Poetry and Heart of Darkness/Things Fall Apart
Directions: For this assignment you should work in pairs. Choose two of the following poems to
analyze and connect to themes in Heart of Darkness and Things Fall Apart. First step; Analyze the
poem on its own merits (theme, tone, etc.). Then write a thesis statement that compares and contrasts
the themes in the poem to those in Heart of Darkness and Things Fall Apart. Apply either SOAPsTone
or TPCASSTT to the analysis of each poem. Individually analyze the other two poems for homework.
The Second Coming
W. B. Yeats
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
(5)
(10)
(15)
(20)
Poem Analysis
1. Briefly summarize the poem’s thematic concepts and draw inferences about the speaker and
audience. Consider how the poem’s appeal to ethos, logos, and pathos tell us something about the
relationship between audience and speaker.
2. Identify at least 3 rhetorical strategies and literary devices that the poet uses and explain HOW they
contribute to the elements in question one.
3. Write a thesis (for each novel) that compares and contrasts the poem to Heart of Darkness and
Things Fall Apart.
The Hollow Men
T. S. Eliot (1925)
Mistah Kurtz—he dead
A penny for the Old Guy
(5)
(10)
I
We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats' feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar
(35)
Not that final meeting
In the twilight kingdom
III
(40)
Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;
(15)
Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death's other Kingdom
Remember us -- if at all -- not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.
Behaving as the wind behaves
No nearer --
(45)
(50)
This is the dead land
This is cactus land
Here the stone images
Are raised, here they receive
The supplication of a dead man's hand
Under the twinkle of a fading star.
Is it like this
In death's other kingdom
Waking alone
At the hour when we are
Trembling with tenderness
Lips that would kiss
Form prayers to broken stone.
II
IV
(20)
(25)
(30)
Eyes I dare not meet in dreams
In death's dream kingdom
These do not appear:
There, the eyes are
Sunlight on a broken column
There, is a tree swinging
And voices are
In the wind's singing
More distant and more solemn
Than a fading star.
Let me be no nearer
In death's dream kingdom
Let me also wear
Such deliberate disguises
Rat's coat, crowskin, crossed staves
(55)
(60)
(65)
In a field
The eyes are not here
There are no eyes here
In this valley of dying stars
In this hollow valley
This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms
In this last of meeting places
We grope together
And avoid speech
Gathered on this beach of the tumid river
Sightless, unless
The eyes reappear
As the perpetual star
Multifoliate rose
Of death's twilight kingdom
The hope only
Of empty men.
V
(70)
Here we go round the prickly pear
Prickly pear prickly pear
Here we go round the prickly pear
At five o'clock in the morning.
Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
(75) And the act
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom
Between the conception
And the creation
(80) Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow
Life is very long
(85)
(90)
Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom
For Thine is
Life is
For Thine is the
(95)
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
Poem Analysis
1. Briefly summarize the poem’s thematic concepts, and draw inferences about the
speaker and audience. Remember to consider how the poem’s appeal to ethos, logos, and
pathos tell us something about the relationship between audience and speaker.
2. Identify at least 3 rhetorical strategies and literary devices that the poet uses and
explain HOW they contribute to the elements in question one.
3. Write a thesis (for each novel) that compares and contrasts the poem to Heart of
Darkness and Things Fall Apart.
"Fall of Icarus" by Breughel
(5)
(10)
(15)
(20)
About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well, they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully
along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
Copyright © 1976 by Edward Mendelson, William Meredith and Monroe K. Spears,
Executors of the Estate of W. H. Auden.
Poem Analysis
1. Briefly summarize the poem’s thematic concepts, and draw inferences about the
speaker and audience. Remember to consider how the poem’s appeal to ethos, logos, and
pathos tell us something about the relationship between audience and speaker.
2. Identify at least 3 rhetorical strategies and literary devices that the poet uses and
explain HOW they contribute to the elements in question one.
3. Write a thesis (for each novel) that compares and contrasts the poem to Heart of
Darkness and/or Things Fall Apart.
T. S. Eliot's "Journey of The Magi"
'A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.'
And the camels galled, sore-footed, refractory,
Lying down in the melting snow.
There were times we regretted
The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,
And the silken girls bringing sherbet.
Then the camel men cursing and grumbling
And running away, and wanting their liquor and women,
And the night-fires going out, and the lack of shelters,
And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly
And the villages dirty and charging high prices:
A hard time we had of it.
At the end we preferred to travel all night,
Sleeping in snatches,
With the voices singing in our ears, saying
That this was all folly.
Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley,
Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation;
With a running stream and a water-mill beating the darkness,
And three trees on the low sky,
And an old white horse galloped away in the meadow.
Then we came to a tavern with vine-leaves over the lintel,
Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver,
And feet kicking the empty wine-skins.
But there was no information, and so we continued
And arrived at evening, not a moment too soon
Finding the place; it was (you may say) satisfactory.
All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.
5
10
15
20
25
30
35
40
Poem Analysis
1. Briefly summarize the poem’s thematic concepts and draw inferences about the
speaker and audience. Consider how the poem’s appeal to ethos, logos, and pathos tell us
something about the relationship between audience and speaker.
2. Identify at least 3 rhetorical strategies and literary devices that the poet uses and
explain HOW they contribute to the elements in question one.
3. Write a thesis (for each novel) that compares and contrasts the poem to Heart of
Darkness and/or Things Fall Apart.