Schoenberg and Pierrot Essay

The use of simile in the last stanza ‘matchstick hands as pale as the violet stems they lived among’ is used to compare a frog to violet flowers, which are very delicate and easily broken. The innocence of childhood is painted through this visual technique as the narrator only sees the frogs being very delicate, but to the readers the simile also creates a vivid image of the condition of the ‘Frogs’/ the French. The use of first person helps to create a reminiscent tone about the narrator’s experiences, and further helps to stress the ideas of childhood innocence and the influence of war on children because the poem is written from a child’s perspective. The use of enjambment generates a conversational and personal tone, emphasizing to the readers the reality of the themes discussed throughout the poem. The use of symbolism of frogs as pets and also representing the French highlights the idea that adults saw ‘Frogs’ as insignificant or unworthy to speak about, whereas the children could not understand this adult thought, and they placed exemplary regard to the wellbeing of the

In the study of English literature, “The Sullivan Ballou Letter” by Sullivan Ballou and “To Lucasta, Going To The Wars” by Richard Lovelace are very similar and different in many various forms of ways. These works of literature can be categorized as goodbye letters from two men who sent them to their wives to show their love, before they leave for different wars. “The Sullivan Ballou Letter” is written in American literature and “To Lucasta, Going To The Wars” is written in British Renaissance literature. The work of literature written by Ballou is perceived in more of a formal way and Lovelace’s is viewed in the form of a ballad with a iambic tetrameter as a rhyme scheme. These two works of literature are compared and contrasted by their

A poem is such a powerful piece of art, for it is so open to interpretation. Fischl has constructed a piece so complex one could just brim the surface of the thoughts potentially influenced by this poem. The poem constantly repeats but each interval pulls you deeper into the large vat of anger, calm, disgust, and regret. Peter L. Fischl opens with a simple stanza. “I would like to be an artist So I could make a painting of you Little Polish Boy.” The calm, regretful

When a reader initially reads Donald Justice’s “The Poet at Seven,” he or she might take the easy route and conclude it for what it says, only. If this method were taken, the poem’s presumed plot would have been taken quite literally: the poet is reminiscing about his childhood memories; the poem is sweet, simple, and nostalgic. However, poems are not that simple. They are complex riddles, full of hidden meaning. To truly shed light on Justice’s purpose of the poem, it is necessary to look at the “what-if’s” through its intricate designs of language. The poem’s form is an important start when close reading. Also, to discern the hidden meaning, it is important to consider the specific word choice and how it paints a picture inside the reader’s mind. As a result, the reader will grasp the poem’s true intention. By doing this, the reader will sincerely have an understanding of “The Poet at Seven,” the way Justice probably would have wanted.

“From the sphere of my own experience I can bring to my recollection three persons of no every-day powers and acquirements, who had read the poems of others with more and more unallayed pleasure, and had thought more highly of their authors, as poets; who yet have confessed to me, that from no modern work had so many passages started up anew in their minds at different times, and as different occasions had awakened a meditative mood.” (2) (paragraph 31).

Throughout Section IV, the speaker deals with her feelings of loss: her father’s slipping away into old age and Alzheimer’s and his eventual death. The final poem in Section IV “The Ottawa River by Night,” segues smoothly into Section V. “The Ottawa River by Night” begins hinting at the speaker’s sense of mortality, and Section V continues to explore and strengthen that sense.

The moon has now become ominous as it forewarns of the child’s death. Spanish culture is once again brought into the poem as the moon becomes deathly. The moon has always been a figure of death in Spanish history and continues to be represented in that matter by this poem. The moon’s sensual appeal balances its foreboding nature. The boy is enticed by the mystery of the moon and does not heed her warning. Once again the boy warns the moon, “flee, moon, moon, moon” (17), as he shows his continued persistence to save the moon he has been draw into. He warns that the gypsies are coming, but the moon will not leave its dance. The moon says, “young boy, leave me, don’t step on / my starched whiteness” (19-20). This shows her lack of concern for the boy, which exemplifies her task to only attract him to her. Her starched whiteness once again contradicts her true mission to lead him to his demise. “Beating the drum of the plain” (22) stresses the intensity of the moment leading up to the point that “within the forge the young man has closed eyes” (23).

Her most notable long work, Asphodel, is, as she described it, “an effort to free [herself] of the . . . ‘H.D. Imagiste’ role” that was established soon after the publication of her first poetic volume, Sea Garden (1916). (Spoo ix) The “valuable and intimate account of female expatriation,” Asphodel is “a portrait of young artists whose experiences are very different from those of their male counterparts” (xi). Asphodel is greatly the story of World War I and its social repercussions; it is a story Doolittle struggled to delineate throughout her career, completing several works of varying structures of which Asphodel is the earliest. It is written in two parts, its composition displaying the explicitly modern technique of strict structural control paired with “elusive, digressive” writing (xiii). In addition to the structure of the novel, the content of Asphodel is distinctively modern, as it is marked by digressions regarding lesbianism, the social destruction of the first World War and the plight to understand the self.

