presentation on the poets of world war one

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Poetry

Modernism, in the arts, is a radical break with the past and the concurrent search for new

forms of expression. Modernism fostered a period of experimentation in the arts from the late 19th

to the mid-20th century, particularly in the years following World War I.

In an era characterized by industrialization, rapid social change, and advances

in science and the social sciences (e.g., Freudian theory), Modernists felt a growing alienation

incompatible with Victorian morality, optimism, and convention. New ideas in psychology,

philosophy, and political theory kindled a search for new modes of expression.

MODERNISM IN LITERATURE

The Modernist impulse is fueled in various literatures by industrialization and

urbanization and by the search for an authentic response to a much-changed world. Although

prewar works by Henry James, Joseph Conrad, and other writers are considered Modernist,

Modernism as a literary movement is typically associated with the period after World War I. The

enormity of the war had undermined humankind’s faith in the foundations of Western society and

culture, and postwar Modernist literature reflected a sense of disillusionment and fragmentation.

A primary theme of T.S. Eliot’s long poem The Waste Land (1922), a seminal Modernist work, is

the search for redemption and renewal in a sterile and spiritually empty landscape. With its

fragmentary images and obscure allusions, the poem is typical of Modernism in requiring the

reader to take an active role in interpreting the text.

The publication of the Irish writer James Joyce’s Ulysses in 1922 was a landmark event in

the development of Modernist literature. Dense, lengthy, and controversial, the novel details the

events of one day in the life of three Dubliners through a technique known as stream of

consciousness, which commonly ignores orderly sentence structure and incorporates fragments of

thought in an attempt to capture the flow of characters’ mental processes. Portions of the book

were considered obscene, and Ulysses was banned for many years in English-speaking countries.

Other European and American Modernist authors whose works rejected chronological

and narrative continuity include Virginia Woolf, Marcel Proust, Gertrude Stein, and William

Faulkner.

The term Modernism is also used to refer to literary movements other than the European

and American movement of the early to mid-20th century. In Latin American

literature, Modernismo arose in the late 19th century in the works of Manuel Gutiérrez

Nájera and José Martí. The movement, which continued into the early 20th century, reached its

peak in the poetry of Rubén Darío. Over the span of these movements, artists increasingly focused

on the intrinsic qualities of their media—e.g., line, form, and colour—and moved away from

inherited notions of art. By the beginning of the 20th century, architects also had increasingly

abandoned past styles and conventions in favour of a form of architecture based on essential

functional concerns. They were helped by advances in building technologies such as the steel

frame and the curtain wall. In the period after World War I these tendencies became codified as

the International style, which utilized simple geometric shapes and unadorned facades and which

abandoned any use of historical reference; the steel-and-glass buildings of Ludwig Mies van der

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Rohe and Le Corbusier embodied this style. In the mid-to-late 20th century this style manifested

itself in clean-lined, unadorned glass skyscrapers and mass housing projects.

What are the characteristics of modern poetry?

Modernist poetry is characterized by themes of disillusionment, fragmentation and

alienation from society. These characteristics are widely believed to be feelings brought on by the

Industrial Revolution and the many social, political and economic changes that accompanied it.

This multinational cultural movement began in the late 19th century and maintained its prevalence

in art throughout World War I and the immediately subsequent years. Many modernist poems have

speakers that seem to be struggling with their own definition of self and placement in society.

The rapid rise of cities in the late 19th century was brought on by the shift from a largely

agricultural economy to a largely industrial one. Massive waves of immigrants from Europe

seeking economic opportunities flocked to major cities. This left many artists and poets feeling

alone and isolated in the midst of busy, populated cities. The poetry of the period reflects feelings

of disenchantment, anxiety and hopelessness, especially in the work following the devastation of

World War I. Modernist poets are also noted for their rejection of Romantic ideas and artistic

styles, preferring to approach language with more suspicion, resulting in fragmented sentence

structure. Notable modernist poets include Wallace Stevens, Gertrude Stein, T. S. Eliot and

Virginia Woolf.

1. Modern (better call it Modernist) poetry is more predominantly intellectual/cerebral in

its appeal, rather than emotive; Eliot and Pound would be the examples;

2. It is chiefly imagistic and involves symbolism, often private in nature; you can think of

Eliot and Yeats;

3. It is often full of allusions of sorts, and inter-textual references; again Eliot is a great

master;

4. It is impersonal, anti-romantic, innovative in attitudes and approaches to life; opposed

to the Romanticist poetics of spontaneity and imagination;

5. It is often lexically, semantically and grammatically challenging for the uninitiated

readership;

6. It rejects traditional versification and metrics to opt for free-verses and various

experimental forms.

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World War I Poetry

The First World War inspired profound poetry – words in which the atmosphere and landscape of

battle were evoked perhaps more vividly than ever before.

The poets – many of whom lost their lives – became a collective voice , illuminating not only the

war’s tragedies and their irreparable effects, but the hopes and disappointments of an entire

generation.

Although it has been more than one hundred years since the Armistice and the end of the First

World War, it continues to move and inspire poets.

War Poets

Wilfred Owen (1893-1918), Siegfried Sassoon (1886-1967), Isaac Rosenberg (1890-1918).

Poetry seemed a natural outlet for the intense emotions generated by the war and its range

challenges the concept that only those with direct experience of fighting, i.e. soldiers, were allowed

to write about war. The Great War was a total war and no one was left untouched by it. Suffering,

mourning, patriotism, pity, and love were universally, if not equally, experienced. Thus "war

poetry" is as all-encompassing as total war itself.

Among the great figures of the war were its documentarians—the poets who served in the war as

soldiers or witnessed its effects in their time and responded with their personal accounts. Many of

their poems remain well-known today for their unflinching reflections on the tolls of battle, like

Wilfred Owen’s "Anthem for Doomed Youth," in which he describes “Only the monstrous anger

of the guns. / Only the stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle.”

World War II

Between 1939 and 1946, over 100 million people from over 30 countries were directly involved

in the Second World War, and an estimated 70 million people died: over 4 times as many as in

World War I.

By its conclusion in 1945, World War II had become the single deadliest conflict in history. Over

25 million soldiers had lost their lives, as well as 55 million civilians, including 11 million killed

in concentration camps.

Poets of World War II

Most of the poets included in the volume served in the armed forces; some—Louis Simpson,

Anthony Hecht, Kenneth Koch—saw combat in the infantry, while others—James Dickey,

Howard Nemerov, Richard Hugo, John Ciardi—fought in the air.

Also included: poets who experienced the war as civilians, including Robinson Jeffers, Marianne

Moore, and Conrad Aiken; poems by conscientious objectors and draft resisters, including William

Stafford and Robert Lowell; and an elegy by James Tate for his father, who was killed in action

when Tate was an infant.

William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)

William Butler Yeats was an Irish poet and dramatist (playwright). Some think he was the

greatest poet of the twentieth century. He won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1923. The works of

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William Butler Yeats form a bridge between the romantic poetry of the nineteenth century and the

hard clear language of modern poetry.

Yeats was not only one of the greatest poets and a major figure in the Irish literary

renaissance (rebirth), but also wrote some of the greatest of all twentieth-century literature. Among

his acquaintances at this time were his father's artist and writer friends, including William Morris

(1834–1896), George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950), and Oscar Wilde (1856–1900).

Major Impacts on Yeats’ Poetry

• The Relationship Between Art and Politics: Yeats believed that art and politics were

intrinsically linked and used his writing to express his attitudes toward Irish politics, as well as to

educate his readers about Irish cultural history.

• The Impact of Fate and the Divine on History: Yeats’s devotion to mysticism led to the

development of a unique spiritual and philosophical system that emphasized the role of fate and

historical determinism, or the belief that events have been preordained.

The Transition from Romanticism to Modernism

Yeats started his long literary career as a romantic poet and gradually evolved into a

modernist poet. When he began publishing poetry in the 1880s, his poems had a lyrical, romantic

style, and they focused on love, longing and loss, and Irish myths. His early writing follows the

conventions of romantic verse, utilizing familiar rhyme schemes, metric patterns, and poetic

structures. Although it is lighter than his later writings, his early poetry is still sophisticated and

accomplished.

Several factors contributed to his poetic evolution: his interest in mysticism and the occult

led him to explore spiritually and philosophically complex subjects. Yeats’s frustrated romantic

relationship with Maud Gonne caused the starry-eyed romantic idealism of his early work to

become more knowing and cynical. Additionally, his concern with Irish subjects evolved as he

became more closely connected to nationalist political causes.

As a result, Yeats shifted his focus from myth and folklore to contemporary politics, often

linking the two to make potent statements that reflected political agitation and turbulence in Ireland

and abroad. Finally, and most significantly, Yeats’s connection with the changing face of literary

culture in the early twentieth century led him to pick up some of the styles and conventions of the

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modernist poets. The modernists experimented with verse forms, aggressively engaged with

contemporary politics, challenged poetic conventions and the literary tradition at large, and

rejected the notion that poetry should simply be lyrical and beautiful. These influences caused his

poetry to become darker, edgier, and more concise. Although he never abandoned the verse forms

that provided the sounds and rhythms of his earlier poetry, there is still a noticeable shift in style

and tone over the course of his career.

An Irish Airman Foresees His Death

I know that I shall meet my fate

Somewhere among the clouds above;

Those that I fight I do not hate

Those that I guard I do not love;

My country is Kiltartan Cross,

My countrymen Kiltartan’s poor,

No likely end could bring them loss

Or leave them happier than before.

Nor law, nor duty bade me fight,

Nor public man, nor cheering crowds,

A lonely impulse of delight

Drove to this tumult in the clouds;

I balanced all, brought all to mind,

The years to come seemed waste of breath,

A waste of breath the years behind

In balance with this life, this death.

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Paraphrase:

The speaker, an Irish airman fighting in World War I, declares that he knows he will die

fighting among the clouds. He says that he does not hate those he fights, nor love those he guards.

His country is “Kiltartan’s Cross,” his countrymen “Kiltartan’s poor.” He says that no outcome in

the war will make their lives worse or better than before the war began. He says that he did not

decide to fight because of a law or a sense of duty, nor because of “public men” or “cheering

crowds.” Rather, “a lonely impulse of delight” drove him to “this tumult in the clouds.” He says

that he weighed his life in his mind, and found that “The years to come seemed waste of breath, /

A waste of breath the years behind.”

This short sixteen-line poem has a very simple structure: lines metered in iambic

tetrameter, and four grouped “quatrains” of alternating rhymes: ABABCDCDEFEFGHGH, or four

repetitions of the basic ABAB scheme utilizing different rhymes.

Commentary

This simple poem is one of Yeats’s most explicit statements about the First World War,

and illustrates both his active political consciousness (“Those I fight I do not hate, / Those I guard

I do not love”) and his increasing propensity for a kind of hard-edged mystical rapture (the airman

was driven to the clouds by “A lonely impulse of delight”). The poem, which, like flying,

emphasizes balance, essentially enacts a kind of accounting, whereby the airman lists every factor

weighing upon his situation and his vision of death, and rejects every possible factor he believes

to be false: he does not hate or love his enemies or his allies, his country will neither be benefited

nor hurt by any outcome of the war, he does not fight for political or moral motives but because

of his “impulse of delight”; his past life seems a waste, his future life seems that it would be a

waste, and his death will balance his life. Complementing this kind of tragic arithmetic is the neatly

balanced structure of the poem, with its cycles of alternating rhymes and its clipped, stoical meter.

Irish Nationalism and Politics

Throughout his literary career, Yeats incorporated distinctly Irish themes and issues into

his work. He used his writing as a tool to comment on Irish politics and the home rule movement

and to educate and inform people about Irish history and culture. Yeats also used the backdrop of

the Irish countryside to retell stories and legends from Irish folklore. As he became increasingly

involved in nationalist politics, his poems took on a patriotic tone. Yeats addressed Irish politics

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in a variety of ways: sometimes his statements are explicit political commentary, as in “An Irish

Airman Foresees His Death,” in which he addresses the hypocrisy of the British use of Irish

soldiers in World War I. Such poems as “Easter1916” and “In Memory of Eva Gore Booth and

Con Markiewicz” address individuals and events connected to Irish nationalist politics, while “The

Second Coming” and “Leda and the Swan” subtly include the idea of Irish nationalism. In these

poems, a sense of cultural crisis and conflict seeps through, even though the poems are not

explicitly about Ireland. By using images of chaos, disorder, and war, Yeats engaged in an

understated commentary on the political situations in Ireland and abroad. Yeats’s active

participation in Irish politics informed his poetry, and he used his work to further comment on the

nationalist issues of his day.

Summary: The poem is almost like a meditation. The speaker knows that he will die somewhere

in the clouds. Still, he doesn't hate his enemies, and he doesn't love his countrymen. In fact, his

real attachment is to his little local village. And nobody forced him into this business either. Some

weird impulse drove him to join the military. At least in the military, he says, his life won't be just

some waste of breath.

The Speaker: Our speaker is the star of the poem, and we learn a lot about him. For starters, he's

an Irish airman (a pilot, not a guy made of air); we know this from the title. But he's a very special

Irish airman, one with the power to foresee his own death, sort of. In a war as fierce as World War

I, being able to predict one's own death in battle wasn't exactly that hard to do. But the airman is

not too scared about it, which seems a little weird to us.

This lack of fear is because he seems to think he's made the right decision. A glorious death

in the air seems a lot better when balanced against his wasted youth and an equally wasteful future.

Along these same lines, he's a strong-minded dude. Neither the cheering crowds, nor your run-of-

the-mill recruiters were able to persuade him to sign up. Instead, some weird sense of duty and the

law were also unable to touch him. He did that on his own because of some powerful, internal

"impulse" he felt, no other reason. He's very much "his own man," so to speak.

The people he really cares about and fights for aren't the English or their allies, but the poor back

in Kiltartan, where he's from. He loves them, and only them, and he hates nobody, not even the

enemy he is supposed to be fighting against.

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It's possible that he doesn't really feel like his life has been wasted breath. He could just be saying

that ironically, implying that his death up in the clouds is pointless and that his past and his future

are, in fact, much more important. Though we really do think the speaker is being serious here (he

seems to be earnest in his love of village and rejection of social pressures), we can't really be 100%

sure. And since we can't be sure, we'll go ahead and say that our speaker is, at the very least, a

mysterious man.

It might be that the poem is about the real Robert Gregory, who was kind of a mystery to

Yeats as well. But, even though Yeats knew Gregory, he didn't totally "know" him? In some ways,

this poem is an attempt to come to grips with some of the mysteries of Robert Gregory: how he

felt up in the sky, why he joined the air force, and why he chose to put his life on the line. So the

poem is kind of an extended investigation into Gregory's mind-set, aimed at giving us a portrait of

how Gregory may have felt, and just who this man was.

