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