Abandoned Farmhouse By Ted Kooser
He was a big man, says the size of his shoes
on a pile of broken dishes by the house;
a tall man too, says the length of the bed
in an upstairs room; and a good, God-fearing man,
says the Bible with a broken back
on the floor below the window, dusty with sun;
but not a man for farming, say the fields
cluttered with boulders and the leaky barn.
Analysis of Literary Techniques
Personification: “says the size
of his shoes”
Imagery: “say the fields
cluttered with boulders”
Alliteration: “Bible with a
broken back”
A woman lived with him, says the bedroom wall
papered with lilacs and the kitchen shelves
covered with oilcloth, and they had a child,
says the sandbox made from a tractor tire.
Money was scarce, say the jars of plum preserves
and canned tomatoes sealed in the cellar hole.
And the winters cold, say the rags in the window frames.
It was lonely here, says the narrow country road.
Something went wrong, says the empty house
in the weed-choked yard. Stones in the fields
say he was not a farmer; the still-sealed jars
in the cellar say she left in a nervous haste.
And the child? Its toys are strewn in the yard
like branches after a storm--a rubber cow,
a rusty tractor with a broken plow,
a doll in overalls. Something went wrong, they say.
Ted Kooser, "Abandoned Farmhouse" from Sure Signs: New and Selected Poems. Copyright ©
1980 by Ted Kooser. Reprinted by permission of University of Pittsburgh Press.
Source: Sure Signs: New and Selected Poems (Zoland Books, 1980)
Poetry Terms
On this and the following pages, fill out the empty boxes, using the Analysis of
Literary Techniques vertical box (to comment on USAGE of technique by the poet)
and the Poetry Terms (to define the techniques being used).
Place the comments next to the line…as in the examples above.
Ambiguity: Definition
Anthem for Doomed Youth By Wilfred Owen
What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.
No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells,
Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs,—
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;
And bugles calling for them from sad shires.
What candles may be held to speed them all?
Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes
Shall shine the holy glimmers of good-byes.
The pallor of girls' brows shall be their pall;
Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,
And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.
Poetry Terms
Analysis of Literary Techniques
“Alone” By Edgar Allan Poe
From childhood’s hour I have not been
As others were—I have not seen
As others saw—I could not bring
My passions from a common spring—
From the same source I have not taken
My sorrow—I could not awaken
My heart to joy at the same tone—
And all I lov’d—I lov’d alone—
Then—in my childhood—in the dawn
Of a most stormy life—was drawn
From ev’ry depth of good and ill
The mystery which binds me still—
From the torrent, or the fountain—
From the red cliff of the mountain—
From the sun that ’round me roll’d
In its autumn tint of gold—
From the lightning in the sky
As it pass’d me flying by—
From the thunder, and the storm—
And the cloud that took the form
(When the rest of Heaven was blue)
Of a demon in my view—
Source: American Poetry: The Nineteenth Century (1993)
Poetry Terms
Analysis of Literary Techniques
When I have Fears That I May Cease to Be By John Keats
When I have fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has gleaned my teeming brain,
Before high-pilèd books, in charactery,
Hold like rich garners the full ripened grain;
When I behold, upon the night’s starred face,
Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,
And think that I may never live to trace
Their shadows with the magic hand of chance;
And when I feel, fair creature of an hour,
That I shall never look upon thee more,
Never have relish in the faery power
Of unreflecting love—then on the shore
Of the wide world I stand alone, and think
Till love and fame to nothingness do sink.
Poetry Terms
Analysis of Literary Techniques
Writing By Howard Nemerov
The cursive crawl, the squared-off characters
these by themselves delight, even without
a meaning, in a foreign language, in
Chinese, for instance, or when skaters curve
all day across the lake, scoring their white
records in ice. Being intelligible,
these winding ways with their audacities
and delicate hesitations, they become
miraculous, so intimately, out there
at the pen’s point or brush’s tip, do world
and spirit wed. The small bones of the wrist
balance against great skeletons of stars
exactly; the blind bat surveys his way
by echo alone. Still, the point of style
is character. The universe induces
a different tremor in every hand, from the
check-forger’s to that of the Emperor
Hui Tsung, who called his own calligraphy
the ‘Slender Gold.’ A nervous man
writes nervously of a nervous world, and so on.
