The poem conveys the speaker’s deep and passionate love through a beginning question followed by responses that follow the same structure. The way and the degree of love are expressed following the phrase “I love thee”. And the end of the poem, the speaker goes beyond the humanistic and lively thinking by referring to god and death. Ending with “I shall but love thee better after death”, the speaker compels the audience that her love is infinite and death is not a hindrance but a catalyst.
Context:
Elizabeth Barrett Browning dedicated this poem to her beloved husband, who admired her poetry and asked to meet up in person in the beginning. Browning had a They exchanged a lot of love letters during their relationship and marriage. The poem was written to show her strong affection.
Question: What does the speaker refer to “a love I seem to lose with my lost saints”?
The poem I chose was “How do I love thee by Elizabeth Barrett Browning.
Scansion:
I love thee freely, as men strive for right- 10 /xx/xx/xx/x
I love thee purely, as they turn from praise- 10 /xx/xx/xx/x
I love thee with the passion put to use- 10 /xx/xx/xx/x
In my old griefs, and with my childhood’s faith-10 /xx/xx/xx/x
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose- 10 /xx/xx/xx/x- 10 syllables per line written in Dactyl?
Translation (at least my understanding): I love you openly and justly like men trying to be honest. I love you purely like the intentions of a praise or prayer. I love you with a lifetime of love and life; like how I loved my childhood memories and love the will to live. I love you like I never loved anything before.
The author deviates a little to talk about age and childhood which only deepens the connection of her life to her lover. As though, the speaker was looking for her mate since childhood and now plans to carry out her old age with him too.
Love- Originates from Germanic lufu which is also rooted in Sanskrit lubhyati or desire. It is the concernated word in each line, the purpose of the poem. The speaker outright admits her feeling over and over to her lover. She is stating the her desires, why she finds his company so irresistible and the depth of her affections towards her lover. Love is a very dense and heavy word in a relationship so to carelessly toss it around in every single line implies the head over heels nature of the speaker. She is so indulged in her affair that the highest degree of affection needs repetition to give it more weight as to her it is just another way to convince her love of her feelings.
Image: “I love thee to the level of every day’s
Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.” invokes an image of a couple on a porch overlooking a sunset. They are each other’s support system and supplement one another’s skills to form a perfect couple. She is his light and he is her calming shadow. It helps convey the motif of love and theme of support in a relationship.
Syntax- “– And if God chooses” The use of the dashes is a pause not a full stop like a period. The author chose to go on the same line which can be seen as how she sees her life going on after death and herzgo her love being eternal. Death is a pause; a transition and she is ready for God to bridge that gap.
Title:The title provokes a thought about tangilizing a rather non-tangible entity: love. When it’s clear that you can love someone by showing affection and giving them time. The speaker proposes that she doesn’t know how to love her better half because she can give him her smile, tears, laughter and life but even that falls short of what the lover is worth.
Synthesia: If the poem was a color it would be a calm orange or light red; the color of love and a waning sunset because that’s what I see a lasting relationship as being. Red is blood, the heart, blushing, and anger; all associated with love. Orange and sunsets for a day that has come to a peaceful end only to transition into a new one like the lasting eternal relationship the speaker hopes for. I feel it would be a violin if the poem were a musical score, because the string instrument is light but carries a lot of voice like the speaker’s emotional tone.
Form: The paragraph and collated/ cramped structure of the poem seems as though the words are stuck together in unison like the two lovers. It shows that the two will be close and if seperated; it wouldn’t make sense much like the rhyme scheme that if one were to isolate or divide the lines in any other way; it wouldn’t rhyme.
Context: Browning was a Victorian author who wrote in the Romantic period. She wrote in secret to her courted man. She was a romantic and sneaky gal at heart (1849).
Question: Why must the speaker repeat that she loves her lover yet ask the question of how she can love him? Does the repetition of the word “love” add value to or devalue the point the speaker was attempting to make to her beloved?
1.
Sundays too my father got up early My father woke up early even on Sundays
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold, He dressed in the early morning cold before sunrise
then with cracked hands that ached With his tired hands that were damaged
from labor in the weekday weather made From his manual job during the week
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him. He made a fire that we all took for granted
The first set of five lines begins with a line of trochaic pentameter and a line of iambic pentameter, but then the third line breaks off by only having six syllables, an abruptly shorter line without meter. The next two lines resume the ten syllable pattern, but the sentence structure within them prevents the meter from being convincingly reestablished. This shift from metrical consistency to deviation is necessary in part to allow the final sentence to stand on its own in the rhythm of the poem.
2. The word austere in the final line, describing the “offices” of love, stands out as a surprising reference to love as stern, harsh, or severe, with earlier versions of the word even meaning violent or savage. Along with the poem’s references to indifference and “chronic angers,” the use of austere presents an uncommon portrait of love as a job, a responsibility, that is not always cheerful and infrequently returned by those who receive it.
3. “I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.”
The image of the cold breaking in the above line is both audibly and descriptively violent, as the harsh consonants of “wake,” “cold,” and “splintering” add physical force to the image of fragmentation, and mimic the crackling of the fire in the poem. The image reinforces the overall theme of a harsh reality, nevertheless filled with austere love in the form of the reliable fire built by the father.
4. “What did I know, what did I know”
The penultimate line sounds a nostalgic and somewhat remorseful tone, questioning and bemoaning the speaker’s youthful lack of gratitude for his father’s love. The repetition of the question, coming after the speaker’s admission of “speaking indifferently” to his father, ends the speaker’s reflection on a particularly somber note, seemingly falling deeper into remorse as he repeats himself.
5. The title, “Those Winter Sundays,” distances the speaker and listener from the memories recounted in the poem, putting the events described very much in the past, as a routine of days long gone. This distance reinforces the nostalgia of the speaker and reminds us how much he has changed, also shown by the questioning of his past self.
