Year 12 English Studies
Commentaries on selected poems for examination revision.
CONTENTS
Poet
Title
Page
Jeri Kroll
1.
2.
Quickening
On Watching a Sleeping Child
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1
William Blake
3.
4.
5.
6.
Infant Joy
The Chimney Sweeper
The Lamb
Holy Thursday
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
THE Chimney Sweeper
The Tyger
LONDON
A POISON TREE
INFANT SORROW
From The Songs of Innocence
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5
5
6
7
From The Songs of Experience
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10
11
11
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13
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20
22
23
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25
26
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30
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33
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35
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Sylvia Plath
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
Metaphors
You’re
Morning Song
Blackberrying
Daddy
The Arrival of the Bee Box
Lady Lazarus
Ariel
Seamus Heaney
20.
21.
22.
Digging
Blackberry Picking
Death of a Naturalist
Robert Lowell
23.
Skunk Hour
Robert Frost
24.
25.
The Road not Taken
Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
Margaret Scott
26.
27.
Grandchild
Housework
John Donne
28.
Holy Sonnet X (Death be not proud)
Appendix
A glossary and guide to form, metre, rhyme and language devices in poetry
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Jerri Kroll
“Quickening”
This poem’s speaker apostrophises her unborn child, beginning with the simile of a sleeping cat which may, like the foetus itself, be lying
in her lap. Sound, rhythm and imagery in the poem are carefully calibrated to reflect the gentle anticipatory ‘flow’ of pregnancy which can
alter a mother’s conventional sense of control. The rhythm of the first line, punctuated by the dactylic opening syllables “You shudder”,
reflects the baby’s movement in the womb just as the simile does. The feline analogy is continued by enjambment over the next three
lines until the middle fifth line lists involuntary physiological movements in a heart beat’s iambic rhythm that extend the idea of the
shudder, ending on the poem’s turn in line six with “an eyelid closing”. This shift from touch to imagined sight establishes the poem’s
second, abstract analogy for the unborn infant as a dream of the mother in line seven, “floating as scraps of dream”. From here on diction
supplants the rhythmic play of the first five lines with an increased emphasis on assonantal sounds like the ‘o’ of “closing”, “floating”,
“hoping” and “whole”, the last two providing bookended sounds to round off the poem’s last line.
The shift from concrete tactile imagery in the first half of the poem to the mother’s more abstract anticipation of a healthy child in her
mind’s eye is reflected in a gradual abandonment of punctuation, which disappears at the end of line six, the ‘turn’ in the poem’s pattern
of imagery occurring just when a reader would expect some form of guidance after the punctuated list of line five. Without punctuation,
lines like “floating as scraps of dream” and “I can’t quite recall” literally float in such a way that a double take is needed to link the dream
scraps with their recall and “each night” can be understood as beginning a new sentence. Thus the poem beautifully evokes the delicate
tension between physical intimacy and apprehension that is associated with pregnancy. In this context, the title’s reference to the
prenatal period when movement of the foetus can be felt by the mother, can also be punning on a transitive sense of the verb, whereby
the mother attempts to “quicken” the child’s coming into being. Potentially alluding to Jorge Luis Borges’ short story “The Circular Ruins”,
Kroll uses a more expressively abstract image of lying “down/ … to dream [the baby] whole”.
LINKS
‘Infant Joy’; ‘On Watching a Sleeping Child’; ‘Metaphors’; ‘You’re’; ‘Morning Song’; ‘Grandchild’.
“On Watching a Sleeping Child”
The shift from Kroll uses a more expressively abstract image of lying “down/ … to dream [the baby] whole”.
LINKS
‘Infant Sorrow’; ‘Quickening’; ‘You’re’; ‘Morning Song’; ‘Grandchild’; ‘Daddy’; ‘Lady Lazarus’; ‘Blackberry Picking’; ‘Death of a Naturalist’; ‘Skunk Hour’.
William Blake
“Infant Joy”1
In the poem’s first two lines, an infant tells us that he has no name and is two days old. How can this be, particularly since the
etymological root (in Latin) of “infant” means non-speaking? The babe communicates in the same way that the lamb (equally nonverbal)
“call[s]” to the shepherd, through movements and sounds – that is, through his very nature – in “The Shepherd”. According to 18th C.
language theory, this type of communication stands at the origin of all languages. Blake has transferred to an infant the gestures and
noises that linguistic speculators imagined as the prehistoric scene in which human speech evolved. He translates this nonverbal mode
of communication into childlike language, including the poems’ predominantly monosyllabic diction (only “happy”, “befall” and “pretty”
All of these notes on Blake are taken from Robert N. Essick’s commentary to his colour plate edition of the Songs of Innocence and of Experience,
based on copy E held by the Henry E. Huntingdon Library (Huntingdon Library and Art Gallery, San Marino, CA: 2008)
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have two syllables), its many repetitions, and quantitative rhythms that follow simple speech patterns more than any formal versification,
an informality which makes it typical of the Songs of Innocence in contrast with the rigid rhythmic and rhyming formalities of Experience
(“The Tyger”, “A Poison Tree”, etc.).
In the third line, we hear another voice, presumably an adult who can understand pre-linguistic communication. The infant immediately
answers with a statement of both his identity (“happy”) and his name that accords perfectly with that identity (“joy”). Placing the adjective
between the subject and verb in “I happy am” incorporates the emotion into the infant’s being rather than attaching it as a modifier. The
adult follows with a blessing that repeats the infant’s name, “Sweet joy befall thee”, repeated as a refrain at the end of the poem. Rather
than having a name imposed by adults, the infant has named himself (or herself). This brief and delicate poem directs us toward the
complex relationships between identity and the act of naming, and between things and words.
The second stanza, spoken by an adult, continues with the simplified diction of childhood, just as parents tend to do when communicating
in “baby talk” with an infant. The speaker repeats “joy”, the infant’s condition and newly minted name, four times in six lines. In response
to this name and to the adult’s song, alluded to in the penultimate line (“I sing the while”),the child smiles as another expression of both
nature and name, the two comprising the child’s unified identity, corporeal and linguistic. We can imagine that the adult’s song is “Infant
Joy”, the name of this poem and of the child. The unity of being and language is complete. In the state of experience, such unities fall into
differential structures of language and their ambiguities, uncertainties, and ironies.
Like the text, the picture features an act of blessing, and possibly naming, in a scene that recalls paintings of the adoration of the Christ
child. Standing before mother and child, precisely in the place where the flower’s stamen would normally be found, is another, much
smaller female. She may be the adult speaker in the poem who participates in the naming of the child, or at least accepts and repeats its
self-naming, and offers a blessing. Each of her wings bears a dot, suggesting both an insect (such as those that fertilise flwers) and the
classical figure Psyche (lover of Eros or Cupid and symbol of the soul), generally portrayed with such wings. As her name implies, she is
a traditional personification of mind or spirit. Blake has united in one motif the human, the animal, the botanic, and the spiritual or mental
realms.
The stems of the two flowers embrace the poem, much as the flame-like petals of the open flower protectively enclose the scene of
mother, baby and spirit figure. Is the pendant flower on the right wilting or about to rise and bloom? Does it anticipate what will “befall”
(final line) this infant? The answer may depend on whether we bring to the design the vision of innocence or of experience.
LINKS
‘The Lamb’; ‘Holy Thursday’; ‘Infant Sorrow’; ‘The Tyger’; ‘Quickening’; ‘On Watching a Sleeping Child’; ‘Metaphors’; ‘You’re’; ‘Morning Song’;
‘Grandchild’; ‘Blackberry Picking’; ‘Death of a Naturalist’.
“The Chimney Sweeper”
This poem offers one of Blake’s more direct engagements with contemporary social issues in the Songs of Innocence (unlike the Songs
of Experience where such direct engagement with social issues is commonplace). The desperate lot of chimney sweepers was well
known to Londoners in Blake’s time. His poem is spoken by one of these unfortunate boys. His father, perhaps unable to care for the
child after the mother’s death and in need of money, literally sells him to a master sweep. The boy is so young that he can barely utter the
street call or “cry” (as it was then called, an expression upon which Blake puns in “London”: ‘In every cry of every Man’) used by
sweepers to drum up business. The call was “sweep, sweep, sweep, sweep”, but Blake renders this as “weep, weep, weep, weep”, as
though the boy were lisping and inadvertently expressing the sorrows of his life. The tradesman’s “cry” becomes a more personally
expressive cry of grief, but only the former is heard, for the speaker is hired to sweep “your chimneys” and thereby transfer soot to
himself and to the bags among which he sleeps. The word “your” in this final line of stanza 1 implicates the reader in the circle of
exploitation.
In the second stanza, the speaker turns to a new recruit, Tom Dacre, whose head is about to be shaved. He may have been a foundling
or orphan, for his surname is taken from Lady Ann Dacre’s Alms Houses, where the indigent residents were permitted to adopt a
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destitute child. Apparently his foster parent has sold him to a master sweeper. The simile used to describe Tom’s curly hair, “like a lamb’s
back”, resonates pitiably with the lambs pictured an described elsewhere in Innocence and their association with Jesus as “the Lamb of
God” (John 1:29; alluded to directly in “The Lamb”). The sacrifice of the boy’s hair symbolically repeats, in 18 th C. London, the sacrifice of
Jesus as the paschal lamb.
The poem’s speaker, in his innocence looking for the silver lining of every cloud, attempts to console Tom by telling him that cutting of his
“white [that is, blonde?] hair” will save it from soot. Most readers will conclude that this is innocence at its most deluded, but for the
moment it satisfies Tom, who is quieted at the opening of the third stanza and falls asleep. He dreams that he and his fellow sweeps are
released from their “coffins of black” – that is, coffin-like chimneys – by an “Angel”. In this resurrection, the angel’s “bright key” recalls the
“keys of hell and death” (Revelation 1:18) used by Christ to release humankind from the grave and from damnation. Now “free” to laugh
and run, their bags of soot “left behind” (stanza 5), the boys escape the cityscape of chimneys and find themselves on the sunny “green”
of innocence. After washing off their soot, the sweeps become “naked & white” as they “sport” on “clouds” driven by nature’s “wind” rather
than fires and cruel masters. The contrast of black and white is straightforward and uncompromised.
While implicitly biblical and even apocalyptic, the release of the sweepers from their burdens has worldly precedents. Some of the kinder
masters allowed their apprentice sweeps to wash “in a river” (stanza 4) once a year. On May day, chimney sweepers and milkmaids
paraded and danced through the streets of London. In his dream, Tom has expanded these moments of release into a permanent future.
The dream ends after the angel tells Tom to be a “good boy” and thereby “have God for his father” rather than the foster father who sold
him or a harsh master. Apparently being “good” means continuing in Tom’s enforced labours, for all the sweeps rise “in the dark” with the
tools of their trade (stanza 6). The sweeper telling the story ends with a moral tag: no harm will come to the sweepers if they “all do their
duty”.
Both Tom Dacre and the poem’s speaker preserve their innocence in spite of their physical circumstances. Even if we do not look for
rhetorical irony, in the sense that the speaker says what he does not mean, the chasm between the inner innocence of the children and
their outer lives makes the political and philosophical ironies evident, particularly in the poem’s final line. If “all” were to include the boys’
masters and “duty” were defined as ethical behaviour, there would indeed be no reason to “fear harm”. But “all” is limited to the young
sweepers in the fourth stanza, and the context of the final stanza indicates that “duty” means sweeping chimneys. The comforting
sentiments of innocence will have terrible consequences for these boys. From the void between inside and outside, dream and material
reality, the Songs of Experience will emerge.
LINKS
‘London’; ‘The Lamb’; ‘Holy Thursday’; ‘THE Chimney Sweeper’ (E); ‘; ‘Blackberry Picking’; ‘Death of a Naturalist’.
“The Lamb”
Like “Infant Joy”, “The Lamb” delves into relationships between identity and naming. As we would expect in the harmonious world of
innocence, the questions about the creator of the lamb in the first stanza are answered completely and without hesitation, as in a
catechism (the spoken exam of religious instruction). This echoing between question and response suggests a unity of voice, also figured
in the relationship between the “tender voice” of the lamb and the landscape that, in perfect rhyme, repeats the joy of the lamb when the
“vales rejoice”.
The shepherd’s answer to his own questions hinges on a symmetry between creature and creator authorised by the reference to Christ
as “the Lamb of God in John 1:29, by the paschal lamb of Revelation (5:6 – 13), and by the incarnation of Christ in “a little child” (stanza
2). Poem and speaker also partake in this identification of creature and creator, for the poem is also “called by thy [the lamb’s] name”,
and the speaker is “called by his [Christ’s] name”. That final step towards inclusiveness is based on Christ’s own words: “I am the good
shepherd” (John 10:11). The circle is complete, embracing Christ as the creator, the lamb, the speaker of the poem, and the poem. The
second stanza traces a spiritual (and not merely linguistic) etymology that finds a common root for lamb, child, and shepherd in Christ. By
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implication, we can also include William Blake, the creator of “The Lamb”, and ourselves as readers who ideally attend to the text much
as the shepherd tends to his flock. Poet and reader share an active role in the composition, for the reader is called on to supply the
missing but implicit verbs, first and second person forms of “to be”, in “I a child & thou a lamb”.
The poem’s rhymed couplets and many repetitions in diction and syntax offer a verbal equivalent to the intertwined identities it proposes.
The final two lines echo each other, for the “God” that blesses and the creatures who are blessed, “Little Lamb[s]” all, share the same
spiritual identity even as their outward forms vary. The logic here is similar to that underlying the conclusion of Blake’s All Religions are
One: “As all men are alike (tho’ infinitely various) So all Religions & as all similars have one source[.] The true Man is the source he being
the Poetic Genius”.
“The Lamb”, in many ways the quintessential song of Innocence, may be Blake’s response to Wesley’s Hymns for Children, particularly
the section headed “Hymns for the Youngest”, which includes the most famous of these hymns, beginning “Gentle Jesus, meek and
mild”. The second stanza of Blake’s poem is remarkably similar to lines from that hymn:
Lamb of God, I look to Thee,
Thou shalt my example be,
Thou art gentle, meek, and mild,
Thou wast once a little child.
Throughout his songs in the “Youngest” section, Wesley stresses the value of innocence, the image of Jesus as a lamb, and the almost
magical powers of his name. However, where Wesley’s child is aware of his fallen condition and in the subservient role of pupil looks to
Jesus as an instructor, Blake’s poem proposes an unselfconscious identity and equality between them.
LINKS
‘Infant Joy; ‘The Tyger’; ‘Quickening’; ‘On Watching a Sleeping Child’; ‘Metaphors’; ‘You’re’; ‘Morning Song’; ‘Grandchild’; ‘Death of a Naturalist’.
“Holy Thursday”
In May or June of each year beginning in 1782, the charity-school children of London marched into St Paul’s Cathedral to sing hymns of