Miraculous. It is as though the world
were a great writing. Having said so much,
let us allow there is more to the world
than writing: continental faults are not
bare convoluted fissures in the brain.
Not only must the skaters soon go home;
also the hard inscription of their skates
is scored across the open water, which long
remembers nothing, neither wind nor wake.
Howard Nemerov, “Writing” from The Collected Poems of Howard Nemerov. Copyright © 1977
by Howard Nemerov. Reprinted with the permission of Margaret Nemerov.
Source: The Collected Poems of Howard Nemerov (The University of Chicago Press, 1977)
Poetry Terms
Analysis of Literary Techniques
Elegy on Toy Piano By Dean Young
For Kenneth Koch
You don't need a pony
to connect you to the unseeable
or an airplane to connect you to the sky.
Necessary it is to love to live
and there are many manuals
but in all important ways
one is on one's own.
You need not cut off your hand.
No need to eat a bouquet.
Your head becomes a peach pit.
Your tongue a honeycomb.
Necessary it is to live to love,
to charge into the burning tower
then charge back out
and necessary it is to die.
Even for the trees, even for the pony
connecting you to what can't be grasped.
The injured gazelle falls behind the
herd. One last wild enjambment.
Because of the sores in his mouth,
the great poet struggles with a dumpling.
His work has enlarged the world
but the world is about to stop including him.
He is the tower the world runs out of.
When something becomes ash,
there's nothing you can do to turn it back.
About this, even diamonds do not lie.
Source: Poetry (October 2003).
Poetry Terms
Analysis of Literary Techniques
The Widow’s Lament in Springtime By William Carlos Williams
Sorrow is my own yard
where the new grass
flames as it has flamed
often before, but not
with the cold fire
that closes round me this year.
Thirty-five years
I lived with my husband.
The plum tree is white today
with masses of flowers.
Masses of flowers
load the cherry branches
and color some bushes
yellow and some red,
but the grief in my heart
is stronger than they,
for though they were my joy
formerly, today I notice them
and turn away forgetting.
Today my son told me
that in the meadows,
at the edge of the heavy woods
in the distance, he saw
trees of white flowers.
I feel that I would like
to go there
and fall into those flowers
and sink into the marsh near them.
William Carlos Williams, “The Widow’s Lament in Springtime” from The Collected Poems of
William Carlos Williams, Volume I, 1909-1939, edited by Christopher MacGowan. Copyright
1938, 1944, 1945 by William Carlos Williams. Reprinted with the permission of New Directions
Publishing Corporation.
Source: Poetry (January 1922).
Poetry Terms
Analysis of Literary Techniques
Two Guitars By Victor Hernández Cruz
Two guitars were left in a room all alone
They sat on different corners of the parlor
In this solitude they started talking to each other
My strings are tight and full of tears
The man who plays me has no heart
I have seen it leave out of his mouth
I have seen it melt out of his eyes
It dives into the pores of the earth
When they squeeze me tight I bring
Down the angels who live off the chorus
The trios singing loosen organs
With melodious screwdrivers
Sentiment comes off the hinges
Because a song is a mountain put into
Words and landscape is the feeling that
Enters something so big in the harmony
We are always in danger of blowing up
With passion
The other guitar:
In 1944 New York
When the Trio Los Panchos started
With Mexican & Puerto Rican birds
I am the one that one of them held
Tight like a woman
Their throats gardenia gardens
An airport for dreams
I've been in theaters and cabarets
I played in an apartment on 102nd street
After a baptism pregnant with women
The men flirted and were offered
Chicken soup
Echoes came out of hallways as if from caves
Someone is opening the door now
The two guitars hushed and there was a
Resonance in the air like what is left by
The last chord of a bolero.