Setting

The speaker is an airman, and he sure talks a lot about the clouds, doesn't he? That's one

way to think of this poem's setting: the clouds. Now the speaker isn't exactly flying through the

clouds or anything like that. The way he talks about them being "above" makes us think he's still

on the ground, maybe standing next to his plane. But he directs our attention upwards, imploring

us to imagine him flying through these clouds and eventually dying.

Symbol Analysis

Air is all over this poem, in one way or another. There's the "airman" of the title, the clouds

that the speaker mentions twice, and all that stuff towards the end about breath. The speaker is

worried that his breath will just be wasted, so he takes to the clouds, searching for a life that is not

a waste. It's as though the clouds offer breath, or air, that is not wasted.

• Title: The poem is about an airman, a guy who spends his time up in the

clouds flying a plane.

• Lines 1- 2: The speaker knows he will die "somewhere among the clouds

above." The phrase "meet my fate" is an example of periphrasis, a roundabout way of

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saying something. Here the speaker says he will meet his fate rather than he will die. While

these clouds are just clouds, they are also a battlefield, the place where the airman will die.

• Line 12: The clouds-as-battlefield idea is expressed again. Here, they are

described as a scene of "tumult," which seems like a bit of an understatement to us. We can

definitely assure you that planes shooting at each other and dudes dying is a little more

than just a tumult.

• Line 14: The speaker says the future ("years to come") seemed like a "waste

of breath." This is a metaphor for the fact that the future seems totally pointless.

• Line 15: The speaker uses the same metaphor to describe the past as wasted

breath. We also have a neat figure here called chiasmus(named for the Greek letter Chi).

A chiasmus is a group of phrases that take the form of X-Y-Y-X. So, here we have years

to come-wasted breath and wasted breath-years behind.

Form and Meter: While Yeats sometimes likes to play games with meter, in "An Irish Airman

Foresees His Death" he's pretty straightforward: iambic tetrameter all the way. You see, iambic

tetrameter is just like iambic pentameter, except there are four (the prefix tetra- means four) iambs,

instead of five. They're two-syllable pairs that contain an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed

syllable. Each iamb makes the sound da-DUM, as in the word "allow." Since we have four of those

in these lines, each line should sound like da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM. But don't take

our word for it. Check out an example:

Nor law nor duty bade me fight. (9)

I know that I shall meet my fate.

“An Irish Airman Foresees His Death” is a short dramatic monologue, originally one of

four poems written by William Butler Yeats to commemorate the death of Major Robert Gregory,

son of Lady Augusta Gregory (Yeats’s onetime patron and later his colleague). Gregory, never a

close personal friend of Yeats, was a multitalented Renaissance man, titled Irish gentry, athlete,

aviator, scholar, and artist who, even though over the age for compulsory military service, enlisted

in World War I. He did so because it was a magnificent avenue for adventure.

The poem is equally divided into two eight-line sentences with four iambic tetrameter

quatrains. Yeats writes in the first person, donning the persona of the airman as he prepares to go

into battle in the sky. In the first quatrain, Yeats shows the airman’s ambiguous feelings about

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fighting in the war; he has no strong emotions concerning either those he is fighting against or

those he is fighting to protect. Even with these mixed sentiments, however, he is sure that he will

die in this adventure. Not only is death from enemy contact possible but also, with aviation in its

infancy, the chances for mechanical error multiply the dangers he faces.

The second quatrain continues this ambiguity as the airman realizes the fruitlessness of his

participation in the war. He knows that no matter what the outcome of his personal battles, they

will not affect the overall war effort—nor will the outcome of...

Themes

Patriotism

It is clear that the pilot, serving in Britain’s Royal Air Force, does not feel patriotism in the

traditional sense of the word: he neither loves the ones he protects nor hates those he fights. He

does feel a sense of identity, but it is with the people of Ireland, specifically those of Kiltartan. The

reason this does not seem to make sense to the reader is that the political situation he lives under

has split the word patriotism into two meanings. Usually, we think of a patriot as fighting for his

or her own country. In this case, though, because Ireland is under British control, the country that

the airman is fighting for is one country, while his country is a completely different one to him.

One imagines that much in colonial life must have created this sort of dilemma, with citizens owing

their loyalty to both the government over their heads and also a distant government across the sea.

Yeats has dramatized this situation to its fullest by putting the airman in a life-or-death situation.

The poem also makes the situation as pathetic as it could be by having the airman lay down his

life for the country in which he does not believe. It is arguable whether this approach would be as

effective in stirring Irish patriotism as well as a straightforward, pro-Irish poem would, but Yeats

was writing about an actual occurrence, and this issue of dual loyalty (or loyalty versus affection)

certainly is worth being examined.

Fate

The power of this poem lies in its first line: the speaker is not trying to beat his fate, nor is

he trying to make things work out to his advantage. He is so certain that he will die that he uses

the term “meet my fate” to mean the same thing as “die,” accepting the fact that he has no other

possible fate except dying. The reader is meant to see this sort of fatalism as depressing; it should

shock us and give us a sense of waste to find out that a young, healthy man feels that he has nothing

left to live for or look forward to. For the poem’s speaker, though, knowing his fate is actually a

blessing. Freed of his responsibility to make the world better in the future or preserve the life he

has known; he is able to act spontaneously—to follow “a lonely impulse of delight” by flying off

into the clouds.

Yeats is bending the rules of reality by making the speaker so absolutely certain of his fate:

the ability to predict the future is always flawed by the fact that something unexpected could come

up. On the other hand, the poet does support the speaker’s certainty by telling us that he has thought

this through completely, “brought all to mind.” We are not told exactly why his past and future are

so pointless, but we are given a pretty good guess in

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Robert Frost (1834-1963)

Robert Frost was born in 1874 in San Francisco, California, not the New England with

which he was later so closely associated. His father, William Prescott Frost, Jr., was a native of

Lawrence, Massachusetts, and a graduate of Harvard College. However, he was something of an

adventurer and wandered to the West Coast in search of a livelier environment and a career in

journalism or law. Frost spent most of his early days in San Francisco and returned for good to

New England and Lawrence only when his father died in 1886. After living on a farm with limited

success, Frost took the family to England in 1912 and settled in the rural village of Beaconsfield,

where he hoped to devote his time to poetry.

Life’s Work

Frost brought together some of his old poems while he was in England and went

unannounced to David Nutt, an English publisher. Nutt liked the poems and agreed to publish

Frost’s first collection, A Boy’s Will (1913). The title, from a poem by Henry Wadsworth

Longfellow, suggests the dreamy days of youth. However, while the book does stress the

experience of a young man, it includes a number of poems that are directly connected to classical

literature. The most significant poem in this group is “The Trial by Existence,” in which Frost

borrowed the myth of the recycling of souls from Vergil’s Aeneid (29-19 b.c.e.; English

translation, 1553) and made it into a poem about humans heroically struggling with their ignorance

about their origins and nature. “A Tuft of Flowers,” one of the best poems in the book, is taken

from a group of rural poems and is about the daily labor of the rural world. The speaker first feels

his isolation from others, but when he sees the “tuft of flowers” spared by a mower, he recognizes

that “Men work together/ Whether they work together or alone.” The book received both positive

and negative reviews in England. However, the most important one was written by poet Ezra

Pound in Poetry magazine; Pound helped establish Frost’s reputation, and he tried to make Frost

into a disciple. Frost, however, was not interested in Pound’s style and wanted to create and

manage his own reputation.

After publishing two books of poetry, Frost knew it was time to return to the United States

and try to make his living through poetry. The news of his success had preceded him, and he was

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seen as an important young American poet who had been recognized by the British critics. Frost

settled with his family on a farm near Franconia, New Hampshire, and immediately set about

establishing his reputation as a poet. He made an ally of poet and critic Louis Untermeyer, who

became a lifelong supporter and interpreter of Frost. He also began reading his poems at colleges

in New England, such as Tufts College and Harvard University, and then in other parts of the

country. This provided Frost with the income that was necessary to support his family and made

his name more widely known. At first he was very shy and trembled when he read his poems, but

he eventually became an extremely effective, if unusual, reader.

Frost’s third book of poetry, Mountain Interval, was published in 1916. It was well

received and contained some of Frost’s best and most typical poems, including “The Road Not

Taken” and “Oven Bird.” His poems were beginning to develop a subtlety in structure that the

early poems did not have. Frost especially liked to set his speakers between opposites or

alternatives, as he did in “The Road Not Taken.”

Frost served as a teacher and a source for inspiration for those who came during the

summer. In 1923, Frost published another book of poems, New Hampshire. It contained some of

his best poems, including “The Need of Being Versed in Country Things,” “To Earthward,” and

“Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” The book received the 1924 Pulitzer Prize for poetry.

Frost brought together another book of poems, West-Running Brook, in 1927.

His Collected Poems appeared in 1930 and won the 1931 Pulitzer Prize for poetry. Frost’s

reputation was at its height; he was the best known and most respected American poet of the time.

However, his honors for his poetry were undercut by his family troubles.

Themes in Robert Frost

Self-Knowledge through Nature:

Nature figures prominently in Frost’s poetry, and his poems usually include a moment of

interaction or encounter between a human speaker and a natural subject

Engaging with nature—whether through manual labor or exploration—has a variety of results,

including self-knowledge, deeper understanding of the human condition, and increased I

Earlier work focuses on the act of discovery and demonstrates how being engaged with nature

leads to growth and knowledge.

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In his later works, experiencing nature provided access to the universal, the supernatural, and the

divine, even as the poems themselves became increasingly focused on aging and mortality.

Community vs. Isolation:

In several Frost poems, solitary individuals wander through a natural setting and encounter another

individual, an object, or an animal.

Earlier poems feature speakers who actively choose solitude and isolation in order to learn more

about themselves, but these speakers ultimately discover a firm connection to the world around

them.

Later poems return the focus to solitude, exploring how encounters and community only heighten

loneliness and isolation.

Symbols in Frost’s Poetry

Trees: Trees function as boundary spaces, where moments of connection or revelation become

possible. Humans can observe and think critically about humanity and the divine under the shade

of these trees or standing nearby, inside the trees’ boundary space.

Trees act as boundaries or borders between different areas or types of experiences. When Frost’s

speakers and subjects are near the edge of a forest, wandering in a forest, or climbing a tree, they

exist in liminal spaces, halfway between the earth and the sky, which allow the speakers to engage

with nature and experience moments of revelation.

Solitary Travelers: Frost’s poetry demonstrates great respect for the social outcast, or wanderer,

who exists on the fringes of a community. Like the romanticized notion of the solitary traveler, the

poet was also separated from the community, which allowed him to view social interactions, as

well as the natural world, with a sense of wonder, fear, and admiration.

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The solitary traveler demonstrates the historical and regional context of Frost’s poetry. Frost’s

speakers and subjects, these people lived on the outskirts of the community, largely away from the

warmth and complexity of human interaction.

The Road Not Taken

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler, long I stood

And looked down one as far as I could

To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,

And having perhaps the better claim,

Because it was grassy and wanted wear;

Though as for that the passing there

Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay

In leaves no step had trodden black.

Oh, I kept the first for another day!

Yet knowing how way leads on to way,

I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

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I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

Comment: The speaker comes upon a fork in the road while walking through a yellow wood. He

considers both paths and concludes that each one is equally well-traveled and appealing.

After choosing one of the roads, the narrator tells himself that he will come back to this fork one

day in order to try the other road.

The speaker ends on a nostalgic note, wondering how different things would have been had he

chosen the other path.

Analysis: Since its publication, many readers have analyzed the poem as a nostalgic commentary

on life choices. The narrator decided to seize the day and express himself as an individual by

choosing the road that was “less traveled by.” As a result of this decision, the narrator claims, his

life was fundamentally different that it would have been had he chosen the more well-traveled

path.

The speaker’s decision to choose the “less traveled” path demonstrates his courage. Rather than

taking the safe path that others have traveled, the narrator prefers to make his own way in the

world.

The Speaker: The speaker only distinguishes the paths from one another after he has already

selected one and traveled many years through life.

In terms of beauty, both paths are equally “fair,” and the overall “…passing there / Had worn them

really about the same.”

It is only as an old man that the narrator looks back on his life and decides to place such importance

on this particular decision in his life. During the first three stanzas, the narrator shows no sense of

remorse for his decision nor any acknowledgement that such a decision might be important to his

life.

Yet, as an old man, the speaker attempts to give a sense of order to his past and perhaps explain

why certain things happened to him.

Of course, the excuse that he took the road “less traveled by” is false, but the speaker still clings

to this decision as a defining moment of his life, not only because of the path that he chose but

because he had to make a choice in the first place.

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Theme: The whole poem is an extended metaphor; the road is life, and it diverges, that is, splits

apart, forks. There is a decision to be made and a life will be changed. Perhaps forever.

Ironic as it is, this is also a poem infused with the anticipation of remorse. Its title is not “The

Road Less Traveled” but “The Road Not Taken.”

But the nature of the decision is such that there is no Right Path—just the chosen path and the

other path.

Conclusion: Identical forks, in particular, symbolize for us the nexus of free will and fate: We

are free to choose, but we do not really know beforehand what we are choosing between. Our

route is, thus, determined by an accretion of choice and chance, and it is impossible to separate

the two.

This poem does not advise. First, there is no less-traveled road in this poem; it isn’t even an

option. Next, the poem seems more concerned with the question of how the concrete present

(yellow woods, grassy roads covered in fallen leaves) will look from a future vantage point.

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

Whose woods these are I think I know.

His house is in the village, though;

He will not see me stopping here

To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer 5

To stop without a farmhouse near

Between the woods and frozen lake

The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake

To ask if there is some mistake. 10

The only other sounds the sweep

Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark, and deep,

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But I have promises to keep,

And miles to go before I sleep, 15

And miles to go before I sleep.

Summary

On the surface, this poem is simplicity itself. The speaker is stopping by some woods on a

snowy evening. He or she takes in the lovely scene in near-silence, is tempted to stay longer, but

acknowledges the pull of obligations and the considerable distance yet to be traveled before he or

she can rest for the night.

Form: The poem consists of four (almost) identically constructed stanzas. Each line is iambic,

with four stressed syllables:

Within the four lines of each stanza, the first, second, and fourth lines rhyme. The third line

does not, but it sets up the rhymes for the next stanza. For example, in the third

stanza, queer, near, and year all rhyme, but lake rhymes with shake, mistake, and flake in the

following stanza.

The notable exception to this pattern comes in the final stanza, where the third line rhymes

with the previous two and is repeated as the fourth line.