6. The poem references only one color, the “blueblack” of the winter morning, an evocative description of the period before sunrise when the world is faintly tinted blue amid the darkness and no vibrant color is present. If it were a color, the poem would be this unearthly blue, despite the fire that should brighten the poem.
7. The central idea of the poem is how love between parents and children is often a silent one, expressed in action and rarely expressed by the child, and how the realization of a parent’s love comes only after the child has matured. The poem’s structure conveys this by moving from pure reminiscing in the description of the father’s morning, to self-analysis in the speaker’s description of his own waking, to commenting in the last lines on his lack of recognition for his father. The speaker thus brings the listener with him on this train of thought, and it seems that the speaker and listener realize the young child’s ignorance together, a fitting form for an experience so universal among parents and children.
8. The author, Robert Hayden, grew up in poverty with foster parents, and had an often contentious relationship with them. Clearly the older Hayden, reflecting on those years, feels he failed to see at the time the love and sacrifice that his parents and all parents make for their children.
9. Why does the poem take place on a Sunday, which, along with the mention of “good shoes,” carries a religious significance that is left implicit by the poem? How does this religious connection matter in the themes of love and parental relationships that the poem discusses?
1. Sits down to rest him in some shady place, (x / x / x / x / x /)
With panting hounds beguiled of their prey: (x / x / x / x / x /)
So after long pursuit and vain assay, (x / x / x / x / x /)
When I all weary had the chase forsook, (x / x / x / x / x /)
The gentle deer return’d the self-same way, (x / x / x / x / x /)
-Written in Iambic Pentameter
Paraphrase:
The hunter rests in the shade
The hunting dogs are tired after not being able to find the deer
The chase was long
The hunter is tired and abandons the prey
The deer left the same way it came
2. One of the most important words used in the poem is the word “weary”. The word weary is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as, “Having the feeling of loss of strength, languor, and need for rest, produced by continued exertion (physical or mental), endurance of severe pain, or wakefulness; tired, fatigued.” The word weary helps to create a connection between the reader and the main hunter in the poem. The word helps to explain that the man has exerted his body on this chase to the extent that he must take a break. Additionally, the definition says that the word, weary, can be the result of mental exertion and stress which allows the reader to question whether the poem is an analogy for some mental stress or the literal physical interpretation.
3. One piece of imagery in the poem that resonated with me was the line, “with panting hounds beguiled of their prey”. Not only does this imagery offer the image of the dogs panting but it also includes the sounds of the dogs panting which emphasizes the extent of the chase. Lastly, the inclusion of the phrase “beguiled of their prey” shows the reader that the hunter and his hounds were duped by the deer.
4. I believe that the most important line in the poem is actually the first line that states, “Like as a huntsman after weary chase”. This line did not catch my attention originally, however, after analyzing the text closely I realized that the first line proves to the reader that the speaker is relating the weary chase of a hunter to some other chase in life. Personally, I believe that the speaker is using the hunter and the deer as an analogy for a man who is seeking to, in a sense, catch his prey.
5. The poem is titled, “Amoretti LXVII: Like as a Huntsman”. The poem is included in a collection of sonnets written by Edmund Spenser. I believe that the word, Like, included in the title, reveals a lot about the poem itself. First off, the word, Like, implies that the Hunter and his chase is being compared to some other unspoken chase. Thus, the usage of that word allows the reader to decide on their own meaning of the poem as it relates to their individual life.
6. If the poem were to be symbolized through a color, I believe that the color would be red. Red is the color of blood which is inside the deer. When the hunter completes the chase and kills the deer, red blood will splatter onto the green grass like rain. Additionally, red evokes a feeling of love and romance which makes sense when the chase is thought of as an analogy for the chase between a man and a woman.
7. The central idea of the poem is the chase that a hunter partakes when trying to kill a deer. The poem is written in Iambic Pentameter which allows for a very smooth flow from start to finish. Additionally, Iambic gives off an organized feel as if the writer was very methodical about the writing process. Similarly, the hunter in the poem is very methodical about his process of catching the deer which makes sense when written in Iambic. Lastly, the author used words that rhyme in order to show that the process that a hunter performs when stocking prey can be beautiful and pleasing.
8. This poem was written by Edmund Spenser in the mid-1500s. Spenser wasn’t much of a hunter, but he was a very romantic man. In fact, he wrote this collection of sonnets for a woman that he later married. Thus, I believe that the poem is an analogy for his chase to marry the woman.
9. How does the writer leave room for the possibility of multiple meanings that can be inferred by the reader?
1. “Is not allayed by her heart-frozen cold,
But that I burn much more in boiling sweat,
And feel my flames augmented manifold?
What more miraculous thing may be told,
That fire, which all things melts, should harden ice,”
Paraphrase
The poet is not turned off by her not loving him back
He would be able to love her more if she loved him back
He has many different forms of love
What else does he have to tell her for her to love him
Why is it that his love pushes her away
2. One of the keywords in the poem is cold because the word cold makes it apparent to the reading that while the poet has a strong love for the woman, she does not love him back. The poet chose to use strong adjective and temperatures to describe his relationship. While at first, we can understand from the use of cold that the woman does not love him back, after looking up cold in the Oxford English Dictionary we can analyze what exactly their relationship means. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, cold means “significant lowness of temperature; lack of heat in an object or a substance; coldness to the sense.” From this, we can understand that the woman is lacking love and feeling in which the poet feels towards her. When he touches her, she feels could because she is not returning the affections.
3. “That fire, which all things melts, should harden ice,”
I think this line is intriguing because the poet is trying to understand why the woman is not falling in love with him. The poet uses the analogy of when something is cold but makes contact with a hot object it melts to describe how when you fall for someone you normally share the same feelings. Instead, he is experiencing the opposite sensation in which he is falling hard but the woman is not falling in love with him. The poet is struggling to come to terms with this reality and move on. Instead, he is drawn in by the fact that he has fallen in love and hopes she too will. When I read this line, I envisioned the fiery frustration of the poet and how he hopes that all of his love will eventually melt away her coldness but instead his love is pushing her farther away.
