Elizabeth Bishon’s poem “One Art” explores the universal experience of loss through enacting a structured, post-modern villanelle, which utilizes parody through understatement and “disobeying” the rigid structure of a villanelle. The speaker’s strategy is revealed through the structural form as well as the play of language through the speaker’s discourse, implications, and ordering. The poem’s linguistic contributions help perform the speaker’s poetic purpose. Before entering into the structural form of the poem, understanding the speaker’s motivations can assist in perceiving the reason for choosing the structure of a villanelle. The speaker appears to be a woman who, perhaps, recently lost a lover. The final stanza introduces an apostprophé, “you,” revealing the speaker’s motivation for writing. “Even losing you,” she says, provides evidence that “the art of losing’s not too hard to master” (16, 15.) The purpose of the poem builds up to the final stanza, with a litotes understating the severity of loss in an ironic sentiment, saying, “Even losing you…I shan’t have lived. It’s evident / the art of losing’s not too hard to master” (18.) The speaker narrows the focus of the poem till she directly addresses the addressee, employing humor the soften the hurt of such a loss that “may look like…disaster” (19.) The tone of the speaker significantly shifts in the sixth stanza, seen in the intimacy of the loss “losing you,” though there are two more minor shifts in the fourth
In the poem, “35/10” by Sharon Olds, the speaker uses wistful and jealous tones to convey her feeling about her daughter’s coming of age. The speaker, a thirty-five year old woman, realizes that as the door to womanhood is opening for her ten year old daughter, it is starting to close for her. A wistful tone is used when the speaker calls herself, “the silver-haired servant” (4) behind her daughter, indicating that she wishes she was not the servant, but the served. Referring to herself as her daughter’s servant indicates a sense of self-awareness in the speaker. She senses her power is weakening and her daughter’s power is strengthening. It also shows wistfulness for her diminishing youth, and sadness for her advancing years. This
Elizabeth Gower is a Melbourne based collage artist. She uses printed packaging and other familiar household detritus as her source material to create works of intricate geometric patterns. Her small and delicate new work, Cycles and Matrix, invites closer inspection in the Sutton Gallery’s simple unpretentious space. One is mesmerized by the repetitions and multiplicity of the layering of discarded junk materials, transforming the chaotic waste material of the 21st Century into ordered beauty.
Audit is a poem written by editor, translator, fiction writer, and poet Tony Barnstone. He has written a collection of varied and unique poems, from topics of the Second World War to a poetry book based on material in classic pulp fiction and B-movies. Barnstone has won numerous awards and literary competitions for his diverse work, including the Pushcart Prize in Poetry and the John Ciardi Prize in Poetry. This poem offers an interesting take on relationships and love and its relation to the world of business. The poem utilizes a variety of poetic devices, some being obvious and others more obscure, which will be explored throughout this paper.
“Once upon a time there was a wife and mother one too many times” (Godwin 39). This short story begins with the famous opening, once upon a time, which foreshadows that the story line will be similar to a fairy tale. It raises expectations for the story that all will be magical and end happily. A typical modern-day fairy tale is that of a distressed character who overcomes an obstacle, falls in love with prince charming, and they ride off into the sunset; living happily ever after never to be heard from again. Godwin however, puts an unexpected twist on “A Sorrowful Woman”. This short story is a tale about what can happen when everyday roles take over our identity. Ultimately, this short story challenges societal expectations of marriage
“One Art” is a villanelle filled with sad sentiments of encouragement towards accepting loss. Elizabeth Bishop uses her tone to pull emotions from the reader that could be confusion and disagreement. Her tone deeply impacts the reader in such a way that it causes him/her to seriously think of accepting her opinion and advice. The capturing way she uses her tone in her word choice shows the reader her natural inflexion when she speaks. The tone of her work even affects her characterization. In “One Art,” Elizabeth Bishop uses tone to convey a character of false casualty, while also using it to emphasize the very heavy impact of her diction.
Liz Larner creates art that has a presence and that shows instability. Her art is influenced by poetics. This is shown through the overlap in some sculptures as well as breakage in others. The art that she produces gives a sense of flow and completeness. Using instability as part of her work is something that brings a sense of change to her work as well as almost never using the same techniques. Her relation of her art work to real life shows her beliefs in the balance of reality and illusion.
In this literary analysis it is essential to compare and contrast Cathy Song’s poem “Heaven” and Bryan Thao Worra’s poem “Pen/Sword” to give the reader a better understanding of what the authors’ are conveying to their readers. The similarities in the style, word choice, and theme will be compared, along with the differences of style, word choice, and theme reflected throughout each poem. Furthermore, I will determine the meaning behind the broken up and/or the way the lines of each poem while describing why the lines are strategically placed throughout the pieces. This will allow me to identify the meaning that the authors’ are explaining to the reader. Each poet specifically writes to give the reader(s) a picture of what they are feeling and defining their emotion through their writing.