praise to God and to express thanks to their benefactors. The ceremony never took place on Maundy Thursday (the Thursday before
Easter) or Ascension Day (the fortieth day after Easter), the days in the church calendar often called “Holy Thursday”. By giving that title
to his poem, Blake hints at a conflation, or an extended typological association, among the three events.
The poem’s diction should immediately tell us that the speaker differs from those we have encountered in Innocence. Although other
poems in the collection are spoken by adults, they are addressing children, or at least using the simple and concrete language
appropriate for young readers. This speaker uses abstractions and rotund polysyllables, such as “harmonious thunderings”, and other
rhetorical forms meant to impress. That rhetoric is the speaker’s response to the way in which he (more probably than “she”) is deeply
moved by the children and their song, but he sees them strictly as an observer, at times a distant one, who has no personal interaction
with them. He twice uses the word “innocent”, indicating a consciousness of the difference between himself and the children. His spirit,
thoughts, and language are raised “to heaven” (stanza 3) by the children’s transcendent singing. The children themselves, and the unions
of flesh and spirit so much a part of Innocence, are left below.
The children are led through London’s streets by “beadles”, the parish officers who carry “wands as white as snow” that signify their cold
authority and contrast with the colours of the children’s clothing (stanza 1). In this cityscape, these men and their staves replace the
shepherd with his crook who protects his flock in the pastoral landscapes of Innocence (“The Lamb”). The children’s “faces clean”
contrast with the sooty faces of chimney sweepers (“The Chimney Sweeper”) and recall the first holy Thursday, when Christ washed the
feet of his disciples (John 13:5). The close-up perspective suggested by the reference to “faces” zooms out to a more distant view when
the speaker compares the group of children to flowing “waters” of the River Thames. The long lines of fourteen or fifteen syllables –
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basically the metric equivalent of the septenaries of Blake’s later prophetic books and epics – capture this flowing motion but also
distance the versification from that of the poem’s companions in Innocence.
The second stanza moves us from London’s streets into St. Paul’s and from the metaphor of “waters” to the children as “flowers” – not of
the pastoral green, but of “London town”. Metaphors carried from nature into the city continue with the comparison with “lambs”, an image
of Christ throughout Innocence. In the context of “Holy Thursday”, the sacrificial lamb on another holy day, Passover or Easter, may be
the most apt allusion. Childhood energies are sacrificed when their expression in play (e.g. “The Ecchoing Green”) is disciplined into the
more rigid form of “companies”, although this does not darken their “radiance”.
The description of the children’s singing in the first two lines of the final stanza draws upon images associated with both Ascension Day
and Maundy Thursday. The former is suggested by voices that ascend “to heaven”; the latter is implied by the simile “like a mighty wind”.
On the first Maundy Thursday, Jesus tell his apostles that, after he has left them, the “Father” will send a “Comforter, which is the Holy
Ghost” (John 14:26). Elsewhere in the New Testament, the coming of the Holy Ghost is imaged as “a…mighty wind” – for example in
Acts 2:2 on Pentecost, another holy day determined by the date of Easter. The children’s song is invested with the spirit of God. The
comparison of their song to “harmonious thunderings”, and the earlier comparisons of the “thousands” of children to “waters” and “lambs”,
echo the language of Revelation 14:1 – 4, a vision of “a Lamb” accompanied by “an hundred forty and four thousand of the “redeemed”
who learn “a new song” from “a voice from heaven, as the voice of many waters, and as the voice of a great thunder”.
Sitting physically (and spiritually?) “beneath” the children are their “wise guardians”, the beadles and other officials of the charitable
institutions for the “poor”. “Then”, at the beginning of the last line, would seem to connect with the description of the children’s song more
than with the presence of guardians. The concluding admonition to extend “pity” alludes to another biblical passage: “Be not forgetful to
entertain strangers: for thereby some have entertained angels unawares” (Hebrews 13:2; also relevant is the story of Tobias and the
angel in the apocryphal Book of Tobit). Are the guardians not truly “wise”? And is “pity”, rather than admiration and reverence, the proper
response to the children and their singing? As in “On Another’s Sorrow”, empathy or pity is basic to innocence. Ironic readings of both
“pity” and “wise” are however made possible by the adult self-consciousness of the speaker and his awareness of differences, the ground
of irony, between the outward lives of the children and their inner spirit expressed through song. The illustrations add powerfully to this
contrast by juxtaposing the regimented lines of children dressed in burdensome adult clothing and controlled by adult masters, with the
visual energies of the text area interpenetrated by lively vines, tendrils, leaves and birds. Thus the “Holy Thursday” of Innocence
foreshadows the dualities that constitute the mental state of experience.
LINKS
‘The Lamb’; ‘HOLY THURSDAY’; ‘On Another’s Sorrow’; ‘The Chimney Sweeper’; ‘Infant Joy’; ‘Infant Sorrow’; ‘On Watching a Sleeping Child’;
‘Metaphors’; ‘You’re’; ‘Morning Song’; ‘Blackberry Picking’; ‘Death of a Naturalist’; ‘Waking in the Blue’; ‘Grandchild’.
“THE Chimney Sweeper”
‘The Chimney Sweeper’ of Innocence preserves his innocent soul in spite of the horrors of his duties. Here in Experience, the sweeper,
the speaker of the second and third stanzas, is all too aware of the material and social conditions that have destroyed his childhood
innocence. The anonymous narrative voice we hear in the first stanza participates, even if inadvertently, in the diminishing of the boy’s
humanity by calling him a “thing”, a term that reduces him to both an object and a categorical abstraction. The sweeper’s sooty blackness
and the white snow is the first contrast of several that reflect harm, marking how far we have moved away from the unities of innocence.
“Tom was happy & warm” in spite of the “cold” in Innocence; here the cold of the outer world has penetrated to the sweeper’s
consciousness.
As in the contrary poem in Innocence, the sweeper’s street cry (“sweep”) is transformed to “notes of woe” (“weep, weep”). The speaker’s
question in line 3 of the first stanza indicates that parental care, so much a part of innocence, has vanished. Blake’s contemporary
audience would know why: in return for money, the parents have apprenticed their child to a master sweep and thus sold him into
bondage. Their attendance at church “to pray” reveals their hypocrisy. Since chimney sweepers were sometimes excluded from church,
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that institution is also implicated in the systems of enslavement, a critique made more explicit in “London” (Jonas Hanway’s 1785 report,
Shewing the Necessity of Putting [Chimney Sweepers] Under Regulations, to Prevent the Grossest Inhumanity to the Climbing Boys,
quotes a beadle excluding them with the taunt ‘What have chimney-sweepers to do in a church?’).
The boy recalls childhood pleasures “upon the heath” at the beginning of the second stanza, remembering and expressing his joy, even
in winter. He believes that, “because” of his former innocence, he could be exploited. From his present perspective, the state of
innocence is reduced, however wrongly, to naiveté. “They” in the third line includes his parents, his master, and all those who tolerate a
system that has “clothed” him in little more than rags and soot, garments of an occupation that will indeed lead to his “death”. The boy is
already dead to childhood and incapable of the dreams of salvation that sustain the sweepers in Innocence.
The present-tense reference to dancing and singing at the beginning of the final stanza may seem anomalous unless we recall the MayDay parades of chimney sweepers. Because of this single day of apparent pleasure, the hypocritical “they” can pretend that sweepers
are happy, forgetting all the other days of deadly labour. The boy’s churchgoing parents “praise” a God and his earthly rpresentatives
who have created a “heaven” on the basis of the sweeper’s “misery” – in at least two senses. By exploiting the labouring classes, the
“Priest & King” can live in a way that seems heavenly to those in misery. By institutionalising a religion that promises future rewards in
heaven, those in power can justify their actions and control their populace. The ironies latent in “duty” at the end of “The Chimney
Sweeper” in Innocence are fully exposed in this contrary poem of Experience. Blake’s corrected drafts of the poem are almost identical to
the etched text, including a change from “wind” to “snow” (the 2nd line of stanza 2; the final diction sacrificing alliteration with “winter’s” for
rhyme with “woe”) and a revision of the poem’s final line from “Who wrap themselves up in our misery” to the printed version which
emphasises social hypocrisy by juxtaposing the imagery of “heaven” with the hell of the sweeper’s existence.
LINKS
‘The Chimney Sweeper’; ‘London’; ‘Holy Thursday’; ‘HOLY THURSDAY’; ‘On Another’s Sorrow’; ‘Infant Joy’; ‘Infant Sorrow’; ‘On Watching a Sleeping
Child’; ‘Morning Song’; ‘Blackberry Picking’; ‘Death of a Naturalist’; ‘Waking in the Blue’; ‘Grandchild’.
“The Tyger”
‘The Lamb’ of Innocence catechises the unity of God, child, lamb, and (by implication) the author of “The Lamb”. The poem teaches
revealed religion, for Christ revealed himself in the flesh as a child and in his words in the bible. “The Tyger”, a poem less about the
nature of large cats or gods than about the thought processes of its speaker, delves into the origins of natural religion, a primitive
theological state in which the nature of God is deducted by the human mind based solely on the experience of the senses. In “The Lamb”,
the child is created in God’s image. In the theology of “The Tyger”, the speaker creates God in his own image of nature. All questions in
“The Lamb” are immediately answered; “The Tyger” is a broken catechism in which no questions are answered. “The Tyger” continues
the critique of 18th C. natural religion (or deism) that Blake began in There is No Natural Religion by exploring how a myth of creation
based on perceptions of fallen nature might have evolved at the dawn of culture.
In his 1757 treatise The Natural History of Religion, atheist philosopher David Hume speculated on the origin of religion in the absence of
a pre-existing deity. He states that the first theological musings were stimulated by “a monstrous birth … a prodigy” – that is, a sublime
experience that both fascinates and frightens its primordial witness. As the mind creates its god out of such experiences, it transfers
“human passions and infirmities to the deity”. “The Tyger” follows a similar process for inventing a god and a narrative about his actions
and intentions.
The poem’s speaker wanders at night in a primeval forest. It is also the forest “of the night”, for he lives in a world of spiritual darkness
devoid of divine revelation. He comes upon a tiger, the only source of illumination, with its glowing eyes and yellow stripes. As Edmund
Burke pointed out in his famous treatise, “the sublime … comes upon us in the gloomy forest, and in the howling wilderness, in the form
of the lion, the tiger, the panther, or rhinoceros.” The wonder inherent in the sublime moment brings to the speaker’s mind questions of
origins. What sort of being could create such a creature that elicits such fear and fascination? With the word “hand”, the first religious
questioner has already begun to attribute human qualities to the creator, as in Hume. The “symmetry” of the fear-inducing tiger’s eyes,
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legs, and stripes – the last attribute an alternation of light and darkness – will evolve into an even more “fearful symmetry” between
creature and creator, between tiger and an even more frightening god. The remainder of the poem will “frame” – will both form and try to
contain – that god’s character and story. Perhaps the speaker’s inability fully to accomplish that framing is implied by the rhythm of the
first and last stanzas. The regular trochaic trimetre (with an additional accented syllable at the end) of the first three lines is broken by the
word “symmetry”, for it adds an unaccented syllable to form an iambc tetrametre line – disrupting the symmetry it names and thereby
throwing into doubt the speaker’s proposed symmetry between visible objects and an invisible power.
The poem’s initial question evokes more questions, but these begin to frame a myth of creation and fall – Hume’s “genealogy, attributes
and adventures” of a god. The speaker wonders, in the second stanza, whether the tiger was created in the “skies”, and thus by a sky
god like Zeus or Jehovah, or in the “deeps”. The latter suggest a primitive form of Gnosticism, or other myths in which the earth was
created by a demiurge from the lower world. In either case, the creator is “distant”, like the divine mechanic of the Deists (a ‘blind
watchmaker’), the opposite of the personal God of Innocence. The dualisms of “The Tyger” – light and darkness, skies and deeps,
speaker and distant god – provide the substructure for both gnostic and Manichean theologies.
“Thine eyes” in the second stanza is probably a reference to the tiger, but this quickly shifts to its creator, the winged “he” in the next line.
The combination of flight, daring and aspiration foreshadows the myths of Daedulus and Icarus. A god who dares to “seize the fire” to
create the tiger’s glowing eyes presages figures like Hephaestus, the blacksmith god whose forges were in the “deeps” below Munt
Aetna, and Prometheus, who dared to steal fire from heaven. Blake continues to develop an ur-myth, a compound of many creation
stories before its dispersal into various mythologies and theologies.
The speaker continues, in the third stanza, to wonder what sort of creator could form a beast as powerful as the tiger. The answer is
implicit in the wording of the questions – a creator at least as powerful (and as sublimely frightening) as his creation. As the speaker
anatomises the tiger into its “sinews” and “heart”, h is also synthesising a god with a “hand” capable of twisting those sinews and making
that heart “beat”. Like a tiger ready to pounce, its creator has “dread feet”, in the speaker’s imaginative search for a likeness or analogy
between creature and creator. The uninterrupted flow of unanswered questions heightens the sense of sublime wonder, much like God’s
questions in Job, chapters 38 – 41, which imply powers beyond human comprehension.
The continuation of blacksmith imagery in the fourth stanza gestures toward Blake’s own role as the creator of “The Tyger" – a printing
plate made of metal. Blake did not literally work at a forge or anvil, but he used hammers to “knock up” the backs of copperplates, fire to
heat ink and plates etched in intaglio, and acids to burn away unprotected surfaces (his illuminated book The Marriage of Heaven and
Hell makes much more explicit reference to these processes in the chapter “A Printing House in Hell”). The imagined scene of the tiger’s
creation merges with the actual scene of Blake’s creation of “The Tyger”. In both instances, the artificer must be as powerful and daring
and as his creation. Blake’s readers continue that sublime activity as they attempt to “clasp” the “deadly terrors” of “The Tyger”, much as
the poem’s speaker attempts to understand the tiger he sees and the unseen god he creates. We can further participate in the poem’s
actions if we read aloud the insistent trochees that began as intimations of the tiger’s footfall and now befit a smith’s hammer blows.
The fifth stanza carries us beyond a creation myth and into an implied theomachy and a story of fallen gods or angels. The speaker is no
longer reacting to the tiger, but to other sense experiences that fascinate and frighten him into mythic speculations, once again as in
Hume’s scenario for the origin of gods. Bolts of lightning become the “spears” of anthropomorphised “stars”; rain becomes their “tears”.
The “he” in the third line is the supreme god who has created the tiger and defeated the “stars”, like Christ’s victory over the rebellious
angels in Milton’s Paradise Lost. Was the god pleased with his “work”, like Jehovah when he “saw” that his creation “was good” (Genesis
1:10)? Did the same god who made the tiger make “the Lamb”? One affirmative answer to the second question is certain: the same
