Week 6 6. Figures of Speech

● Week 6 6. Figures of Speech

30) The Eagle by Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-1892)

He clasps the crag with crooked hands; Close to the sun in lonely lands, Ring'd with the azure world, he stands.

The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls; He watches from his mountain walls, And like a thunderbolt he falls.

1) Form and styles: 2 stanzas with AAA, BBB. Alliteration, personification, hyperbole. 2) Story: The poem has a very simple concept. It focuses on one eagle alone in the wild. In the first line, the eagle is atop a mountain, poised to strike. He is high up where no other animal or human can go. He is alone in his grandeur, with the sun and the bright blue sky forming the perfect background scenery. 3) The second stanza shows the only action of the eagle. The first and second line show that as he watches from his high perch, the sea moves below him. Then, in the final line, the eagle makes a grand dive towards the sea. The poem ends here, with the reader not quite sure why the eagle dived off his mountain roost. 4) Background: Romanticism was a reaction to The Enlightenment or the notion that human actions were guided by other forces.[2] The movement as a whole emphasized feeling over thought, and was characterized by imagination, individualism, and freedom. Romantic poets often focused on the idea that nature is beautiful and to understand life, humans must appreciate nature. "The Eagle" shows Tennyson's appreciation of nature.

31) Shall I Compare Thee To A Summer’s Day? by William Shakespeare (1564-1616)

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate: Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, And summer’s lease hath all too short a date; Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines, And often is his gold complexion dimmed; And every fair from fair sometime declines, By chance or nature’s changing course untrimmed; But thy eternal summer shall not fade, Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st; Nor shall death brag thou wand’rest in his shade, When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st: So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

1) Form and styles: Shakespearean sonnet ABAB CDCD EFEF GG 2) Themes: eternity, youth, age, love 3) Story: The speaker opens the poem with a question addressed to the beloved: “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” The next eleven lines are devoted to such a comparison. In line 2, the speaker stipulates what mainly differentiates the young man from the summer’s day: he is “more lovely and more temperate.” Summer’s days tend toward extremes: they are shaken by “rough winds”; in them, the sun (“the eye of heaven”) often shines “too hot,” or too dim. And summer is fleeting: its date is too

short, and it leads to the withering of autumn, as “every fair from fair sometime declines.” The final quatrain of the sonnet tells how the beloved differs from the summer in that respect: his beauty will last forever (“Thy eternal summer shall not fade...”) and never die. In the couplet, the speaker explains how the beloved’s beauty will accomplish this feat, and not perish because it is preserved in the poem, which will last forever; it will live “as long as men can breathe or eyes can see.” 4) This sonnet is certainly the most famous in the sequence of Shakespeare’s sonnets; it may be the most famous lyric poem in English. Among Shakespeare’s works, only lines such as “To be or not to be” and “Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?” are better-known. This is not to say that it is at all the best or most interesting or most beautiful of the sonnets; but the simplicity and loveliness of its praise of the beloved has guaranteed its place. 5) On the surface, the poem is simply a statement of praise about the beauty of the beloved; summer tends to unpleasant extremes of windiness and heat, but the beloved is always mild and temperate. Summer is incidentally personified as the “eye of heaven” with its “gold complexion”; the imagery throughout is simple and unaffected, with the “darling buds of May” giving way to the “eternal summer”, which the speaker promises the beloved. The language, too, is comparatively unadorned for the sonnets; it is not heavy with alliteration or assonance, and nearly every line is its own self-contained clause—almost every line ends with some punctuation, which effects a pause. 6) Sonnet 18 is the first poem in the sonnets not to explicitly encourage the young man to have children. The “procreation” sequence of the first 17 sonnets ended with the speaker’s realization that the young man might not need children to preserve his beauty; he could also live, the speaker writes at the end of Sonnet 17, “in my rhyme.” Sonnet 18, then, is the first “rhyme”—the speaker’s first attempt to preserve the young man’s beauty for all time. An important theme of the sonnet (as it is an important theme throughout much of the sequence) is the power of the speaker’s poem to defy time and last forever, carrying the beauty of the beloved down to future generations. The beloved’s “eternal summer” shall not fade precisely because it is embodied in the sonnet: “So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,” the speaker writes in the couplet, “So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.”