Commentary

This is a poem to be marveled at and taken for granted. Like a big stone, like a body of

water, like a strong economy, however it was forged it seems that, once made, it has always been

there. Frost claimed that he wrote it in a single nighttime sitting; it just came to him. Perhaps one

hot, sustained burst is the only way to cast such a complete object, in which form and content,

shape and meaning, are alloyed inextricably. One is tempted to read it, nod quietly in recognition

of its splendor and multivalent meaning, and just move on. But one must write essays. Or study

guides.

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Like the woods it describes, the poem is lovely but entices us with dark depths—of

interpretation, in this case. It stands alone and beautiful, the account of a man stopping by woods

on a snowy evening, but gives us a come-hither look that begs us to load it with a full inventory of

possible meanings. We protest, we make apologies, we point to the dangers of reading poetry in

this way, but unlike the speaker of the poem, we cannot resist.

The last two lines are the true culprits. They make a strong claim to be the most celebrated

instance of repetition in English poetry. The first “And miles to go before I sleep” stays within the

boundaries of literalness set forth by the rest of the poem. We may suspect, as we have up to this

point, that the poem implies more than it says outright, but we can’t insist on it; the poem has gone

by so fast, and seemed so straightforward. Then comes the second “And miles to go before I sleep,”

like a soft yet penetrating gong; it can be neither ignored nor forgotten. For the last “miles to go”

now seems like life; the last “sleep” now seems like death.

The basic conflict in the poem, resolved in the last stanza, is between an attraction toward

the woods and the pull of responsibility outside of the woods. What do woods represent? Woods

are sometimes a symbol for wildness, madness, the pre-rational, the looming irrational. But these

woods do not seem particularly wild. They are someone’s woods, someone’s in particular—the

owner lives in the village. But that owner is in the village on this, the darkest evening of the year—

so would any sensible person be. That is where the division seems to lie, between the village (or

“society,” “civilization,” “duty,” “sensibility,” “responsibility”) and the woods (that which is

beyond the borders of the village and all it represents). If the woods are not particularly wicked,

they still possess the seed of the irrational; and they are, at night, dark—with all the varied

connotations of darkness.

Part of what is irrational about the woods is their attraction. They are restful, seductive,

lovely, dark, and deep—like deep sleep, like oblivion. Snow falls in downy flakes, like a blanket

to lie under and be covered by. And here is where many readers hear dark undertones to this lyric.

To rest too long while snow falls could be to lose one’s way, to lose the path, to freeze and die.

Does this poem express a death wish, considered and then discarded? Do the woods sing a siren’s

song? To be lulled to sleep could be truly dangerous. Is allowing oneself to be lulled akin to giving

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up the struggle of prudence and self-preservation? Or does the poem merely describe the

temptation to sit and watch beauty while responsibilities are forgotten—to succumb to a mood for

a while?

The woods sit on the edge of civilization; one way or another, they draw the speaker away

from it (and its promises, its good sense). “Society” would condemn stopping here in the dark, in

the snow—it is ill advised. The speaker ascribes society’s reproach to the horse, which may seem,

at first, a bit odd. But the horse is a domesticated part of the civilized order of things; it is the

nearest thing to society’s agent at this place and time. And having the horse reprove the speaker

(even if only in the speaker’s imagination) helps highlight several uniquely human features of the

speaker’s dilemma. One is the regard for beauty (often flying in the face of practical concern or

the survival instinct); another is the attraction to danger, the unknown, the dark mystery; and the

third—perhaps related but distinct—is the possibility of the death wish, of suicide.

Not that we must return too often to that darkest interpretation of the poem. Beauty alone

is a sufficient siren; a sufficient protection against her seduction is an unwillingness to give up on

society despite the responsibilities it imposes. The line “And miles to go before I sleep” need not

imply burden alone; perhaps the ride home will be lovely, too. Indeed, the line could be read as

referring to Frost’s career as a poet, and at this time he had plenty of good poems left in him.

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T.S. Eliot (1888–1965)

Born in St. Louis on Sept. 26, 1888.

Lived there for 18 years

Attended Harvard and earned his undergraduate (bachelor’s) and master’s degrees there.

Went to Paris for a year; returned to Harvard to pursue a doctorate in philosophy, but ended up

settling in England in 1914 (24 yr.)

He published his poems, including this one, in magazines in 1915.

He was known for his articulation of the disillusionment (loss of identity) of a younger post-

WWI generation with the values and conventions of the Victorian era.

He received the Novel Prize for Literature in 1948 and died in London in 1965.

T. S. Eliot and Modernism

The term “modernism” refers to a movement which commenced in the late 1800s,

coalesced immediately after World War I, and remained influential past World War II into the

late 1940s, when postmodernism began to take hold. The modernist movement encompassed

poetry, fiction, drama, painting, music and architecture in particular. As with any movement, its

evolution and decline of influence is gradual and hard to pinpoint in time. In any case, the true

birth of modernism in poetry is frequently dated to the publication of T.S. Eliot's "The Love

Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" in 1917.

In many ways, modernism is a reaction to the atrocities of the World Wars as well as to

the Victorian ideals that preceded them. In the widespread suffering and chaos that followed the

wars, the older ideals seemed questionable, as did many moral precepts. Modernist poets were

therefore concerned with breaking established rules, traditions and conventions, and finding a

distinctly contemporary mode of expression, through countless experiments in form and style.

The chief concern was the intricacies of language and how to use them, as well as with writing as

an end in itself. The world seemed to be breaking apart, the meaning of everything was being

questioned, and modernism grappled with the fragmentation and complexity brought about by

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such a state. The modern poet had a different world from the Victorian poets to contemplate, and

thus employed new forms and styles as fitting this new disillusioned world view.

As the earliest Modernist, Eliot had a central role in determining certain broad dictates of

the movement. With fellow Modernist poet Ezra Pound, for example, he decided that “The

poet's mind is in fact a receptacle for seizing and storing up numberless feelings, phrases,

images, which remain there until all the particles which can unite to from a new compound are

present together”. By this, he almost certainly meant that true poetry is not only a creative

expression of a poet’s worldview, but that such expression had to be scientifically derived—

another of his beliefs. He contended that poetry was the highest form of science and the one most

necessary to the generation that came after science had destroyed so many cities.

With these ideas in mind, Eliot and many other Modernist poets, such as Pound, William

Carlos Williams, Dylan Thomas, and William Butler Yeats attempted to describe the world they

saw before them in poetry, rather than transport their readers to a false. Though they saw

themselves as harshly realistic, their work might also be interpreted as incoherent or

unnecessarily. Eliot, like the others, attributed the former to the incoherence of the times and the

latter to the misconceptions of his critics (T. S. Eliot). He described his mission as follows:

“What we have to do is to bring poetry into the world in which the audience lives and to

which it returns when it leaves the theatre; not to transport the audience into some imaginary

world totally unlike their own, an unreal world in which poetry can be spoken. What I should

hope might achieved, by a generation of dramatists having the benefit of our experience, is that

the audience should find, at the moment of awareness that it is hearing poetry, that it is saying to

itself: "I could talk in poetry too!" Then we should not be transported into an artificial world; on

the contrary, out own sordid, dreary, daily world would be suddenly illuminated and

transfigured.” (from Poetry and Drama, 1951).

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The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

S’io credesse che mia risposta fosse

A persona che mai tornasse al mondo,

Questa fiamma staria senza piu scosse.

Ma perciocche giammai di questo fondo

Non torno vivo alcun, s’i’odo il vero,

Senza tema d’infamia ti rispondo.

LET us go then, you and I,

When the evening is spread out against the sky

Like a patient etherized upon a table;

Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,

The muttering retreats 5

Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels

And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:

Streets that follow like a tedious argument

Of insidious intent

To lead you to an overwhelming question…. 10

Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”

Let us go and make our visit.

In the room the women come and go

Talking of Michelangelo.

The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes, 15

The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes

Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,

Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,

Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,

23

Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap, 20

And seeing that it was a soft October night,

Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.

And indeed there will be time

For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,

Rubbing its back upon the window panes; 25

There will be time, there will be time

To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;

There will be time to murder and create,

And time for all the works and days of hands

That lift and drop a question on your plate; 30

Time for you and time for me,

And time yet for a hundred indecisions,

And for a hundred visions and revisions,

Before the taking of a toast and tea.

In the room the women come and go 35

Talking of Michelangelo.

And indeed there will be time

To wonder, “Do I dare?” and, “Do I dare?”

Time to turn back and descend the stair,

With a bald spot in the middle of my hair— 40

(They will say: “How his hair is growing thin!”)

My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,

My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin—

(They will say: “But how his arms and legs are thin!”)

Do I dare 45

Disturb the universe?

24

In a minute there is time

For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.

For I have known them all already, known them all:

Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons, 50

I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;

I know the voices dying with a dying fall

Beneath the music from a farther room.

So how should I presume?

And I have known the eyes already, known them all— 55

The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,

And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,

When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,

Then how should I begin

To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways? 60

And how should I presume?

And I have known the arms already, known them all—

Arms that are braceleted and white and bare

(But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!)

Is it perfume from a dress 65

That makes me so digress?

Arms that lie along a table, or wrap about a shawl.

And should I then presume?

And how should I begin?

. . . . . . . .

Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets 70

And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes

Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows?…

25

I should have been a pair of ragged claws

Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.

. . . . . . . .

And the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully! 75

Smoothed by long fingers,

Asleep … tired … or it malingers,

Stretched on the floor, here beside you and me.

Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,

Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis? 80

But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed,

Though I have seen my head (grown slightly bald) brought in upon a platter,

I am no prophet—and here’s no great matter;

I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,

And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker, 85

And in short, I was afraid.

And would it have been worth it, after all,

After the cups, the marmalade, the tea,

Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me,

Would it have been worth while, 90

To have bitten off the matter with a smile,

To have squeezed the universe into a ball

To roll it toward some overwhelming question,

To say: “I am Lazarus, come from the dead,

Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all”— 95

If one, settling a pillow by her head,

Should say: “That is not what I meant at all;

That is not it, at all.”

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And would it have been worth it, after all,

Would it have been worth while, 100

After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets,

After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the floor—

And this, and so much more?—

It is impossible to say just what I mean!

But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen: 105

Would it have been worth while

If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl,

And turning toward the window, should say:

“That is not it at all,

That is not what I meant, at all.”

. . . . . . . . 110

No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;

Am an attendant lord, one that will do

To swell a progress, start a scene or two,

Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,

Deferential, glad to be of use, 115

Politic, cautious, and meticulous;

Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;

At times, indeed, almost ridiculous—

Almost, at times, the Fool.

I grow old … I grow old … 120

I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?

I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.

I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

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I do not think that they will sing to me. 125

I have seen them riding seaward on the waves

Combing the white hair of the waves blown back

When the wind blows the water white and black.

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea

By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown 130

Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

Elements of the Poem: Type of Work: Dramatic Monologue (Modern)

A dramatic monologue presents a moment in which a speaker discusses a topic and, in doing so,

reveals his/her personal feelings to a listener (reader).

Only the speaker talks, and intentionally and unintentionally reveals information about

himself/herself.

Since the main focus of a dramatic monologue is this personal information, and not the speaker’s

topic, a dramatic monologue is a type of character study.

Summary: This poem, the earliest of Eliot’s major works, was completed in 1910 or 1911 but

not published until 1915. It is an examination of the tortured psyche of the prototypical modern

man—overeducated, eloquent, neurotic, and emotionally stilted. Prufrock, the poem’s speaker,

seems to be addressing a potential lover, with whom he would like to “force the moment to its

crisis” by somehow consummating their relationship. But Prufrock knows too much of life to

“dare” an approach to the woman: In his mind he hears the comments others make about his

inadequacies, and he chides himself for “presuming” emotional interaction could be possible at

all. The poem moves from a series of fairly concrete (for Eliot) physical settings—a cityscape

(the famous “patient etherised upon a table”) and several interiors (women’s arms in the

lamplight, coffee spoons, fireplaces)—to a series of vague ocean images conveying Prufrock’s

emotional distance from the world as he comes to recognize his second-rate status (“I am not

Prince Hamlet’). “Prufrock” is powerful for its range of intellectual reference and also for the

vividness of character achieved.

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Form: “Prufrock” is a variation on the dramatic monologue, a type of poem popular with Eliot’s

predecessors. Dramatic monologues are similar to soliloquies in plays. Three things characterize

the dramatic monologue, according to M.H. Abrams. First, they are the utterances of a specific

individual (not the poet) at a specific moment in time. Secondly, the monologue is specifically

directed at a listener or listeners whose presence is not directly referenced but is merely

suggested in the speaker’s words. Third, the primary focus is the development and revelation of

the speaker’s character. Eliot modernizes the form by removing the implied listeners and

focusing on Prufrock’s interiority and isolation. The epigraph to this poem, from Dante’s

Inferno, describes Prufrock’s ideal listener: one who is as lost as the speaker and will never

betray to the world the content of Prufrock’s present confessions. In the world Prufrock

describes, though, no such sympathetic figure exists, and he must, therefore, be content with

silent reflection. In its focus on character and its dramatic sensibility, “Prufrock” anticipates

Eliot’s later, dramatic works.

The rhyme scheme of this poem is irregular but not random. While sections of the poem

may resemble free verse, in reality, “Prufrock” is a carefully structured amalgamation of poetic

forms. The bits and pieces of rhyme become much more apparent when the poem is read aloud.

One of the most prominent formal characteristics of this work is the use of refrains. Prufrock’s

continual return to the “women [who] come and go / Talking of Michelangelo” and his recurrent

questionings (“how should I presume?”) and pessimistic appraisals (“That is not it, at all.”) both

reference an earlier poetic tradition and help Eliot describe the consciousness of a modern,

neurotic individual. Prufrock’s obsessiveness is aesthetic, but it is also a sign of compulsiveness

and isolation. Another important formal feature is the use of fragments of sonnet form,

particularly at the poem’s conclusion. The three three-line stanzas are rhymed as the conclusion

of a Petrarchan sonnet would be, but their pessimistic, anti-romantic content, coupled with the

despairing interjection, “I do not think they (the mermaids) would sing to me,” creates a contrast

that comments bitterly on the bleakness of modernity.

Type of Work: Dramatic Monologue (Modern)

A dramatic monologue presents a moment in which a speaker discusses a topic and, in doing so,

reveals his/her personal feelings to a listener (reader).

Only the speaker talks, and intentionally and unintentionally reveals information about

himself/herself.

29

Since the main focus of a dramatic monologue is this personal information, and not the speaker’s

topic, a dramatic monologue is a type of character study. Planes, subway trains, cars, and WWI created dramatic shifts in day to day modern life that often left people feeling lost or left behind,

questioning their identity.

Modernist poetry is often difficult to understand and analyze because the SPEAKER is usually

uncertain about his/her own ontological (the essence/nature) being.

The speaker in modernist poems characteristically wrestles with the fundamental question of

“self,” often feeling fragmented and alienated from the world around him/her.

