The science fiction poem, “Overheard in an Antarean Bar” by Glenn A. Meisenheimer is a poem about how a person of a certain species in a bar is talking to another species about how they personally are not too keen on interspecies mating. Based on the title, I assume that it does not take place in our own solar system, and takes place in either another system belonging to a species called the Antareans or a planet / place named Antarean. Because the title has the word “overheard” this means that the person speaking in the poem is not the narrator, and so the poem is told in another’s point of view. I see the poem as essentially just one big quote or a one-sided conversation.
There are four stanzas in this poem, with four lines each. The first stanza is setting up what the rest of the poem is about, them not being interested in interspecies mating. The second stanza starts to explain why they feel this way by saying, “You have the wrong designs” and describes what I think is themselves. In the third the person describes the person they are talking to, and then the poem ends with saying that these differences “cannot be resolved” and to come back in a million years.
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When they say the line “This interspecies mating, though, is really not my bag” could mean that interspecies mating is a commonality where they are now. Because not much is really said other than they’ve been in space for a while we are not sure about how the species feel about each other unless because there is interspecies mating they are, in fact, on peaceful terms. Whether or not the two people know each other are unknown, so they could have just met at the bar or could be
The poem starts out with a mirror being personified “I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions. / Whatever I see, I swallow immediately. / Just as it is unmisted by love or dislike.” The mirror changes itself based upon what it sees regardless of what it is. Ironically the same can be said about humans that their environments also change them. Humans reflect diet through physique, smoking through tarred lungs, or self-esteem from social ranking. The poem then says, “It is pink, with speckles. I have looked at it so long / I think it is a part of my heart. But it flickers.” This poem is reflecting patterns of which emotional states also transform the person. When a man spends enough time in a given area, he or she develops an emotional attachment to it. Another transformation “Now I am a lake.” This direct shift from a mirror that gives an exact copy transforms into a lake in which gives a reflection that’s murky and hard to make out. It goes on “A woman bends over me, / Searching my reaches for what she really is. / Then turns to those liars, the candles or the moon.” This section calls into question the objectivity of the previous reflections. The mirror that is now transformed into the lake and is suspicious to those that give light, which also reveals the actual object. It also could reflect that mirror is only as accurate as the observer and perception distort reality. A
The poem starts out describing the dreary streets with cheap hotels and restaurants where the speaker lives. He is on his way to a place where women, including the one he adores, are getting together to talk and have some tea. They are talking about people with great creative minds, like Michelangelo and unlike Prufrock. This is the first of many excuses he gives in the poem. Next, he talks about how there is so much time. There is time for ?indecisions? and ?revisions, before the taking of a toast and tea.? Here he is trying to convince himself that there is plenty of time to decide what he is going to say before he makes a toast in her honor.
In the first line a question is asked: "I have to say poetry and is that nothing and am I saying it?" The second line is simply a paraphrase of the first question. The poet wants to know if writing poetry is worth anything, or if it is "nothing." The poem explores and wanders while developing the entire theme until the opening question is answered by the final couplet. The first two lines are followed by two more corresponding lines. Lines 3-4 state that the author has nothing, but that he has poetry to say and he must say it. To summarize the first quatrain, the author asks what the meaning of poetry is, but before he has answered his initial question, he continues by explaining that, regardless of his condition, or the meaning of poetry, he has something he must say through poetry.
Before delving any deeper into this poem and its meaning, a few basic questions must be answered first. I believe the speaker to be William Blake himself. I am able to infer this from the repeated use of the pronoun “I.” Thought the course of the poem, the speaker’s temperament changes. At the start of the poem the speaker ...
Despite there being seven narrators of the lyric poem, neither of them have a real voice in their own story that they share together. They have no names, faces, or futures in their own narrative. Due to their own choices, they are nothing more than revolving characters in an ongoing story of wasted youth, whose voices were or will eventually be lost at the hands of reckless living and the lack of foresight, other than the pursuit of fickle
T.S. Eliot had very philosophical and religious meanings behind this poem, and that helped me relate personally very well with this work of his. He used allusions to other poems, letting me make connections with works I have read before. He also used inclusive language and had the same opinion as me portrayed in this work. Based on these, T.S. Eliot has convinced me of his messages in this poem, as well as made this by far my favorite of his.
...e feminine population. In this poem the speaker does not seem to be very respectful of the female he is pursuing. Of course that is conducive to the time but it also says something about the validity of the message of the poem. In synopsis the flea, blood and death of the flea are all used as metaphors for sex, the exchange of life force (a very important thing) within the act of sex (represented as something as insignificant as a flea) and then orgasm, which can feel important and significant for a period of time but is really only as important as the death of a flea. The speaker in this poem hopes to convince his lady to sleep with him by trivializing sex and comparing it to something as insignificant as a flea. Meanwhile I say lady, screw the speaker and the flea you would get more of a commitment from a machine than a guy as afraid of human contact as this one.