In the northwestern work, Vallejo persistently splits bodies and discourses into respective sections as a way of creating arguments of appropriate language (that is, political, or lyric and of appropriate depiction) to the inherent material bases whilst weakening the need that national landscape or poetic discourse provide the underlying contents. In contrast, Vallejo’s Paris poems for instance, attempt to hold the individual and the collective in standpoint at the same time, and to put into consideration their enmeshment, providing a deliberately disproportionate lyric supplement to diminutive political discourse. On notable ways, the works of Vallejo, particularly ‘Scales’ is significantly similar to Varallonos ‘The death of 21 years’ because

As opposed to the majority of Shakespeare’s sonnets in the series that are addressed to an unnamed young man, sonnet 60 deals largely with the relentless approach of time and its war against humanity rather than love. In this sonnet, the breaking of the poetic form expected of a sonnet is utilized to not only enhance the specific localized metaphors in the poem, but the overall thematic content as well. By taking the traditional iambic pentameter and presenting moments of disruption, this poem draws attention to the dramatization of Time’s march against humanity, and also to the ability of the writer of this poem who appears in the final couplet. In this paper, I intend to look specifically at the utilization of trochaic feet in order to examine the ways in which the manipulation of metrical devices can create meaning.

“Wild Swans at Coole”, “Easter 1916” and “The Second Coming” encapsulate the romanticism in his early poetry to civil influences and then a modernist approach in the later years. The three poems explore distinct transition of a poet while discussing ideas of history, love and politics.

“If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away.” (FCF 4).

Charles Baudelaire’s poetry is a great example of when two seemingly opposing styles of writing, romanticism and realism, meet. The two intertwine in this work to form a masterpiece of natural beauty and painful realism. His use of nature to drive many of his deeper contemplations gives this work an air of romanticism. He contrast this beauty by discussing topics that a writer of strict romanticism would typically stray away from, such as the strongly negative reality of human behavior. However, the combination of these two styles that appear to stand in opposition of one another is part of the unique and haunting beauty that Baudelaire offers in his poetry.

For this essay I will be unraveling two poems to find a deeper meaning from The Norton Anthology of World Literature, Volume B. The two poems are “A Lover’s Prize” by Beatrice of Dia and “The Wound of Love” written by Heinrich von Morungen. Heinrich and Beatrice are considered to be medieval lyric poets; however, Beatrice was a medieval lyric poet from France and they are known as troubadour. Beatrice just so happened to be apart of southern France’s trobairitz which was just a tribute to some of the best troubadour of their time. She was married to the Count of Viennois, Guilhem de Poitiers but she was having an affair with another troubadour who went by the name Raimbaut d’Orange and their poetic style was quite similar. However, when it comes to Heinrich von Morungen not much is known about him. From the little we know about Heinrich, we find that, his style of writing fit into the category of Minnesang which means “songs of love”. His lyrics (that have survived) are also some of the greatest in early German history. Nonetheless, these writers have both put forth some impressive work.

The imagery in the poem, specifically natural imagery, helps use the reader’s senses to develop a vivid depiction of the speaker’s connection to nature and dissatisfaction with the surrounding reality. The speaker’s continued use of the “moon” reflects her attribution of feminine identity and idolistic character to the moon. As opposed to referencing herself and her personal insomnia, she uses the imagery of the moon “beyond sleep” to convey her internal struggles with insomnia and her reality. Throughout the poem, the speaker also refers to shining, reflective surfaces, such as “a body of water or a mirror”, to describe the inverted reality in which the speaker experiences reciprocated love. Reflective surfaces often invert the image that is projected into them, seemingly distorting the true nature and reality of the projected image. The speaker’s reference to this reflective imagery highlights her desire to escape the burden of a patriarchal society and assume an independent and free feminine identity. Specifically, the use of natural imagery from the references to the “moon” and “a body of water” convey the speaker’s desire to take refuge within the Earth or in the feminine identity of the Earth, Mother Earth. Feminine identities are often related and associated with aspects of nature due to the natural cycle of the menstrual period and the natural process of procreation. The speaker takes advantage of these connotations to suggest Earth and natural imagery as an escape from the man-made terrors of male dominated society. In the second stanza, the speaker uses extensive imagery to develop metaphors conveying the speaker’s experience of jealousy of the moon