In other words, a coherent speaker with a clear sense of himself/herself is hard to find in

modernist poetry, often leaving the reader feeling “lost.”

The Speaker: The poem centers on a balding, insecure middle-aged man.

He expresses his thoughts about the dull, uneventful, mediocre life he leads as a result of his

feelings of inadequacy and his fear of making decisions.

Unable to seize opportunities or take risks (especially with women), he lives in a world that is the

same today as it was yesterday and will be the same tomorrow as it is today.

He does try to make progress, but his timidity and fear of failure inhibit him from taking action.

Setting: The action takes place in the evening in a bleak section of a smoky/foggy city.

This city is probably St. Louis, where Eliot grew up, but could also be London, where he moved

to.

Eliot probably intended to leave the setting ambiguous because it was unimportant and could be

any city anywhere.

The Characters: J. Alfred Prufrock: The speaker, a timid, overcautious middle-aged main. He

escorts his listener through streets in a shabby part of a city, past cheap hotels and restaurants, to

a social gathering where the women he would like to meet are conversing. However, he is

hesitant to take part in the activity for fear of making a fool of himself.

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The Listener: An unidentified companion of Prufrock. The listener could also be Prufrock’s

inner self, one that prods him but fails to move him to action.

The Lonely Men in Shirtsleeves: Leaning out of the windows and smoking pipes, they are like

Prufrock in that they look upon a scene without being a part of it. The smoke from their pipes

helps form the haze over the city that serves as a metaphor for a timid cat (which could very well

be Prufrock himself).

Themes:

Loneliness and Alienation: Prufrock is a pathetic man whose anxieties and obsessions have

isolated him.

Indecision: Prufrock resists making decisions for fear that their outcomes will turn out wrong.

Inadequacy: Prufrock continually worries that he will make a fool of himself and that people

will ridicule him for his clothes, his bald spot, and his overall physical appearance.

Pessimism: Prufrock sees only the negative side of his own life and the lives of others.

Women come and go talking of Michael Angelo

This allusion highlights the theme of sexual anxiety. Michelangelo, a world-renowned painter,

sculptor and poet, serves as a model of the ideal “Renaissance man”, the male exemplary for

excellence. An image also associated with Michelangelo is his sculpture of David, considered to

be the embodiment of male physical perfection.

Figures of Speech: The metaphor of a Cat is apparent. Phrases such as “rubs its back,” “rubs its

muzzle,” “sudden leap,” “curled once about the house,” and others to clearly point to the

metaphor.

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Cats are not very sociable creatures. Eliot essentially compares Prufrock to the cat in this stanza.

Prufrock hesitates while socializing with others (particularly women), and spends the entire

poem trying to bring himself to talk to just one girl.

Prufrock refers to “yellow fog” and “yellow smoke,” which means: Clouded. He cannot act and

is paralyzed, blocked by his own thoughts.

The colour yellow, associated with cowardice, just supports this idea.

Finally, when looking at the story of the cat as a whole in this stanza, nothing is accomplished.

The cat essentially moves around in the night, but by the end it just “fell asleep.” In the same

way as Prufrock, the cat did not act in any significant way.

Style:

Conversational diction combined with the stylized language of poetry (figurative language).

Variations in length and meter

Constant shifts in the train of thought

Shifts in topics under discussion

Shifts from abstract to concrete (universal to particular)

Shifts from obvious allusions to more abstract allusions (suggesting Prufrock was well read and

retained bits and pieces of what he read in his memory)

The Eipgraph: It is from Italian poet Dante’s Inferno, a story of a journey through Hell. These

lines have been spoken by a lost soul, Guido da Montefeltro.

He tells his story to Dante because he believes that his story would never reach anyone on earth;

therefore, he need not to be ashamed for admitting anything he had done.

32

It’s a “Love Song” that begins with mention of a trip through Hell.

The quoted passage from Dante's Inferno suggests that Prufrock is one of the damned and he

speaks only because he is sure no one will listen.

When the evening is spread out against the sky, Like a patient etherized upon a table.

When the evening is spread out against the sky, Like a patient etherized upon a table.

This comparison clearly reveals the psyche of Prufrock. He is inactive and helpless like a

patient. Evening also symbolizes Twilight which indicates uncertainty and inability to see clearly

This comparison clearly reveals the psyche of Prufrock. He is inactive and helpless like a

patient. Evening also symbolizes Twilight which indicates uncertainty and inability to see

clearly.

I should have been a pair of ragged claws

Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.

Prufrock is disgusted with the aimlessness of his contemporary life. He urges to get freedom

from the society which is actually devoid. He wants to be a crab which scuttles across the seas.

Most apparent in these lines is Prufrock’s desire for insignificance. The use of the crab,

especially, creates images of futility, of moving slowly and with great difficulty- images also

associated with the process of aging and approaching death.

Do I dare to eat a peach

He imagines himself growing old, unchanged, worrying about his health and the “risks” of eating

a peach. He believes he will be fragile and would not be able to eat a peach as his teeth will be

weak by then. This is an Imagery of an old man. He has the fear of aging and death.

At the end of the poem, he faintly hears the mermaids of romance singing in his imagination,

even though they are not singing to him. In a final imagined vision, he sees these nymphs of the

sea, free and beautiful, calling him. Reality, however, intrudes in the form of “human voices,”

33

perhaps those of the art-chattering women, and he is “drowned” in his empty life. Then he says

that “human voices” wake him—perhaps he is awakening from a daydream at one of these get

together? “And we drown”—he ends his love song with drowning, death...

Eliot has left an open ending. It is an inconclusive poem.

Commentary: “Prufrock” displays the two most important characteristics of Eliot’s early poetry.

First, it is strongly influenced by the French Symbolists, like Mallarmé, Rimbaud, and

Baudelaire, whom Eliot had been reading almost constantly while writing the poem. From the

Symbolists, Eliot takes his sensuous language and eye for unnerving or anti-aesthetic detail that

nevertheless contributes to the overall beauty of the poem (the yellow smoke and the hair-

covered arms of the women are two good examples of this). The Symbolists, too, privileged the

same kind of individual Eliot creates with Prufrock: the moody, urban, isolated-yet-sensitive

thinker. However, whereas the Symbolists would have been more likely to make their speaker

himself a poet or artist, Eliot chooses to make Prufrock an unacknowledged poet, a sort of artist

for the common man.

The second defining characteristic of this poem is its use of fragmentation and

juxtaposition. Eliot sustained his interest in fragmentation and its applications throughout his

career, and his use of the technique changes in important ways across his body of work: Here,

the subjects undergoing fragmentation (and reassembly) are mental focus and certain sets of

imagery; in The Waste Land, it is modern culture that splinters; in the Four Quartets we find the

fragments of attempted philosophical systems. Eliot’s use of bits and pieces of formal structure

suggests that fragmentation, although anxiety-provoking, is nevertheless productive; had he

chosen to write in free verse, the poem would have seemed much more nihilistic. The kinds of

imagery Eliot uses also suggest that something new can be made from the ruins: The series of

hypothetical encounters at the poem’s center are iterated and discontinuous but nevertheless lead

to a sort of epiphany (albeit a dark one) rather than just leading nowhere. Eliot also introduces an

image that will recur in his later poetry, that of the scavenger. Prufrock thinks that he “should

have been a pair of ragged claws / Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.” Crabs are

scavengers, garbage-eaters who live off refuse that makes its way to the sea floor. Eliot’s

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discussions of his own poetic technique (see especially his essay “Tradition and the Individual

Talent”) suggest that making something beautiful out of the refuse of modern life, as a crab

sustains and nourishes itself on garbage, may, in fact, be the highest form of art. At the very

least, this notion subverts romantic ideals about art; at best, it suggests that fragments may

become reintegrated, that art may be in some way therapeutic for a broken modern world. In The

Waste Land, crabs become rats, and the optimism disappears, but here Eliot seems to assert only

the limitless potential of scavenging.

“Prufrock” ends with the hero assigning himself a role in one of Shakespeare’s plays:

While he is no Hamlet, he may yet be useful and important as “an attendant lord, one that will do

/ To swell a progress, start a scene or two...” This implies that there is still a continuity between

Shakespeare’s world and ours, that Hamlet is still relevant to us and that we are still part of a

world that could produce something like Shakespeare’s plays. Implicit in this, of course, is the

suggestion that Eliot, who has created an “attendant lord,” may now go on to create another

Hamlet. While “Prufrock” ends with a devaluation of its hero, it exalts its creator. Or does it?

The last line of the poem suggests otherwise—that when the world intrudes, when “human

voices wake us,” the dream is shattered: “we drown.” With this single line, Eliot dismantles the

romantic notion that poetic genius is all that is needed to triumph over the destructive,

impersonal forces of the modern world. In reality, Eliot the poet is little better than his creation:

He differs from Prufrock only by retaining a bit of hubris, which shows through from time to

time. Eliot’s poetic creation, thus, mirrors Prufrock’s soliloquy: Both are an expression of

aesthetic ability and sensitivity that seems to have no place in the modern world. This realistic,

anti-romantic outlook sets the stage for Eliot’s later works, including The Waste Land.

Prufrockian paralysis: Paralysis, the incapacity to act, has been the Achilles heel of many

famous, mostly male, literary characters. Shakespeare's Hamlet is the paragon of paralysis;

unable to sort through his waffling, anxious mind, Hamlet makes a decisive action only at the

end of "Hamlet." Eliot parodically updates Hamlet's paralysis to the modern world in "The Love

Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." Parodically, Prufrock's paralysis is not over murder and the state of

a corrupt kingdom, but whether he should "dare to eat a peach" (122) in front of high-society

women.

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Indeed, Prufrock's paralysis revolves around his social and sexual anxieties, the two

usually tied together. Eliot intended Prufrock's name to resound of a "prude" in a "frock," and the

hero's emasculation shows up in a number of physical areas: "his arms and legs are thin" (44)

and, notably, "his hair is growing thin" (41). The rest of the poem is a catalogue of Prufrock's

inability to act; he does not, "after tea and cakes and ices, / Have the strength to force the

moment to its crisis" (79-80).

The original title of the poem was "Prufrock Among the Women," and Prufrock, as a

balding, weak, neurotic, effete intellectual, is both baffled and intimidated by women. Perhaps

the central image of his anxiety is his being "pinned and wriggling on the wall" (58) under the

unflinching gaze of women (exacerbated since the women's eyes, much like their "Arms that are

braceleted and white and bare" [63], seem eerily disconnected from their bodies). At least here

the women seem to be paying attention to him, however hostile they may be. By the end of the

poem, Prufrock feels ostracized from the society of women, the "mermaids singing, each to each.

/ I do not think that they will sing to me" (124-125). Interestingly, Prufrock's obsession with his

bald spot rears its ugly head here; the beautiful, vain mermaids comb the "white hair of the

waves blown back" (127). As hair is a symbol of virility, Eliot suggests that Prufrock's paralysis

is deeply rooted in psychosexual anxiety.

Yet Prufrock admits he is not even "Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be; / Am an

attendant lords / Almost, at times, the Fool" (111-112, 119). At best he is the doddering Polonius

from "Hamlet," or a generic clown. He is a modern tragic hero, which is to say he is a mock-hero

whose concerns are pathetic yet still real. The final six lines of the poem comprise a sestet that

somewhat echoes the Petrarchan sonnet, yet Prufrock, unlike Petrarch, does not have an ideal,

unrequited love like Laura; he has a very real anxiety about all women.

Temporal repetition and anxiety: Prufrock's paralysis (see Prufrockian paralysis, above) roots

itself in the poem's structure. Eliot deploys several refrains, such as "In the room the women

come and go / Talking of Michelangelo" (13-14, 35-36) and "And would it have been worth it,

after all" (87, 99), to underscore Prufrock's tendency to get stuck on a problem. Just when we

believe Prufrock has waded through the "hundred visions and revisions" (33) and come to a

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conclusion, he echoes a line from the beginning of the stanza. For instance, the double "'at all'"

from the woman's "'That is not it at all, / That is not what I meant, at all'" (109-110) provides the

answer for Prufrock's original question of "And would it have been worth it, after all" (no,

evidently).

The refrains and echoes indicate Prufrock's entrapment in the present tense, but Eliot

notes his hero's other temporal afflictions. The swinging rhythm of the poem - at times rhymed

for long stretches, often not - hints at a confusing, chaotic sense of time within Prufrock's head.

The confusion establishes itself in the "And would it have been worth it, after all" line. By using

the perfect conditional tense, Prufrock deludes himself into thinking he has made a decision and

is now reviewing it.

This delusion only masks Prufrock's greater anxiety about the future and aging. Already

characterized as having lost the luster of youth (and pathetically trying to approximate the

bohemian style of rolling his trousers), the only thing Prufrock marches toward decisively is

death. The poem's epigraph from Dante's Inferno casts a deathly pallor over the proceedings, and

Prufrock seems already in his own nightmarish afterlife. The two allusions to Andrew Marvell's

poem "To His Coy Mistress" ironically comment on Prufrock's attitude toward life. In the poem,

the speaker urges his lady to have sex with him while they are still young and alive. Prufrock's

allusions, however - "And indeed there will be time" (23) and "Would it have been worthwhile, /

Š To have squeezed the universe into a ball" (90, 92) - reinforce his fixation on paralysis rather

than sex. He deludes himself into thinking he has plenty of time left, and thus does not need to

act; death looms, though, however much he wants to deny it. Sex, of course, reproduces new life

while death ends it; Prufrock is somewhere in the middle, gradually advancing on the latter.

Modernist Aspects

Fragmentation: One of the key terms in Modernist literature, fragmentation is the accumulation

of numerous and varied - often to chaotic effect - signs (words, images, sounds). James Joyce's

Ulysses, with fragments as obscure as specific letters that course meaningfully throughout the

novel, is possibly the defining fragmented Modernist work. But it is so successful because the

Modernists also believed that meaning could be made out of these fragments. To quote from

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Eliot's "The Wasteland," possibly the defining Modernist poem: "These fragments I have shored

against my ruins" (431). From the ruins of fragments, some coherence can be established; only

this gives the chaos of modern life hope.

Prufrock concerns itself with fragmentation, yet it does not quite have the hopefulness of

"The Wasteland" (it should be noted that many readers do not see this optimism behind the finale

of "The Wasteland"). The city Prufrock lives in is itself fragmented, a scattered collection of

"Streets that follow like a tedious argument" (8) above which "lonely men in shirt-sleeves" (72)

lean out of their isolated windows. The population is fragmented, lost and alone; even the sterile

skyline resembles a "patient etherized upon a table" (3).