artificer made the etched copperplates of both “The Tyger” and “The Lamb”. These questions, however, also imply profound theological
issues. If the creator smiled at his creation, then the world perceived by our senses is good. If not, then it is as fallen as the defeated
“stars”, or Milton’s angels lamenting their fate in hell. To put the issue in other terms, are we to celebrate the physical world or decy it,
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hoping for a better world to come? Most religions wrestle with that question. Blake’s purpose is not to provide answers but to state the
fundamental question he imagines to have been asked, prior to the development of religions that attempt answers.
The second question about lambs and tigers (“thee” at the end of the fifth stanza) implies another, related conundrum in the history of
religion. If we answer “yes”, then we will create a monotheistic religion, but one that must contend with a god capable of fearfully
symmetrical creations – gentleness and fierceness, innocence and experience, good and evil – and hence a god with a compound, even
contradictory, character. If we answer “no”, then we are on the way toward polytheism, and we must suffer a muddled theology in which
various deeds are apportioned to disparate, contentious gods, as in Greek mythology or Hindu religion. Blake’s speaker has asked a
question that initiates one of the basic differences among religions throughout history, those with one god and those with many.
The final stanza repeats the first, with a change in the last line from “could” to “dare”, a word already used three times in the poem. Thus
the initial question of the god’s capability has shifted to a logically prior question about his audacity. Rather than answers, we are left with
yet another question, one that moves a step back from where we began and implies an infinite regress of questions. The poem’s speaker
is not without imaginative powers, but he is caught in the “dull round” of natural religion, “bounded by organs of perception”, unable to
perceive that he is “himself Infinite” and that his own “Poetic or Prophetic character” is at one with the creative faculties of God (There is
No Natural Religion, reproduced in The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, Newly Revised Edition, ed. David V. Erdman, NY:
Doubleday, 1988; pp. 2-3). He is one of those “men” who “forgot that All deities reside in the human breast” (The Marriage of Heaven and
Hell, Erdman, p.38), and he thereby becomes one of those who “adores an impersonal God” and thus “has none; and, without guide or
rudder, launches on an immense abyss that first absorbs his powers, and next himself.” (John Caspar Lavater, Aphorisms on Man
Translated from the Original Manuscript, London: J. Johnson, 1788, a book which Blake annotated extensively, commenting on this
aphorism: “would to God that all men would consider it”, Erdman, p.596)
One interpretation of the stark contrast between the poem’s fearsome beast of experience and the illustration’s lamb-like tiger of
innocence is that we create our own tigers, depending on the state of consciousness we bring to that endeavour. As Blake wrote in about
1808 in his annotations to Sir Joshua Reynolds’s Discourses on Art, “As the Eye – Such the Object” (Erdman, p.645).
LINKS
‘The Lamb’; ‘London’; ‘Infant Sorrow’; ‘On Watching a Sleeping Child’; ‘Blackberrying’; ‘The Moon and the Yew Tree’; ‘Blackberry Picking’; ‘Death of a
Naturalist’; ‘Skunk Hour’; ‘Holy Sonnet X’; ‘They put Us far apart’.
“London”
Blake was a great walker who could travel west from Lambeth on the Borough Road to Westminster Bridge over the Thames, then turn to
the north and east to be in London with all its wonders and horrors. The speaker of “London” takes such a walk through the great city to
see and hear a dystopian vision of hell.
The poem begins with a contrast between the speaker and what he discovers. “I wander” suggests a ramble rather than a journey with a
specific destination, but “charter’d” indicates a structured system of laws and leases that grant privileges to a few and prescribe
prohibitions for most. Even the naturally free-flowing river has been “charter’d”, its channel confined within the embankments, the rights to
its use leased out. In The Rights of Man, Thomas Paine protested that “it is a perversion of terms to say, that a charter gives rights. It
operates by a contrary effect, that of taking rights away.”
Paine also sees England “disfigured with the marks” of conquest and tyranny. The speaker of “London” finds similar “marks” on the faces
he sees in the city. This physiognomy of “weakness” and “woe” may be the result of emotional expression, but more permanent “marks”
were caused by diseases such as smallpox and syphilis, an 18th C. equivalent of the Bible’s “mark” of Cain (Genesis 4:15), the “mark
upon the foreheads of men that sigh and that cry” (Ezekiel 9:14), and “the mark of the beast” (Revelation 16:2). The speaker does not
merely observe these marks, but “mark[s]” them. Blake’s use of the same word for the speaker’s activity and for what he sees implicates
the speaker in that marking; he has a predilection to perceive the marks in “every” face. Blake is also implicated in a process of marking –
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remarking on London, marking copperplates with acid-resist, marking paper with printed letters. Subject and object often merge in
Innocence, but here they imprint each other with the signs of woe. To emphasise this marking, Blake alters the iambic metre of the first
three lines of the first stanza to trochaic in the final line, so that the stress falls twice on “marks”.
The second stanza moves from visible to auditory marks. The repeated “every” resounds like a hammer blow, four times in three lines, to
emphasise the prevalence of these notes of woe throughout London’s human sounds. The “cry” of “every Man” includes the street cries
of tradesmen selling their wares or services; like the cries of the chimney sweepers, they bespeak bondage to destructive social and
economic systems. For the speaker, the infant’s cry at birth signals a justified “fear” of being born into such a world, one in which the
child’s cries to be fed will evolve into street cries of trade. The word “ban” resonates with several meanings, including prohibitions, curses,
the crying of marriage banns in churches, the banning of freedoms by William Pitt’s government, and the bands named as “manacles” in
the stanza’s final line. The complex interchanges of visual and verbal in the poem – inherent in the written word but also foregrounded by
Blake’s composite art of illuminated printing – culminate in the final (and stressed) “hear”. The speaker hears “manacles”, like the clink of
prisoners’ chains, in “every voice” of the city; readers can hear the “Man” in the “manacles”. In one of Blake’s most famous images, these
manacles are “mind-forg’d”, for they are products of a state of consciousness that imposes commercial exploitation, chartered streets and
rivers, and multiple bans on human thoughts and actions. The manacled minds include the speaker’s own, for he never sees beyond the
world of experience.
Blake continues to intertwine the visual and the auditory in the third stanza with a series of images that seem to be drawn from the
speaker’s mind, as if it were manacled to a synaesthesia which perceives moral outrage through a blending of these senses. Read from
top to bottom, the first letters in each line spell “HEAR”. We hear again the “Chimney-sweeper’s” cry, lisped into “weep” in both of the
Innocence and Experience songs, but this time infecting the speaker’s vision. Church chimneys need cleaning because they are filled
with black soot, but the church is also “blackning” because as sweepers clean the chimneys their bodies (and lungs) are blackened. We
can hear several puns on “appalls”: etymologically, to grow pale, like cleaned chimneys and sickened children; to make the sweepers
insignificant, “pale” in comparison to the churches; to cover a corpse or hearse with a dark “pall”; to restrict and enclose, like a “pale” of
land. The institution that should be most responsive to the sweepers’ needs is appropriately appalled by their condition, even as it
continues to exploit their labour and contribute to their early death. In this interpretation the synaesthesic image evokes Jesus’
condemnatory metaphor for Pharisaic hypocrisy as “whited sepulchres”, which in Blake’s poem becomes the “blackning Church” of dead
moral law whited or appalled, in the transitive sense of the verb, by the work of the sweepers.
The soldier’s “sigh” becomes, through another synaesthesic transformation, blood running “down Palace walls”. Blake again shifts his
metre to trochees so that the emphasis falls on “Runs”, “blood”, and “walls”. The king and his ministers have sent British soldiers to fight
in European and colonial wars. Consonance and rhyme link “appals” and “Palace walls” in an aural indication that church and state
maintain power by exploiting their adherents and citizens, respectively. The poem’s speaker hears and sees duplicity everywhere.
The final stanza leads us into a night-time and nightmare vision of human relationships. The “Harlot’s curse”, never heard in fashionable
discourse, becomes the “most” heard. She may be verbally cursing her lot in life, or a man refusing to pay, but the speaker interprets the
sounds she utters as signs of “how” she passes on to her customers the “curse” of venereal disease. The transformation is now from the
aural to the pathological, from communication to communicable disease. The customers in turn infect their wives, who then infect the
children they bear with a form of gonorrhoea that causes a greenish discharge from an infant’s eyes. The baby’s tears are blasted, in the
sense of withered and ruined, and changed to pus. The infection can seal the eyelids shut and lead to blindness. The “midnight” darkness
of the city becomes internalised and permanent. The audible “blasts” of the harlot’s curse become (and alliterate with) the “blights” of a
plague that turns the carriage, in which the bride and bridegroom ride after the marriage ceremony, into a “hearse”. Wedlock has become
another destructive manacle in the poem’s chain of interlinked sounds, puns, and images. What should be the beginning of new life is
marked with death. The poem ends with a “hearse” containing all that we “hear” and “se[e]” in the poem. It is difficult to find in literature
more binding and blinding ironies since Sophocles.
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LINKS
‘The Chimney Sweeper’; ‘THE Chimney Sweeper’; ‘Holy Thursday’; ‘HOLY THURSDAY’; ‘On Another’s Sorrow’; ‘Infant Sorrow’; ‘The Applicant’; ‘Daddy’;
‘Lady Lazarus’; ‘Blackberry Picking’; ‘Death of a Naturalist’; ‘Waking in the Blue’; ‘Memories of West Street and Lepke’; ‘Grandchild’.
“A Poison Tree”
When Blake read Lavater’s Aphorisms, he underlined the following sentence and wrote “bravo” in the margin: “The most stormy
ebullitions of passion, from blasphemy to murder, are less terrific than one single act of cool villainy”. Two of Blake’s “Proverbs of Hell”
express a similarly favourable view of active passion: “He who desires but acts not, breeds pestilence”, and “Sooner murder an infant in
its cradle than nurse unacted desires” (The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Erdman; 35, 38). “A Poison Tree” further explores how
repressed emotions grow into villainy.
The opening stanza explicitly declares the case for expression and against repression. The couplets mirror each other in a symmetry
which perfectly suits a song of Experience; the first line of each is trochaic, the second an iambic line setting forth the consequences of
each way of dealing with anger. The metaphoric possibilities in the final word, “grow”, initiate the story of the poison tree.
The speaker nurtures his compound of anger and fear with “tears” that water the tree and deceitful “smiles” that sun it in stanza 2. A
Machiavellian duplicity masks from the world his repressed emotions and intentions and creates a division within the self. The tree bears
fruit in the third stanza and tempts the “foe”. He “knew” that the “apple bright” is the speaker’s, and thus one of his motivations for theft is
envy for what others have. The foe creeps into the “garden” (stanza 4) when night has “veild” the pole star, eats the fruit of the poison
tree, and dies. In the final lines, the speaker is “glad” to see the corpse, “outstretched beneath the tree”, as he appears in the design
below. The enemy’s cruciform position suggests that he has been sacrificed to a false morality of punishment. Repressed anger,
vengeance, duplicity, temptation, jealousy and theft have joined forces, with murderous results. We have left the landscapes and
emotions of Innocence far behind.
Several other trees are related to the poison tree. Blake knew of the legendary Upas tree of Java that poisons the ground around it, for in
his Notebook he compares another poisonous tree to the one “at Java found”. Blake’s own tree of “Mystery” in “The Human Abstract” (a
contrary song of Experience to “The Divine Image” in Innocence) is also destructive: it bears “the fruit of Deceit” (stanza 5) and both trees
grow from “the Human Brain” (final line). The most intriguing parallel is with the tempting but deadly “tree of knowledge of good and evil”
in the Garden of Eden (Genesis 2:9). If we read Genesis from the perspective of “A Poison Tree”, then Jehovah, an angry deity
throughout much of the Old Testament, would be cast in the same role as the poem’s speaker. Latent within Blake’s story of the poison
tree is a heterodox interpretation of Genesis in which Jehovah, not Satan, is the scheming tempter. The title Blake wrote above his draft
of the poem, “Christian Forbearance”, suggests that the supposed virtue of restraint can be yet another form of repression and a disguise
for evil.
LINKS
‘London’; ‘THE Chimney Sweeper’; ‘HOLY THURSDAY’; ‘On Another’s Sorrow’; ‘Infant Sorrow’; ‘Blackberrying’; ‘The Moon and the Yew Tree’;
‘Blackberry Picking’; ‘Death of a Naturalist’; ‘Waking in the Blue’; ‘Skunk Hour’; ‘The Road not Taken’ ; ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’.
“Infant Sorrow”
A harsh contrary to “Infant Joy”, “Infant Sorrow” treats birth as the entry into a fallen and “dangerous” world. In contrast to the
unselfconsciousness of Innocence, the infant speaker is all too conscious of his predicament. His mother “groand” with the pains of
parturition, a result of Eve’s fall (Genesis 3:16); his father “wept” at the woman’s suffering and perhaps with foreboding about the child’s
future. Rather than piping with “merry chear” like the shepherd in the “Introduction” to Innocence, the child is helpless and his “piping” is a
“loud” cry, neither tuneful nor articulate. Babes in Innocence are types of the Christ child; here the comparison is with a “fiend” who tries
to hide from the world that has descended into furious madness. Blake has begun to answer the questions Anna Laetitia Barbauld poses
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at the beginning of one of her anodyne 1781 Hymns in Prose for Children: “Child of mortality, whence comest thou? Why is thy
countenance sad, and why are thine eyes red with weeping?”
The child/parent relationship, central to the harmonies of Innocence, decays into a struggle against all forms of constraint, be it the
“fathers hands” or the “swaddling bands” (stanza 2). The tightly woven iambic and trochaic rhythms and emphatic, masculine rhymes
(“wept”, “leapt”; “hands”, “bands”) contribute their own sense of restraint, even more powerfully than the symmetries of “A Poison Tree”
or “The Tyger”. The revolt fails: the child remains bound and “weary” from his efforts. Thinking strategically, cunningly, the child turns
from the father to the mother to “sulk upon” her breast. The infant has already learned a good deal about the world of experience as a
world of bondage; the poem leaves us with little doubt that there are more struggles to come between isolated self and fallen world,
desire and entrapment.
Having “leapt” into “the dangerous world”, the “naked” newborn tries to leap out of it, and out of the mother’s grasp, in the design. The
figures are placed within a setting defined by woven fabrics, including bedding and blood-red background drapery that helps to fill in the
entire space of the plate below the text. Not only is the text and design relationship reversed from “Infant Joy”, most of whose illustration
sits above the text, but the openness and interconnection of that design has been replaced with a filling in by the picture which crowds
the text of “Infant Sorrow” up into the top left corner of the plate.
LINKS
‘Infant Joy’; ‘London’; ‘HOLY THURSDAY’; ‘Quickening’; ‘On Watching a Sleeping Child’; ‘Metaphors’; ‘You’re’; ‘Morning Song’; ‘Daddy’; ‘Grandchild’;
‘Blackberry Picking’; ‘Death of a Naturalist’.
Sylvia Plath2
“Lady Lazarus”
Eillen M. Aird
