Just as poetry is a permanent mark of feelings that last forever on paper, tattoos are permanent symbols that last forever on the skin. Tattoos and poetry can easily be combined such as in Kim Addonizio’s sonnet, “First Poem for You,” the speaker admires her partner’s nature themed tattoos in a darkened room. This may seem to be a simple poem, but by utilizing tattoos as symbols, including tactile and visual imagery in her poem, and using the sonnet as her structure, Addonizio laments about the true meaning of relationships and their longevity.…
“Thanatopsis” is a romantic poem written by William Cullen Bryant. The poem gives a pantheistic and philosophical view of nature, God, and death. “Thanatopsis” was a revolutionary work for its time because it focuses of finding solace in death. Bryant’s writing challenged the normal concept of literature by building off of and borrowing old ideas. Before transcendentalist ideas became popular, writers’ work was centered on God and the physical world. Bryant and other transcendentalist writers challenged this ordinary way of thinking by questioning reality, finding comfort in nature, and concentrating on improving their inner beings. Bryant vividly describes the beauty and grace in nature with the use of personification. He wants the reader…
Flattered but embarrassed, she informs him in front of his friends that there are topics for poetry other than sex. When he asks her to name one, she writes the word “love” on his hand.…
What do you think are the feelings about marriage in this poem and how does the poet present those feelings to the reader? (18 marks)…
The poet also uses imagery such as ‘lakes and ‘swans’, to symbolise the peacefulness, and also to symbolise love. You notice words that show the subject is not alone, with ‘we’ and ‘our’. These words and also the motion of the swans, the lake, and the peacefulness are foreshadowing that the poem will take a turning onto love that is more literate. However I don’t think that the poems theme is so much about love in particular, but about a natural love, a natural pull that brings two people together even after hard times.…
Compare and contrast Don Quixote with either King Arthur or Sundiata. How are the two figures you have chosen alike? How are they different? Be sure to use specific examples from the stories you have read to illustrate your points.…
It can be said that struggles bring people together and, at the same time, break them apart. When two people realize their life situations are quite similar are controlled by fundamentalism, they tend to stay close to one another for comfort and understanding, even though they share nothing in interest. However one will eventually attempt a change, to try and manipulate their circumstances for the better or to leave. The other is inevitably left alone and desolate. Although a complicated kindness entwines many such consequences from social issues and other obstacles deep inside its storylines, it reveals its dominant theme in the conclusion: that love endures in the end. Love will make hardships tolerable, will bind people together in spirit if not in a physical sense, and will brighten the optimism in the heart.…
“Let Me Not to the Marriage of True Minds” by Shakespeare Compared with “Why Should A Foolish Marriage Vow” by John Dryden…
“You have all these ingredients, the details of your life...you must add the heat and…
In this poem, the evening has set upon the urban neighborhood as the speaker embarks on a walk. He see a crowd of people and hears a lover singing to his beloved and his song portrays that his love will never cease. The clocks, however, showcase a contradictory attitude through the use of their diction by insinuating that love will end because the lovers’ lives will as well. Throughout the poem, the lovers remain naively optimistic while the clocks take a cynical point of view toward love and time. The author of this poem demonstrates device usage such as metaphors, personification, and symbolism in effort to reveal the idea that one should live each day as if were his/her last.…
In “A Decade,” a poem by Amy Lowell, the reader is shown how a lover’s attitude can go from infatuation at first to just predictability and love. In this poem Lowell uses imagery and similes to elaborate on the feelings of the speaker towards his/her lover. In the beginning of the relationship the speaker is infatuated with the lover, and Lowell expresses this infatuation through the use of a simile in line one when comparing the lover to “red wine and honey”. As the relationship goes on deeper into the decade a comparison between the lover and “morning bread” is made in line three, showing the reader that instead of being like “red wine and honey” in the beginning, which burnt the speaker’s mouth with sweetness, now the lover is perceived as being “smooth and pleasant”.…
The poem is arranged into five stanzas, each with its own setting and time of day to unify the whole literary piece into one length of time; a day. It starts from one midnight to the next, taking the reader through a journey that could possibly be compared to the length of one’s lifetime. The first stanza starts its time during the late night. This is evident because the speaker addresses the way light works in the dark. The first two lines could be understood as two lovers are trying to find each other in the dark but there is enough light from them to ‘bless’ them with a ‘meaningless O’ which could represent a kiss between the two lovers. A kiss itself is meaningless but because the lovers were able to find each other, the light allowed them to “[teach…
The poem “Valentine” written by the present poet laureate in UK, Carol Ann Duffy, subverts the idealized and universal idea of love and projects the dual nature of its essence. She rejects the gifts conventionally associated with Valentine’s Day, such as ‘red-rose’, ‘satin cloth’, ‘cute card’, ‘kissogram’ and brings a Copernican revolution with the option of “Onion” as a gift which acts as an extended metaphor throughout the poem. Insofar as the techniques are concerned, the poetess employs imagery, symbolism, word choice and structure so as to entrench in the mind of the reader that “Valentine” is an unusual love-poem.…
“Love is not all” by Edna St. Vincent Millay, is a sonnet consisting of 1 stance and 14 lines in total. The poetic devices that the sonnet possesses in order to convey its theme are metaphors and imagery. The first device that Millay uses is metaphors where Millay compares love to everything that we believe that aren’t true about love. Such examples are included in the first and second line of the sonnet where, “it is not meat nor drink. Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain” (Millay, 1931). These examples are established in the sonnet in order for Millay to inform the reader that love is not all the things that you think it is, but instead the opposite. These examples start from the first line all the way to line seven where Millay then mainly puts focus on the second device, imagery. Even though there is imagery used throughout the entire sonnet, the last couple of lines is when this device is mostly put to effect towards what love does to the significant other. These examples are revealed to the…
In the poem “Old Couple” by Charles Simic, the author utilizes a frightful tone, and the symbol of the fifth floor window to reveal the controlling idea that humans tend to impose their perceptions onto the world around them, which can alter the way one perceives reality. In order to have a better grasp on people and the world around them, one should remain open minded instead of jumping to conclusions. Within this poem, the speaker is unreliable. The speaker is viewing the couple from a distance and describes the couple from what they have seen. In the first stanza, the speaker states, “As far as I know, they never go out.” By stating “As far as I know,” the speaker reveals that they do not know much about the old couple. Consequently, the…