Eliot achieves much of this fragmentation through his exquisite imagery. Whether it is

the subliminal comparison between the fog "that rubs its muzzle on the windowpanes" (16) and

feline movement, a self-conscious dissection of how women's eyes have Prufrock "pinned and

wriggling on the wall" (58), or Prufrock's self-debasement as a "pair of ragged claws" (73), the

images in "Prufrock" are specific and symbolicHis intent behind these fragmented images is, as

he has argued in his essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent," that the "progress of an artist is

a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality." Out of the fragmented images

we come away with a coherent analysis of Prufrock-the-character, not of Eliot-the-poet.

The poem comes in the form of a dramatic monologue, a form that is usually fit for a

resonant speaking voice (and one that extinguishes the personality of the poet, too). But

"Prufrock" has a chorus of fragmented voices - the epigraph to Dante, the frequent allusions to

the Bible, Shakespeare, and many poetic predecessors - which deny the existence of a solo voice.

This, then, is Prufrock's voice: a fragmentation of voices past and present that somehow

harmonize.

Debasement and Hell: The opening image of the evening "spread out against the sky / Like a

patient etherized upon a table" (2-3) hints that what is lower down will be much worse. The

epigraph from Dante's Inferno, a work in which the hero descends into the nine successive levels

of Hell, also suggests this lowering of height and expectations. Indeed, Prufrock sweeps the

reader on a generally downward ride - from the skyline to street life, down stairs during a party,

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even to the sea floor. Prufrock consistently feels worse about himself in these situations - the

reference to "Scuttling across the floors of silent seas" (74) is the ultimate in self-pitying - but

they have more resonance when we consider the Dante epigraph. Prufrock is descending into his

own Hell, and he brings the reader along with him for safety - just as Guido da Montefeltro tells

Dante his story in Hell only because he thinks Dante will never resurface and tell others about it.

Fittingly, Prufrock switches from his first-person singular narration to first-person plural in the

last stanza: "We have lingered in the chambers of the sea / By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed

red and brown / Till human voices wake us, and we drown" (129-131). For his final plunge,

Prufrock wants to make sure that we, his Dantesque listener, accompany him into his self-pitying

Hell.

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Imagism

The imagist movement included English and American poets in the early twentieth century

who wrote free verse and were devoted to “clarity of expression through the use of precise visual

images.” A strand of modernism, imagism was officially launched in 1912 when Ezra Pound read

and marked up a poem by Hilda Doolittle, signed it “H. D. Imagiste," and sent it to Harriet Monroe

at Poetry magazine.

The movement sprang from ideas developed by T. E. Hulme, who—as early as 1908—was

proposing to the Poets’ Club in London poetry based on absolutely accurate presentation of its

subject with no excess verbiage. The first tenet of the imagist manifesto was “To use the language

of common speech, but to employ always the exact word, not the nearly-exact, nor the merely

decorative word.”

Imagism was a reaction against the flabby abstract language and “careless thinking” of

Georgian romanticism. Imagist poetry aimed to replace muddy abstractions with exactness of

observed detail, apt metaphors, and economy of language. For example, Pound’s “In a Station of

the Metro” started from a glimpse of beautiful faces in a dark subway and elevated that perception

into a crisp vision by finding an intensified equivalent image. The metaphor provokes a sharp,

intuitive discovery in order to get at the essence of life.

Pound’s definition of the image was “that which presents an intellectual and emotional

complex in an instant of time.” Pound defined the tenets of imagist poetry as:

I. Direct treatment of the “thing," whether subjective or objective.

II. To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation.

III. As regarding rhythm: to compose in sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of the

metronome.

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Ezra Pound (1885-1972)

Of all the major literary figures in the twentieth century, Ezra Pound has been one of the most

controversial; he has also been one of modern poetry's most important contributors. In an

introduction to the Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot declared that Pound "is more

responsible for the twentieth-century revolution in poetry than is any other individual."

"In a Station of the Metro" (1913)

In a station of the metro,

The apparition of these faces in a crowd;

Petals on a wet, black bough.

In this quick poem, Pound describes watching faces appear in a metro station. It is unclear

whether he is writing from the vantage point of a passenger on the train itself or on the platform.

The setting is Paris, France, and as he describes these faces as a "crowd," meaning the station is

quite busy. He compares these faces to "petals on a wet, black bough," suggesting that on the dark

subway platform, the people look like flower petals stuck on a tree branch after a rainy night.

Analysis:

The brevity of this poem can be intimidating to analyze; after all, how much can a poet

possibly convey in merely two lines? However, the shortness of this poem fits with its topic; when

reading, the words flash by quickly, just as a subway speeds away from the platform in an instant.

The doors open quickly, revealing a sea of faces, and then closes again - the faces are gone after a

fleeting glance. This poem's length and quick pace matches the constant motion of a train as it

speeds by.

Though short, this poem is very sensory in nature; it allows the reader to imagine a scene

while reading the lines. Through Pound's economical description of these faces as "petals on a wet,

black bough," he is able to invoke a transient tone.

This poem is also a clear example of the Imagist style. Victorian poets would frequently

use an abundance of flowery adjectives and lengthy descriptions in their poems. Yet Pound

employs a Modernist approach to "In a Station of the Metro," using only a few descriptive words

(and no verbs among them) to successfully get his point across.

Pound uses the word "apparition," which is a ghostly, otherworldly figure, something

ephemeral that fades in and out of view. By using this word, Pound reveals surprise at seeing this

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sea of faces as the subway doors open, which, for a brief moment, fills him with a sense of awe

and astonishment. Also, the impermanence of the image gives the poem a melancholy tone, as if

Pound is contemplating the fragility of life.

Pound connects images of petals and boughs to a mass of humanity - linking a man-made

metropolitan scene with the cycles of nature. Pound's use of living metaphors adds to the fleeting

tone of this poem. Flowers and trees, like human beings on a metro, are constantly moving,

growing, and changing. This short glimpse through the metro doors is the only time that group of

people will be as they are in that instant. Similarly, no two petals will ever look exactly the same,

as rains come and go, winters freeze, and new buds bloom.

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Harlem Renaissance

During the 1920s and 1930s a literary and cultural revolution arose, referred to as the

Harlem Renaissance. The movement cultivated a new cultural identity and voice for African

Americans through art, music, and literature. The period coincided with the movement of many

African Americans from the South to the urban areas in the North. Such early literary pillars as

Countee Cullen, Zora Neale Hurston, W.E.B. DuBois, and numerous others contributed to a body

of work that opened doors to publishing houses and other literary outlets formerly closed. The

arrival of the Great Depression marked a temporary end to the movement, but its descendants

(Richard Wright and Arna Bontemps, for example) emerged after World War II to continue their

work.

Langston Hughes (1902-1967)

Langston Hughes was an American poet, novelist, and playwright whose African-

American themes made him a primary contributor to the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s.

James Mercer Langston Hughes was born on February 1, 1902, in Joplin, Missouri. His

parents, James Hughes and Carrie Langston, separated soon after his birth, and his father

moved to Mexico. While Hughes’s mother moved around during his youth, Hughes was

raised primarily by his maternal grandmother, Mary, until she died in his early teens. From

that point, he went to live with his mother, and they moved to several cities before

eventually settling in Cleveland, Ohio. It was during this time that Hughes first began to

write poetry, and that one of his teachers first introduced him to the poetry of Carl Sandburg

and Walt Whitman, both whom Hughes would later cite as primary influences. Hughes was

also a regular contributor to his school's literary magazine, and frequently submitted to

other poetry magazines, although they would ultimately reject him.

Hughes graduated from high school in 1920 and spent the following year in Mexico

with his father. Around this time, Hughes's poem "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" was

published in The Crisis magazine and was highly praised. In 1921 Hughes returned to the

United States and enrolled at Columbia University where he studied briefly, and during

which time he quickly became a part of Harlem's burgeoning cultural movement, what is

commonly known as the Harlem Renaissance. But Hughes dropped out of Columbia in

1922 and worked various odd jobs around New York for the following year, before signing

on as a steward on a freighter that took him to Africa and Spain. He left the ship in 1924

and lived for a brief time in Paris, where he continued to develop and publish his poetry.

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Growing Success: In November 1924, Hughes returned to the United States and worked

various jobs. In 1925, he was working as a busboy in a Washington, D.C. hotel restaurant

when he met American poet Vachel Lindsay. Hughes showed some of his poems to

Lindsay, who was impressed enough to use his connections to promote Hughes’s poetry

and ultimately bring it to a wider audience. In 1925, Hughes’s poem “The Weary Blues”

won first prize in the Opportunity magazine literary competition, and Hughes also received

a scholarship to attend Lincoln University, in Pennsylvania. While studying at Lincoln,

Hughes poetry came to the attention of novelist and critic Carl Van Vechten, who used his

connections to help get Hughes’s first book of poetry, The Weary Blues, published by

Knopf in 1926. The book had popular appeal and established both his poetic style and his

commitment to black themes and heritage. Hughes was also among the first to use jazz

rhythms and dialect to depict the life of urban blacks in his work. He published a second

volume of poetry, Fine Clothes to the Jew, in 1927.

After his graduation from Lincoln in 1929, Hughes published his first novel, Not

Without Laughter. The book was commercially successful enough to convince Hughes that

he could make a living as a writer. During the 1930s, Hughes would frequently travel the

United States on lecture tours, and also abroad to the Soviet Union, Japan, and Haiti. He

continued to write and publish poetry and prose during this time, and in 1934 he published

his first collection of short stories, The Ways of White Folks. In 1937 he served as a war

correspondent for several American newspapers during the Spanish Civil War.

A Continuing Life of Letters

In 1940, Hughes's autobiography up to age 28, The Big Sea, was published. Also

around this time, Hughes began contributing a column to the Chicago Defender, for which

he created a comic character named Jesse B. Semple, better known as "Simple," a black

Everyman that Hughes used to further explore urban, working-class black themes, and to

address racial issues. The columns were highly successful, and "Simple" would later be the

focus of several of Hughes's books and plays.

In the late 1940s, Hughes contributed the lyrics for a Broadway musical titled Street

Scene, which featured music by Kurt Weill. The success of the musical would earn Hughes

enough money that he was finally able to buy a house in Harlem. Around this time, he also

taught creative writing at Atlanta University and was a guest lecturer at a university in

Chicago for several months.

Over the next two decades, Hughes would continue his prolific output. In 1949 he

wrote a play that inspired the opera Troubled Island and published yet another anthology

of work, The Poetry of the Negro. During the 1950s and 1960s, he published countless

other works, including several books in his "Simple" series, English translations of the

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poetry of Federico García Lorca and Gabriela Mistral, another anthology of his own poetry,

and the second installment of his autobiography, I Wonder as I Wander.

The Negro Speaks of Rivers

I’ve known rivers:

I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in

human veins.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.

I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.

I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.

I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln went down to New

Orleans, and I’ve seen its muddy bosom turn all golden in the sunset.

I’ve known rivers:

Ancient, dusky rivers.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

Summary:

The speaker claims that he has known rivers as “ancient as the world,” older than the

blood that flows in our veins. His soul has grown deep, just like the rivers. He writes about

bathing in the Euphrates at the beginning of civilization, and later, he built a hut along the

Congo and listened to the river as he fell asleep. He looked at the Nile and watched the

pyramids rise nearby; he heard the muddy Mississippi sing when Abraham Lincoln

traveled to New Orleans. He repeats that he has known “ancient, dusky rivers,” and his

soul has grown deep like the rivers.

Analysis:

“The Negro Speaks of Rivers” is Langston Hughes’s first mature poem. He wrote it in 1920

at the age of seventeen, while traveling by train to visit his father in Mexico. The young

Hughes was inspired to pen this verse when his train crossed over the Mississippi River. It

was published in 1921 in the journal the Crisis, which had a predominantly African

American readership. Although Hughes did not technically write "The Negro Speaks of

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Rivers" in or about Harlem, he addresses themes that would later become closely associated

with the Harlem Renaissance. Hughes dedicated this poem to W.E.B. DuBois a few years

after its initial publication. It was also read out loud at Hughes's own funeral service in

1967.

When Langston Hughes was writing "The Negro Speaks of Rivers," he was most

influenced by the work of Carl Sandburg and Walt Whitman. He particularly cited

Whitman's “Song of Myself” as an inspiration for the longer lines in “Negro.” The poem

is free verse but has the rhythm of a gospel preacher. Hughes utilizes anaphora, which is

the repetition of words or phrases at the start of each line, like “I built,” “I looked,” and “I

heard.”

In this poem, the speaker links himself to his ancestors, firmly placing them in important

historical, religious, and cultural sites all over the world. The speaker begins by claiming a

connection to the world's ancient rivers that predated human beings, and that has made his

soul grow "deep like the rivers." This insightful and articulate description indicates the

speaker's immense intellect, and allows him to make a definitive connection between

people of his race and the rest of human civilization. In the early 20th Century, white

Americans often viewed their darker-skinned counterparts as less than human, and here,

Hughes offers concrete proof of historical equality.

The speaker mentions four great rivers, starting with the Euphrates, which historians and

archaeologists often label as the birthplace of human civilization. Then, he mentions the

strong and mighty Congo, along which many great African kingdoms have flourished. The

speaker then cites the long, winding Nile and the great Egyptian pyramids. He witnessed

the creation of these structures, which are amongst man's greatest feats of architecture.

Finally, he writes about the muddy and golden Mississippi, which he links American

slavery and Abraham Lincoln.

Although the speaker shares many of Langston Hughes's beliefs, he is a universal figure

rather than an autobiographical depiction of Hughes himself. The speaker serves as a voice

for all African Americans, as he traces their lineage to the cradles of civilization.

Onwuchekwa Jemie extols the merits of the poem:

It is a sonorous evocation of transcendent essences so ancient as to appear timeless,

predating human existence, longer than human memory. The rivers are part of God's body,

and participate in his immortality. They are the earthly analogues of eternity: deep,

continuous, mysterious. They are named in the order of their association with black history.

The black man has drunk of their life-giving essences, and thereby borrowed their

immortality.

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Death is one of the main themes in the poem, although it is subtle. Critic Arnold Rampersad

writes:

With its allusions to deep dusky rivers, the setting sun, sleep, and the soul, [the poem] is

suffused with the image of death and, simultaneously, the idea of deathlessness. As in

Whitman's philosophy, only the knowledge of death can bring the primal spark of poetry

and life. Here Langston Hughes became ‘the outsetting bard,’ in Whitman's phrase, the

poet who sings of life because at last he has known death.

LANGSTON HUGHES I, too, sing America

I, too, sing America.

I am the darker brother.

They send me to eat in the kitchen

When company comes,

But I laugh,

And eat well,

And grow strong.

Tomorrow,

I’ll be at the table

When company comes.

Nobody’ll dare

Say to me,

“Eat in the kitchen,”

Then.

Besides,

They’ll see how beautiful I am

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And be ashamed—

I, too, am America.

