Poetry is literature in which special intensity is given to the expression of feelings and ideas by the use of distinctive form, style, and imagery. The meaning of a poem can be intensified by deliberate use of the different elements of poetry. In this paper, I will use three poems we have discussed in class to explore how the villanelle form, personnification, and ekphrasis each contribue to deepen the meaning of their respective poems. One poetic structure that exhibits how form contributes to meaning is the villanelle. A villanelle is a fairly complicated verse form, comprised of nineteen lines divided into six stanzas. The first five stanzas have three lines each, and the last stanza has four lines. Elizabeth Bishop’s poem “One Art” provides a masterful example of the villanelle composed in way that draws out a sophisticated level of meaning. One of the most impressive and difficult aspects of writing a villanelle is the necessity of repeating refrains. Bishop’s effortless flow of speech while maintaining these patterns of refrains, allows emphasis to be placed on her repeating message: the …show more content…
Gregory Corso’s “The Whole Mess…Almost” relies heavily on personnification to criticize the social norms that Corso is rejecting. In this poem, the narrator is running about his room, throwing abstractions like Truth and Love and Humor out the window, in order to remove them from his life. Corso conveys his belief that these values are unauthentic through his use of stereotypical personnification. For example, he describes Love as “cooing,” Death as “hiding” and God as “glowering.” Corso’s vivid personification intensifies his criticism of how social norms lack authenticity, thereby validating his decision to “beg(in) throwing out those things” or in application, remove them from his
Castillo refers to all words in poems as gold. Every word must be picked and placed with all the care in the world. Along with her imagery and choice of words, metaphors, poetry form, and flow are essential to creating the two featured poems. After many reads of both “Seduced by Natassja Kinski” and “El Chicle” I have been able to visually interpret the worlds created in both poems. “El Chicle” is all about imagery, however, “Seduced by Natassja Kinski” also contains valuable imagery.
The confronting theme of life is shown through poetic techniques in the poems, Pieta and November. The cycle of life is shown through Pietà and November in two different ways. The child’s life is unfortunately cut short as it, ‘only [lives] one day.’ Whilst in November, the subject of the poem is about a Grandmother who is at the end of the cycle of life. This is unlike the baby in Pietà who is not able to live, or have a chance of living a long life. This may cause the audience to ponder about the purpose of life. Armitage uses consonantal alliteration and visual imagery, in ‘sun spangles,’ to symbolise that, ‘the only thing you can get, out of this life,’ is the beautiful happy moments. This logic is true for many non-believers as the purpose of life is unknown to them and the only positive reason for life is by creating happy memories.In November,the last moments of life are shown through the enjambment and flow. The audience is involved with the journey of bringing the woman to the hospital as if you are, ‘with your grandma taking four short steps to [your] two.’ This is effective as the audience can put themselves in the place of the narrator in the story.This is unlike Pieta which is written in past tense and is not able to put themselves in the place of mother but the audience is more sympathetic towards the mother and her loss of her child.
John Hollander’s poem, “By the Sound,” emulates the description Strand and Boland set forth to classify a villanelle poem. Besides following the strict structural guidelines of the villanelle, the content of “By the Sound” also follows the villanelle standard. Strand and Boland explain, “…the form refuses to tell a story. It circles around and around, refusing to go forward in any kind of linear development” (8). When “By the Sound” is examined in regards to a story, the poem’s linear development does not get beyond the setting. …” The poem starts: “Dawn rolled up slowly what the night unwound” (Hollander 1). The reader learns the time of the poem’s story is dawn. The last line of the first stanza provides place: “That was when I was living by the sound” (3). It establishes time and place in the first stanza, but like the circular motion of a villanelle, each stanza never moves beyond morning time at the sound but only conveys a little more about “dawn.” The first stanza comments on the sound of dawn with “…gulls shrieked violently…” (2). The second stanza explains the ref...
The speakers and audience in poem are crucial elements of the poem and is also the case in these poems. In the poem Untitled, it can be argued that the poem is being written by Peter based on what his father might say to him...
Translating a poem is no easy task and requires a new style of thinking, but exploring a poem in a foreign language compels a higher level of engagement within poetry. When I first began scanning this foreign poem a feeling of being overwhelmed came over me. I had so much to do and it seemed I had so far to go. In “an ABC of Translating Poetry”, Willis Barnstone exclaims, “the translator plays with nothingness, with la nada, and from nothing comes everything” (Barnstone). Thus, when I began to explore my poem I decided I needed to first get a clear grasp on my poem and its structure. “Hagamos
In "Myth" Trethewey uses a variant form of the villanelle to create the emotions she felt during her grief. Traditionally, a villanelle has five tercets followed by a quatrain with two repeating refrains and two repeating rhymes throughout the poem. Trethewey, however, changes this slightly.