Victor Hernández Cruz, "Two Guitars" from Maraca: New and Selected Poems, 1965-2000.
Copyright © 2001 by Victor Hernández Cruz. Reprinted with the permission of Coffee House
Press. www.coffeehousepress.org.
Source: Maraca: New and Selected Poems 1965-2000 (Coffee House Press, 2001)
Poetry Terms
Analysis of Literary Techniques
Medusa By Louise Bogan
I had come to the house, in a cave of trees,
Facing a sheer sky.
Everything moved,—a bell hung ready to strike,
Sun and reflection wheeled by.
When the bare eyes were before me
And the hissing hair,
Held up at a window, seen through a door.
The stiff bald eyes, the serpents on the forehead
Formed in the air.
This is a dead scene forever now.
Nothing will ever stir.
The end will never brighten it more than this,
Nor the rain blur.
The water will always fall, and will not fall,
And the tipped bell make no sound.
The grass will always be growing for hay
Deep on the ground.
And I shall stand here like a shadow
Under the great balanced day,
My eyes on the yellow dust, that was lifting in the wind,
And does not drift away.
Source: Body of this Death: Poems (1923)
Poetry Terms
Analysis of Literary Techniques
Mending Wall By Robert Frost
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun;
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbour know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
"Stay where you are until our backs are turned!"
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of out-door game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, "Good fences make good neighbours."
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
"Why do they make good neighbours? Isn't it
Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down." I could say "Elves" to him,
But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather
He said it for himself. I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me,
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father's saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, "Good fences make good neighbours."
Poetry Terms
Analysis of Literary Techniques
Slant By Suji Kwock Kim
If the angle of an eye is all,
the slant of hope, the slant of dreaming, according to each life,
what is the light of this city,
light of Lady Liberty, possessor of the most famous armpit in the world,
light of the lovers on Chinese soap operas, throwing BBQ’d ducks at each
other
with that live-it-up-while-you’re-young,
Woo Me kind of love,
light of the old men sitting on crates outside geegaw shops
selling dried seahorses & plastic Temples of
Heaven,
light of the Ying ‘n’ Yang Junk Palace,
light of the Golden Phoenix Hair Salon, light of Wig-o-ramas,
light of the suntanners in Central Park turning over like rotisserie chickens
sizzling on a spit,
light of the Pluck U & Gone with the Wings fried-chicken shops,
the parking-meter-leaners, the Glamazons,
the oglers wearing fern-wilting quantities of cologne, strutting, trash-talking,
glorious:
the immigrants, the refugees, the peddlars, stockbrokers and janitors,
stenographers and cooks,
all of us making and unmaking ourselves,
hurrying forwards, toward who we’ll become, one way only, one life only:
free in time but not from it,
here in the city the living make together, and make and unmake over and
over
Quick, quick, ask heaven of it, of every mortal relation,
feeling that is fleeing,
for what would the heart be without a heaven to set it on?
I can’t help thinking no word will ever be as full of life as this world,
I can’t help thinking of thanks.
Poetry Terms
Analysis of Literary Techniques
Romance By Claude McKay
To clasp you now and feel your head close-pressed,
Scented and warm against my beating breast;
To whisper soft and quivering your name,
And drink the passion burning in your frame;
To lie at full length, taut, with cheek to cheek,
And tease your mouth with kisses till you speak
Love words, mad words, dream words, sweet senseless words,
Melodious like notes of mating birds;
To hear you ask if I shall love always,
And myself answer: Till the end of days;
To feel your easeful sigh of happiness
When on your trembling lips I murmur: Yes;
It is so sweet. We know it is not true.
What matters it? The night must shed her dew.
We know it is not true, but it is sweet—
The poem with this music is complete.
Claude McKay, "Romance" from Harlem Shadows: The Poems of Claude McKay (New York:
Harcourt, 1922). Courtesy of the Literary Representative for the Works of Claude McKay,
Schombourg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and
Tildeen Foundations.