Summary:

The speaker claims that he, too, sings America. He is the “darker brother” who is sent to

eat in the kitchen when there are guests visiting. However, he does laugh and he eats well and

grows bigger and stronger. Tomorrow, he will sit at the table when the guests come, and no one

will dare to tell him to eat in the kitchen. They will see his beauty and be ashamed, for, as he

claims, “I, too, am America.”

Analysis:

The poem “I, Too” is also known as “I, Too, Sing America,” and was initially titled

“Epilogue” when it appeared in The Weary Blues, the 1926 volume of Langston Hughes's poetry.

It has been anthologized repeatedly and scholars have written about it many times. It is written in

free verse and features short lines and simple language.

Hughes wrote "I, Too" from the perspective of an African American man - either a slave,

a free man in the Jim Crow South, or even a domestic servant. The lack of a concrete identity or

historical context does not mitigate the poem’s message; in fact, it confers on it a high degree of

universality, for the situation Hughes describes in the poem reflects a common experience for

many African Americans during his time.

The speaker begins by declaring that he too can “sing America,” meaning that he is

claiming his right to feel patriotic towards America, even though he is the “darker” brother who

cannot sit at the table and must eat in the kitchen. This alludes to the common practice of racial

segregation during the early 20th century, when African Americans faced discrimination in nearly

every aspect of their lives. They were forced to live, work, eat and travel separately from their

white counterparts, had few civil or legal rights, were often victims of racial violence, and faced

economic marginalization in both the North and the South. One critic identifies the opening lines

of the poem as illustrative of W.E.B. DuBois’s theory of “double-consciousness":

It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always

looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape

of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-

ness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings;

two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from

being torn asunder.

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The speaker does not languish in despair, however. He proclaims that "tomorrow" he will

join the others at the table and no one will dare send him back to the kitchen. Not only that, but

the "others" will see “how beautiful” the speaker is and will therefore feel ashamed. This statement

is extremely hopeful and optimistic. The speaker demonstrates a heightened sense of self and

proclaims his ambition to assert his legitimacy as a an American citizen and as a man.

The invocation of America is important, for Hughes is expressing his belief that African

Americans are a valuable part of the country's population and that he foresees a racially equal

society in the near future. Many critics believe that "I, Too" is an unofficial response to the great

poet Walt Whitman’s poem, “I Hear America Singing.” This is likely given Hughes’s expressed

affinity for Whitman's work, as well as the similarity between the titles and choice of words. In

Whitman’s poem, a variety of Americans - including a mechanic, carpenter, boatman, and mother

- sing joyfully about America. Hughes suggests that even though the circumstances are different

for African Americans, they also deserve to experience patriotism.

Oppression

Symbol Analysis

There is not much actual violence in "I, Too, Sing America", but there is plenty of

oppression, and if the reader looks at the poem in its full cultural context (i.e., that of slavery),

there is plenty of suggested violence within the text here. Most of the actions of the white

Americans in this piece are blatantly oppressive, and those same actions are just bristling with a

subtle, almost-there violence. Let's look at it in the poem.

Lines 3-4: This image, of the white slave owners sending their house-slaves into the kitchen

when company shows up for dinner, is both obviously oppressive and somewhat violent. After all,

the consequences of slave disobedience and rebellion are well-documented.

Lines 8-9: These lines aren't so much about oppression so much as they imagine a future

without oppression, when the different races are seen as equal and can share meals together.

Lines 11-12: This line is almost like a little threat (think: "how dare you?" or "don't you

dare!"). The speaker seems to be saying "I have paid dearly for this freedom – and you will not be

oppressing me any longer."

Health as a hope

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Symbol analysis

This set of images includes the notions of nourishment-as-symbol. There are many ways

we nourish ourselves in a metaphorical sense. If we think about it poetically, it can mean to

nurture the speaker’s soul, educate himself and grow from experiences..

Lines 5-7: Again, we have a powerful image of the narrator taking his situation (which is

awful) and turning it on its head. Instead of letting the oppression get him down, he goes to the

kitchen to eat and "eats well" and "grows strong." Health, here, is being used as a symbol for

perseverance – growing in the face of adversity.

Lines 8-9: The future tense here ("Tomorrow, / I'll be") is an indicator of hope. The

narrator is suggesting that by eating (both literally and figuratively), he will get to a point where

he'll be on equal footing with his white oppressors.

Lines 16-17: Here, the speaker is expressing his hope again (although really, it looks more

like assurance – go, assertiveness!). He's implying that by "eating well" and "growing strong," he'll

become so beautiful (which is probably meant to be both literal and metaphorical – a symbol for

power and education and strength) that the white people who enslaved him will be ashamed that

they ever did.

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Rita Dove (1952-2014)

U.S.), American poet, writer, and teacher who was the first African American to serve as poet

laureate of the United States (1993–95).

Dove was ranked one of the top hundred high-school students in the country in 1970, and she was

named a Presidential Scholar. She graduated summa cum laude from Miami University in Ohio in

1973 and studied subsequently at Tübingen University in Germany. She studied creative writing

at the University of Iowa (M.F.A., 1977) and published the first of several chapbooks of her poetry

in 1977. From 1981 to 1989 Dove taught at Arizona State University, leaving that post to teach at

the University of Virginia.

In her poetry collections, including The Yellow House on the Corner (1980) and Museum (1983),

as well as a volume of short stories titled Fifth Sunday (1985), Dove focused her attention on the

particulars of family life and personal struggle, addressing the larger social and political

dimensions of the black experience primarily by indirection. The Pulitzer Prize-winning Thomas

and Beulah (1986) is a cycle of poems chronicling the lives of the author’s maternal grandparents,

born in the Deep South at the turn of the century. Subsequent poetry collections included The

Other Side of the House (1988), Grace Notes (1989), Mother Love (1995), On the Bus With Rosa

Parks (1999), American Smooth (2004), and Collected Poems: 1974–2004 (2016). In 1993 Dove

was appointed poet laureate of the United States by the Library of Congress, becoming the

youngest person and the first African American to hold the post. In 2018 she was named poetry

editor of The New York Times Magazine.

In addition to poetry and short stories, Dove wrote a novel, Through the Ivory Gate (1992); a

collection of essays, The Poet’s World (1995); and a verse play, The Darker Face of the Earth

(published 1994).

Parsley

1.The Cane Fields

There is a parrot imitating spring

The place, its feathers parsley green.

Out of the swamp the cane appears

to haunt us, and we cut it down. El General

searches for a word; he is all the world

there is. Like a parrot imitating spring,

we lie down screaming as rain punches through

and we come up green. We cannot speak an R__

out of the swamp, the cane appears

and then the mountain we call in whispers Katalina.

The children gnaw their teeth to arrowheads.

There is a parrot imitating spring.

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El General has found his word: perejil.

Who says it, lives. He laughs, teeth shining

out of the swamp. The cane appears

in our dreams, lashed by wind and streaming.

And we lie down. For every drop of blood

There is a parrot. For every drop of blood

there is a parrot imitating spring.

Out of the swamp the cane appears.

2. The Palace

The word the general’s chosen parsley.

It is fall, when thoughts turn

to love and death; the general thinks

of his mother, how she died in the fall

and he planted her walking cane at the grave

and it flowered, each spring stolidly forming

four-star blossoms. The general

pulls on his boots, he stomps to

curtains, the one with a parrot

in a brass ring. As he paces he wonders

Who can I kill today. And for a moment

the little knot of screams

is still. The parrot, who has traveled

all the way from Australia in an ivory

cage, is, coy as a widow, practicing

spring. Ever since the morning

his mother collapsed in the kitchen

while baking skull-shaped candies

for the Day of the Dead, the general

has hated sweets. He orders pastries

brought up for the bird; they arrive

dusted with sugar on a bed of lace.

The knot in his throat starts to twitch;

he sees his boots the first day in battle

splashed with mud and urine

as a soldier falls at his feet amazed ---

how stupid he looked! --- at the sound

of artillery. I never thought it would sing

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the soldier said, and died. Now

the general sees the fields of sugar

cane lashed by rain and streaming.

He sees his mother’s smile, the teeth

gnawed to aarrowheads. He hears

the Haitians sing without R’s

as they swing the great machetes:

Katalina, they sing, Katalina,

mi madle, mi amol en muelte. God knows

his mother was no stupid woman; she

could roll an R like a queen. Even

a parrot can roll an R! In the bare room

the bright feathers arch in a parody

of greenery, as the last pale crumbs

disappear under the blackened tongue. Someone

calls out his name in a voice

so like his mother’s, a startled tear

splashes the tip of his right boot.

My mother, my love in death.

The general remembers the tiny green sprigs

men of his village wore in their capes

to honor the birth of a son. He will

order many, this time, to be killed

for a single, beautiful word.

Poem analysis

In the poem by Rita Dove called “Parsley”, the single word “parsley” entered history.

During an interview with Rita Dove given by Stan Sanvel Rubin, she explained a little background

of the history behind this poem. “In 1957, Trujillo ordered 20,000 Black Haitians killed because

they couldn't roll their R's. And he chose the Spanish word for "parsley" in order to test this. It was

an act of arbitrary cruelty. But it fascinated me, not only for its political implications but for the

way language enters into history at that point-that there's a word that determines whether you live

or die (Rubin, Stan Sanvel).” It is quite interesting how this poem is divided into two parts. The

first part of the poem indicates the point of view for victims, and then the point of view of the man

who gives the order to kill them.

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The poem begins with a parrot which is named a green parrot, "imitating spring"

(Baym 1636 line 1). At this time, "Parsley" is told from the point of view of the Haitian workers,

who soon give us an image of the sugarcane fields as well. The second part of the poem begins

with the parsley, not the parrot. Now we're looking in on El General at home, as he thinks of his

dead mother and ponder, "Who can I kill today" (Baym 1636 line 31). This section shows where

his mother, who was baking cookies on the day she died. El General is reminiscing about her as

he feeds his parrot cookies, and as he thinks about killing soldiers in battle. His thoughts turn to

the Haitian workers and how they cannot pronounce an "r," something even his mother and his

parrot can do. Finally, someone "calls out his name in a voice just like his mother's" (Baym 1637

lines 64-65) then he sheds a tear. But this emotion quickly turns to rage and revenge, as he gives

the orders to execute all who cannot pronounce the "r" in "parsley."

There are many themes, but the one that is quite largely stated is the theme of violence

and power. This poem is entirely fused with violence. Since the idea is the death of 20,000 people

by the order of one man, the work takes on cruelty of larger-than-life magnitudes. Even when it

comes to the harvesting sugarcane it is introduced with a kind of violence. This speaks of the words

"cut it down in line 4 of the poem." This is followed by screaming, punching, lying down (which

may well be dying), gnawing, and arrowheads just in the very first part of the poem. The second

bit gets even more explicitly violent, with Trujillo wondering, "Who can I kill today?" It's a bloody

poem, but very subtle and haunting one.

The power dynamic in this poem is clearly a rhetorical plot; one man has all the power,

and everyone else has none. The way Trujillo uses his power is quite brutal; he uses it to tone down

his own unhappiness by inflicting pain on others. The simple historical fact of Trujillo's existence,

even if the poem doesn't go into it explicitly, is an example of a power dynamic gone horribly

awry. He is a dictator, and he used his leadership to randomly violent ends. The massacre depicted

in "Parsley" is something that only someone with immense amounts of power.

Symbol Analysis

The parrot is, perhaps even more than the parsley itself, the driving symbol of the poem.

It appears over and over again, first in a kind of vague way ("there is a parrot" – where? Dunno.

Oh wait! "In the palace," which we don't really know anything about yet), and then in a very

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specific way as the pet bird of a vicious dictator. One of the things that's so important about the

parrot is that it's beautiful and bright green, which ties it to both the thing that it's imitating –

spring – and to the title of the poem.

For Dove, the parrot symbolizes a ton of very important things. First, the parrot represents the

irony of beauty – the fact that beauty continues to persist through horror, just like how new

plants will show up in spring despite whatever else might be going on in the world. The parrot

also symbolizes wealth (it's a pampered pet), and it symbolizes slavery (the caging of something

that is independent and should be free). That's a lot of weight to be hanging on something with

hollow bones, but there you have it. The parrot is a big deal.

• Lines 1-2: First instance of the parrot, and immediately it's paralleled with

spring in a kind of bizarre way – "imitating spring." Hm. That's probably because the

parrot's green. Actually, it's "parsley green," which is both pretty (after all, parsley's a pretty

plant) and kind of devastating (we know from Dove's note that "parsley" is the word that

will occasion the death of 20,000 Haitians).

• Lines 6-7: Now we have a simile in which the bird is compared to the "we"

(the Haitian cane workers), who are "lying down screaming." We happen to think that the

simile refers more to the second part of that sentence, in which the rain brings things

up green again. But the violence is already creeping up here.

• Lines 17-18: Now the parrot and blood come together in the same sentence.

The parrot has gone from a simple beautiful thing to something that is always accompanied

by violence and death.

• Lines 32-35: First instance of the parrot in a cage. This is when we learn

that the bird's exotic (it came from Australia) and that it's beingpersonified as "coy," or

deliberately shy. This makes it seem kind of phony, or annoying, even.

• Lines 60-62: Now the parrot is fully a parody – something entirely fake,

something making a mockery of something else – of spring, as it finishes eating. (The

parrot's been given pastries, which, when the sugarcane workers can barely afford to live,

is a horrible parody .

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The Speaker: Think of the speaker as an interested and horrified third party. We're not

coming at this from anyone's specific point of view, unless you want to count the poet herself.

But there is no "I" in this poem – most of it is in the third person.

So then who's talking? We might be able to imagine the speaker as a kind of poetic historian –

someone who has just found out these horrible facts about the history of Haitians in the

Dominican Republic, and wants to make sure that we know about it. The speaker is concerned

with issues of hate, especially when it's race-related, and since stumbling upon this piece of

history, has not been able to let it go. Thus the repetitive insistence – since the story seems

almost too bizarre to be true, the speaker must convince us that it is, in fact, true, and that it bears

thinking about. Sometimes the only Think of the speaker as an interested and horrified third

party. We're not coming at this from anyone's specific point of view, unless you want to count

the poet herself. But there is no "I" in this poem – most of it is in the third person.

One of the cool things about lyric poetry with narrative leanings is that the setting can be very

clear. In "Parsley" – a poem derived from an actual historical event – there are concrete places to

which the events in the poem correspond. This makes it easy on us, as readers, to picture things,

and it's good for the poet, too, since there are real-life images and historical places from which

she can pull images.

The Setting: We're in one country for this poem, but in two separate locales. In the first part of

the poem, we're out in Trujillo's sugarcane fields in the Dominican Republic, with his Haitian

workers. In the second half, we're still in the Dominican Republic, but we've moved indoors, to

Trujillo's palace, where he keeps his parrot in his dead mother's room.