A companion piece to “Daddy”, in which the poet again fuses the worlds of personal pain and corporate suffering, is “Lady Lazarus”. In
this poem a disturbing tension is established between the seriousness of the experience described and the misleadingly light form of the
poem. The vocabulary and rhythms which approximate to the colloquial simplicity of conversational speech, the frequently end-stopped
lines, the repetitions which have the effect of mockingly counteracting the violence of the meaning, all establish the deliberately flippant
note which this poem strives to achieve. These are all devices which also operate in Auden’s ‘light verse’, but the constantly shifting tone
of “Lady Lazarus” is found less frequently in Auden’s more cerebral poetry. At times the tone is hysterically strident and demanding:
The peanut-crunching crowd
Shoves in to see
Them unwrap me hand and foot—
The big strip tease.
Gentlemen, ladies
These are my hands
My knees.
Then it modulates into a calmer irony as the persona mocks herself for her pretensions to tragedy: ‘Dying/is an art, like everything else./I
do it exceptionally well.’ As in “Daddy” Sylvia Plath has used a limited amount of autobiographical detail in this poem; the references to
suicide in “Lady Lazarus” reflect her own experience. As in “Daddy”, however, the personal element is subordinate to a much more
inclusive dramatic structure, and one answer to those critics who have seen her work as merely confessional is that she used her
from Modern American Poetry An Online Journal and Multimedia Companion to Anthology of Modern American Poetry (Oxford
University Press, 2000) Edited by Cary Nelson http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/m_r/plath/lazarus.htm
2
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personal and painful material as a way of entering into and illustrating much wider themes and subjects. In “Lady Lazarus” the poet again
equates her suffering with the experiences of the tortured Jews, she becomes, as a result of the suicide she inflicts on herself, a Jew:
A sort of walking miracle, my skin
Bright as a Nazi lampshade,
My right foot
A paperweight,
My face a featureless, fine
Jew linen.
The reaction of the crowd who push in with morbid interest to see the saved suicide mimics the attitude of many to the revelations of the
concentration camps; there is a brutal insistence on the pain which many apparently manage to see with scientific detachment. “Lady
Lazarus” represents an extreme use of the ‘light verse’ technique. Auden never forced such grotesque material into such an insistently
jaunty poem, and the anger and compassion which inform the poem are rarely found so explicitly in his work. “Lady Lazarus” is also a
supreme example of Sylvia Plath’s skill as an artist. She takes very personal, painful material and controls and forms it with the utmost
rigour into a highly wrought poem, which is partly effective because of the polar opposition between the terrible gaiety of its form and the
fiercely uncompromising seriousness of its subject. If we categorize a poem such as “Lady Lazarus” as ‘confessional’ or ‘extremist’ then
we highlight only one of its elements. It is also a poem of social criticism with a strong didactic intent, and a work of art which reveals
great technical and intellectual ability. The hysteria is intentional and effective.
From Sylvia Plath: Her Life and Work. Copyright © 1973 by Eileen M. Aird
Arthur Oberg
“Lady Lazarus” and “Daddy” are poems which seem written at the edge of sensibility and of imagistic technique. They both utilize an
imagery of severe disintegration and dislocation. The public horrors of the Nazi concentration camps and the personal horrors of
fragmented identities become interchangeable. Men are reduced to parts of bodies and to piles of things. The movement in each poem is
at once historical and private; the confusion in these two spheres suggests the extent to which this century has often made it impossible
to separate them.
The barkerlike tone of “Lady Lazarus” is not accidental. As in “Daddy,” the persona strips herself before the reader ... all the time utilizing
a cool or slang idiom in order to disguise feeling. Sylvia Plath borrowed from a sideshow or vaudeville world the respect for virtuosity
which the performer must acquire, for which the audience pays and never stops paying. Elsewhere in her work, she admired the virtuosity
of the magician's unflinching girl or of the unshaking tattoo artist. Here, in “Lady Lazarus,” it is the barker and the striptease artist who
consume her attention. What the poet pursues in image and in rhyme (for example, the rhyming of ‘Jew’ and ‘gobbledygoo’) becomes
part of the same process I observed in so many of her other poems, that attempt, brilliant and desperate, to locate what it was that hurt.
Sylvia Plath never stopped recording in her poetry the wish and need to clear a space for love. Yet she joined this to an inclination to see
love as unreal, to accompanying fears of being unable to give and receive love, and to the eventual distortion and displacement of love in
the verse. Loving completely or ‘wholly’ she considered to be dangerous, from her earliest verse on.
[. . . .]
Poems like “Daddy” and “Lady Lazarus” in the end may not be the triumphs which their momentum and inventiveness at times celebrate.
Instead, and this is my sense of them, they belong more to elegy and to death, to the woman whose ‘loving associations’ abandoned her
as she sought to create images for them.
From Modern American Lyric: Lowell, Berryman, Creeley,-and Plath. Rutgers University Press, 1978
Christina Britzolakis
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Although Plath’s ‘confessional’ tropes are often seen in terms of a Romantic parable of victimization, whether of the sensitive poetic
individual crushed by a brutally rationalized society, or of feminist protest against a monolithic patriarchal oppressor, her self-reflexivity
tends to turn confession into a parody gesture or a premise for theatrical performance. The central instance of the ‘confessional’ in her
writing is usually taken to be “Lady Lazarus”. M. L. Rosenthal uses the poem to validate the generic category: ‘Robert Lowell’s “Skunk
Hour” and Sylvia Plath’s “Lady Lazarus” are true examples of ‘confessional’ poetry because they put the speaker himself at the centre of
the poem in such a way as to make his psychological shame and vulnerability an embodiment of his civilization.’ The confessional
reading of the poem is usually underpinned by the recourse to biography, which correlates the speaker’s cultivation of the ‘art of dying’
with Plath’s suicidal career. Although Plath is indeed, at one level, mythologizing her personal history, the motif of suicide in “Lady
Lazarus” operates less as self-revelation than as a theatrical tour de force, a music-hall routine.
With “Daddy”, “Lady Lazarus” is probably the single text in the Plath canon which has attracted most disapproval on the grounds of a
manipulative, sensationalist, or irresponsible style. Helen Vendler, for example, writes that ‘Style (as something consistent) is
meaningless, but styles (as dizzying provisional scepticism) are all . . . Poems like “Daddy” and “Lady Lazarus” are in one sense
demonically intelligent, in their wanton play with concepts, myths and language, and in another, and more important, sense, not intelligent
at all, in that they wilfully refuse, for the sake of a cacophony of styles (a tantrum of style), the steady, centripetal effect of thought.
Instead, they display a wild dispersal, a centrifugal spin to further and further reaches of outrage.’ Here, the element of ‘wilful’ pastiche in
“Lady Lazarus” is measured against a normative ideal of aesthetic detachment. Yet the poem’s ironic use of prostitution as the figure of a
particular kind of theatricalized self-consciousness—of the poet as, in Plath’s phrase, ‘Roget’s trollop, parading words and tossing off
bravado for an audience’ (JP 2I4)—calls for a reading which takes seriously what the poem does with, and to, literary history.
Like “Lesbos”, “Lady Lazarus” is a dramatic monologue which echoes and parodies “The Love Song of J. AIfred Prufrock”. The title
alludes, of course, not only to the biblical story of Lazarus but also to Prufrock’s lines: ‘I am Lazarus, come from the dead, | Come back
to tell you all, I shall tell you all’. Like Eliot, Plath uses clothing as a metaphor for rhetoric: the ‘veil’ or ‘garment’ of style. By contrast with
Eliot’s tentative hesitations, obliquities, and evasions of direct statement, however, Plath’s poem professes to ‘tell all’. Lady Lazarus
deploys a patently alienated and manufactured language, in which the shock tactic, the easy effect, reign supreme. Her rhetoric is one of
direct statement (‘I have done it again’), of brutal Americanisms (‘trash’, ‘shoves’, ‘the big strip tease’, ‘I do it so it feels like hell’, ‘knocks
me out’), of glib categorical assertions and dismissals (‘Dying is an art, like everything else’) , and blatant internal rhymes (‘grave cave’,
‘turn and burn’). As Richard Blessing remarks, both “Lady Lazarus” and “The Applicant” are poems that parody advertising techniques
while simultaneously advertising themselves. The poet who reveals her suffering plays to an audience, or ‘peanut-crunching crowd’; her
miraculous rebirths are governed by the logic of the commodity. Prufrock is verbally overdressed but feels emotionally naked and
exposed, representing himself as crucified before the gaze of the vulgar mass. Lady Lazarus, on the other hand, incarnates the ‘holy
prostitution of the soul’ which Baudelaire found in the experience of being part of a crowd; emotional nakedness is itself revealed as a
masquerade. The ‘strip-tease’ artist is a parodic, feminized version of the symbolist poet sacrificed to an uncomprehending mass
audience. For Baudelaire, as Walter Benjamin argues, the prostitute serves as an allegory of the fate of aesthetic experience in
modernity, of its ‘prostitution’ to mass culture. The prostitute deprives femininity of its aura, its religious and cultic presence; the woman’s
body becomes a commodity, made up of dead and petrified fragments, while her beauty becomes a matter of cosmetic disguise (makeup and fashion). Baudelaire’s prostitute sells the appearance of femininity. But she also offers a degraded and hallucinated memory of
fulfilment, an intoxicating or narcotic substitute for the idealized maternal body. For the melancholic, spleen-ridden psyche, which
obsessively dwells on the broken pieces of the past, she is therefore a privileged object of meditation. She represents the loss of that
blissful unity with nature and God which was traditionally anchored in a female figure. Instead, Benjamin argues, the prostitute, like
commodity fetishism, harnesses the ‘sex-appeal of the inorganic’, which binds the living body to the realm of death.
Lady Lazarus is an allegorical figure, constructed from past and present images of femininity, congealed fantasies projected upon the
poem’s surface. She is a pastiche of the numerous deathly or demonic women of poetic tradition, such as Poe’s Ligeia, who dies and is
13
gruesomely revivified through the corpse of another woman. Ligeia’s function, which is to be a symbol, mediating between the poet and
‘supernal beauty’, can only be preserved by her death. Similarly, in Mallarme’s prose poem “Le Phenomene Futur”, the ‘Woman of the
Past’ is scientifically preserved and displayed at a circus sideshow by the poet. For Plath, however, the woman on show, the ‘female
phenomenon’ is a revelation of unnaturalness instead of sensuous nature, her body gruesomely refashioned into Nazi artefacts. Lady
Lazarus yokes together the canonical post-Romantic, symbolist tradition which culminates in “Prufrock”, and the trash culture of True
Confessions, through their common concern with the fantasizing and staging of the female body:
I rocked shut
As a seashell.
They had to call and call
And pick the worms off me like sticky pearls.
The densely layered intertextual ironies at work in these lines plot the labyrinthine course of what Benjamin calls ‘the sex appeal of the
inorganic’ through literary history. They echo Ariel’s song in The Tempest, whose talismanic status in Plath’s writing I have already noted.
Plath regenders the image, substituting Lady Lazarus for the drowned corpse of the father/king. The metaphor of the seashell converts
the female body into a hardened, dead and inorganic object, but at the same time nostalgically recalls the maternal fecundity of the sea.
The dead woman who suffers a sea change is adorned with phallic worms turned into pearls, the ‘sticky’, fetishistic sublimates of male
desire. In Marvell’s poem of seduction, “To His Coy Mistress”, the beloved is imagined as a decaying corpse: ‘Nor, in thy marble vault
shall sound | My echoing song: then worms shall try | That long-preserved virginity: | And your quaint honour turn to dust; | And into ashes
all my lust.’ In T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, the refrain ‘Those are pearls that were his eyes’ is associated with the drowned Phoenician
sailor, implicit victim of witch-like, neurotic, or soul-destroying female figures, such as Madame Sosostris and Cleopatra.
Lady Lazarus stages the spectacle of herself, assuming the familiar threefold guise of actress, prostitute, and mechanical woman. The
myth of the eternally recurring feminine finds its fulfilment in the worship and ‘martyrdom’ of the film or pop star, a cult vehicle of male
fantasy who induces mass hysteria and vampiric hunger for ‘confessional’ revelations. Lady Lazarus reminds her audience that ‘there is a
charge, a very large charge | For a word or a touch | Or a bit of blood | Or a piece of my hair or my clothes.’ It is as if Plath is using the
Marilyn Monroe figure to travesty Poe’s dictum in “The Philosophy of Composition” (I846) that ‘the death of a beautiful woman is,
unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world’. The proliferation of intertextual ironies also affects the concluding transformation of
“Lady Lazarus” into the phoenix-like, man-eating demon, who rises ‘out of the ash’ with her ‘red hair’. This echoes Coleridge’s description
of the possessed poet in “Kubla Kahn”: ‘And all should cry Beware! Beware! His flashing eyes, his floating hair!’ The woman’s hair, a
privileged fetish-object of male fantasy, becomes at once a badge of daemonic genius and a flag of vengeance. It is tempting to read
these lines as a personal myth of rebirth, a triumphant Romantic emergence of what Lynda Bundtzen calls the female ‘body of
imagination’. The myth of the transcendent-demonic phoenix seems to transcend the dualism of male-created images of women,
wreaking revenge on ‘Herr Doktor’, ‘Herr God’, and ‘Herr Lucifer’, those allegorical emblems of an oppressive masculinity. Yet Lady
Lazarus’s culminating assertion of power—’I eat men like air’—undoes itself, through its suggestion of a mere conjuring trick. The attack
on patriarchy is undercut by the illusionistic character of this apotheosis which purports to transform, at a stroke, a degraded and
catastrophic reality. What the poem sarcastically ‘confesses’, through its collage of fragments of ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture, is a commodity
status no longer veiled by the aura of the sacred. Lyric inwardness is ‘prostituted’ to the sensationalism of ‘true confession’. The poet can
no longer cherish the illusion of withdrawing into a pure, uncontaminated private space, whose immunity from larger historical conflicts is
guaranteed by the ‘auratic’ woman. . . .for Plath the female body, far from serving as expiatory metaphor for the ravages of modernity,
itself becomes a sign whose cultural meanings are in crisis.
from Sylvia Plath and Theatre of Mourning. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999. Copyright © 1999 by Christina Bitzolkais
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Robert Frost
"The Road Not Taken"
A seemingly simple poem of four cinquains (five-line stanzas) with a regular rhyme scheme (ababba) and regular
though unusual rhythm (an iambic trimetre that ends with a final anapaestic – three beat – foot), the simple
natural imagery it uses is drawn from a traditional commonplace of making a choice at a crossroads that goes
back to the bible. The subtleties of the rhythm and language, however, are such that while the poem seems to
suggest some progress or direction, it actually disguises a state of indecision or unconscious action, as the
following critics variously argue.
"The Road Not Taken” can be read against a literary and pictorial tradition that might be called "The Choice of
the Two Paths,” reaching not only back to the Gospels and beyond them to the Greeks but to ancient English
verse as well. In Reson and Sensuallyte, for example, John Lydgate explains how he dreamt that Dame Nature
had offered him the choice between the Road of Reason and the Road of Sensuality. In art the same choice was
often represented by the letter "Y" with the trunk of the letter representing the careless years of childhood and
