Poetry
Maggie Chang
Poetry
● 3 uses of language: practical, literary, and
argumentative
● Practical: sharpens our feeling of existence and widens
our experiences; lets us think outside the box
● Literary: clarifies that feeling and helps readers
understand what they are experiencing; literature does
not tell us about experience, but allows us to participate
in it
● Argumentative: persuades readers to obtain the
speaker’s or the author’s specific viewpoint
“The Whipping”, Robert Hayden
This poem shows humanity
for its animosity and
anger, as well as the
continuous pattern of
habits passed down to
the next generation.
“To His Coy Mistress”, Andrew Marvell
Had we but world enough, and time,
Thine eyes and on thy forehead gaze;
My echoing song: then worms shall try
This coyness, Lady, were no crime.
Two hundred to adore each breast;
That long preserved virginity,
We would sit down and think which way But thirty thousand to the rest;
And your quaint honour turn to dust,
To walk and pass our long love’s day.
An age at least to every part,
And into ashes all my lust:
Thou by the Indian Ganges’ side
And the last age should show your heart; The grave’s a fine and private place,
Shouldst rubies find: I by the tide
For, Lady, you deserve this state,
But none, I think, do there embrace.
Of Humber would complain. I would
Nor would I love at lower rate.
Now therefore, while the youthful hue
Love you ten years before the Flood,
But at my back I always hear
Sits on thy skin like morning dew,
And you should, if you please, refuse
Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near;
And while thy willing soul transpires
Till the conversion of the Jews.
And yonder all before us lie
At every pore with instant fires,
My vegetable love should grow
Deserts of vast eternity.
Now let us sport us while we may,
Vaster than empires, and more slow;
Thy beauty shall no more be found,
And now, like amorous birds of prey,
An hundred years should go to praise
Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound
Rather at once our time devour
“To His Coy Mistress”, Andrew Marvell, cont’d.
Than languish in his slow-chapt power.
“To His Coy Mistress” expresses the
imagery and irony that
Let us roll all our strength and all
this man appears to be in
love with this shy woman no matter
Our sweetness up into one ball,
what in the world. Yet,
he really desires to get in her pants
And tear our pleasures with rough strife
Thorough the iron gates of life:
Thus, though we cannot make our sun
Stand still, yet we will make him run.
and be lustful instead of romantic.
“The Second Coming”, William Butler Yeats
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Are full of passionate intensity.
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
“The Second Coming”, William Butler Yeats
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
“The Second Coming” is basically a
biblical allusion for
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
the upcoming new chapter in life.
The End
“Common language is the one dimensional
language communicating information. Poetry is
the multidimensional language that expresses
senses, emotions, imagination, and
experience.”