4. “Is not allayed by her heart frozen cold”
I think this line is important because it shows how committed the poet is in the relationship. He is not turned off by the fact that the woman does not love him back as much as he loves her. He is determined to continue to pursue this relationship in hopes that her heart will turn from cold to hot.
5. The significance of the title and similar to the first line of the poem is it explains to the reader that the poet is in love with someone who is not in love with him. He is fiercely in love with her and he describes his love as strong as fire while she is cold like ice. The poet is in love with someone who has a cold heart because she does not love him back, but he is deeply in love and can feel the heat (fire) within himself.
6. If the poem were a color, I think it would be a mix of red and blue to symbolize ice and fire because the entire poem the poet is struggling with the concept that he is deeply in love, but the woman does not love him back. Red would symbolize the poet’s love (fire) while blue would be ice and the woman’s cold heart.
7. The poem starts out by the poet explaining to the reader that he is madly in love with someone who is not in love with him. The poet is contemplating how the woman cannot love him back and at the same time how his love continues to grow stronger for her. The poet is not turned off by the fact that as his love grows stronger, she moves farther away and becomes colder but yet he is determined to win her over. He realizes that this is part of love and that love can do this to people.
8.
Author: Edmund Spenser
History
• England
• Written 1595
• Written after his wife died (first wife died in 1954)
• Wrote it leading up to his wedding with his new wife (Elizabeth Boyle)
9. Did Edmund Spenser write this poem about his wife Elizabeth Boyle and the struggle of getting her to fall in love with him or is the poem more about him overcoming the death of his wife?
“I cry your mercy-pity-love! -aye, love!”
1)
This is an Iambic poem:
Of love, your kiss,—those hands, those eyes divine,
x / x / x / x / x /
That warm, white, lucent, million-pleasured breast,
x / x / x / x x / x /
Yourself—your soul—in pity give me all,
x / x / x / x / x /
Withhold no atom’s atom or I die
x / x / x / x / x /
Or living on perhaps, your wretched thrall,
x / x / x / x / x /
Paraphrase:
Line 1: I am in love with your eyes, hands, and lips
Line 2: And with your magnificent, pleasure producing breasts
Line 3: Even when you are down, give me all of you
Line 4: Don’t hold back even the smallest part of you, or I will not be able to live
Line 5: And if I somehow can live, you will have complete power over me
2)
I believe the most important word in this poem is “thrall.” According to OED, the definition of thrall is. “The state of being in someone’s power, or of having great power over someone.” The word thrall comes from Old Norse and Old English meaning “slave.” I believe this word is significant to the rest of the poem because it proves how much of an impact this specific woman has on the author, despite us knowing nothing about her really. It proves how enthralling, and almost enchanting the feelings of love can be.
3)
The sentence I chose that provided some great imagery and resonates to the meaning of rest of the poem is, “That warm, white, lucent, million-pleasured breast.” This sentence, emphasized by the word “lucent,” gave me an incredible image in my head of this woman the author is describing. This sentence made me picture her as almost Greek Goddess like, as she is described as having a glow to her, showcasing the author’s intense feelings toward her.
4)
The most important line in this poem is the last line of the poem, “Losing its gust, and my ambition blind!” Not only does this line end the poem with a great rhyme scheme, but it also ties the poem together, and really emphasizes how the author truly believes he cannot live, or function without her.
5) The title of this poem is “I cry your mercy-pity-love! -aye, love!” This is also the first line of the poem. The significance of the title just exemplifies what we read in the rest of the poem, the author is obsessed with everything about this woman. He is so reliant on her love that, in a way, it could almost be seen as resulting in life or death for him.
6) If this poem were a color, it would most definitely be red. Not only is red the color of love, but it is also the color of blood. While the author is madly in love with this woman, he cannot function without her, and will result to a life of bloody despair if something goes wrong. If this poem were played by an instrument, it would be a lyre. When reading this, I pictured an all powerful Greek Goddess like figure being described, and this is an instrument commonly portrayed with Greek Gods.
7) The central idea of this poem is to express the author’s extreme love for this woman, and how he believes he cannot physically live without her. I believe this is portrayed in the poem through the use of multiple dashes. Using dashes provides a big pause in the sentence, adding huge emphasis to the author’s statements. With the sentences put together in this way, I can almost picture it as if the author starts his sentence, then pauses, cringing his eyes because of the intense emotions he is feeling, and then adds another statement to the sentence to express these feelings. This is the effect of the dashes.
8) This poem was written in 1819, when Keats was about 24 years old. Around this time, Keats fell in love with a woman named Fanny Brawne, and wrote some of his most famous poems about her. This poem was written during the heart of the Romanticism era.
9) How does the way this poem is written, the separation of lines, rhyme scheme, and various punctuation marks, contribute to the feelings of the poem, which for the most part seem to depict someone who is almost driven to the point of insanity over a specific woman?
Poem Exercise 1
Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802 By William Wordsworth
1.
a) Never did sun more beautifully steep | Never had there been a more beautiful sunrise; never had the sun been in such a beautiful position.
b) In his first splendour, valley, rock, or hill; | The first things to be touched by the sunrise’s brilliance are the valleys, rocks and hills.
c) Ne’er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep! | the speaker has never been so deeply at peace.
d) The river glideth at his own sweet will: | the river (under the bridge) appear to be running to its own pace, peacefully.
e) Dear God! the very houses seem asleep; | the sunrise shines in the early hours of the morning, so everything seems still and quiet (including the houses).
I believe that this poem is written in Pyrrhic trimter (3 feet of X X /) however in line 2 the speaker seems to steer away from this rhyme scheme in order to draw attention to the blandness of someone who cannot recognize the beauty of the sun.