the two paths branching off at the age when the child is expected to exercise discretion. In one design the "Two
Paths" are shown in great detail. "On one side a thin line of pious folk ascend a hill past several churches and
chapels, and so skyward to the Heavenly City where an angel stands proffering a crown. On the other side a
crowd of men and women are engaged in feasting, music, love-making, and other carnal pleasures while close
behind them yawns the flaming mouth of hell in which sinners are writhing. But hope is held out for the worldly
for some avoid hell and having passed through a dark forest come to the rude huts of Humility and Repentance."
Embedded in this quotation is a direct reference to the opening of the famous late medieval Italian poet Dante's
Inferno:
Midway upon the journey of our life
I found myself within a forest dark,
For the straightforward pathway had been lost.
Ah me! how hard a thing it is to say
What was the forest savage, rough, and stern,
Which in the very thought renews the fear.
So bitter is it, death is little more.
For the large moral meaning which "The Road Not Taken" seems to endorse - go, as I did, your own way, take
the road less travelled by, and it will make "all the difference"-does not maintain itself when the poem is looked at
more carefully. Then one notices how insistent is the speaker on admitting, at the time of his choice, that the two
roads were in appearance "really about the same," that they "equally lay / In leaves no step had trodden black,"
and that choosing one rather than the other was a matter of impulse, impossible to speak about any more clearly
than to say that the road taken had "perhaps the better claim." But in the final stanza, as the tense changes to
future, we hear a different story, one that will be told "with a sigh" and "ages and ages hence." At that imagined
time and unspecified place, the voice will have nobly simplified and exalted the whole impulsive matter into a
deliberate one of taking the "less travelled" road:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I -I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
15
Is it not the high tone of poignant annunciation that really makes all the difference? An earlier version of the
poem had no dash after "I"; presumably Frost added it to make the whole thing more expressive and heartfelt.
From Frost: A Literary Life Reconsidered. Copyright © 1984 by William Pritchard.
A close look at the poem reveals that Frost's walker encounters two nearly identical paths: so he insists,
repeatedly. The walker looks down one, first, then the other, ‘as just as fair.’ Indeed, ‘the passing there / Had
worn them really about the same.’ As if the reader hasn't gotten the message, Frost says for a third time. ‘And
both that morning equally lay/ In leaves no step had trodden black.’ What, then, can we make of the final
stanza? My guess is that Frost, the wily ironist, is saying something like this: ‘When I am old, like all old men, I
shall make a myth of my life. I shall pretend, as we all do, that I took the less travelled road. But I shall be lying.’
Frost signals the mockingly self-inflated tone of the last stanza by repeating the word ‘I,’ which rhymes - several
times - with the inflated word ‘sigh.’ Frost wants the reader to know that what he will be saying, that he took the
road less travelled, is a false position, hence the sigh.
From “Frost” by Jay Parini, in Columbia Literary History of the United States. Ed. Emory Elliott. Copyright © 1988
by the Columbia University Press.
The strongly sententious (moralistic) yet ironic last stanza in effect predicts the happy but mistaken reading
which "The Road Not Taken" has been traditionally understood to endorse – it predicts, in other words, what the
poem will be sentimentally made into. The power of the last stanza within the conventional thinking which looks
for signs of truth, God or meaning in Nature, guarantees Frost a popular audience, while for those who get his
game – readers attuned to more literary and unconventional thinking – for that reader, this poem tells a different
tale: that our life-shaping choices are irrational, that we are fundamentally out of control. This is the fabled
‘wisdom’ of Frost, which he hides in a moralizing statement that asserts the consoling contrary of what he knows.
From Frank Lentricchia, Modernist Quartet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995: 71-74.
The ironies of this poem have been often enough remarked. Not least among them is the contrast of the title with
the better-remembered phrase of the poem's penultimate line: ‘the [road] less travelled by’ (CPPP 103). Which
road, after all, is the road ‘not taken’? Is it the one the speaker takes, which, according to his last description of
it, is ‘less travelled’-that is to say, not taken by others? Or does the title refer to the supposedly better-travelled
road that the speaker himself fails to take? Precisely who is not doing the taking? This initial ambiguity sets in
play equivocations that extend throughout the poem. Of course, the broadest irony in the poem derives from the
fact that the speaker merely asserts that the road he takes is ‘less travelled’: the second and third stanzas make
clear that ‘the passing there’ had worn these two paths ‘really about the same’ and that ‘both that morning
equally lay / In leaves no step had trodden black.’ Strong medial caesurae3 in the poem's first ten lines comically
emphasize the ‘either-or’ deliberations in which the speaker is engaged, and which have, apparently, no real
consequence: nothing issues from them. Only in the last stanza is any noticeable difference between the two
roads established, and that difference is established by fiat: the speaker simply declares that the road he took
was less travelled. There is nothing to decide between them. …
Comical as "The Road Not Taken" may be, there is serious matter in it … ; choices — even when they are
undertaken so lightly as to seem unworthy of the name ‘choice’ — are always more momentous, and very often
more providential, than we suppose. There may be, one morning in a yellow wood, no difference between two
3
medial caesurae: = breaks in the flow of sound in the middle of a line of verse
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roads — say, the Democratic and the Republican parties. But ‘way leads on to way,’ as Frost's speaker says,
and pretty soon you find yourself in the White House. …
There is obviously a contradiction in "The Road Not Taken" between the speaker's assertion of difference in the
last stanza and his indifferent account of the roads in the first three stanzas. But it is a contradiction more
profitably described—in light of Frost's other investigations of questions about choice, decision, and action—as a
paradox. He lets us see, as I point out above, that every action is in some degree intemperate, incalculable,
‘step-careless.’ The speaker of "The Road Not Taken,"… is therefore a figure for us all. This complicates the
irony of the poem, saving it from platitude on the one hand (the M. Scott Peck reading) and from sarcasm on the
other (the biographical reading of the poem merely as a joke about Edward Thomas). I disagree with Frank
Lentricchia's suggestion in Modernist Quartet that "The Road Not Taken" shows how ‘our life- shaping choices
are irrational, that we are fundamentally out of control’ (75). The author of "The Trial by Existence" would never
contend that we are fundamentally out of control—or at least not do so in earnest.
From The Ordeal of Robert Frost: The Poet and His Poetics by Mark Richardson. Copyright © 1997 by the
Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois.
"The Road Not Taken" is an ironic commentary on the autonomy of choice in a world governed by instincts,
unpredictable contingencies, and limited possibilities. It parodies and demurs from the biblical idea that God is
the ‘way’ that can and should be followed and the American idea that nature provides the path to spiritual
enlightenment. The title refers doubly to bravado for choosing a road less travelled but also to regret for a road
of lost possibility and the eliminations and changes produced by choice. "The Road Not Taken” reminds us of
the consequences of the principle of selection in all aspects of life, namely that all choices in knowledge or in
action exclude many others and lead to an ironic recognitions of our achievements. At the heart of the poem is
the romantic mythology of flight from a fixed world of limited possibility into a wilderness of many possibilities
combined with trials and choices through which the pilgrim progresses to divine perfection. I agree with Frank
Lentricchia's view that the poem draws on ‘the culturally ancient and pervasive idea of nature as allegorical
book, out of which to draw explicit lessons for the conduct of life (nature as self-help text).’ I would argue that
what it is subverting is something more profound than the sentimental expectations of genteel readers of fireside
poetry. . . .
The drama of the poem is of the persona making a choice between two roads. As evolved creatures, we should
be able to make choices, but the poem suggests that our choices are irrational and aesthetic. The sense of
meaning and morality derived from choice is not reconciled but, rather obliterated and cancelled by a non-moral
monism (a view that there is only one kind of ultimate principle governing all things). Frost is trying to reconcile
impulse with a conscience that needs goals and harbours deep regrets. The verb Frost uses is taken, which
means something less conscious than chosen. The importance of this opposition to Frost is evident in the way
he changed the title of "Take Something Like a Star" to "Choose Something Like a Star," and he continued to
alter titles in readings and publications. Take suggests more of an unconscious grasp than a deliberate choice.
(Of course, it also suggests action as opposed to deliberation.)
In "The Road Not Taken" the persona's reasons wear thin, and choice is confined by circumstances and the
irrational. In lines 1-10, we are told that both roads had been worn ‘about the same,’ though his ‘taking’ the
second is based on its being less worn. The basis of selection is individuation, variation, and ‘difference’: taking
the one ‘less travelled by.’ That he ‘could not travel both / And be one traveller’ means not only that he will never
be able to return but also that experience alters the traveller; he would not be the same by the time he came
17
back. Frost is presenting an anti-myth in which origin, destination, and return are undermined by a nonprogressive development. And the hero has only illusory choice. This psychological representation of the
developmental principle of divergence strikes to the core of Darwinian theory. Species are made and survive
when individuals diverge from others in a branching scheme, as the roads diverge for the speaker. The process
of selection implies an unretracing process of change through which individual kinds are permanently altered by
experience. Though the problem of making a choice at a crossroads is almost a commonplace, the drama of the
poem conveys a larger mythology by including evolutionary metaphors and suggesting the passage of eons.
The change of tense in the penultimate line—to took—is part of the speaker's projection of what he ‘shall be
telling,’ but only retrospectively and after ‘ages and ages.’ Though he cannot help feeling free in selection, the
speaker's wisdom is proved only through survival of an unretraceable course of experience: [lines 11-20]
The poem leaves one wondering how much ‘difference’ is implied by all, given that the ‘roads’ already exist, that
possibilities are limited. Exhausted possibilities of human experience diminish great regret over ‘the road not
taken’ or bravado for ‘the road not taken’ by everyone else. The poem does raise questions about whether there
is any justice in the outcome of one's choices or anything other than aesthetics, being ‘fair,’ in our moral
decisions. The speaker's impulse to individuation is mitigated by a moral dilemma of being unfair or cruel, in not
stepping on leaves, ‘treading’ enough to make them ‘black.’ It might also imply the speaker's recognition that
individuation will mean treading on others.
From Robert Frost and the Challenge of Darwin by Robert Faggen. Copyright © 1997 by The University of
Michigan
"Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening"
A simple poem of four quatrains (four-line stanzas) with a regular rhyme scheme (aaba) broken only in the final
stanza with the use of repetition giving it a mono-rhyme, and a regular iambic tetrametre rhythm. While its simple
natural imagery and situation echoes Frost’s "The Road Not Taken", its particular use of time and setting
emphasise an unambiguous tension between stillness and movement, rather than an ironic sleight-of-hand
around choice. Building on the poem’s perfectly balanced tetrametre (four-beat) rhythm, its title’s sibilant
consonance is repeated in almost every line, emphasising the atmosphere of timeless stillness, which itself is
symbolised by the poem’s pivotal eighth line: ‘The darkest evening of the year’. The personification of the horse
as another actor in the poem, giving ‘his harness bells a shake / To ask if there is some mistake’, is another
contrast to the previous poem and does incorporate a slight irony, juxtaposing the animal’s human-like
impatience with the speaker’s desire to become one with nature. A third, unseen actor is the neighbour ‘whose
woods these are’, but by being absent in ‘His house […] in the village’, he introduces the dichotomy of man and
nature that the speaker contemplates. This intermediateness is made more obvious by line seven’s image, which
seems to state most literally and naturally the speaker’s location ‘Between the woods and frozen lake’: a
circumstance adding symbolic weight to the concept of stasis – like water in winter, time itself seems to have
become frozen. The repetition of the poem’s final lines provides an ironic and literal echo of this idea: literal
because repetition is itself a form of echo, and ironic in that the repeated line – ‘And miles to go before I sleep’ –
embodies movement in time, space and syntax (with its use of a conjunction at the start).
Frost encourages us to read this situation as an image of the poet’s or artist’s paradox, having to live in the world
with all of its demands and obligations, but also wanting to explore the individual gift of contemplation and
18
aesthetic pleasure. But rather than giving us a poetic equivalent of the clichéd advice to ‘stop and smell the
roses’ (which would have made the poem far closer to the ironic “Road Not Taken”), Frost takes us into the state
of mind of one who feels the tension between wanting to experience a Zen-like moment of communion with
nature, while simultaneously recognising the pragmatic demands of life. He achieves this by combining a
seamlessly naturalistic description with a subtle use of poetic devices like diction, rhythm, rhyme, symbolism and
personification. The final quatrain’s nursery-like refrain ultimately becomes a chant that aspires to poetry’s magic
spell of words, fixing the beauty of nature and a frozen moment in time for eternity, or to borrow the words of
Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18, allowing beauty to grow ‘in eternal lines to time’.
Seamus Heaney
"Digging"
This poem shows how the young Heaney looked up to his elders – in this case both father and grandfather.
Seeing his father (now old) ‘straining’ to dig ‘flowerbeds’, the poet recalls him in his prime, digging ‘potato drills’.
And even earlier, he remembers his grandfather, digging peat. He cannot match ‘men like them’ with a spade,
but he sees that the pen is (for him) mightier, and with it he will dig into his past and celebrate them.
Heaney challenges the stereotype of Paddy with a spade. The stereotype contains some truth - Irishmen are
justifiably well known for digging, but Heaney shows the skill and dignity in their labour. We also see their sense
of the work ethic – the father still digs in old age, the grandfather, when he was working, would barely stop to
drink.
Note: the pen is ‘snug as a gun’ because it fits his hand and is powerful. Heaney is from County Derry (Northern
Ireland) but the poem was published in 1966, before the ‘troubles’, and this is not a reference to them. However,
Northern Ireland was born out of the political violence of the Irish Civil War and its aftermath in the 1920’s, and
Heaney’s gun arguably alludes to the romantic figure of Irish republicans fighting for the nationalist cause.
This poem’s loose structure looks at two memories – the father digging the potato drills, the grandfather digging
turf, for which he was famous as the best digger on the peat bog. The poet celebrates not so much their strength
as their expertise. The digger's technique is exactly explained (‘The coarse boot nestled on the lug...’). Each
man dug up what has real value

