Little City, written by Robert Horan is a literary piece about a spider that spins its web, in order to trap ‘gold visitor(S)’ and ‘coppery captive(S)’ amongst other casualties, so to feed. The title of the poem is inconsistent. Habitually, the descriptive adjective ‘little’ is not paired up with the concrete noun ‘city’. Thus Horan’s choice of words is ambiguous. The unusual heading might confuse the reader or help the elocutionist build a more fertile imagination, so to assume what these lines are about. The poet lays out his creation in an open form, comprising six stanzas, each having a different number of verses. There are fourteen sentences in all; hence the metric level does not equate the syntactic level. These verses have no rhyme, thus one cannot help notice the two rhyming words in the last part of the fourth stanza, ‘wires’, ‘flutters’ and the other in the final part, ‘walking’ ,’rocking’. The difference between the two sets of rhyming words is that, in the fourth stanza, Horan writes, consecutively, the two verses, so create the illusion of a fast flow, whereas in the final division, he chooses to write another line in between the two similar sounding line-ending words. The poet might have included this forced rhyme so to make his piece sound a little melodic in the end, as well as to amplify the lack of heartbeat; since rhyming words give the poem a pace that sounds like that of a heart, when read out loud, of the victims the spider feeds on. The rhythm is mostly fast, with the exception of the fourth and fifth stanzas. Both parts include several pauses due to the full-stops added at the end of almost each verse. Thus these punctuation marks help the reader pause and take in what Horan is writing. This has the eff... ... middle of paper ... ...un-on lines in the second division, which shift to end-stopped verses in the fourth part. This style helps to increase momentum to convey the poet’s skilful way with word so as to bring to life such scene and magnify the pedantic tone. The metre is mainly trochaic, ‘Spider, from his flaming sleep’, having a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed one. Such verse is composed of three trochaic feet with the last foot stressed. However there are some exceptions, ‘Fat hero, burnished cannibal’, which is iambic, that is having an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed one. With the scope of the open form, the poem depends mainly on the intrinsic tone, lucid diction and developed and elaborate imagery so to achieve such a detailed literary piece. These are the fine techniques that make Robert Horan such a brilliant poet. Works Cited Little City - Robert Horan
From the very first word of the poem, there is a command coming from an unnamed speaker. This establishes a sense of authority and gives the speaker a dominant position where they are dictating the poem to the reader rather than a collaborative interacti...
... is shown moreover through these pauses. We also see that he places question marks at the end of sentences, which is another way he is showing us the uncertainty in the voice of society. Through his punctuation and word placement, we clearly see the voice of society in his poem, but in a way that tells us not to conform to it.
The paper discusses the sound of the poem and how those certain words, said aloud, help to emphasize the meaning. Looking at the form of a poem in this way gave me a new way of looking at the text and finding the meaning. Personally, I have not had much familiarity looking at the sound of a text, but now see how the sound can be valuable when looking for the meaning of a text. I like to look at the imagery that is utilized in a text because I believe it works well in giving the reader a look into the text and bringing the text to life. What I have discovered reading about the formalist approach is to look at the overall form and how the text itself affects the meaning. Looking at the imagery and symbols helps me personally find the meaning in a text, so learning that the form of the text also can contribute to the meaning was
"Characteristics of Modern Poetry - Poetry - Questions & Answers." ENotes - Literature Study Guides, Lesson Plans, and More. Web. 09 Jan. 2012. .
...oes hand in hand with the structure of the poem as well; bringing about a certain rhythm through punctuation and line breaks. It is this rhythm brings out the repetition and clash of elements especially with parentheses, which allows us to look at the element of starvation while considering the reaction of the press.