2. Splendour, noun. The OED defines Splendour as, “Great brightness; brilliant light or lustre.” It also links the word to wealth, pomp and parades. I believe that the speaker deliberately uses this word to link the celebratory aspect of a sunrise. Watching the sun come up is like going to a parade with vast riches and positive emotion. It is also interesting to note that when the speaker uses the word “splendour” in line 10, he also personifies the sun by giving it the pronoun “his”. This is interesting because it shows how magnificent a sunrise is: it is not some innate scientific phenomenon but instead a lively gift.
3. The image of the “smokeless air” in line 8 really resonated with me. This image is important because I feel like the speaker is trying to show a lot of different sound that comes with a sunrise. While the brilliance of a sunrise is splendous and might feel loud or overwhelming (like the speaker alludes to in lines 10-12), the sunrise occurs in the morning when all is quiet and still. The image of the smokeless, clear air makes me think of a clear morning where everything is still quiet and beautiful. The houses themselves still seem “asleep” (more personification) because everything is so quiet and still.
4. I believe line 9 ‘Never did sun more beautifully steep’, is the most important line in the poem. This is because the speaker shows how personable this experience was for them; they had never witnessed such a beautiful sun. While the speaker talks a lot about how the sunrise is beautiful itself, the fact that this line separates a specific sunrise from others, shows the importance of personal experience and makes the audience feel envious they were not there to witness this beauty. This being said, I like how the speaker says this line in the past tense (using “did”), showing that there could be sunsets which are more beautiful in the future.
5. The title of the poem: Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802, shows the personal aspect of the piece as I was talking about. This shows where the speaker was when they witnessed this sunset, peacefully perched on a bridge, during the late summer/early fall, overlooking their surroundings.
6. I think that this poem would be a light bronze color. As the speaker spoke the poem, this color would shift and become lighter and lighter until it reached a goldish aura. This is because like a sunrise, the poem becomes more intense as goes on. The speaker uses harsher punctuation (like exclamation points) and stresses more syllables at the end of the poem making it more grand and “loud” as I explored earlier. I think that this poem would be performed on an alto saxophone because this brass instrument emulates a human voice, singing lowly in the morning. This song would first be played soft and low, perhaps a F or E note, and then move up to a C/B by the end. Like the shift in color, this shift in sound would emulate the evolution and spectacular-ness of a sunrise.
7. I believe that the central idea of the poem is that a sunrise is an emotional experience that resembles a living thing. As the sun rises, things start slow and steady but it is impossible to ignore its beauty. It gently breathes life into everything it touches, slowly starting the day waking all that it shines down on. The more beings and objects this wonderful creation touches, the more intense the experience becomes. This is shown in the speaker’s diction. In the beginning of the poem the focus is quiet aspects of setting (how it is like a doth garment, silent and bare). By the end of the poem, the speaker is highlighting how the sunrise has an immaculate ability to turn all hearts still as it breathes life into the day.
8. This poem was written during the Regency Era in England. During this time there was a large focus on the growth of the fine arts and architecture: specifically, the beauty of both of these developments. It makes sense that the poem was written in this era because it focuses a lot on combing the achievements of mankind with the beauty of nature. In line six, the speaker talks of ships, towers and domes (all man made creations), and how the sun emulates these technological advancements. Nevertheless, there is nothing more beautiful than when the sun shines down onto other natural creatures such as a valley or hill (lines 9,10).
9. The last line of the poem reads, “And all that mighty heart is lying still!” My question is: why do our hearts lay still when there is a sunrise? If no one but a fool could ignore the sunrise, what does it mean that while we are witnessing such beauty our hearts rest?
“I, Being born a Woman and Distressed (Sonnet XLI)”, Edna St. Vincent Millay
(1)
I, being born a woman and distressed
– The speaker was born a woman.
By all the needs and notions of my kind,
– The speaker is upset or agitated by what is needed as a woman and what is expected of women.
Am urged by your propinquity to find
– The proximity of another pushes the female speaker to a certain feeling.
Your person fair, and feel a certain zest
– The feeling is admiration of the other’s body and excitement.
To bear your body’s weight upon my breast
– This excitement spawns from feeling the other’s body on top of her.
For most of the poem, each line has ten syllables, and the poem is in pentameter. However, the ninth, tenth, eleventh, and thirteenth lines have eleven syllables, where a shift in tone occurs. I have italicized the stressed syllables in the first line. The poem appears to mostly have trochees.
(2) The most important word is “fume”, which is derived Latin and French roots. This word concerns the body, life, and yet something also transparent, fading, and vaporous, like the fleeting moment of passion that is the subject of the sonnet.
(3) The fifth line of the poem—“To bear your body’s weight upon my breast”—makes clear the physicality of the poem. It draws within the mind the image of two bodies intertwined and deeply aware, involved, with each other—but not the minds or the hearts of the two.
(4) The ninth line of the poem—“Think not for this, however, the poor treason”—features a shift in scansion as well as tone. The speaker begins to make plain here that the physical, sexual, interaction occurring will not further develop into a romantic or even platonic relationship.
(5) The poem takes the first line as its title, which fixes attention solely on the poem itself and its contents. Otherwise, the poem is simply numbered as another sonnet, likely one of many by Millay.
(6) I think of this sonnet as a reddish pink, especially considering the “blood” imagery within it. A tuba might play this; the speaker is unflinching and almost heavy-handed in tearing apart their momentary lover.
(7) As with many sonnets, this poem focuses on love. However, it is a purely physical love, unlike the emotional and romantic loves that often concern sonnets. This sonnet also gives autonomy and power to its female speaker, allowing for female sexual pleasure, unlike depriving her of it as do many sonnets that a woman their subject.
(8) According to the Academy of American Poets, the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay was a feminist, taught from a young age to be ambitious and self-sufficient, and openly bisexual. She wrote on topics of female sexuality and feminism and gave popular readings and public appearances.
(9) How does “I, Being born a Woman and Distressed (Sonnet XLI)” by Edna St. Vincent Millay frame female sexuality?