32) Shall I Compare Thee To A Summer’s Day? by Howard Moss (1922-1987)

Who says you’re like one of the dog days? You’re nicer. And better. Even in May, the weather can be gray, And a summer sub-let doesn’t last forever. Sometimes the sun’s too hot; Sometimes it is not. Who can stay young forever? People break their necks or just drop dead! But you? Never! If there’s just one condensed reader left Who can figure out the abridged alphabet, After you’re dead and gone, In this poem you’ll live on.

1) Howard Moss (January 22, 1922 – September 16, 1987) was an American poet, dramatist and critic. He was poetry editor of The New Yorker magazine from 1948 until his death and he won the National Book Award in 1972 for Selected Poems. 2) Form and styles: sonnet imitating or parodying Shakespeare’s sonnet 18. 3) Shakespeare's poem uses a traditional sonnet rhyme scheme, and also uses iambic pentameter, the traditional sonnet meter. Moss' poem obviously does not. If you count the lines of that poem, and look at the rhymes and the inconsistent meter, you'll see some of the technical ways in which the two poems are different. As I've already mentioned, they're also different in tone and style, since one is a serious love poem and the other one is just a joke. But they're also similar in the sense that the Moss poem is all about fooling around with material from the Shakespeare poem. 4) The main difference between the two poems is that Shakespeare's sonnet is a meditation on love, death, and the passage of time, that anyone can learn crucial life lessons from. Howard Moss' poems is a silly private joke between 'educated' Americans, which makes for a very easy exercise for dumb teachers to set and mark. People who love poetry, or even just love life, will find endless sources of value in the Shakespeare sonnet. 5) That implication is completely missing from Howard Moss’s “abridged” and updated version of the poem. In fact, it’s all just a string of quirky expressions that leave out all of the details and the subtext, the big ideas underneath the text. It’s like bread made the old fashioned way and the newfangled, factory way (with all of the vitamins, minerals, textures, flavor and care processed out of it).

6) “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” turns into “Who says you’re like one of the dog days?” Yes, dog day, is an expression that references summer, but Shakespeare is comparing his lover to a summer’s day, something thought of as bright, beautiful and bountiful, and Moss is comparing her to a dog day, something thought of as arduously hot, languid and a drudgery to endure. The modern expression makes her not quite as wonderful and you kind of wonder how beautiful the poet thinks her to be (maybe not so in love). 7) There is a lot of personification that goes on in Shakespeare’s poem, “rough winds do shake the darling buds of May.” I interpreted “rough” as a personification of the winds – thinking of them as bullies pulling at these darlings. But using “darling” to describe young and tender buds makes them dear to the poet not simply tender. Darling is used to describe a lover (someone you feel tender towards) or a child, someone you feel such great love and tenderness for that you feel the need to protect him or her. Obviously the word choice and the way the image is constructed gives the reader much to interpret as opposed to “even in May, the weather can be gray.” There’s no image, the language is straight forward and not much to interpret other than,” sometimes May isn’t bright and sunny.”

Metaphor and Simile

33) Metaphors by Sylvia Plath (1943-1963)

I’m a riddle in nine syllables, An elephant, a ponderous house, A melon strolling on two tendrils. O red fruit, ivory, fine timbers! This loaf’s big with its yeasty rising. Money’s new-minted in this fat purse. I’m a means, a stage, a cow in calf. I’ve eaten a bag of green apples, Boarded the train there’s no getting off.