One of the cool things about lyric poetry with narrative leanings is that the setting can be very

clear. In "Parsley" – a poem derived from an actual historical event – there are concrete places to

which the events in the poem correspond. This makes it easy on us, as readers, to picture things,

and it's good for the poet, too, since there are real-life images and historical places from which

she can pull images.

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Themes

Violence:

This poem is utterly infested with violence. Since the premise is the death of 20,000 people

by the order of one man, the piece takes on cruelty of epic proportions. Even the literal act of

harvesting sugarcane is infused with a kind of violence – "cut it down." This is followed by

screaming, punching, lying down (which may well be dying), gnawing, and arrowheads – and this

is just the very first part of the poem. The second bit gets even more explicitly violent, with Trujillo

wondering, "Who can I kill today?" It's a bloody poem, but very subtle and haunting one.

Wealth:

In the midst of all this killing, there's a very interesting economic subtext that has a lot to

do with where the poem actually takes place. On a geographic level, we're in the Caribbean – Haiti

and the Dominican Republic, which share a much-bloodied border. But on a smaller level, the

poem takes place in two locations that showcase a division of wealth that is very important to the

piece: the Dominican dictator's palace and his sugarcane fields. The parrot, which we parsed out

in the "Symbols, Imagery, and Wordplay" section, is hanging out in the palace, along with the

dictator, Trujillo. It's all about the wealth there. And outside, slaving in the fields, are the Haitians

who will eventually meet their demise at Trujillo's hands. The division between the rich and the

poor, in this poem and in the actual historical event, occasion the massacre itself in many ways

(it's not the whole story, but it's a good chunk of it).

Power:

Power is very much related to the wealth issue. (Ever heard the phrase "money is power"

or "money talks"? That's where we're coming from here.) The power dynamic in this poem is very

clearly delineated: one man has all the power, and everyone else has none. The way in which

Trujillo came to power is less important than what he does with it – he uses it to assuage his own

unhappiness by inflicting pain on others. The simple historical fact of Trujillo's existence, even if

the poem doesn't go into it explicitly, is an example of a power dynamic gone horribly awry. He

is a dictator, and he used his leadership to arbitrarily violent ends. The massacre depicted in

"Parsley" is something that only someone with immense amounts of power could do. So,

thematically, power is hugely relevant to the poem.

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Hate:

So, wealth, power, and this theme, hate, are all very much connected in this poem. (We're

having kind of a hard time telling them apart, really. Bear with us.) They're tough to separate from

each other mostly because they're all in a crazy, tangled relationship. In this poem, the wealth gives

rise to the power, power usually causes one to accrue more wealth, and the combination of power

and hate gives rise to the violence that is our first theme. At any rate, for reasons that are entirely

irrational, Trujillo has decided that he hates Haitians. This isn't just him, either – historically,

darker-skinned Haitians have met with an astonishing amount of prejudice from their lighter

Dominican neighbors. It's a longstanding relationship founded and continued on hate. Trujillo is

just an extreme example of an overall political climate. A climate, sadly, that's ended in the deaths

of tens of thousands.

Family:

This might seem like a kind of "secondary" theme, considering that it only pops up in the

second part of the poem, and it's almost entirely fictional (we know next to nothing about Trujillo's

mother, and Dove admits that she only loosely based the poem on actual history). But in terms of

the poem, it's both important and fascinating. The implication in the second part of the poem is

that the genocide Trujillo commits is somehow related to the way in which he grieves over his

mother's death. As if he is so depressed and angry over her passing that the only way to feel better

is to kill other people. This is completely twisted, but the notion of family and loss become integral

to the poem, both as a way to understand Dove's imagining of Trujillo's character and as a possible

cause for the atrocities he then commits.

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Ted Hughes (1930-1998)

Ted Hughes was born in Yorkshire in 1930. His rural upbringing on the moors immensely

influenced his poetry. He met his future wife, the American poet Sylvia Plath, while at Cambridge

University. He initially studied English, but later dropped this in favour of archaeology and

anthropology. His first collection, The Hawk in the Rain, was published in 1957. He and Plath had

two children, but he left her in 1962 following her discovery of his affair. She committed suicide

in 1963.

During the '60s, his reputation grew with a series of books for both children and adults,

perhaps most notably The Iron Man. However, he was vilified by Plath's supporters for what they

saw as his role in her death, and Hughes wrote some of his bitterest and most savage poetry in

the 1970s.

In 1984, he was made Poet Laureate following John Betjeman's death, a post he held until

his own death in 1998. Shortly before this, he had published his two most popular3 books, Tales

from Ovid and Birthday Letters, a series of poems addressed to Plath.

The Hawk Roosting

I sit in the top of the wood, my eyes closed.

Inaction, no falsifying dream

Between my hooked head and hooked feet:

Or in sleep rehearse perfect kills and eat.

The convenience of the high trees!

The air's buoyancy and the sun's ray

Are of advantage to me;

And the earth's face upward for my inspection.

My feet are locked upon the rough bark.

It took the whole of Creation

To produce my foot, my each feather:

Now I hold Creation in my foot

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Summary:

Ted Hughes' poem 'Hawk Roosting' on its literal level of meaning is an expression of a bird of

prey, the hawk, which is sitting on a tree and meditating about its power of destruction, its ability

to suppress change, and its conceited arrogance and superiority. However, since there is a clear

projection of human attributes to the bird, we can easily see that the poem is an implicit satire on

a tyrant that the bird represents. More generally, it could be said that the bird is a symbol of the

human evils of arrogance, destructiveness, conceited and egotistical attitude, obsession of power

and tyranny; in short, the hawk is a symbol of inhumanity.

Analysis:

The poem begins with the hawk resting on a tree with his eyes closed. In lines 3, the bird being

‘hooked’ emphasizes on the sharp parts of the bird that are used for attacking and killing its prey.

In addition, Ted Hughes had used ‘feet’ instead of claws which creates an image in the reader’s

mind about the connection between the hawk and humans. This connection is known

as personification. The expression ‘perfect kill’ refers to the impression that the hawk has about

himself being superior and arrogant.

In the second stanza, the hawk arrogantly tells us that the world is made for him; ‘the convenience

of the high trees/ the air’s buoyancy and the sun’s rays/ are of advantage to me.” The words,

‘convenience’, ‘advantage’, ‘buoyancy’, ‘inspection’ are all examples of elevated and

sophisticated diction. It also represents the hawk as an intelligent bird. The hawk, moreover, says

in pride that the earth waits for the hawk’s inspection.

In the third stanza, the word ‘Creation’ has been used with a capital C which is synonymous

with God,

“it took the whole of Creation/ To produce any foot, my each feather”, the arrogance and sense

of superiority is pushed to the highest level and that is vividly portrayed in the above lines.

Finally, the hawk thinks himself to be the all powerful, to be God, ‘Now I hold creation in my

foot.’erfect kill’ refers to the impression that the hawk has about himself being superior and

arrogant.

The end of the stanza and the beginning of the fourth are linked by enjambment, as the hawk is

shown that it is free to ‘fly up’ and circle the world below at its leisure. The idea that he sees

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himself as God is again reinforced in the lines, ‘I will kill where I pleasure because it’s all mine.’

In lines 15 and 16, the hawk says his possesses no ‘sophistry’ which means that his doesn’t

reason. Line 16 uses bitter language like ‘tearing off their heads’ signifying that the hawk enjoys

much his actions.

‘The allotment of death’ in the fifth stanza provides the readers with an image of the hawk

hunting. The hawk chooses its own prey brutally. The stanza closes with the lines ‘No arguments

asserts my rights’ meaning that the hawk need not justify his ways of killings. They are

unquestionable.

In the final stanza, the hawk says ‘the sun is behind’ which we can deduce as the sun is behind

him for real or it could also mean that the sun is with him. In the second verse, the hawk says,

‘nothing has changed since I began’ which gives the impression of time. It makes the reader feel

that the hawk has always been looking upon the earth. The final lines ‘My eye has permitted no

change/ I am going to keep things like this’ show the idea of domination or control. The poem is

complex in nature and there are different interpretations to this.

The poem is divided into six stanzas consisting of four equal lines. The lines are neat, fairly short

and efficient. The form of the lines matches with the qualities of the hawk. One of the most

distinct personalities of the hawk that is represented in the poem is that of arrogance. Attributing

the hawk as the speaker gives immense effect on displaying the theme of the poem. Hawks are

known to be powerful, dignified among birds. Man is entitled to have these features too. Hence,

it is easy to draw a connection between the two which can make the reader think that the speaker

is man if not for the title of the poem. Therefore Ted Hughes uses the hawk as

a symbol for power. It can be compared with a tyrant or an authoritarian despot who is self-

centered and arrogant. He would never allow himself or his ways to be questioned and would see

the world as designed for his purpose.

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Naomi Shihab Nye (1952- )

Biography:

Naomi Shihab Nye was born in St. Louis, Missouri in 1952. Her father was a Palestinian

refugee and her mother an American of German and Swiss descent, and Nye spent her

adolescence in both Jerusalem and San Antonio, Texas. Her experience of both cultural

difference and different cultures has influenced much of her work. Known for poetry that lends a

fresh perspective to ordinary events, people, and objects, Nye has said that, for her, “the primary

source of poetry has always been local life, random characters met on the streets, our own

ancestry sifting down to us through small essential daily tasks.” Characterizing Nye’s “prolific

canon” in Contemporary Women Poets, Paul Christensen noted that Nye “is building a

reputation…as the voice of childhood in America, the voice of the girl at the age of daring

exploration.” In her work, according to Jane Tanner in theDictionary of Literary Biography,

“Nye observes the business of living and the continuity among all the world’s inhabitants…She

is international in scope and internal in focus.” Nye is also considered one of the leading female

poets of the American Southwest. A contributor to Contemporary Poets wrote that she “brings

attention to the female as a humorous, wry creature with brisk, hard intelligence and a sense of

personal freedom unheard of” in the history of pioneer women.

Nye received her BA from Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas and continues to live and

work in the city. “My poems and stories often begin with the voices of our neighbors, mostly

Mexican American, always inventive and surprising,” Nye wrote for Four Winds Press. “I never

get tired of mixtures.” A contributor to Contemporary Southern Writerswrote that Nye’s poetry

“is playfully and imaginatively instructive, borrows from Eastern and Middle Eastern and Native

American religions, and resembles the meditative poetry of William Stafford, Wallace Stevens,

and Gary Snyder.” Nye’s first two chapbooks were published in the 1970s. Both Tattooed

Feet (1977)and Eye-to-Eye (1978) are written in free verse and structured around the theme of a

journey or quest. They announced Nye as a “wandering poet”, interested in travel, place, and

cultural exchange. In her first full-length collection, Different Ways to Pray (1980), Nye explores

the differences between, and shared experiences of, cultures from California to Texas, from

South America to Mexico. In “Grandfather’s Heaven,” a child declares: “Grandma liked me even

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though my daddy was a Moslem.” As Tanner observed, “with her acceptance of different ‘ways

to pray’ is also Nye’s growing awareness that living in the world can sometimes be difficult.”

Nye’s next books include On the Edge of the Sky (1981), a slim volume printed on

handmade paper, and Hugging the Jukebox (1982), a full-length collection that also won the

Voertman Poetry Prize. In Hugging the Jukebox, Nye continues to focus on the ordinary, on

connections between diverse peoples, and on the perspectives of those in other lands. She writes:

“We move forward, / confident we were born into a large family, / our brothers cover the earth.”

Nye creates poetry from everyday scenes throughoutHugging the Jukebox in poems like “The

Trashpickers of San Antonio” and the title poem, where a boy is enthusiastic about the jukebox

he adopts and sings its songs in a way that “strings a hundred passionate sentences in a single

line.” Reviewers generally praised Hugging the Jukebox, noting Nye’s warmth and celebratory

tone. Writing in theVillage Voice, Mary Logue commented that in Nye’s poems about daily life,

“sometimes the fabric is thin and the mundaneness of the action shows through. But, in an

alchemical process of purification, Nye often pulls gold from the ordinary.” According

to Library Journal contributor David Kirby, the poet “seems to be in good, easy relation with the

earth and its peoples.”

The poems in Yellow Glove (1986) present a more mature perspective tempered by tragedy and

sorrow. In “Blood” Nye considers the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. She describes a café in

combat-weary Beirut, bemoans “a world where no one saves anyone,” and observes “The

Gardener” for whom “everything she planted gave up under the ground.” Georgia

Review contributor Philip Booth declared that Nye brings “home to readers both how variously

and how similarly all people live.” In Red Suitcase (1994), Nye continues to explore the effect of

on-going violence on everyday life in the Middle East. Writing for Booklist, Pat Monaghan

explained that “some of her most powerful poems deal with her native land’s continuing search

for peace and the echoes of that search that resound in an individual life. Nye is a fluid poet, and

her poems are also full of the urgency of spoken language. Her direct, unadorned vocabulary

serves her well: ‘A boy filled a bottle with water. / He let it sit. / Three days later it held the

power / of three days.’ Such directness has its own mystery, its own depth and power, which Nye

exploits to great effect.”

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Fuel (1998) is perhaps Nye’s most acclaimed volume. The poems range over a variety of

subjects, settings and scenes. Reviewing the book for Ploughshares, Victoria Clausi regarded it

as, above all, an attempt at connection: “Nye’s best poems often act as conduits between opposing

or distant forces. Yet these are not didactic poems that lead to forced epiphanic moments. Rather,

the carefully crafted connections offer bridges on which readers might find their own stable

footing, enabling them to peek over the railings at the lush scenery.” Like her mentor, William

Stafford, Nye again and again manifests her “belief in the value of the overlooked, the half-

forgotten,” wrote Clausi, as well as investigating more “worldly concerns” like the Israeli-

Palestinian conflict. Though Clausi believed that Nye’s “poetics require a calmer language,” a

reviewer for Publisher’s Weeklyfound that “Nye’s witnessings of everday life and strife never

quite acquire collective force, yet they convey a delicate sense of moral concern and a necessary

sense of urgency.”

After the World Trade Center attacks in 2001, Nye became an active voice for Arab-

Americans, speaking out against both terrorism and prejudice. The lack of understanding between

Americans and Arabs led her to collect poems she had written which dealt with the Middle East

and her experiences as an Arab-American into one volume. 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the

Middle East (2002) received praise for the timeliness of its message. Publisher’s Weekly declared

that it was “an excellent way to invite exploration and discussion of events far away and their

impact here at home.” Nye’s next book, You and Yours (2005), continues to explore the Middle

East and the possibilities of poetic response. Divided into two sections, the first deals with Nye’s

personal experiences as a mother and traveler and intersperses Nye’s typical free-verse with prose

poems. Part two examines the Middle East with “indignity and compassion,” according

to Publisher’s Weekly. Donna Seaman wrote that the book is “tender yet forceful, funny and

commonsensical, reflective and empathic,” adding, “Nye writes radiant poems of nature and

piercing poems of war, always touching base with homey details and radiant portraits of family

and neighbors. Nye’s clarion condemnation of prejudice and injustice reminds readers that most

Americans have ties to other lands and that all concerns truly are universal.”