“What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why” – Edna St. Vincent Millay
1. “Thus in the winter stands the lonely tree,
Nor knows what birds have vanished one by one,
Yet knows its boughs more silent than before:
I cannot say what loves have come and gone,
I only know that summer sang in me
A little while, that in me sings no more.” (9-14)
Paraphrase: Like a tree in the winter that does not know which birds have left but notice that they are gone, [the speaker] cannot say who it was they loved, just that they loved many before and now have no one to love.
The poem is written in Iambic pentameter (u / u / u / u / u /) with no irregular beats.
2. Forget, v.: to lose remembrance of; to cease to retain in one’s memory.
This poem centers around the speaker’s failure to remember the men they have loved and engaged with before. The word ‘forgotten’ appears in the second line of the poem [“What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why, / I have forgotten, and what arms have lain” (1-2)] highlighting the speaker’s forgetting as a central aspect of the poem from the start. Echoes of the word appear later in the poem [“unremembered boys” (7), “I cannot say what loves” (12)], further highlighting how the speaker’s forgetting of these encounters creates a melancholic picture of a life.
3. “but the rain
Is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh
Upon the glass and listen for reply” (3-5)
The idea that these lost and forgotten loves are ghosts that come back to seek the speaker’s attention and yet are still rebuffed is very striking. The speaker feels some remorse about these boys, as they still seem to haunt the speaker’s memory, yet they are faceless, unnamed, as the speaker does not seem to care enough about them to remember beyond their existence any specific facts.
4. These three lines are also the most important in the poem, as they present a somewhat bleak outlook and contextualize the space around the speaker to give the world an atmosphere. The breaking of “but the rain / is full of ghosts tonight” splits the most important image and emphasizes ‘ghosts,’ showing that the loves past still haunt the speaker. ‘Ghosts’ is a stressed syllable, further emphasizing this position.
5. The title of the poem is the first line. Likely this is because the poem was otherwise unnamed; this is possibly in deference to an older tradition of naming sonnets as numbered units instead of with true titles, and simply referring to them by the first line to differentiate, as is done with Shakespearian sonnets.
6. This poem would be a bluish-grey; something dark and like the night, though almost reminiscent of rain or cloudy skies of winter. The poem is melancholic, and I feel that this color would support that. The poem would be played on an oboe; oboe is often used in orchestral pieces and ballets to represent a melancholic tone.
7. The sonnet form is often used for love poetry; Millay’s use of the form turns that tradition onto its head by presenting the love in a melancholic and almost negative way. By using a form that has a specific and recognizable history, Millay can play with breaking down the perceived conventions of the form with content while still maintaining the hallmarks of a sonnet (meter/rhyme) to fit the poem into a recognizable canon.
8. This poem was first published in Vanity Fair in 1920. Millay lived and worked in Greenwich Village after her graduation from Vassar College in 1917, writing poetry and plays as well as becoming involved in local theatrical pursuits. Millay, who was openly bisexual often wrote about love between women; this poem, published in the same year as her collection “A Few Figs and Thistles”, details female sexuality and presents Millay (when read as the speaker) as a sexually open woman whose dalliances with men subvert the common ideology of the woman as a homemaker.
9. Much of Millay’s work centers around female liberation and sexuality, as well as her own very open bisexuality. How does this poem recognize this personal history while still remaining open to any that read it?
1.
I cry your mercy—pity—love!—aye, love! (Pleading for love)
Merciful love that tantalizes not, (Love that comes easily, without pain or struggle)
One-thoughted, never-wandering, guileless love, (Love that is simple and straightforward)
Unmasked, and being seen—without a blot! (Love that is clear and unobscured)
O! let me have thee whole,—all—all—be mine! (Yearning for love)
The poem is written in iambic pentameter.
2.
Love – According to the OED, love originates from the Old English word “lufu,” of Germanic origin, which dates even further back to both Sanskrit, “lubhyati” (desires), and Latin “libet” (it is pleasing). All of the origins of love can be associated with the desire that Keats expresses in this poem.
3.
I am really fascinated by the image of love as a physical thing, love being compared to an object, potentially a living thing, in the sense that it can be physically seen, that it can come around to someone, and even perform actions.
4.
I would have to cite the fifth line, “O! let me have thee whole,—all—all—be mine!” as the most important because of how it cements the significance of love.
5.
“I cry your mercy-pity-love! -aye, love!” as the title line suggestions how subject to the power of love Keats is in writing this poem.
6.
I think this poem would represent red because of the color’s association with love and romantic undertones, and I also think that if it were played out in a song then it would be performed to the sound of a violin.
7.
The meaning is a call to the subject of the poem, Keats’ love interest, to respond to his cries for love and to love him back.
8.
This poem was written by John Keats, an English Romantic poet who lived a short life of only 25 years, with his work spanning the early 1800’s, in a time period where other such poets were gaining prominence. It is important to note that this poem was dedicated to a woman named Fanny Brawne, the love of his life, who eventually became his fiance before his death to tuberculosis.
9.
What would the understanding and appreciation of this poem be if the historical significance was changed, for example, if the plea on John Keats’ part was one of unrequited love?
Poem Title: “How Do I Love Thee?”
Scansion:
I love thee to the level of everyday’s ( I love you every minute of my day )
Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light ( even when it’s at night )
I love thee freely, as men strive for right ( I love you bravely and nothing can stop me)
I love thee purely, as they turn from praise. (I love you unconditionally)
I love thee with the passion put to use (I love you faithfully and it will last forever)
In my old griefs, and with my childhood’s faith
The poem is dominated by the iambic pentameter, which consists of 10 beats and 5 feet.
Diction:
In this poem, the repetition of the word “love” seems to be the most prominent word that echoes around the poem. Yet, the word “how” in the title plays an essential role in leading the whole poem. Besides referring to “in what means”, it also means “to what degree” and “at what rate”. What we comprehend beyond its common meaning, the title of the poem is not just asking “in what ways do I love you?” but also–“to what extent do I love you?”