1) Sylvia Plath (/plæθ/; October 27, 1932 – February 11, 1963) was an American poet, novelist, and short story writer. Born in Boston, she studied at Smith College and Newnham College at the University of Cambridge before receiving acclaim as a poet and writer. She was married to fellow poet Ted Hughes from 1956 until they separated in September 1962. They lived together in the United States and then in England and had two children, Frieda and Nicholas. Plath was clinically depressed for most of her adult life. She died by suicide in 1963. Plath is credited with advancing the genre of confessional poetry and is best known for her two published collections, The Colossus and Other Poems and Ariel. She also wrote The Bell Jar, a semi-autobiographical novel published shortly before her death. In 1982, she won a posthumous Pulitzer Prize for The Collected Poems. 2) Styles: The nine lines correspond to the nine months of pregnancy, and each line possesses nine syllables. She first announces herself as a "riddle in nine syllables" (the poem is also nine lines long). She then describes herself as an elephant, similar to a huge house. She is also like a watermelon, walking along on two small legs, though she praises both the “red fruit” of her belly and the “fine timbers” of her legs. She then compares herself to a loaf of bread, its yeast rising big and full, and a coin purse stuffed with newly-minted money. 3) Themes: The unsettling nature of “Metaphors” (The Colossus, William Heinemann Limited, 1960) arises from the dichotomy of Plath’s tone and the images she chooses to convey her mentality. Initially, she playfully compares her pregnant state to an “elephant,” a “house,” a ripening “melon,” and a “yeasty” loaf of bread. However, starting with the sixth line, it becomes clear that beneath these pithy musings run the undercurrents of anxiety. Plath begins to see herself merely as a “means”—almost an incubator, with no other worth besides that of birthing offspring. This culminates with the last line, where she realizes that she is forever changed, irrevocably. Her pregnancy was only the beginning of the train-ride; she must now become a mother. 4) Background: Plath was pregnant with her first child, Frieda, at the time of the poem's composition. Though most critics concur that Plath's healthiest relationships in life were with her two children, the poem suggests a deep ambivalence about motherhood. The basic conflict is the poem is that of duty vs. individuality. The narrator feels that by subsuming herself to the duty of motherhood, her own individuality is being stifled. Though the poem uses consistent first person, the ironic effect is that the speaker's individuality is only expressed in terms of the child she carries. She is aware of herself, but only in terms of what she cannot be. 3

5) The unsettling nature of “Metaphors” (The Colossus, William Heinemann Limited, 1960) arises from the dichotomy of Plath’s tone and the images she chooses to convey her mentality. Initially, she playfully compares her pregnant state to an “elephant,” a “house,” a ripening “melon,” and a “yeasty” loaf of bread. However, starting with the sixth line, it becomes clear that beneath these pithy musings run the undercurrents of anxiety. Plath begins to see herself merely as a “means”—almost an incubator, with no other worth besides that of birthing offspring. This culminates with the last line, where she realizes that she is forever changed, irrevocably. Her pregnancy was only the beginning of the train-ride; she must now become a mother.

34) Simile by N. Scott Momaday (1934-)

What did we say to each other That now we are as the deer Who walk in single file With heads high With ears forward With eyes watchful With hooves always placed on firm ground In whose limbs there is latent flight

1) The poem "A Simile" consists of mostly that, a simile. There are eight lines in the poem, and seven of the lines make up the simile. Only the first line says what is happening in actuality, but it is an important clue as to the meaning of the poem. That first line reads, "What did we say to each other..." This immediately clues the reader in to the fact something important was said between two people. The rest of the lines tell the reader that whatever was said caused a conflict. The people the poem refers to are now "as the deer," whose limbs are full of "latent flight." After what was said in the first line, the people are now flighty towards each other, perhaps frightened of what may come. 2) The simplicity of this poem is very powerful, and the simile itself is artfully crafted. Just by likening the two people that had the conflict to deer, so much is said about what their relationship is now like. The image of deer walking through the woods, always watchful and ready to flee at the slightest signal, is powerful and does all the work for N. Scott Momaday in this poem. 3) The poem is a simile poem, meaning the entire poem is a simile. Line 2 contains the comparison "and we are like the deer" and the rest of the poem describes in what manner his people are like the deer. 4) Momaday writes of the fate of Native Americans, having himself grwon up on the Kiawa Indian reservation. The deer is portrayed as submissive, yet noble, able to break forth without warning.

35) A Martian Sends a Postcard Home by Craig Raine (1944-)

Caxtons are mechanical birds with many wings and some are treasured for their markings-- they cause the eyes to melt or the body to shriek without pain. I have never seen one fly, but sometimes they perch on the hand. Mist is when the sky is tired of flight and rests its soft machine on the ground: then the world is dim and bookish like engravings under tissue paper. Rain is when the earth is television. It has the properites of making colours darker.

