Edna St. Vincent Millay has created complex as well as emotionally and politically charged poetry in her career. Her poetry is often considered expressive yet also indifferent by some critics. Yet, her skill with metaphor and other evocative poetic features bring us poems that are reflective of her self, and also ourselves as readers. By developing skilled metaphors for interpreting and developing her own identity as an author and for us as a reader, we are given a construction of selfhood. In this essay, I will analyze Edna St. Vincent Millay’s two poems; If I should learn, in some quite casual way, and What lips my lips have kissed in order to explain the meaning and presence of selfhood in lyric poetry. Through interpreting Millay’s poems, I will explain the construction of selfhood or identity in each poem through formal structures. Understanding selfhood comes with understanding one’s surroundings and how we are able to relate or compare ourselves to these surroundings. Edna St. Vincent Millay does a very complete job of bringing metaphor, narrative, diction and imagery to h...
“Who am I?” is the question raised by Gwen Harwood in her poem, ‘Alter Ego’. Gwen Harwood’s poems explore societal positions and expectations of women in the 1950s which are derived from her own experiences. Though most of her poems have an underlying theme of grief, loss, love and the passing of time, which is explored through her reflecting on her childhood, some are also about self-discovery. ‘Alter Ego’ and ‘The Glass Jar’ are two examples of poems about self-discovery. The 1950s wasn’t the greatest era for female creativity, might it be art or literature which is why most artists and writers sold their material under male pseudonyms as did Gwen Harwood.
7. The personification in the second stanza is that she gives poems the ability to hide and are waiting to be found. The author states that poems are hiding in the bottom of your shoes, and they are the shadows drifting across your ceiling before you wake up. This is personification because she gives the poems traits that only a living organism can possess.
The speaker’s rocky encounter with her ex-lover is captured through personification, diction, and tone. Overall, the poem recaps the inner conflicts that the speak endures while speaking to her ex-lover. She ponders through stages of the past and present. Memories of how they were together and the present and how she feels about him. Never once did she broadcast her emotions towards him, demonstrating the strong facade on the outside, but the crumbling structure on the inside.
Influenced by the style of “plainspoken English” utilized by Phillip Larkin (“Deborah Garrison”), Deborah Garrison writes what she knows, with seemingly simple language, and incorporating aspects of her life into her poetry. As a working mother, the narrator of Garrison’s, “Sestina for the Working Mother” provides insight for the readers regarding inner thoughts and emotions she experiences in her everyday life. Performing the daily circus act of balancing work and motherhood, she, daydreams of how life might be and struggles with guilt, before ultimately realizing her chosen path is what it right for her and her family.
In this paper I will discuss two poems by Sharon Olds. They are both taken from her collection “The Dead and the Living” and are entitled “The Eye” and “Poem to My Husband from my Fathers Daughter.”
John Ashbery, the great American modernist poet, achieved a fiscally small but artistically tremendous success with his book April Galleons, published in 1987; he won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry with his 1975 effort Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, and won nearly unanimous acclaim from poets both domestic and abroad; this volume continues in the same stylistic vein as Self-Portrait, and furthers the deep and fragmented exploration of the themes which have fascinated him, as evidenced through his verse. This volume was both a stylistic departure and a thematic continuance from his earlier books, including the notable 1956's Some Trees and the subsequent The Tennis Court Oath. John Ashbery, in all these works and all the works following them (including his latest offering, Your Name Here) addresses several major topics, most notably the meaning of America and the myth of the American Dream, as well as the subjective human experience of consciousness, the unusual and fragmented sense of time and identification it produces; his approach is typified by a search for the truth and meaning of things, explored through series of abstract objects set into a fabric which creates a thick emotional density. Although a investigation of every poem in this book would be valuable and enlightening, for brevity's purpose only three will be selected: A Mood of Quiet Beauty, Insane Decisions, and Some Money.
In her poem entitled “The Poet with His Face in His Hands,” Mary Oliver utilizes the voice of her work’s speaker to dismiss and belittle those poets who focus on their own misery in their writings. Although the poem models itself a scolding, Oliver wrote the work as a poem with the purpose of delivering an argument against the usage of depressing, personal subject matters for poetry. Oliver’s intention is to dissuade her fellow poets from promoting misery and personal mistakes in their works, and she accomplishes this task through her speaker’s diction and tone, the imagery, setting, and mood created within the content of the poem itself, and the incorporation of such persuasive structures as enjambment and juxtaposition to bolster the poem’s
Emily Dickinson is known to be a poet of great renown. Even after many decades, her work continues to be a major influence in English literature. Her poems are known for their breaking of the standard poetic rules and dives deep into self-conscious of the human mind and society’s views of right and wrong. In particular is poem 754. Much of Emily Dickson’s poem, “My Life Stood – A Loaded”, places a large of amount of emphasizes in violence and narrates her time with her ‘Owner’. The speaker in this poem is subjected to the imposed gender dynamics of 19th century and tries to find an alternative around this. The speaker of the poem experiences powerful emotions and acts on them during the duration of the poem.