Imagery:
“I love thee to the level of everyday’s, Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light” The line creates an image of the shifting between day and night, between sunshine and candle-light. Such image is very beautiful in a way that expresses the endless love for another person. No matter day or night, love never stops. The image created in the beginning is a setup for the end of the poem, in which it says “I shall but love thee better after death.” These two lines is compelling while demonstrating the depth of love being expressed by the speaker.
Syntax:
“How do I love thee. Let me count the ways.” is the most important line in the poem. It sets the tone of the poem when indicating the counting begins. Counting requires attention and carefulness. As the speaker uses the word “count”, it shows the speaker’s deliberation about this question, which attracts the audience’s full attention to the following lines of the poem.
Title:
The title summarizes the poem by simply asking a question: how do I love you? The poem is overall responding to this inquiry. The title is very appealing that lures the curiosity of the audience. After reading the poem, one can refer back to the title and feel the overall idea resonating in the poem: love you during day and night and even more beyond death.
Synesthesia: The poem would be the color red since red shadows the strong and unresistant passion within the human mind. If it were set to a musical score, it would be written for the piano. As the speaker refers to nighttime, the most common instrumental pieces at night would be the piano pieces, which are quiet and soothing.
Content/Form Relationship:
The poem conveys the speaker’s deep and passionate love through a beginning question followed by responses that follow the same structure. The way and the degree of love are expressed following the phrase “I love thee”. And the end of the poem, the speaker goes beyond the humanistic and lively thinking by referring to god and death. Ending with “I shall but love thee better after death”, the speaker compels the audience that her love is infinite and death is not a hindrance but a catalyst.
Context:
Elizabeth Barrett Browning dedicated this poem to her beloved husband, who admired her poetry and asked to meet up in person in the beginning. Browning had a They exchanged a lot of love letters during their relationship and marriage. The poem was written to show her strong affection.
Question: What does the speaker refer to “a love I seem to lose with my lost saints”?
The poem I chose was “How do I love thee by Elizabeth Barrett Browning.
Scansion:
I love thee freely, as men strive for right- 10 /xx/xx/xx/x
I love thee purely, as they turn from praise- 10 /xx/xx/xx/x
I love thee with the passion put to use- 10 /xx/xx/xx/x
In my old griefs, and with my childhood’s faith-10 /xx/xx/xx/x
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose- 10 /xx/xx/xx/x- 10 syllables per line written in Dactyl?
Translation (at least my understanding): I love you openly and justly like men trying to be honest. I love you purely like the intentions of a praise or prayer. I love you with a lifetime of love and life; like how I loved my childhood memories and love the will to live. I love you like I never loved anything before.
The author deviates a little to talk about age and childhood which only deepens the connection of her life to her lover. As though, the speaker was looking for her mate since childhood and now plans to carry out her old age with him too.
Love- Originates from Germanic lufu which is also rooted in Sanskrit lubhyati or desire. It is the concernated word in each line, the purpose of the poem. The speaker outright admits her feeling over and over to her lover. She is stating the her desires, why she finds his company so irresistible and the depth of her affections towards her lover. Love is a very dense and heavy word in a relationship so to carelessly toss it around in every single line implies the head over heels nature of the speaker. She is so indulged in her affair that the highest degree of affection needs repetition to give it more weight as to her it is just another way to convince her love of her feelings.
Image: “I love thee to the level of every day’s
Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.” invokes an image of a couple on a porch overlooking a sunset. They are each other’s support system and supplement one another’s skills to form a perfect couple. She is his light and he is her calming shadow. It helps convey the motif of love and theme of support in a relationship.
Syntax- “– And if God chooses” The use of the dashes is a pause not a full stop like a period. The author chose to go on the same line which can be seen as how she sees her life going on after death and herzgo her love being eternal. Death is a pause; a transition and she is ready for God to bridge that gap.
Title:The title provokes a thought about tangilizing a rather non-tangible entity: love. When it’s clear that you can love someone by showing affection and giving them time. The speaker proposes that she doesn’t know how to love her better half because she can give him her smile, tears, laughter and life but even that falls short of what the lover is worth.
Synthesia: If the poem was a color it would be a calm orange or light red; the color of love and a waning sunset because that’s what I see a lasting relationship as being. Red is blood, the heart, blushing, and anger; all associated with love. Orange and sunsets for a day that has come to a peaceful end only to transition into a new one like the lasting eternal relationship the speaker hopes for. I feel it would be a violin if the poem were a musical score, because the string instrument is light but carries a lot of voice like the speaker’s emotional tone.
Form: The paragraph and collated/ cramped structure of the poem seems as though the words are stuck together in unison like the two lovers. It shows that the two will be close and if seperated; it wouldn’t make sense much like the rhyme scheme that if one were to isolate or divide the lines in any other way; it wouldn’t rhyme.
Context: Browning was a Victorian author who wrote in the Romantic period. She wrote in secret to her courted man. She was a romantic and sneaky gal at heart (1849).
Question: Why must the speaker repeat that she loves her lover yet ask the question of how she can love him? Does the repetition of the word “love” add value to or devalue the point the speaker was attempting to make to her beloved?
1.
Sundays too my father got up early My father woke up early even on Sundays
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold, He dressed in the early morning cold before sunrise
then with cracked hands that ached With his tired hands that were damaged
from labor in the weekday weather made From his manual job during the week
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him. He made a fire that we all took for granted
The first set of five lines begins with a line of trochaic pentameter and a line of iambic pentameter, but then the third line breaks off by only having six syllables, an abruptly shorter line without meter. The next two lines resume the ten syllable pattern, but the sentence structure within them prevents the meter from being convincingly reestablished. This shift from metrical consistency to deviation is necessary in part to allow the final sentence to stand on its own in the rhythm of the poem.
2. The word austere in the final line, describing the “offices” of love, stands out as a surprising reference to love as stern, harsh, or severe, with earlier versions of the word even meaning violent or savage. Along with the poem’s references to indifference and “chronic angers,” the use of austere presents an uncommon portrait of love as a job, a responsibility, that is not always cheerful and infrequently returned by those who receive it.