Source: Harlem Shadows: The Poems of Claude McKay (Harcourt Inc., 1922)
Poetry Terms
Analysis of Literary Techniques
Analysis of Literary Techniques
A Thank-You Note By Michael Ryan
For John Skoyles
My daughter made drawings with the pens you sent,
line drawings that suggest the things they represent,
different from any drawings she — at ten — had done,
closer to real art, implying what the mind fills in.
For her mother she made a flower fragile on its stem;
for me, a lion, calm, contained, but not a handsome one.
She drew a lion for me once before, on a get-well card,
and wrote I must be brave even when it’s hard.
Such love is healing — as you know, my friend,
especially when it comes unbidden from our children
despite the flaws they see so vividly in us.
Who can love you as your child does?
Your son so ill, the brutal chemo, his looming loss
owning you now — yet you would be this generous
to think of my child. With the pens you sent
she has made I hope a healing instrument.
Poetry Terms
Reverie in Open Air By Rita Dove
I acknowledge my status as a stranger:
Inappropriate clothes, odd habits
Out of sync with wasp and wren.
I admit I don’t know how
To sit still or move without purpose.
I prefer books to moonlight, statuary to trees.
But this lawn has been leveled for looking,
So I kick off my sandals and walk its cool green.
Who claims we’re mere muscle and fluids?
My feet are the primitives here.
As for the rest—ah, the air now
Is a tonic of absence, bearing nothing
But news of a breeze.
Source: Poetry (March 2003).
Analysis of Literary Techniques
The Snappy Guide to Scanning a Poem
Adapted by Dr. K from materials at
http://www.english.bham.ac.uk/staff/tom/teaching/firstyear06/howtoscan.htm and
http://www.amittai.com/prose/meter.php
Note: This Guide is heavily based on, and deeply indebted to, Stephen Fry's excellent book, The Ode
Less Travelled, which anyone interested in poetry should read. It also draws from John Hollander’s
Rhyme’s Reason, an equally informative and entertaining book.
If you’ve grown up on a steady diet of free verse, it probably comes as a nasty surprise to you that
not all poetry in English is written that way. Robert Frost told the students at Milton Academy in 1935
that “Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down,” and many poets before and since
have chosen to meet the challenge of meter and rhyme when creating their works. Part of being an
English major (and taking the GRE subject exam, etc., etc.) is learning how to “scan” a poem—that is,
to determine its meter and its rhyme scheme. In doing so, you’ll gain insight not only into what the
poet wanted to emphasize in the poem but also be able to connect it to other works (by the poet and
others) in the same metrical and prosodic forms, helping you to place a poem in its historical period
and circumstances. So learning to play poetic “tennis” by mastering meter and rhyme is a big part of
your development as critical readers of literature. Let’s look at the two main areas separately, starting
with meter.
Name that foot
The basic meter of English poetry is iambic: two syllables to a foot. That’s part of our Indo-European
language heritage, since Indo-European featured short syllables as building blocks for words. Note that
the names follow a consistent pattern: an adjective describing the shape of the foot or basic stress
pattern, and a noun telling you how many feet are in a line. Thus, iambic pentameter tells you that
you have five iambs in your line. Pretty simple, once you know what the feet are. And since there only a
handful of stress patterns, once you get them down, you just have to count the syllables in the line and
you’re in business.
OK, so what do these funny words mean?
The basic six sound patterns in English have names of Greek etymology and look like this:
iamb
(_ /)
_
/_
/
_
/_
/
_/
/
_
/
_
The
falli
out
of
fait
frie
ren
is
of
love
ng
hful nds, ewi
ng
trochee
(/ _)
/_
/_
/
_
/_
Double,
double
toil
and
trouble
anapest
(_ _ /)
_
_
/_
_
/
_
_/
I
am
monar
of
all
I
survey
ch
dactyl
(/_ _)
/
_
_
/__
Take
her
up
tenderly
spondee
pyrrhic
-and the
/
whit
e
/
brea
st
(/ /)
(_ _)
-of
the
/
dim
/
sea