food - ‘new potatoes’, and

fuel - ‘the good turf’.
Again there are

technical terms (‘lug’, ‘shaft’) and

monosyllabic (‘bog’, ‘sods’, ‘curt cuts’) or

colloquial terms: ‘By God, the old man could handle a spade.’
The onomatopoeia (where the sound resembles or suggests meaning) is obvious in ‘rasping’, ‘gravelly’,
‘sloppily’, ‘squelch’ and ‘slap’.
There is a central extended metaphor of digging and roots, which shows how the poet, in his writing, is getting
back to his own roots (his identity, and where his family comes from). The poem begins almost as it ends, but
only at the end is the writer's pen seen as a weapon for digging. This is indicative of a major change in tone
which, while gradual, is most marked by the speaker’s return to his original image whose weapon simile (‘snug
as a gun’) has been transformed into a metaphorical tool (‘I’ll dig with it’). The patronising tone of lines 5-7 (‘I look
down / Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds / Bends low’ – emphasis added to the diction denoting the
19
speaker’s condescending attitude) has become one of modest respect in lines 26-28 (‘the curt cuts of an edge /
Through living roots awaken in my head. / But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.’ – emphasis added to the
diction denoting the speaker’s admiring and reverential attitude: note the double meaning in ‘living roots’.)

How does the poem explore ideas of heritage and family tradition?

What does the poem suggest about physical labour?
Explain in your own words the image in the last line of the poem.
"Blackberry Picking"
This poem gives a vivid account of picking blackberries. But it is really about hope and disappointment (how
things never quite live up to our expectations) and blackberry picking becomes a metaphor for other
experiences.

In the first half of the poem Heaney describes the picking - from the appearance of the first fruit to the
frenzy of activity as more fruit ripens.

The second half of the poem concerns the attempt to preserve the berries - always a failure, as the
fungus set in and the fruit fermented. (Now that many people in the west have freezers, this problem is
solved. But do many young people still go to pick blackberries?)
In the first section Heaney presents the tasting of the blackberries as a sensual pleasure - referring to sweet
‘flesh’, to ‘summer's blood’ and to ‘lust’. He uses many adjectives of colour (how many can you find?) and
suggests the enthusiasm of the collectors, using every available container to hold the fruit they have picked.
There is also a hint that this picking is somehow violent - after the ‘blood’ comes the claim that the collectors'
hands were ‘sticky as Bluebeard's’ (whose hands were covered with the blood of his wives).
The lusciousness of the fresh fruit contrasts with what it quickly becomes ‘fur’ and ‘rat-grey fungus’, as ‘lovely
canfuls’ smell ‘of rot’.
The poem is set out in iambic pentameter couplets with half rhyme ( apart from a rhyming couplet in lines 3 & 4,
repeated with the same rhyme in the concluding lines 23 & 24). Like many of Heaney's poems it is full of
monosyllabic nouns: ‘clot’, ‘knot’, ‘cans’, ‘pots’, ‘blobs’, ‘pricks’, ‘byre’, ‘fur’, ‘cache’, ‘bush’, ‘flesh’ and ‘rot’ (there
are others). The poem has a clear structure - the two sections match the two stages of the poet's thought.
This poem is ambiguous in its viewpoint, too. We see the view of a frustrated child in ‘I...felt like crying’ and ‘It
wasn't fair’, but a more detached adult view in the antithesis of ‘Each year I hoped they'd keep, knew they would
not.’ The poem looks at a theme that is as old as poetry itself - the transitoriness of pleasure (how good things
do not last), and relates it to a familiar childhood experience.
Heaney suggests that what is true of blackberries may be true of good things generally. But this is argument by
analogy. Nowadays we can preserve our fruit by freezing it - so does this mean that hopes are not disappointed
after all?

How far is this poem about something particular or about life in general?

Explain how the poem contrasts ideas of expected pleasure and disappointment.

Does this poem give the viewpoint of a child or an adult or both?

Can you explain why Heaney, in the last line, says that he ‘hoped’ for something, even though he ‘knew’
it would not happen?
20
The title “Blackberry-Picking" evokes images of sensuous fruit and the pleasurable—often ritualistic—act of
harvesting them. But despite its passion for this summer delicacy, the poem begins with a straightforward
sentence: ‘Late August, given heavy rain and sun/ For a full week, the blackberries would ripen.’ It isn't until line
three, when the speaker makes the observation, ‘At first, just one, a glossy purple clot/ Among others, red,
green, hard as a knot,’ that you get a sense of his experience with blackberries and his excitement as they
transform from hard ‘knots’ into sticky ‘clots.’
These hints heighten the poem's tone and imagery. Using images of the body to capture the experience of
eating berries, the speaker says, ‘You ate that first one and its flesh was sweet/ Like thickened wine: summer's
blood was in it/ Leaving stains upon the tongue and lust for/ Picking.’ Like wine, the fruit intoxicates, lowering the
speaker's inhibitions and making him want more.
A pronoun shift in line nine—from the anonymous ‘you’ to a more intimate ‘us’—intensifies the power of the
berries. Armed with ‘milk cans, pea tins, jam-pots,’ the speaker and his companion(s) labor until their containers
are full and their joy has taken on a savage quality. The berries are now ‘dark blobs’ that burn like ‘a plate of
eyes,’ and the children's hands are ‘peppered/ With thorn pricks, [their] palms sticky as Bluebeard's.’ (The pirate
Bluebeard was famous for killing his wives.)
In the second stanza, this euphoria ends. The shift comes when the speaker says they ‘hoarded the fresh
berries in the byre,’ since the use of the word ‘byre’—a shed, but also a homonym for ‘bier,’ a support for a
corpse or casket—foreshadows the fate of their haul. The innocent ‘hunger’ of the children in stanza one is no
match for the ‘rat-grey fungus, glutting on our cache’ as the berries spoil. The speaker realizes they would have
lasted longer on the bush, but like the others he was overwhelmed by desire. In response to losing the berries,
he says, ‘I always felt like crying. It wasn't fair/ That all the lovely canfuls smelt of rot./ Each year I hoped they'd
keep, knew they would not.’ The imagery is no longer lush, but the masculine end-stopped rhyme— striking as
only the second fully rhyming couplet in a poem built almost entirely of off-rhymes—connects this stanza’s bleak
view back to that moment when the first berry ripened and we see the cycle in full: how each summer the
speaker is seduced by blackberries, and how each summer he collects them only to see them spoil. Year after
year, hope and desire let him forget the unfairness of time's passage, yet he must also face the sad knowledge
that his harvest cannot be preserved.
"Death of a Naturalist"
This poem is similar to “Blackberry Picking” in its subject and structure - here, too, Heaney explains a change in
his attitude to the natural world, in a poem that falls into two parts, a sort of before and after. But here the
experience is almost like a nightmare, as Heaney witnesses a plague of frogs like something from the Old
Testament. You do not need to know what a flax-dam is to appreciate the poem, as Heaney describes the
features that are relevant to what happened there - but you will find a note below.
The poem's title is amusingly ironic - by a naturalist, we would normally mean someone with expert scientific
knowledge of living things and ecology (what we once called natural history), someone like David Attenborough,
Diane Fossey (of Gorillas in the Mist fame) or Steve Irwin (who handled dangerous snakes). The young Seamus
Heaney certainly was beginning to know nature from direct observation - but this incident cut short the possible
scientific career before it had ever got started. We cannot imagine real naturalists being so disgusted by a horde
of croaking frogs.
21
The poem has a fairly simple structure. In the first section, Heaney describes how the frogs would spawn in the
lint hole, with a digression into his collecting the spawn, and how his teacher encouraged his childish interest in
the process. In the second section, Heaney records how one day he heard a strange noise and went to
investigate - and found that the frogs, in huge numbers, had taken over the flax-dam, gathering for revenge on
him (to punish his theft of the spawn). He has an overwhelming fear that, if he puts his hand into the spawn
again, it will seize him - and who knows what might happen then?
The poem is set out in two sections of blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentametre lines). Heaney uses
onomatopoeia more lavishly here than in any poem - and many of the sounds are very indelicate: ‘gargled’, ‘slap
and plop’ and ‘farting’. The lexicon is full of terms of putrefaction, ordure (excrement or faeces) and generally
unpleasant things - ‘festered’, ‘rotted’, ‘slobber’, ‘clotted water’, ‘rank / With cow dung’ and ‘slime kings’.
In the first section, the poet notes the festering in the flax-dam, but can cope with this familiar scene of things
rotting and spawn hatching. Perhaps, as an inquisitive child he felt some pride in not being squeamish - he
thinks of the bubbles from the process as gargling ‘delicately’. He is confident in taking the frogspawn - he does
it every year, and watches the ‘jellied specks’ become ‘fattening dots’ then turn into tadpoles. He has an almost
scientific interest in knowing the proper names (‘bullfrog’ and ‘frogspawn’) rather than the teacher's patronizing
talk of ‘daddy’ and ‘mammy’, and in the idea of forecasting the weather with the spawn. (Not really very helpful,
since you can see if it is raining or sunny by direct observation - no need to look at the frogspawn.)
The second section appears like a punishment from offended nature for the boy's arrogance - when he sees
what nature in the raw is really like, he is terrified. This part of the poem is ambiguous - we see the horror of the
plague of frogs, ‘obscene’ and ‘gathered...for vengeance’, as it appeared to the young boy. But we can also see
the scene more objectively - as it really was. If we strip away the effect of imagination, we are left with a swarm
of croaking amphibians. This may bring out a difference between a child in the 1940s and a child in the west
today. The 21st century child knows all about the frogs' habitat and behaviour from wildlife documentaries, but
has never seen so many frogs at close range in real life. The young Heaney was used to seeing nature close up,
but perhaps never got beyond the very simple account of ‘mammy’ and ‘daddy’ frogs. The teacher presents the
amphibians as if they were people.
The arrival of the frogs is like a military invasion - they are ‘angry’ and invade the dam; the boy ducks ‘through
hedges’ to hide from the enemy. Like firearms, they are ‘cocked’, or they are ‘poised like mud grenades’ (a
grenade is a hand-bomb - the frogs, in colour and shape, resemble the Mills Hand Bomb, used by British
soldiers from the Great War to modern times).
The poem has some echoes of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner - in a shorter and more
comic version: the would-be naturalist is, like the mariner, revolted by ‘slimy things’; the Ancient Mariner learns to
love them as God's creatures. Heaney indulges in a riotous succession of disgusting descriptions: ‘gross-bellied’,
‘slap and plop’, ‘obscene threats’ (suggesting swear words), ‘farting’ and ‘slime kings’.
Wordsworth suggests that poets should use everyday language. In this poem, Heaney uses terms we do not
expect to see in poetry, and presents nature as the very opposite of beautiful.
Notes on the poem

Flax is an annual plant (it grows from seed) some one to two feet high, with blue flowers. A flax dam
(traditionally called a lint hole), in Northern Ireland is not really a dam, but a pool where bundles (called
‘beets’) of flax are placed for about three weeks to soften the stems. The process is called ‘retting’.
Those who used to do this work report that the smell is very strong and unpleasant. Heaney describes
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the flax as held down by ‘sods’ (large clumps of earth or turf - a favourite word of the poet: count how
often he uses it here and in other pieces). In some dams large stones would hold down the flax. Fibre
from flax was cleaned and spun into yarn, woven into linen and bleached.

The townland is the smallest administrative area in Northern Ireland. They range in size from less than
an acre to well over 2,000, while the average is some 300 acres. The boundaries between them are
often streams or old roads.

Be careful how you write naturalist - keep the ‘al’ in it, and don't mix it up with naturist, which is an old
name for someone who takes off his or her clothes, to live in a ‘state of nature’!

How would you react (as a young adult or as a child) to the sight of a horde of frogs invading a familiar
place?

How far does this poem tell the truth about frogs and how far does it tell the reader about the power of
imagination?

Is this poem comic, serious or both? How far does the poet invite us to laugh at him?

Heaney describes the frogs' heads as ‘farting’. As a boy he might have said this word to friends, but
would not repeat it at home or write it in school work. How does it work in the poem?

Is it a good idea for teachers of the young to explain how animals live by describing them in human
terms, like ‘mammy’ (mum or mummy) and ‘daddy’?

How well does this poem fit in with your ideas of what poetry should normally be like?

How truthful is the title? Did Heaney really lose his interest in, and love of, nature. Or does the poem
record only a dramatic change of attitude, or something else?