3. “I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.”
The image of the cold breaking in the above line is both audibly and descriptively violent, as the harsh consonants of “wake,” “cold,” and “splintering” add physical force to the image of fragmentation, and mimic the crackling of the fire in the poem. The image reinforces the overall theme of a harsh reality, nevertheless filled with austere love in the form of the reliable fire built by the father.
4. “What did I know, what did I know”
The penultimate line sounds a nostalgic and somewhat remorseful tone, questioning and bemoaning the speaker’s youthful lack of gratitude for his father’s love. The repetition of the question, coming after the speaker’s admission of “speaking indifferently” to his father, ends the speaker’s reflection on a particularly somber note, seemingly falling deeper into remorse as he repeats himself.
5. The title, “Those Winter Sundays,” distances the speaker and listener from the memories recounted in the poem, putting the events described very much in the past, as a routine of days long gone. This distance reinforces the nostalgia of the speaker and reminds us how much he has changed, also shown by the questioning of his past self.
6. The poem references only one color, the “blueblack” of the winter morning, an evocative description of the period before sunrise when the world is faintly tinted blue amid the darkness and no vibrant color is present. If it were a color, the poem would be this unearthly blue, despite the fire that should brighten the poem.
7. The central idea of the poem is how love between parents and children is often a silent one, expressed in action and rarely expressed by the child, and how the realization of a parent’s love comes only after the child has matured. The poem’s structure conveys this by moving from pure reminiscing in the description of the father’s morning, to self-analysis in the speaker’s description of his own waking, to commenting in the last lines on his lack of recognition for his father. The speaker thus brings the listener with him on this train of thought, and it seems that the speaker and listener realize the young child’s ignorance together, a fitting form for an experience so universal among parents and children.
8. The author, Robert Hayden, grew up in poverty with foster parents, and had an often contentious relationship with them. Clearly the older Hayden, reflecting on those years, feels he failed to see at the time the love and sacrifice that his parents and all parents make for their children.
9. Why does the poem take place on a Sunday, which, along with the mention of “good shoes,” carries a religious significance that is left implicit by the poem? How does this religious connection matter in the themes of love and parental relationships that the poem discusses?
1. Sits down to rest him in some shady place, (x / x / x / x / x /)
With panting hounds beguiled of their prey: (x / x / x / x / x /)
So after long pursuit and vain assay, (x / x / x / x / x /)
When I all weary had the chase forsook, (x / x / x / x / x /)
The gentle deer return’d the self-same way, (x / x / x / x / x /)
-Written in Iambic Pentameter
Paraphrase:
The hunter rests in the shade
The hunting dogs are tired after not being able to find the deer
The chase was long
The hunter is tired and abandons the prey
The deer left the same way it came
2. One of the most important words used in the poem is the word “weary”. The word weary is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as, “Having the feeling of loss of strength, languor, and need for rest, produced by continued exertion (physical or mental), endurance of severe pain, or wakefulness; tired, fatigued.” The word weary helps to create a connection between the reader and the main hunter in the poem. The word helps to explain that the man has exerted his body on this chase to the extent that he must take a break. Additionally, the definition says that the word, weary, can be the result of mental exertion and stress which allows the reader to question whether the poem is an analogy for some mental stress or the literal physical interpretation.
3. One piece of imagery in the poem that resonated with me was the line, “with panting hounds beguiled of their prey”. Not only does this imagery offer the image of the dogs panting but it also includes the sounds of the dogs panting which emphasizes the extent of the chase. Lastly, the inclusion of the phrase “beguiled of their prey” shows the reader that the hunter and his hounds were duped by the deer.
4. I believe that the most important line in the poem is actually the first line that states, “Like as a huntsman after weary chase”. This line did not catch my attention originally, however, after analyzing the text closely I realized that the first line proves to the reader that the speaker is relating the weary chase of a hunter to some other chase in life. Personally, I believe that the speaker is using the hunter and the deer as an analogy for a man who is seeking to, in a sense, catch his prey.
5. The poem is titled, “Amoretti LXVII: Like as a Huntsman”. The poem is included in a collection of sonnets written by Edmund Spenser. I believe that the word, Like, included in the title, reveals a lot about the poem itself. First off, the word, Like, implies that the Hunter and his chase is being compared to some other unspoken chase. Thus, the usage of that word allows the reader to decide on their own meaning of the poem as it relates to their individual life.
6. If the poem were to be symbolized through a color, I believe that the color would be red. Red is the color of blood which is inside the deer. When the hunter completes the chase and kills the deer, red blood will splatter onto the green grass like rain. Additionally, red evokes a feeling of love and romance which makes sense when the chase is thought of as an analogy for the chase between a man and a woman.
7. The central idea of the poem is the chase that a hunter partakes when trying to kill a deer. The poem is written in Iambic Pentameter which allows for a very smooth flow from start to finish. Additionally, Iambic gives off an organized feel as if the writer was very methodical about the writing process. Similarly, the hunter in the poem is very methodical about his process of catching the deer which makes sense when written in Iambic. Lastly, the author used words that rhyme in order to show that the process that a hunter performs when stocking prey can be beautiful and pleasing.
8. This poem was written by Edmund Spenser in the mid-1500s. Spenser wasn’t much of a hunter, but he was a very romantic man. In fact, he wrote this collection of sonnets for a woman that he later married. Thus, I believe that the poem is an analogy for his chase to marry the woman.
9. How does the writer leave room for the possibility of multiple meanings that can be inferred by the reader?
1. “Is not allayed by her heart-frozen cold,
But that I burn much more in boiling sweat,
And feel my flames augmented manifold?