Elizabeth Seydel Morgan’s poem, Anger Villanelle, is a villanelle with the rhyme scheme, ‘aba’ ‘aba’ ‘aba’ and so forth. Anger Villanelle’s use of personification was displayed in it’s repeated line “I see your innocence flinching at my meaning”, representing the victim of the narrator’s innocence cowering to the narrator’s surmount wrath. With the luxury of the grandiose repeated line, I, including my erstwhile inner-teenage depression self, indulged over the metaphor in “the demon in my head is always scheming”. Another pleasurable factor of the poem, although it clings onto the selected theme, is the authors use of diction expressed the emotions of enragement and weakness.
The tone of the poem changes as the poem progresses. The poem begins with energetic language like “full of heroic tales” and “by a mere swing to his shoulder”. The composer also uses hyperboles like “My father began as a god” and “lifted me to heaven”. The use of this positive language indicates to the responder that the composer is longing for those days – he is nostalgic. It also highlights the perspective of a typical child. The language used in the middle of the poem is highly critical of his father: “A foolish small old man”. This highlights the perspective of a typical teenager and signifies that they have generally conflicting views. The language used in the last section of the poem is more loving and emotional than the rest: “...revealing virtues such as honesty, generosity, integrity”. This draws attention to a mature adult’s perspective.
Here is a discussion of how the sound and metrics of the poem help convey that meaning. In the face of strong emotion, the poet sets himself the task of mastering it in difficult form of villanelle. Five tercets are followed by a quatrain, with the first and last line of stanza repeated alternately as the last line of the subsequent stanzas and gathered into a couplet at the end of the quatrain. And all this on only two rhymes. His villanelle repeates the theme of living and fury through the most forceful two lines, "do not go gentle into that good night," and "rage, rage against the dying of the light." Thomas further compounds his difficulty by having each line
Richard Blanco is a Cuban- American poet who was given the oppurunity to write an inaugaration poem for Barack Obama's second swearing-in. He wrote a poem titled "One Today" that praised the good and unique things about the United States and also the everyday people who's daily routines help to make America the proud country that it is.
Michael Ryan’s villanelle, Self-Help, follows the typical villanelle style with 19 lines, including five terrets and a quatrain. The main storyline follows the speaker who is reprimanding a woman for blindly falling for a man, only seeing the good in him and being naive with her marriage. With the first and third lines stating, “What kind of delusion are you under?” (1) and “You see the lightning but not the thunder” (3) repeating, it emphases an obsessive thought, as if a haunting motif is spread throughout, where the author doesn’t understand the protagonist’s thoughts or actions. Through the use of assonance and consonance, such as “hath” (4) and rat (5), “crown them” (11) and “baseball bat” (11), the author uses repetition to set the mood of the poem in a negative light— setting a certain tone. Even the title Self-Help is the author’s way of communication they’re done trying to help the protagonist and it’s time for that person to reflect themselves and take care of their situation.
The Poem “Introduction to Poetry” is by Billy Collins, an English poet, and it is about how teachers often force students to over-analyze poetry and to try decipher every possible meaning portrayed throughout the poem rather than allowing the students to form their own interpretation of the poem based on their own experiences.
Style is the special way an author creates his or her work. Gabriela Mistral exploits an informal style in her poem “Ballad”. The poem discusses the poets feelings and is written in first person point of view validating its informality; “My heart’s blood.”-Line17 using ‘my’ and describing her heart confirm this. Diction contributes to style in an extensive way. Repetition is a form of diction that is heavily spread out through the poem. “Saw him pass by.”-Lines 2/6, “He goes loving.../...in bloom”-Lines1-2/11-12, and “He will go.../through eternity.”-Lines 19-20/23-24. The repetition emphasizes the authors style an diction. In this poem diction is displayed through negative connotation. Choosing to describe her emotional state as “,wretched,”-Line 5, instead of sad or unhappy, and by adding a
The most prominent quality of Elizabeth Bishop’s, “One Art,” remains the concise organization and rhyme scheme of the poem, which amazingly keeps the audience informed at all times what the theme. Her choice of a villanelle constantly reminds the audience that “the art of losing” always seem easy until one loses something so much more than an inanimate object and at the point, it does become a “disaster.” Written in 1976, the poem is very modern and uses an impeccable rhyme scheme, diction, and imagery to convey the hints of misery and frantic the speaker feels.