Model T is a room with the lock inside --

a key is turned to free the world

for movement, so quick there is a film to watch for anything missed.

But time is tied to the wrist or kept in a box, ticking with impatience.

In homes, a haunted apparatus sleeps, that snores when you pick it up.

If the ghost cries, they carry it to their lips and soothe it to sleep

with sounds. And yet, they wake it up deliberately, by tickling with a finger.

Only the young are allowed to suffer openly. Adults go to a punishment room

with water but nothing to eat. They lock the door and suffer the noises

alone. No one is exempt and everyone's pain has a different smell.

At night, when all the colours die, they hide in pairs

and read about themselves -- in colour, with their eyelids shut.

1) Craig Anthony Raine, FRSL (born 3 December 1944) is an English poet. Along with Christopher Reid, he is the best-known exponent of Martian poetry.[1] He was a fellow of New College, Oxford from 1991 to 2010 and is now emeritus professor. He has been the editor of Areté since 1999. 2) Based on the first six lines, we understand that the poem will be a description of human culture seen through the eyes of a Martian. The speaker uses the word “Caxtons” to refer to books. Englishman William Caxton, who lived during the fifteenth century, was the first person to print books in English. In these lines, the Martian compares books to birds. Like birds, books have wings (pages), and, like birds, they are marked in ways that give them value. Birds can be distinguished by their color(s), books by the words they contain. Because the speaker does not know the words for “cry” or “laugh,” he says that books can “cause the eyes to melt / or the body to shriek without pain,” referring to humans’ emotional response when they read books. In lines 5 and 6, the speaker returns again to the comparison of books to birds, focusing on the way in which humans frequently hold books. To the Martian, a book in a person’s hands looks like a bird perching. 3) Poets and philosophers have long asked if what we see is reality or illusion. In his “Allegory of the Cave” Plato claimed that the world we experience is a world of appearances—an imperfect copy of the real. The human world is a shadow world of the pure forms that exist in the realm of ideas. In “A Martian Sends a Postcard Home,” Raine underscores the notion that experience itself is insufficient for understanding the world, because we are all bound by personal and cultural ideas of what is. Another way of saying this is that experience is at once an interpretation and something to be interpreted. For

example, an activity that we frequently take for granted, reading, is a foreign concept for the Martian, whose experience exists outside of earthly conventions. He cannot conceive that words can make a human being laugh or cry, nor can he comprehend those responses. He describes what human beings do when they sleep as “reading,” implicitly seeing dreams as kinds of books. Although the Martian does not have the language to literally name the things and activities of human culture, by making connections to his own experience and culture, he is able to make sense of humanity and, in the process, allow (human) readers to see their own world in a fresh way. As a result, we see how our perceptions are caught up in our desires and how what we consider to be real is tied to our own conventions of language and naming.

Other Figures of Speech

36) You fit into me by Margaret Atwood (1939-) you fit into me like a hook into an eye a fish hook an open eye