In addition to her poetry collections, Nye has produced fiction for children, poetry and song

recordings, and poetry translations. She has also produced a book of essays, Never in a

Hurry (1996), and edited several anthologies, including the award-winning This Same

Sky (1992), which represents 129 poets from sixty-eight countries. In her introduction to the

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anthology Nye writes, “Whenever someone suggests ‘how much is lost in translation!’ I want to

say, ‘Perhaps—but how much is gained!’“ Booklist critic Hazel Rochman called it “an

extraordinary anthology, not only in its global range…but also in the quality of the selections and

the immediacy of their appeal.” Nye also compiled and edited a bilingual anthology of Mexican

poetry, The Tree Is Older Than You Are (1995).Nye edited the collection I Feel a Little Jumpy

around You (1996), which combines 194 “his and her” poems, pairing a poem written by a man

with one written by a woman. And Nye’s anthology The Space between Our Footsteps (1998) is a

collection of the work of 127 contemporary Middle-Eastern poets and artists representing nineteen

countries.

As a children’s writer, Nye is acclaimed for her sensitivity and cultural awareness. Her

book Sitti’s Secrets (1994) concerns an Arab-American child’s relationship with her sitti—

Arabic for grandmother—who lives in a Palestinian village. Hazel Rochman, in Booklist,praised

Nye for capturing the emotions of the “child who longs for a distant grandparent” as well as for

writing a narrative that deals personally with Arabs and Arab Americans. In 1997 Nye

published Habibi, her first young-adult novel. Readers meet Liyana Abboud, an Arab-American

teen who moves with her family to her Palestinian father’s native country during the 1970s, only

to discover that the violence in Jerusalem has not yet abated. As Liyana notes, “in Jerusalem, so

much old anger floated around…[that] the air felt stacked with weeping and raging and praying

to God by all the different names.” Autobiographical in its focus, Habibi was praised by Karen

Leggett, who noted in theNew York Times Book Review that the novel magnifies through the lens

of adolescence “the joys and anxieties of growing up” and that Nye is “meticulously sensitive to

this rainbow of emotion.” Nye sees her writing for children as part of her larger goals as a writer.

As Nye explained to a Children’s Literature Review contributor, “to counteract negative images

conveyed by blazing headlines, writers must steadily transmit simple stories closer to heart and

more common to everyday life. Then we will be doing our job.”

Nye told Contemporary Authors: “I have always loved the gaps, the spaces between things, as

much as the things. I love staring, pondering, mulling, puttering. I love the times when someone

or something is late—there’s that rich possibility of noticing more, in the meantime…Poetry

calls us to pause. There is so much we overlook, while the abundance around us continues to

shimmer, on its own.”

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Two Countries

Skin remembers how long the years grow

when skin is not touched, a gray tunnel

of singleness, feather lost from the tail

of a bird, swirling onto a step,

swept away by someone who never saw

it was a feather. Skin ate, walked,

slept by itself, knew how to raise a

see-you-later hand. But skin felt

it was never seen, never known as

a land on the map, nose like a city,

hip like a city, gleaming dome of the mosque

and the hundred corridors of cinnamon and rope.

Skin had hope, that’s what skin does.

Heals over the scarred place, makes a road.

Love means you breathe in two countries.

And skin remembers--silk, spiny grass,

deep in the pocket that is skin’s secret own.

Even now, when skin is not alone,

it remembers being alone and thanks something larger

that there are travelers, that people go places

larger than themselves.

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Because a poem is generally compact, every word is important. Examine the words

(diction) and how they’re used to create an impression that evokes the senses of touch, taste, smell,

sight, or sound (imagery). Comparisons (metaphor or simile) are also powerful ways poets create

an impression or convey an idea. For example, Naomi Shihab Nye’s poem “Two Countries” is

about loneliness and finding love again:

Skin remembers how long the years grow

when skin is not touched, a gray tunnel

of singleness, feather lost from the tail

of a bird, swirling onto a step,

swept away by someone who never saw it was a feather.

Nye uses metaphor by comparing loneliness to “a gray tunnel” and a “feather lost from

the tail of a bird.” The tunnel signifies a void with no end. The fact that the tunnel is gray renders

it vague and ghostly. Consider the difference it would have made if she’d described the tunnel as

black. The feather, a delicate, tiny thing that was once part of a greater whole, is now listless and

lost. These metaphors portray loneliness as an empty and floating nothingness, without direction

or end. Nye also uses imagery. She talks of the feather “swirling onto a step” and “swept away by

someone who never saw it was a feather.” Here, the feather is personified, looking for welcome

but carelessly brushed aside by someone who just didn’t see it. This imagery evokes the sense of

touch, presenting the human as a delicate, hopeful thing easily brushed aside. Finally, Nye chose

to refer to a person as “skin.” This diction immediately creates an intimacy between the subject

and the reader, something we can feel and touch.

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Seamus Heaney (1939-2013)

Seamus Heaney was an Irish poet and professor. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature and

published several volumes of poetry in his lifetime. Heaney's poetry often deals with themes of

nature, family, and politics, and has the unique quality of being well-received by both critics and

common readers.

Early Life and Education: Seamus Heaney was born in Northern Ireland in 1939. He was the

eldest of nine children and lived on a farm. At age twelve, he won a scholarship to a Catholic

boarding school, which removed him from the farm life he knew and introduced him to the

world of education and poetry. Heaney eventually studied English Language and Literature and

trained to be a teacher. As a student, Heaney was influenced by the poetry of Patrick Kavanagh

and soon began to write his own poetry.

Professional Life: Heaney worked as a teacher in Belfast while publishing his poetry in local

magazines. Heaney published his first book of poems in 1965 entitled Eleven Poems. A year

later his Death of a Naturalist was published, receiving critical acclaim. Heaney continued to

lecture at various colleges and universities, eventually becoming a professor at both Harvard

University and the University of Oxford. Heaney would go on to publish several more volumes

of poetry and prose, eventually winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995.

Poetry: Heaney's poetry often dealt with themes of nature and the struggles of his Irish

upbringing. His early work reveals his interest in the natural world in poems like 'Digging' and

'Death of a Naturalist.' He was also able to draw in the common reader with themes of family life

and death. Poems such as 'Mid-Term Break' and 'Clearances' are memorials to his brother, who

died at age three, and his mother. Heaney also used the violent political backdrop of Ireland in

his works, including 'Casualty' and 'Whatever You Say, Say Nothing.'

'Mid-Term Break' tells the story of Heaney's first experience with death. His younger brother died

at age three, and this poem explores this heart-wrenching experience of loss. It takes the reader on

a journey from Heaney's receiving the news at college, to greeting relatives at the wake, to viewing

the body and accepting the reality that his little brother has died. Heaney's use of common language

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and themes in works like this give his poetry the emotion and accessibility that make it so popular

with readers and critics alike.

Digging

Between my finger and my thumb

The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.

Under my window, a clean rasping sound

When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:

My father, digging. I look down

Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds

Bends low, comes up twenty years away

Stooping in rhythm through potato drills

Where he was digging.

The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft

Against the inside knee was levered firmly.

He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep

To scatter new potatoes that we picked,

Loving their cool hardness in our hands.

By God, the old man could handle a spade.

Just like his old man.

My grandfather cut more turf in a day

Than any other man on Toner’s bog.

Once I carried him milk in a bottle

Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up

To drink it, then fell to right away

Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods

Over his shoulder, going down and down

For the good turf. Digging.

The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap

Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge

Through living roots awaken in my head.

But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.

Between my finger and my thumb

The squat pen rests.

I’ll dig with it.

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Comment: That 'Digging' is the first poem in the first volume Heaney published - Death of a

Naturalist - consolidates a more general approach he had initially aired to the Belfast Group of

poets, before publication in 1966. Although many poets have spoken of the profound sense of self-

worth conferred by identification, few have done so with such poignant gravitas, or affecting

simplicity.

Ted Hughes' hymning of the 'square shouldered self-respect' achieved through writing, and Tony

Harrison's 'busking' of his father in his own words, both demand to be heard, but Heaney's

phenomenally skilled use of form and language acts to underwrite historical continuity, and to

declare cultural allegiance, by rendering poet and artisan indivisible in ways that run deeper than

a turf trench.

Present in his imagination as he writes, the narrator conjures a vision of his father and grandfather,

each at his labors, each blend in an act of reverence before his potato-bed or peat hag, as strong

and silently stoical as oaks. Not reverence in the religious sense: rather, in the paying of due

homage to a landscape both men understand instinctively, a terrain which commands respect as it

yields to the 'bright edge' of steel.

The clever metrical heft of the verse - mostly steady iambics - shadows the regular 'clean' rasp of

a sinking spade, and the slicing and chopping of soil or turf which follows. But most we remember

the satisfying extraneous sounds of the farm and the moor, rendered onomatopoeically: the rasping,

straining, heaving, squelching and slapping which effortlessly draw the reader - or more properly,

listener - to a rural Northern Ireland of the imagination.

We do not hear the sound of a trigger being pulled, but the double-edged presence of a gun image

early in the poem strikes a deliberately discordant note.

Guns are not unusual in farming communities - the unsentimental facts of economic survival

sometimes demand a pragmatic brutalism - and it is possible that Heaney is echoing his fear for

an, at this point, uncertain writer's future in this unsettling oxymoron. But it is also seems likely

that the 'Troubles', which began only a couple of years after this book was published, and continued

for a further thirty, were stirring in the poet's mind at the time of writing.

Heaney finds a metaphor for the act of poetic creation, the art of writing itself, in the measured,

rhythmical tilling of the land in 'Digging': grandfather, father and son are bound together, through

labour and love, in an arc of endurance which is both productive and self-sustaining. The poem's

final three lines - now as frequently repeated as many in Shakespeare - stake a claim for the idea

of poetry as work, and vocation.

Analysis

Digging is an 8 stanza, 31 line poem that starts off in the present, moves into the past and then

returns to the present and hints at the future towards the end.

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It doesn't have a set rhyme scheme as such and alternates between tetrameter and pentameter

rhythms, with several shorter lines here and there. Essentially it is a free verse poem with strong

internal rhymes, alliteration and assonance, typical textured Heaney.

The reader is taken into the mind of the speaker who is watching out the window as his father

digs the garden. What is notable is the fact that the speaker holds a pen - from the first line the

pen holds the power of the present (and on into the future), whilst the spade used by the father is

distanced, a tool of the past.

Gradually the emphasis shifts from the here and now back into the past, a sensual feel for the

land with all its smells and sounds dominating the middle of the poem.

The speaker is reflecting on the rural history of his family, the men who worked the land and

concludes that they were born and bred for such toil, whilst he is made for something less

manual - he will use the pen in much the same way that his forebears used the spade.

Stanza 1

A non-rhyming couplet, the opening lines set the scene, giving a close up for the reader of the

speaker's finger and thumb holding a pen (with which he is writing?). This pen is powerful and

full of life changing potential - the reference to a gun suggests that it can fire bullets, symbolic

ones of course.

Note the slant rhyme of thumb/gun which loosely binds the lines, whilst enjambment sends the

reader straight from the end of the first line onto the second.

Stanza 2

Three lines, with the third and fourth line fully rhymed which points to a strong bond. Stretching

away from the tetrameter of the opening two lines, these are pentameter, allowing for more

content.

The speaker can hear someone digging into soil. It's his father. It must be a familiar sound to the

speaker, he knows it's him even before he looks down. Again enjambment helps the flow of

meaning between lines and also between stanzas.

Stanza 3

Another increase in lineation, this time four lines, and not a hint of rhyme this time. What does

change though is the tense as the speaker, watching his father bend as he goes through the potato

drills, goes back in time 20 years, perhaps to when he was a child.

Stanza 4

Five lines, the close-up culmination of all his father's spadework over the years. The speaker was

there, observing the hard work, the detail, as his father went about digging up the new potatoes.

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Verbs like nestled, rooted and buried sit firmly in the rural landscape, whilst boot, knee and

hands bring a strong, physical dimension.

What Are The Literary/Poetic devices in Heaney's Digging?

Rhyme: There is no set rhyme scheme for Digging, no established pattern of end rhymes. The

only full rhymes occur in lines 3 and 4, sound/ground, but these are what might be called

accidental because they are not a part of a scheme. The rounded vowels do however underline

the importance of the father's use of the spade.

Internal rhyme is in evidence, both full and slant: look/Stooping/boot/rooted/cool. And again

with: Between/clean/knee/deep/neatly/heaving. Plus: thumb/under/rump/up/lug/cut/turf.

Use of these long and short vowels, with gutterals, brings texture and interest to the sounds,

giving the poem a depth of contrast in various stanzas.

Meter: There is no set regular metre in this poem although tetrameter, four beats per line, and

pentameter lines dominate, especially pentameter, five beats per line. This steady core parallels

the action of the digger, steady and without extremes.

The opening lines are iambic tetrameter, four stresses each line:

Between / my fin / ger and / my thumb

The squat / pen rests; / snug as / a gun.

But note the trochees (2nd line, 2nd and 3rd feet) which together with the semi-colon pauses the

reader and places stress on pen and snug.

Pentameters follow in lines 3 and 4:

Under / my win / dow, a / clean rasp / ing sound

When the / spade sinks / into / gravel / ly ground.

Both lines have five feet and a mix of iambic, trochaic and spondaic. The spondees bring force to

the words - clean rasp and spade sinks - and, especially in line 4, combine with trochees to bring

assertive action as the spade does its work.

Shorter lines tend to slow things down, so note that stanzas 2,3,5 and 8 end with short lines to

reflect the slowing down of the spadework being observed.

Metaphor: The pen is the spade, the speaker declaring that he will use the pen to dig with,

leaving behind the tool of his forefathers, the farmer's spade.

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Alliteration: There are several examples of alliteration, which enhances the sound and brings

variety and interest for the reader:

spade sinks/ gravelly ground...tall tops/buried the bright....squelch and slap...curt cuts.

Repetition: Repeating certain words and phrases in a poem gives the reader a clear message of

importance and emphasis. It can also be an echo of the action taking place, in this case that of

digging, which is most definitely repetitive.

So look out for the words: digging...spade....down...men...turf....and the first line and a

half...Between my finger and my thumb/The squat pen rests.

Onomatopiea: Words that sound like what they mean - for example: squelch/slap/soggy.