Although the author wrote “Monday at the River” in conversation with “Saturday at the Border,” she did not maintain the same structure for her poem and particularly omitted the two additional stanzas. The omission of the two stanzas was intentionally done to demonstrate how a villanelle in its standard form should look. The narrator gives instruction to Caarruth’s narrator to ensure him that he too can write a “Proper Villanelle” (Murdakhayeva 19), one that follows the standard structure as opposed to a “Frail Villanelle” (Carruth 18), which deviates from the standard form of a villanelle. Furthermore, he suggests that Carruth’s narrator has the assets needed to write well he just needs the proper
In "The Intentional Structure of the Romantic Image," one encounters a piece of the twentieth-century discussion of the philosophical considerations of language. One can say that Paul de Man really takes the view of Romanticism akin to that of Martin Heidegger's view of poetry in general. Heidegger states that poetry must be a kind of "speaking being" or the creation of something "new" through language.(Note 1) Language itself stands upon itself in poetry according to Heidegger. De Man picks up the broad discussion of what language is with his discussion of the Romantic image. The main thesis of this essay lies in the difference between the everyday consciousness that one has of the concrete world and the consciousness which one achieves through the Romantic image. De Man says that these two functions of the consciousness differ and that the objects one finds in concrete nature are essentially different from those found in Romantic imagery.
In conclusion, `La Tierra de Alvargonzález' highlights many recurrent themes which can be seen throughout the collection of `Campos de Castilla', such as the interaction of the landscape, not only with the narrator, but also the characters within the story which is told in this poem. This poem can also be compared to the `romances viejos' in its constant references to the Old Testament.
This essay is anchored on the goal of looking closer and scrutinizing the said poem. It is divided into subheadings for the discussion of the analysis of each of the poem’s stanzas.
By the end of this meditation, however, the sentiment of these first three lines has been exposed as an ironically failed attempt to master disaster, with the poem’s final stanza uniting those two words in a heartrending concluding couplet. The poem’s first line is an expression of what Bishop desperately wants to be true; the remaining eighteen lines document Bishop’s painful admission, through both content and form, that such a claim is dishonest. Similar motivations mark the poem’s title and first stanza: somehow lessen loss’s sting by asserting either its uniformity or ubiquity. Loss has no distinction, Bishop declares in the first three lines, willingly using the nebulous and catch-all word “things” to describe loss’s casualties.
‘I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud’ and ‘The Preservation of Flowers’: two notable poems, two very different styles of writing. This essay will look at their contrasts and similarities, from relevant formal aspects, to the deeper meanings hidden between the lines. We will examine both writers use of rhyme scheme, sound patterning, word choice, figurative language and punctuation. It will also touch a little on the backgrounds of the writers themselves and their inspirations, with the intention of gaining a greater understanding of both texts.
As we move through Lope’s collection we see that the emphasis becomes more on poetry itself rather than his desires. While Lope claims in the Advertimiento al Señor Lector that Juana is the ‘sujeto de la mayor parte destos epigramas’ (RBT, p.112), as if to say that love and desire are the ultimate source of this work, at times, the poems are only closely related, if even, to these themes. For example, Sonnet 10 is introdcued as, ‘Describe un monte sin qué ni para qué’ (RBT, p.139). The opening quatrain sets the scene and the ‘locus amoenus depicted here is an erotic space, more dangerously evocative in its graphic downward movement from mountains to valley to meadow’ as the poet writes, ‘Caen de un monte a un valle entre pizarras..’ (l.1).
It will further deal with the development of tension throughout the poem. By making a distinction between tension through formal aspects, such as rhyme scheme, and tension through content it will try to show the interconnection between both of them. Additionally, the paper will deal with the possible effect of tension on the reader and how the poem might be perceived by him/her.
The poets integrated ?metaphysical conceits? as focal parts of these poems. Along with these, they used effective language as a basis for their convincing arguments, they included subjects of periodical importance (e.g. ?courtship? and ?religion?), and use very clever structures that are manipulated in order to make the poem read in the desired way. The very clear indication of the theme in question was strongly aided by the way in which the personas portrayed the emotions they felt and the way they showed their attitudes towards the subject. Considering all these factors, the poets made critical arguments to the mistresses in order to alter their views, thus changing their minds, on denying the poets the sex that they desired so strongly.