In the poem The Courage That My Mother Had by Edna St. Vincent Millay, the speaker explains the admiration he/she had for his/her mother’s courage. The author integrates strong imagery in order to fully explain the message that the speaker is trying to get across to the reader. In the first stanza, the speaker describes his/her’s mother as a “Rock from [the] New England quarried,” and later uses the same idea of a rock to describe the courage his/her mother possesses. What can be understood from the repetition of the image of a rock, is that the mother figure is as strong as the courage inside her. Another way we can see that the speaker truly loves their mother’s courage, is the fact that although he/she received a golden brooch that had previously
...sed society with religious overtones throughout the poem, as though religion and God are placing pressure on her. The is a very deep poem that can be taken in may ways depending on the readers stature yet one thing is certain; this poem speaks on Woman’s Identity.
In the poem “What Lips my Lips Have Kissed, and Where and Why”, Edna St. Vincent Millay elucidates that it is possible to feel alone in a relationship, and if a significant other doesn’t mean anything, then forgetting the details of a past romance is inconsequential: regardless of whether a lover is close or distant, a profound emptiness endures. Millay reaches this conclusion by first hinting in the title that the identities of the men are negligible— they all blend together and take a back seat to the woman’s desolation— as she uses synecdoche to refer to her past lovers as “lips” rather than people as a way of dehumanizing them; secondly, through melancholy imagery of ghosts which furthers the idea of an unseen force, or rather feeling, haunting her and beseeching attention, and she cannot be bothered to respond to these pleas, despite the fact that they “stir a quiet pain”, because it would do nothing to ameliorate her aloneness (line 6); and lastly, through the metaphor of a “lonely tree” whose boughs are “more silent than before” because Millay doesn’t specify that the tree was vibrant or prolific during summer or include any distinctive details about the birds: the focus is on the sense of solitude— none of the birds were special, but the woman misses having someone around to help foster the illusion that she isn’t alone, despite the fact that she is emotionally void (9-11).
The speaker reflects on the teenage girl’s childhood as she recalls the girl played with “dolls that did pee-pee” (2). This childish description allows the speaker to explain the innocence of the little girl. As a result, the reader immediately feels connected to this cute and innocent young girl. However, the speaker’s diction evolves as the girl grew into a teenager as she proclaims: “She was healthy, tested intelligent, / possessed strong arms and back, / abundant sexual drive and manual dexterity” (7-9). The speaker applies polished language to illustrate the teen. This causes the reader not only to see the girl as an adult, but also to begin to grasp the importance of her situation. The speaker expresses what the bullies told this girl as she explains: “She was advised to play coy, / exhorted to come on hearty” (12-13). The sophisticated diction shifts towards the girl’s oppressors and their cruel demands of her. Because of this, the reader is aware of the extent of the girl’s abuse. The speaker utilizes an intriguing simile as she announces: “Her good nature wore out / like a fan belt” (15-16). The maturity of the speaker’s word choice becomes evident as she uses a simile a young reader would not understand. This keeps the mature reader focused and allows him to fully understand the somberness of this poem. The speaker concludes the poem as she depicts the teenage girl’s appearance at her funeral: “In the casket displayed on satin she lay / with the undertaker’s cosmetics painted on” (19-20). The speaker elects not to describe the dead girl in an unclear and ingenuous manner. Rather, she is very clear and
Marianne Moore’s most popular poem, which is also her most ambiguously titled poem, is called “Poetry.” In this poem Moore decisively strayed away from her conventional writing style of contrariety and the bizarre, but it does seem to share other characteristics of her earlier poetry. Moore’s apparent purpose in writing “Poetry” was to criticize the present social outlook on the entire idea of poetry, to come up with a universal definition of poetry and of genuine poetry, and ultimately to convince those who dislike poetry of its benefits. She attempted to present this criticism and definition by means of blatant irony, and even though she desperately wants to describe the seemingly trivial activity of poetry, she fails to provide a definition that is not caught up in the negative.
Millay's poem, I, being born a woman and distressed and Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper . & nbsp; Two Works Cited In the early nineteenth century, the issue of whether women should be granted certain privileges, such as voting, arose in America. Two female writers during this time are Edna St. Vincent Millay and Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Both women were living in a period of history where women's writings created an impact on literature. Most women were supposed to stay at home and take care of the children and many women were not highly educated; therefore, there were few women writers.
This, in fact, is an example of “dynamic decomposition” of which the speaker claims she understands nothing. The ironic contradiction of form and content underlines the contradiction between the women’s presentation of her outer self and that of her inner self. The poem concludes with the line “’Let us go home she is tired and wants to go to bed.’” which is a statement made by the man. Hence, it “appears to give the last word to the men” but, in reality, it mirrors the poem’s opening lines and emphasises the role the woman assumes on the outside as well as her inner awareness and criticism. This echoes Loy’s proclamation in her “Feminist Manifesto” in which she states that women should “[l]eave off looking to men to find out what [they] are not [but] seek within [themselves] to find out what [they] are”. Therefore, the poem presents a “new woman” confined in the traditional social order but resisting it as she is aware and critical of