Repetition is used profoundly to help the reader understand the symbols and themes throughout the poem. It creates the emphasis that the speaker is praying and searching immensely for his connection to eternal life. It also creates an effect on the reader that the speaker and the spider are similar in the same way, repeating similar actions. “Artful repetition of keywords and phrases occurs throughout ‘A Noiseless Patient Spider.’ This is a strategy Whitman employs in many poems … but it is particularly appropriate here, because the repetition echoes the repetitive nature of the spider’s actions and longings of the soul,” (Napierkowski and Ruby 31: 192-193). The repetition portrays the yearning desire of the spider and the speaker to find their connections. In the second stanza Whitman writes, “Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to connect them…” (Whitman 212). He repeatedly uses verbs in this line to show how tremendously the speaker wants to find his reattachment to society. It emphasizes the persistent activity of the speaker’s soul. Repetition is one of the many great rhetorical devices Whitman uses. Not only is it shown in this poem, but he also uses it in many other poems to create themes and different aspects. “Whitman’s poetry exudes a sense of music throughout, not in the traditional manner, but in a new vein, much of it emanating from his expertise in using the repetition of sounds, words, and phrases to create expressive rhythms,” (Philip K and Irons-Georges 5: 2704). This rhetorical device has created many different characteristics in Whitman’s poems, and has especially created one in “A Noiseless Patient Spider.” Without his repetition throughout the poem, the portrayal of the themes separateness and desire for connection would not have been understood by the
Choosing the first person form in the first and fourth stanza, the poet reflects his personal experiences with the city of London. He adheres to a strict form of four stanzas with each four lines and an ABAB rhyme. The tone of the poem changes from a contemplative lyric quality in the first to a dramatic sharp finale in the last stanza. The tone in the first stanza is set by regular accents, iambic meter and long vowel sounds in the words "wander", "chartered", "flow" and "woe", producing a grave and somber mood.
The essays used in this book have been chosen by Harold Bloom, being that they are still by different essayists than the last two sources mentioned and considering Bloom is not one of them, it is still not bias. This source shed some light on the context of the two poems that were analyzed, but minimal observations on the poem itself and its correlation to the themes. Given this, there was only bare to little use of this secondary source.
Roethke’s poem has a regular rhyme scheme that can be expressed as “abab”. The only exception to this scheme would be the first stanza as the words “dizzy” (2) and “easy” (4) are slant rhymes. Only the end syllables of the two words sound the same. As a result, the use of a consistent “abab” rhyme scheme allows the poem to reflect the
2. The poem starts off with a white spider on a white heal-all which holds onto a white moth. Just the knowledge of knowing that it is a spider, not to mention a fat spider, it has a negative connotations because no one really likes them to be honest. Spiders symbolize death and mystery. As for the heal-all, it is a plant that is commonly used for medicinal purposes. The rhyme scheme and vowel sounds emphasized that they are ‘characters of death and blight.’
The poem is launched by a protracted introduction during which the speaker indulges in descriptions of landscape and local color, deferring until the fifth stanza the substantive statement regarding what is happening to whom: "a bus journeys west." This initial postponement and the leisurely accumulation of apparently trivial but realistic detail contribute to the atmospheric build-up heralding the unique occurrence of the journey. That event will take place as late as the middle of the twenty-second stanza, in the last third of the text. It is only in retrospect that one realizes the full import of that happening, and it is only with the last line of the final stanza that the reader gains the necessary distance to grasp entirely the functional role of the earlier descriptive parts.
“How many times these low feet staggered-” is written from the perspective of someone in an abusive relationship with the deceased woman. They are constantly wondering why she is not cleaning the house and calling her lazy. The poem consists of 12 lines of iambic tetrameter with the exception of the final stanza, which alternates pentameter and tetrameter each line. Because the lines are similar in length, there is no feeling of starting and stopping or drawing something out then contracting it, but more of a monotonous relaying of events. The poem features end rhyme in the second and fourth lines of each stanza. The effect of rhyming “tell” and “steel” is a contrast between the action of telling and the motionless, immovable steel that the woman’s body has taken on, making her incapable of ever telling. The term “soldered mouth” conjures the gruesome image of a mouth permanently melted closed, but also seems reminiscent of a body that has been embalmed, whose lips are sealed in the same manner. The anaphora in lines 3 and 4 of the word “try” drive the phrases following it and take on the feeling of a fruitless effort. You try once to “stir the awful river” and then you try again to “lift the hasps of steel,” but no matter how much you continue to try ...
In order for either the spider or the soul to capture its prey, first they both must create a way to trap what they need and trick it into being caught. “It launched forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself, ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them” (lines 4-5). These lines are describing the spider while it makes its web. The poet uses the word “tirelessly” to show that the spider must complete its task of finding sustenance in order to survive. The repetition of the word “filament” shows how deliberately t...
In the last line of the second stanza, the subject enters dramatically, accompanied by an abrupt change in the rhythm of the poem:
In An Abandoned Bundle, Mtshali recounts his discovery of an abandoned child, on faeces and garbage, attacked by wild dogs. Mtshali begins the poem with very soothing image of “morning mist” over a “white city”, however this is quickly distorted by the harsh, graphic simile