What more miraculous thing may be told,
That fire, which all things melts, should harden ice,”
Paraphrase
The poet is not turned off by her not loving him back
He would be able to love her more if she loved him back
He has many different forms of love
What else does he have to tell her for her to love him
Why is it that his love pushes her away
2. One of the keywords in the poem is cold because the word cold makes it apparent to the reading that while the poet has a strong love for the woman, she does not love him back. The poet chose to use strong adjective and temperatures to describe his relationship. While at first, we can understand from the use of cold that the woman does not love him back, after looking up cold in the Oxford English Dictionary we can analyze what exactly their relationship means. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, cold means “significant lowness of temperature; lack of heat in an object or a substance; coldness to the sense.” From this, we can understand that the woman is lacking love and feeling in which the poet feels towards her. When he touches her, she feels could because she is not returning the affections.
3. “That fire, which all things melts, should harden ice,”
I think this line is intriguing because the poet is trying to understand why the woman is not falling in love with him. The poet uses the analogy of when something is cold but makes contact with a hot object it melts to describe how when you fall for someone you normally share the same feelings. Instead, he is experiencing the opposite sensation in which he is falling hard but the woman is not falling in love with him. The poet is struggling to come to terms with this reality and move on. Instead, he is drawn in by the fact that he has fallen in love and hopes she too will. When I read this line, I envisioned the fiery frustration of the poet and how he hopes that all of his love will eventually melt away her coldness but instead his love is pushing her farther away.
4. “Is not allayed by her heart frozen cold”
I think this line is important because it shows how committed the poet is in the relationship. He is not turned off by the fact that the woman does not love him back as much as he loves her. He is determined to continue to pursue this relationship in hopes that her heart will turn from cold to hot.
5. The significance of the title and similar to the first line of the poem is it explains to the reader that the poet is in love with someone who is not in love with him. He is fiercely in love with her and he describes his love as strong as fire while she is cold like ice. The poet is in love with someone who has a cold heart because she does not love him back, but he is deeply in love and can feel the heat (fire) within himself.
6. If the poem were a color, I think it would be a mix of red and blue to symbolize ice and fire because the entire poem the poet is struggling with the concept that he is deeply in love, but the woman does not love him back. Red would symbolize the poet’s love (fire) while blue would be ice and the woman’s cold heart.
7. The poem starts out by the poet explaining to the reader that he is madly in love with someone who is not in love with him. The poet is contemplating how the woman cannot love him back and at the same time how his love continues to grow stronger for her. The poet is not turned off by the fact that as his love grows stronger, she moves farther away and becomes colder but yet he is determined to win her over. He realizes that this is part of love and that love can do this to people.
8.
Author: Edmund Spenser
History
• England
• Written 1595
• Written after his wife died (first wife died in 1954)
• Wrote it leading up to his wedding with his new wife (Elizabeth Boyle)
9. Did Edmund Spenser write this poem about his wife Elizabeth Boyle and the struggle of getting her to fall in love with him or is the poem more about him overcoming the death of his wife?
“I cry your mercy-pity-love! -aye, love!”
1)
This is an Iambic poem:
Of love, your kiss,—those hands, those eyes divine,
x / x / x / x / x /
That warm, white, lucent, million-pleasured breast,
x / x / x / x x / x /
Yourself—your soul—in pity give me all,
x / x / x / x / x /
Withhold no atom’s atom or I die
x / x / x / x / x /
Or living on perhaps, your wretched thrall,
x / x / x / x / x /
Paraphrase:
Line 1: I am in love with your eyes, hands, and lips
Line 2: And with your magnificent, pleasure producing breasts
Line 3: Even when you are down, give me all of you
Line 4: Don’t hold back even the smallest part of you, or I will not be able to live
Line 5: And if I somehow can live, you will have complete power over me
2)
I believe the most important word in this poem is “thrall.” According to OED, the definition of thrall is. “The state of being in someone’s power, or of having great power over someone.” The word thrall comes from Old Norse and Old English meaning “slave.” I believe this word is significant to the rest of the poem because it proves how much of an impact this specific woman has on the author, despite us knowing nothing about her really. It proves how enthralling, and almost enchanting the feelings of love can be.
3)
The sentence I chose that provided some great imagery and resonates to the meaning of rest of the poem is, “That warm, white, lucent, million-pleasured breast.” This sentence, emphasized by the word “lucent,” gave me an incredible image in my head of this woman the author is describing. This sentence made me picture her as almost Greek Goddess like, as she is described as having a glow to her, showcasing the author’s intense feelings toward her.
4)
The most important line in this poem is the last line of the poem, “Losing its gust, and my ambition blind!” Not only does this line end the poem with a great rhyme scheme, but it also ties the poem together, and really emphasizes how the author truly believes he cannot live, or function without her.
5) The title of this poem is “I cry your mercy-pity-love! -aye, love!” This is also the first line of the poem. The significance of the title just exemplifies what we read in the rest of the poem, the author is obsessed with everything about this woman. He is so reliant on her love that, in a way, it could almost be seen as resulting in life or death for him.
6) If this poem were a color, it would most definitely be red. Not only is red the color of love, but it is also the color of blood. While the author is madly in love with this woman, he cannot function without her, and will result to a life of bloody despair if something goes wrong. If this poem were played by an instrument, it would be a lyre. When reading this, I pictured an all powerful Greek Goddess like figure being described, and this is an instrument commonly portrayed with Greek Gods.
7) The central idea of this poem is to express the author’s extreme love for this woman, and how he believes he cannot physically live without her. I believe this is portrayed in the poem through the use of multiple dashes. Using dashes provides a big pause in the sentence, adding huge emphasis to the author’s statements. With the sentences put together in this way, I can almost picture it as if the author starts his sentence, then pauses, cringing his eyes because of the intense emotions he is feeling, and then adds another statement to the sentence to express these feelings. This is the effect of the dashes.
8) This poem was written in 1819, when Keats was about 24 years old. Around this time, Keats fell in love with a woman named Fanny Brawne, and wrote some of his most famous poems about her. This poem was written during the heart of the Romanticism era.
9) How does the way this poem is written, the separation of lines, rhyme scheme, and various punctuation marks, contribute to the feelings of the poem, which for the most part seem to depict someone who is almost driven to the point of insanity over a specific woman?