Nature, that washed her hands in milk” can be divided structurally into two halves; the first three stanzas constitute the first half, and the last three stanzas make up the second half. Each stanza in the first half corresponds to a stanza in the second half. The first stanza describes the temperament of Nature, who is, above all, creative. This first stanza of the first half corresponds to stanza four, the first stanza in the second half of the poem. Stanza four divulges the nature of Time, who, unlike Nature, is ultimately a destroyer. Time is introduced as the enemy of Nature, and Ralegh points out that not only does Nature “despise” Time, she has good reason for it (l. 19). Time humiliates her: he “rudely gives her love the lie,/Makes Hope a fool, and Sorrow wise” (20-21). The parallel between the temperaments of Nature and Time is continued in stanzas two and five. Stanza two describes the mistress that Nature makes for Love. This mistress, who is made of “snow and silk” instead of earth, has features that are easily broken (3). Each external feature is individually fragile: her eyes are made of light, which cannot even be touched, her breath is as delicate as a violet, and she has “lips of jelly” (7-8). Her demeanor is unreliable, as well; it is made “Only of wantonness and wit” (12). It is no surprise that all of the delicate beauty Nature creates in stanza two is destroyed by Time in stanza five. Time “dims, discolors, and destroys” the creation of Nature, feature by feature (25-26). Stanzas three and six complete the parallel. In the third stanza, the mistress is made, but in her is “a heart of stone” (15). Ralegh points out that her charm o...
In relation to structure and style, the poem contains six stanzas of varying lengths. The first, second, and fourth stanzas
The first core issue present in the poem is a low self esteem or insecure sense of self. Most of the poem is centered around the speaker’s indecisiveness and low self confidence. An unknown and overwhelming question is introduced in the first stanza and is revisited later on through “A hundred indecisions. . . a hundred visions and revisions” (Eliot). According to the chapter on Psychoanalytic Criticism, “This core issue [insecure sense of
Both poets present readers with characters questioning the apparent transience of nature. Whitman's young girl weeps to see the black "burial-clouds that lower victorious soon to devour all," (line 12) just as Stevens' young woman is saddened "when the birds are gone, and their warm fields/Return no more" (lines 49-50). These characters, unable to grasp the entirely of the cycle of mortality, are dismayed by earthly loss they continually observe.
In the first stanza, the poet seems to be offering a conventional romanticized view of Nature:
The beginning line of the poem is, “Can I see another’s woe, and not be in sorrow too?” William Blake first asks whether one can witness another person’s sorrow and not refrain from feeling sorrowful too. William Blake ask the question repeatedly in the first two stanzas before he gives the answer later in the third stanza, “No, never can it
The first stanza sets the tone of mockery. The speaker uses metaphors, hyperboles, irony and imagery to seduce his coy mistress. He begins his poem of seduction with an insult: “Had we but world enough, and time, / This coyness, lady, were no crime.” He calls her a criminal for being so reluctant when they are constrained by world and time. To him, it is a misconduct to not jump right into his arms when they have so little time to live. Since this lady does not immediately throw herself upon him, he tries his hand at flattery. “My vegetable love should grow” is a slightly exaggerated image of his love. He uses it to compare how a vegetable, if nourished and cared for, will continue to grow, just like his love for this lady even if it is slowly. He asks her to imagine an incomprehensible amount of time when he says “Two hundred to adore each breast/ But thirty thousand to the rest” The effect of this imagery is to bring her outside of the immediate moment. Many of the hyperboles are so outrageous; the tone of mockery is predominant over the tone of seduction.
The poem opens with a quote from Shakespeare's Measure for Measure 'Mariana in the moated grange'. In the play Mariana is deserted by her lover Angleo, and she is spending her days in a solitary grange. The quote gives the reader of the poem the main theme it explores, which is Mariana's longing for her lover to return. It is interesting to note that the quote is lacking a verb, which implies that there is no action in the poem, that there is a sense of stasis or a sense of unending time, isolation and despair, Mariana can therefore be called a lyrical poem, indeed lyric poems as J.S Mill puts it express 'feeling confessing itself to itself in solitude'. It can also be described as a speech overheard, Mariana the poem is in a way a rewriting of Mariana the character of Shakespeare's play. The form of the poem also reinforce this ideas of lyricality, ' lyric poetry may be said to retain most prominently the elements which evidence its origins in musical ...