Does this poem have anything in common with other poems by Heaney? How far does it fit into a pattern
of poems that show him not to be a real country person (like his father and grandfather) - because he
can't dig, he can't plough, he gets upset when the blackberries start rotting and he is frightened by a lot
of frogs?
Robert Lowell
“Skunk Hour”
“Skunk Hour” depicts a man at a moment of crisis. In the early 1950s, Robert Lowell was a successful, even
famous poet, yet was writing few poems. American culture was changing rapidly and dynamically in those
postwar years, and Lowell—due in part to his encounters with Allen Ginsberg and Beat culture—was beginning
to feel that his work was archaic and staid. His poems, he worried, were too old-fashioned, too tight-lipped and
taciturn, to capture the vivid immediacy of contemporary American life. “Prehistoric monsters,” he called them,
“dragged down into the bog and death by their ponderous armor.” But how could he incorporate more personal
matters into his poetry without violating the privacy of his loved ones, and turning his life into mere material?
That his life at this particular point in time offered up so much material only exacerbated the sense of crisis. In a
span of about three years, Lowell turned 40 and became both an orphan and a parent. His mother, with whom
he had had a complex and difficult relationship, embodied the “double-edged sword”—liberty and privilege on
the one hand, social constraint and oppressive propriety on the other—that his Boston family’s high social status
represented. And Lowell had inherited something else from his family, too: a debilitating manic depression,
whose agonizing cycles repeatedly institutionalized him during this period.
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“Skunk Hour” expresses the turmoil of Lowell’s personal life at this crucial point. It is a poem framed by
matriarchal images, and built around an analogy between art and voyeurism. It also dramatizes an inner debate
between the demands of formality and discretion on the one hand and, on the other, the longing for an open and
candid poetry that would capture the life of a privileged and educated American man in the middle of the 20th
century.
The first framing matriarchal image to which we are introduced is “Nautilus Island’s hermit / heiress”:
Nautilus Island’s hermit
heiress still lives through winter in her Spartan cottage;
her sheep still graze above the sea.
Her son’s a bishop. Her farmer
is first selectman in our village;
she’s in her dotage.
Thirsting for
the hierarchic privacy
of Queen Victoria’s century,
she buys up all
the eyesores facing her shore,
and lets them fall.
Lowell uses the pronoun “her” to denote nearly every noun in the first stanza. The hermit heiress owns
everything in her little world; she seems to know no form of relationship other than that of possession. While she
may be a stand-in for Lowell’s mother, at a deeper level she represents Lowell himself, and his fears of what he
might become: an isolated, irrelevant creature of the past, ensconced in his social class like an island dweller
facing an empty shore.
Lowell’s language is replete with words indicating aristocratic status (“heiress,” “above,” “selectman,”
“hierarchic”), isolation (“Island,” “hermit,” “privacy”), and the anachronistic persistence of relics of the past in the
vastly changed conditions of the present. Phrases such as “Spartan cottage” and “Queen Victoria’s century”
suggest specific historical eras that contrast with the liberalized, modernistic present. The hermit heiress’s
venture into real estate, meanwhile, seems to express a deep-seated revulsion toward the present era, in favor
of the bubble of privilege and “hierarchic privacy” that she desires to preserve.
Lowell’s conflict is also evident in other images he presents. Beginning in the third stanza, Lowell introduces a
series of images relating to the color red:
The season’s ill—
we’ve lost our summer millionaire,
who seemed to leap from an L. L. Bean
catalogue. His nine-knot yawl
was auctioned off to lobstermen.
A red fox stain covers Blue Hill.
This image is followed later by the blood cell that houses Lowell’s sobbing spirit in stanza six, and the “red fire” of
the skunks’ “moonstruck eyes” in stanza seven. Two of these images are explicitly linked to animals, while the
third is connected to Lowell himself, metaphorically reinforcing the ongoing inner conflict between the poet’s
civilized self and his wilder impulses.
In the first four stanzas, the poet’s presence is signalled indirectly, through possessive phrases such as “our
village,” “our summer millionaire,” and “our fairy decorator.” In stanza five, halfway through the poem, he finally
makes a direct appearance:
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One dark night,
my Tudor Ford climbed the hill’s skull;
I watched for love-cars. Lights turned down,
they lay together, hull to hull,
where the graveyard shelves on the town. . . .
My mind’s not right.
Even here he seems hesitant about fully entering the poem as an active participant. It is not Lowell, after all, but
his “Tudor Ford” (another anachronistic reference to a bygone era) that climbs the hill, almost as if it were acting
of its own volition.
It is not long before we realize the explanation of Lowell’s reluctance to assume responsibility. He is engaged in
illicit and voyeuristic activity, spying on the “love-cars” in which young lovers, inspired by the era’s pop songs,
are pursuing their furtive trysts. The link between poetry and voyeurism is the vertebral metaphor of the poem:
Lowell’s spying is a metaphor for his art, which, as he was coming to realize, could not be as honest as it
needed to be without revealing confidences and risking pain. Even as he finds himself drawn toward a new,
more candid type of poetry, he worries (“My mind’s not right”) that this desire is a manifestation of a base
impulse, perhaps even a consequence of his mental instability.
This inner conflict reaches its climax in stanza six, before giving way to a new set of images:
A car radio bleats,
“Love, careless Love. . . .” I hear
my ill-spirit sob in each blood cell,
as if my hand were at its throat. . . .
I myself am hell;
nobody’s here—
only skunks, that search
in the moonlight for a bite to eat.
They march on their soles up Main Street:
white stripes, moonstruck eyes’ red fire
under the chalk-dry and spar spire
of the Trinitarian Church.
The skunks are presented as outsiders, rebels, figures of strength who have taken over the sleepy town’s Main
Street and whose vivid, almost demonic colours—“white stripes, moonstruck eyes’ red fire”—appear in sharp
contrast to the wan “chalk-dry and spar spire / of the Trinitarian Church.” The skunks manifest power rather than
privilege: they “march . . . up Main Street” as would an invading army. Lowell’s admiration of them, and the
potential freedom they represent, is palpable.
The structure of the poem, we now realize, is highly symmetrical: two stanzas devoted to a matriarchal figure;
two to a society in crisis; two to an individual—the poet—in crisis; and two to a society led by an alternative
matriarchal figure who represents a potential resolution to Lowell’s dilemma. The hermit heiress, who would
have had him forgo artistic candor and continue to write “prehistoric monsters” all his life, finds her nemesis in
the mother skunk:
I stand on top
of our back steps and breathe the rich air—
a mother skunk with her column of kittens swills the garbage pail.
She jabs her wedge-head in a cup
of sour cream, drops her ostrich tail,
and will not scare.
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What Lowell finds in the mother skunk is an image for the artist he is becoming. It is a rich and deeply
ambivalent image: the poet as garbage-pail-swiller, rooting about in humanity’s trash and finding nourishment
there, bringing what is hidden to light. The metaphor seems both mocking and derogatory. There is something
ridiculous about the image of the skunk with her nose plunged into the sour cream cup, and also something a bit
disgusting. Yet what is most clear is that the skunk is entirely unconcerned with our reaction to her. We are
beyond her notice—almost, one senses, beneath her contempt. And it is this, perhaps, that injects an element of
potential liberation into the scene.
Lowell would never give himself over entirely to the path of the skunk. Though he would become known as one
of the first and most significant of the so-called Confessional poets, his poetry would eschew the uninhibitedness
and frequent anti-intellectualism of many of the Beats. What feeds his later work is precisely what energizes
“Skunk Hour”: the perpetual, irresolvable tension between the wild and the civilized, between the artist’s need to
reveal and the human being’s need to conceal.
At times, particularly in his later years, he would ask how well he had balanced these. In the last poem of his
penultimate book, The Dolphin, Lowell would wonder whether he had “plotted perhaps too freely with my life, /
not avoiding injury to others, / not avoiding injury to myself— / to ask compassion. . . .” The conflicts that would
continue to shape the remainder of Lowell’s artistic career—and, to a great extent, his personal life as well—are
all present, microcosmically, in the deeply illuminating self-portrait that “Skunk Hour” ultimately reveals itself to
be.
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Margaret Scott
"Grandchild"
Time, life, love and the interconnectedness of things are the themes of this poem. In thirty-five lines of irregular
free verse, Scott recounts the circumstances of her grand-daughter’s birth within the deceptively simple context
of both reporting and imagining everything that occurred at the same moment. The opening sentence prefigures
this strategy by focussing on time to tell us in line five that her ‘daughter bore a son’ while ‘workmen were
switching on lights’ elsewhere in the town. By the careful use of commonplace detail like ‘chilly kitchens’ and
‘Gladstone bags’, woven together with a subtle alliterative and assonant rhythm – ‘and driving down quiet
streets under misty lamps’ – Scott uses a natural fluency of language to embody the poem’s central idea of
life’s mysterious connections.
The same connectedness is seen in the associative effects of her imagery, so that what seems like objective
reportage attains the effects of simile. In observing that the ‘nurses sponged him clean / as the glittering shingle
of suburbs beside the river / waned to a scattered glimmer of pale cubes’, the explicit connection of the image is
a coincidence of time. But a secondary one hangs in the mind as we notice how both the river and the migrating
morning sun over suburban rooftops are evocative of light on a newborn baby’s skin. With equal subtlety, Scott
underlines the poem’s diurnal structure by carefully marking time, from the first line’s ‘early this morning’ to line
eight’s ‘We met at half-past twelve’, line fifteen’s ‘lunch-time crowds’ and eventually the concluding line’s ‘the
coming of night’. Variety of detail and sentence length complement the naturalness of this gradual forward
movement in time: ‘A bunch of flowers fell on the floor. We passed / the baby round. His dark head lay in my
hand / like a fruit.’
While much of the incidental detail with which Scott surrounds her account of the birth is implicitly imagined, it is
delivered with the assurance of one who knows what sort of bags and cars the local workers use, or can literally
see the shining suburban houses through the hospital window. Even her speculation that the baby ‘seemed to
be dwelling on something half-remembered’ has the ring of a cliché, imagining what newborns are thinking. But
despite following her description of the baby itself immediately with more ordinary observational details, of girls in
high heels, an ambulance, an office clerk ‘with a streaming tie’, his ‘occasionally / flexing fingers thin and soft as
snippets of mauve string’ seem to trigger a greater imaginative freedom in the poem’s second half.
By what seems to be a subliminal power of suggestion, Scott takes those ‘snippets of mauve string’ as an
inspiration to weave a future life for her grandchild in the wide world beyond the hospital walls. Suddenly in line
nineteen, significantly begun with the prepositional ‘Beyond’, she leaps global geographies ‘in Santa Fe, /
Northampton or the other side of town’ to imagine in the magically realised detail of a poet’s eye, a young couple
simultaneously meeting to conceive another child – her grandchild’s future wife. Again details like the cotton
dress and the sandals slipping ‘on metal treads’ provide a realism that makes the scene both vivid and
believable. Effortlessly segueing to a future best friend for her grandchild, presently ‘lying perhaps in his cot / on
a balcony’ in Greece, Scott begins to conjoin both time and space:
News he may break to our boy in some passage-way
in a house we’ve never seen is breeding now
in the minds of pensive children queuing by Red Cross
trucks, or curled like foetuses deep under warm quilts
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as the long ship-wrecking roar of the distant sea
slides to the coming of night and fades away.
Through a seemingly casual use of future conditional and present tense verbs, this concluding sentence
connects the future with the present; intimacy (words between best friends ‘in some passage-way’; or things ‘in
the minds of pensive children’) with distance (‘queuing by Red Cross trucks’ or ‘the distant sea’); familiarity (best
friend of ‘our boy’) with strangeness (‘a house we’ve never seen’) and comfort or domesticity (‘deep under warm
quilts’) with suffering and disaster (‘Red Cross’ or ‘the long ship-wrecking roar’). But despite its geopolitical
allusions to third-world misfortune and maritime disaster, Scott maintains the poem’s focus on the birth of her
grandchild through a subtle wordplay in images carrying a delicate balance of positive and negative
connotations: firstly in her metaphor of news ‘breeding now / in the minds of pensive children’; and then in the
simile of it ‘curled like foetuses deep under warm quilts’.
A final observation should be made about the poem’s tone. Along with its use of more naturalistic and
commonplace imagery, the poem abstains from the sentimentality that usually accompanies the birth of children.
Just as it tries to celebrate life as an interconnected, contingent and full experience (from the crowded hospital
ward to the bird’s-eye world view), the poem tries to embrace pain as well as joy. Not only does the concluding
sentence imply that the grandchild will become aware of suffering, however vicariously, but there are quarrelling
parents, insistent boyfriends, chilly morning work obligations, even flowers falling on the floor. But Scott’s calmly
assured observations are expressed through a discriminating balance of ordinary and poetic diction that
manages to convey a wise admiration for her grandchild’s future.
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From Chapter Two of The Elements of Poetry by A.P. Book
© Jonathan Stoner http://teach.beavton.k12.or.us/%7Ejonathan_stoner/eng11/poetry
Types of Poems
1. Lyric: subjective, reflective poetry with regular rhyme scheme and metre which reveals the poet’s thoughts
and feelings to create a single, unique impression.
Matthew Arnold, “Dover Beach”
William Blake, “The Lamb,” “The Tiger”
Emily Dickinson, “Because I Could Not Stop for Death”
Langston Hughes, “Dream Deferred”
Andrew Marvell, “To His Coy Mistress”
Walt Whitman, “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking”
2. Narrative: nondramatic, objective verse with regular rhyme scheme and metre which relates a story or
narrative.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “Kubla Khan”
T. S. Eliot, “Journey of the Magi”
Gerard Manley Hopkins, “The Wreck of the Deutschland”
Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “Ulysses”
3. Sonnet: a rigid 14-line verse form, with variable structure and rhyme scheme according to type:
a. Shakespearean (English)—three quatrains and concluding couplet i iambic pentametre, rhyming abab
cdcd efef gg or abba cddc effe gg. The Spenserian sonnet is a specialized form with linking rhyme abab
bcbc cdcd ee.
Robert Lowell, “Salem”
William Shakespeare, “Shall I Compare Thee?”
b. Italian (Petrarchan)—an octave and sestet, between which a break in thought occurs. The traditional
rhyme scheme is abba abba cde cde (or, the sestet, any variation of c, d, e).
Elizabeth Barrett Browning, “How Do I Love Thee?”
John Milton, “On His Blindness”
John Donne, “Death, Be Not Proud”
4. Ode: elaborate lyric verse which deals seriously with a dignified theme.
John Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn”
Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Ode, to the West Wind”
William Wordsworth, “Ode: Intimations of Immortality”
5. Blank Verse: unrhymed lines of iambic pentametre.
Robert Frost, “Birches”
John Milton, “Paradise Lost”
Theodore Roethke, “I Knew a Woman”
William Shakespeare, Macbeth
Robert Frost, “Mending Wall”
6. Free Verse: unrhymed lines without regular rhythm.
Walt Whitman, “The Last Invocation”
William Carlos Williams, “Rain,” “The Dance”
Richard Wilbur, “Juggler”
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7. Epic: a long, dignified narrative poem which gives the account of a hero important to his nation or race.
Lord Byron, “Don Juan”
John Milton, “Paradise Lost”
Homer, “The Iliad,” “The Odyssey”
8. Dramatic Monologue: a lyric poem in which the speaker tells an audience about a dramatic moment in
his/her life and, in doing so, reveals his/her character.
Robert Browning, “My Last Duchess”
T. S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”
9. Elegy: a poem of lament, meditating on the death of an individual.
W. H. Auden, “In Memory of W. B. Yeats”
John Milton, “Lycidas”
Theodore Roethke, “Elegy for Jane”
Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “In Memoriam.A. H. H.”
10. Ballad: simple, narrative verse which tells a story to be sung or recited; the folk ballad is anonymously
handed down, while the literary ballad has a single author.
John Keats, “La Belle Dame sans Merci”
Edward Arlington Robinson, “Richard Cory”
William Butler Yeats, “The Fiddler of Dooney”
11. Idyll: lyric poetry describing the life of the shepherd in pastoral, bucolic, idealistic terms.
Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “Idylls of the King”
William Wordsworth, “The Solitary Reaper”
12. Villanelle: a French verse form, strictly calculated to appear simple and spontaneous; five tercets and a final
quatrain, rhyming aba aba aba aba aba abaa. Lines 1, 6, 12, 18 and 3, 9, 15, 19 are refrain.
Theodore Roethke, “The Walking”
Dylan Thomas, “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night”
13. Light Verse: a general category of poetry written to entertain, such as lyric poetry, epigrams, and limericks.
It can also have a serious side, as in parody or satire.
Vachel Lindsay, “The Congo”
Lewis Carroll, “Jabberwocky”
14. Haiku: Japanese verse in three lines of five, seven, and five syllables, often depicting a delicate image.
Matsuo Basko,
The lightning flashes!
And slashing through the darkness,
A night-heron’s screech.
15. Limerick: humorous nonsense-verse in five anapestic lines rhyming aabba, a-lines being trimetre and b-lines
dimetre.
Edward Lear,
There was an old man at the Cape
Who made himself garments of crêpe.
When asked “Will they tear?”
He replied “Here and there,
But they keep such a beautiful shape!”
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Metre
Metre is poetry’s rhythm, or its pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables, and is measured in units of feet. The
five basic kinds of metric feet are indicated below. Bold marks indicate stressed or unstressed syllables.
Type of Metric Foot
Accent/Stress
Example
Iambic
unstressed-stressed
bal-loon
Trochaic
stressed-unstressed
so-da
Anapestic
unstressed-unstressed-stressed
con-tra-dict
Dactyllic
stressed-unstressed-unstressed
ma-ni-ac
Spondaic
stressed-stressed
man-made
Metrical units are the building blocks of lines of verse; lines are named according to the number of feet they
contain:
Number of Metric Feet
Type of Line
one foot ......................................................... monometre
two feet ......................................................... dimetre
three feet........................................................ trimetre
four feet ......................................................... tetrametre
five feet ......................................................... pentametre
six feet ........................................................... hexametre
seven feet ...................................................... heptametre
eight feet........................................................ octometre (rare)
Scansion is the analysis of these mechanical elements within a poem to determine metre. Feet are marked off
with slashes (/) and accented appropriately (stress, unstress). Emily Dickinson’s “Because I Could Not Stop for
Death” is scanned here:
Be-cause / I could / not stop / for Death
He kind- / ly stopped / for me
The Car- / riage held / but just / our-selves
And Im- / mor-tal- / i-ty.
The feet in these lines are iambic. The first and third lines have four feet and can be identified as iambic
tetrametre. The second and fourth lines, with three feet each, are iambic trimetre. Therefore, the basic metre is
iambic tetrametre.
Metric feet make up lines, which make up stanzas. A stanza is to a poem what a paragraph is to a narrative or
essay. Stanzas are identified by the number of lines they contain:
Number of Lines
Type of Stanza
2 .............................................................. couplet
3 .............................................................. tercet
4 .............................................................. quatrain
5 .............................................................. cinquain
6 .............................................................. sestet
7 .............................................................. septet
8 .............................................................. octet (octave)
9 .............................................................. x-lined stanza
(or more)
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Other Metric Terms
amphibrach: a foot with unstressed-stressed-unstressed syllables: Chi-ca-go
anacrusis: an extra unaccented syllable at the beginning of a line before the regular metre begins.
“Mine / by the right / of the white / e-lec-tion” (Emily Dickinson)
amphimacer: a foot with stressed-unstressed-stressed syllables: at-ti-tude
catalexis: an extra unaccented syllable at the ending of a line after the regular metre ends (opposite of anacrusis).
“I’ll tell / you how / the sun / rose” (Emily Dickinson)
caesura: a pause in the metre or rhythm of a line.
Flood-tide below me! || I see you face to face!
(Walt Whitman: “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”)
enjambement:
a run-on line, continuing into the next without a grammatical break.
Green rustlings, more-than-regal charities
Drift coolly from that tower of whispered light.
(Hart Crane: “Royal Palm”)
Rhyme
1. Rime: old spelling of rhyme, which is the repetition of like sounds at regular intervals, employed in
versification, the writing of verse.
2. End Rhyme: rhyme occurring at the ends of verse lines; most common rhyme form.
I was angry with my friend,
I told my wrath, my wrath did end.
(William Blake, “A Poison Tree”)
3. Internal Rhyme: rhyme contained within a line of verse.
The splendour falls on castle walls
And snowy summits old in story:
The long light shakes across the lakes
And the wild cataract leaps in glory.
(Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “Blow, Bugle, Blow”)
4. Rhyme Scheme: pattern of rhymes with a unit of verse; in analysis, each end rhyme-sound is represented by a
letter.
Take, O take those lips away,—a
That so sweetly were forsworn;—b
And those eyes, the break of day,a
Lights that do mislead the morn:—b
But my kisses bring again, bring again;—c
Seals of love, but seal’d in vain, seal’d in vain.—c
(William Shakespeare, “Take, O Take Those Lips Away”)
5. Masculine Rhyme: rhyme in which only the last, accented syllable of the rhyming words correspond exactly
in sound; most common kind of end rhyme.
She walks in beauty like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies;
And all that’s best of dark and bright
Meet in her aspect and her eyes:
Thus mellowed to that tender light
Which heaven to gaudy day denies.
(Lord Byron, “She Walks in Beauty”)
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6. Feminine Rhyme: rhyme in which two consecutive syllables of the rhyming words correspond, the first
syllable carrying the accent; double rhyme.
Trembling, hoping, lingering, flying,
O the pain, the bliss of dying!
(Alexander Pope, “Vital Spark of Heavenly Flame”)
7. Half Rhyme (Slant Rhyme): imperfect, approximate rhyme.
In the mustardseed sun,
By full tilt river and switchback sea
Where the cormorants scud,
In his house on stilts high among beaks
(Dylan Thomas, “Poem on His Birthday”)
8. Assonance: repetition of two or more vowel sounds within a line.
Burnt the fire of thine eyes
(William Blake, “The Tiger”)
And I do smile, such cordial light
(Emily Dickinson, “My Life Had Stood, A Loaded Gun”)
9. Consonance: repetition of two or more consonant sounds within a line.
And all is seared with trade; bleared smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares men’s smell: the soil
(Gerard Manley Hopkins, “God’s Grandeur”)
Love, all alike, no season knows, nor clime,
Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time.
(John Donne, “The Sun Rising”)
10. Alliteration: the repetition of one or more initial sounds, usually consonants, in words within a line.
Bright black-eyed creature, brushed with brown.
(Robert Frost, “To a Moth Seen in Winter”)
He clasps the crag with crooked hands
(Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “The Eagle”)
11. Onomatopoeia: the use of a word whose sound suggests its meaning.
The buzz saw snarled and rattled in the yard
(Robert Frost, “Out, Out”)
Veering and wheeling free in the open
(Carl Sandburg, “The Harbor”)
12. Euphony: the use of compatible, harmonious sounds to produce a pleasing, melodious effect.
I knew a woman, lovely in her bones,
When small birds sighed, she would sigh back at them.
(Theodore Roethke, “I Knew a Woman”)
And the smooth stream in smoother numbers flows
(Alexander Pope, “Sound and Sense”)
13. Cacophony: the use of inharmonious sounds in close conjunction effect; opposite of euphony.
Or, my scrofulous French novel
On grey paper with blunt type!
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Simply glance at it, you grovel
Hand and foot in Belial’s gripe;
(Robert Browning, “Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister”)
But when loud surges lash the sounding shore
(Alexander Pope, “Sound and Sense”)
Poetic Devices and Figurative Language
1. Metaphor: a figure of speech which makes a direct comparison of unlike objects by identification or
substitution.
All the world’s a stage
(William Shakespeare, As You Like It)
Death is the broom
I take in my hands
To sweep the world clean.
(Langston Hughes, “War”)
2. Simile: a direct comparison of two unlike objects, using like or as.
The holy time is quiet as a nun
(William Wordsworth, “On the Beach at Calais”)
And like a thunderbolt he falls
(Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “The Eagle”)
3. Conceit: an extended metaphor comparing two unlike objects with powerful effect. (It owes its roots to
elaborate analogies in Petrarch and to the Metaphysical poets, particularly Donne.)
If they be two, they are two so
As stiff twin compasses are two;
Thy soul, the fix’d foot, makes no show
To move, but doth, if th’ other do.
John Donne, “A Valediction Forbidding Mourning”)
4. Personification: a figure of speech in which objects and animals have human qualities.
When it comes, the landscape listens,
Shadows hold their breath. (Emily Dickinson, “A Certain Slant of Light”)
Into the jaws of Death.
Into the mouth of Hell.
(Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “The Charge of the Light Brigade”)
5. Apostrophe: an address to a person or personified object not present.
Little Lamb, who made thee?
(William Blake, “The Lamb”)
O loss of sight, of thee I most complain!
(John Milton, “Samson Agonistes”)
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6. Metonymy: the substitution of a word which relates to the object or person to be named, in place of the name
itself.
The serpent that did sting thy father’s life.
Now wears his crown.
(William Shakespeare, Hamlet)
A spotted shaft is seen (snake).
(Emily Dickinson, “A Narrow Fellow in the Grass”)
7. Synecdoche: a figure of speech in which a part represents the whole object or idea.
Not a hair perished (person).
(William Shakespeare, The Tempest)
And all mankind that haunted nigh
Had sought their household fire (homes).
(Thomas Hardy, “The Darkling Thrush”)
8. Hyperbole: gross exaggeration for effect: overstatement.
Love you ten years before the Flood,
And you should, if you please, refuse
Till the conversion of the Jews.
(Andrew Marvell, “To his Coy Mistress”)
Our hands were firmly cemented.
(John Donne, “The Ecstasy”)
9. Litotes: a form of understatement in which the negative of an antonym is used to achieve emphasis and
intensity.
He accused himself, at bottom and not unveraciously, of a fantastic, a demoralized sympathy with her.
(Henry James, “The Pupil”)
10. Irony: the contrast between actual rneaning and the suggestion of another meaning.
a. Verbal—meaning one thing and saying another.
next to of course god america i love you (e.e. cummings)
b. Dramatic—two levels of meaning—what the speaker says and what he/ she means, and what the
speaker says and the author means.
I stood upon a high place,
And saw, below, many devils
Running, leaping,
And carousing in sin.
One looked up grinning,
And said, “Comrade! Brother!
(Stephen Crane, “I Stood Upon a High Place”)
c. Situational—when the reality of a situation differs from the anticipated or intended effect; when
something unexpected occurs.
What rough beast, its hour come round at last
Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?
(William Butler Yeats, “The Second Coming”)
(The second coming of Christ is intended, but a rough beast will come instead.)
11. Symbolism: the use of one object to suggest another, hidden object or idea.
In Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken,” the fork in the road represents a major decision in life, each
road a separate way of life.
In Alexander Pope’s “The Rape of the Lock,” “Cupid’s flames” symbolizes love.
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In Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “The Caged Skylark,” “a dare-gale skylark scanted in a dull cage”
symbolizes the human spirit contained within the domains of society.
12. Imagery: the use of words to represent things, actions, or ideas by sensory description.
Night after Night
Her purple traffic
Strews the land with Opal Bales—
Merchantmen—poise upon Horizons—
Dip—and vanish like Orioles!
(Emily Dickinson, “This Is the Land Where Sunset Washes”)
And the May month flaps its glad green leaves like wings
(Thomas Hardy, “Afterwards”)
He clasps the crag with crooked hands;
Close to the sun in lonely lands,
Ringed with the azure wdrld, he stands.
The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls;
He watches from his mountain walls,
And like a thunderbolt he falls.
(Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “The Eagle”)
13. Paradox: a statement which appears self-contradictory, but underline basis of truth.
Elected silence, sing to me.
(Gerard Manley Hopkins, “The Habit of Perfection”)
Were her first years the Golden Age; that’s true,
But now she’s gold oft-tried and ever-new.
(John Donne, “The Autumnal”)
14. Oxymoron: contradictory terms brought together to express a paradox for strong effect.
Beautiful tyrant! fiend angelical!
Dove-feathered raven! wolvish-ravening lamb!
(William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet)
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.
(Gerard Manley Hopkins, “Pied Beauty”)
15. Allusion: a reference to an outside fact, event, or other source.
World-famous golden-thighed Pythagoras
Fingered upon a fiddle-stick or strings
What a star sang and careless Muses heard
(Pythagoras—Greek mathematician; Muses—mythological goddesses of beauty and music)
(William Butler Yeats, “Among School Children”)
In Breughel’s great painting, The Kermess,
the dancers go round, they go round and around
(William Carlos Williams, “The Dance”)
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