1) Margaret Atwood's "You Fit Into Me" portrays the helplessness and pain of feeling trapped in an unhealthy romantic relationship. (I) The poem begins on a positive note (S with a little E). The speaker proclaims her lover a perfect "fit" in the opening line and title, (D) suggesting a relationship that is both emotionally and sexually satisfying (1). (E) She compares this fit to that of a "hook into an eye" (2). (D) This simile suggests their relationship is secure, just as a hook and eye holds clothing securely in place; it is as if they were made for each other, specifically designed to work together, to "fit". (E) However, a far more unpleasant side to their relationship is revealed in the following final stanza. (S) The perfectly suited hook and eye become his "fish hook" in her "open eye" (3-4). (D) This rather startling shift of imagery suggests the speaker's feeling of entrapment and helplessness. (E) It is as if she has taken the bait on his hook and entered a seemingly loving relationship only to discover too late her inability to break free from the bond. (E) The "open eye" (D) makes it clear that she sees the situation; she is in pain and suffers, but has lost control of her autonomy; she is aware that the source of her entrapment is his snare biding her to this unequal relationship, but there seems to be nothing she can do regain her independence. (E) In a larger sense, Atwood's poem might be viewed as paralleling the experience of many women in intimate relationships. A love that once seemed so perfect and promising begins to feel, for whatever reasons, like an overwhelming deception seemingly impossible to break free of. (AC) 2) The idea sentence merely introduces the basic idea of the poem that will be developed and explored in the paragraph; it does not try to say too much; it is just a beginning. From there, the situation or setting is quickly established ("the poem begins"). Then, the analysis jumps into the beginning details of poem itself, BUT IT HANDLES THE DETAILS ONE STEP AT A TIME! It does not try to describe the whole poem all at once....baby steps! For each detail paraphrased or quoted, the analysis attempts to provide as complete and thorough of explanation as possible. (As you get better at writing, you will notice that the ratio of D:E begins to increase in the direction of E.) 3) A second summary/situation/setting sentence with the transition "however" is used to emphasize the shift in the poem's meaning. Most poems have this sort of shift. A poem's basic structure might be described as a situation established first, and then a sort of shift that leads to a new insight, resolution, or further complication that seems unresolvable or is further commented upon. To put it another way, the poem often says, "This is the situation, this is how it plays out." D and E return as the second half of the poem is handled. Note that the E begins to dominate as the conclusion and resolution of the poem, and the analysis, is reached.

37) The Pulley by George Hearbert (1593-1633)

When God at first made man,

Having a glass of blessings standing by, “Let us,” said he, “pour on him all we can. Let the world’s riches, which dispersèd lie, Contract into a span.”

So strength first made a way; Then beauty flowed, then wisdom, honour, pleasure. When almost all was out, God made a stay, Perceiving that, alone of all his treasure, Rest in the bottom lay.

“For if I should,” said he, “Bestow this jewel also on my creature, He would adore my gifts instead of me, And rest in Nature, not the God of Nature; So both should losers be.

“Yet let him keep the rest, But keep them with repining restlessness; Let him be rich and weary, that at least, If goodness lead him not, yet weariness May toss him to my breast.”

1) “The Pulley” is both a myth of origins and a moral and spiritual fable; these two genres overlap because, for Herbert, one’s devotional responsibilities are perfectly consistent with and flow inevitably from who one is. Despite the brevity and simplicity of the poem, several key facts are affirmed. For example, this version of the Creation myth emphasizes the dignity of humankind, bestowed by a God who is thoughtful, generous, and kind. The story of Creation in the Book of Genesis is astonishing: A spiritual breath raises dusty clay to life in the form of Adam. In Herbert’s poem, the Creation seems even more splendid, as humankind is described as the sum and epitome of all the world’s riches, and God is a being who communicates easily and cordially with His creation. 2) Nestled somewhere within the Age of Shakespeare and the Age of Milton is George Herbert. There is no Age of Herbert: he did not consciously fashion an expansive literary career for himself, and his characteristic gestures, insofar as these can be gleaned from his poems and other writings, tend to be careful self-scrutiny rather than rhetorical pronouncement; local involvement rather than broad social engagement; and complex, ever-qualified lyric contemplation rather than epic or dramatic mythmaking. This is the stuff of humility and integrity, not celebrity. But even if Herbert does not appear to be one of the larger-than-life cultural monuments of seventeenth-century England—a position that virtually requires the qualities of irrepressible ambition and boldness, if not self-regarding arrogance, that he attempted to flee—he is in some ways a pivotal figure: enormously popular, deeply and broadly influential, and arguably the most skillful and important British devotional lyricist of this or any other time. 3) There is, as Stanley Stewart has convincingly demonstrated, a substantial School of Herbert cutting across all ages. Stewart focuses on the seventeenth-century poets who professed allegiance to Herbert and whose works are markedly indebted to his techniques, subjects, and devotional temperament. He comes up with an impressive list, including some admittedly minor poets, such as Henry Colman, Ralph Knevet, Mildmay Fane, Christopher Harvey, and Thomas Washbourne, and some considerably more talented poets, such as Henry Vaughan, Richard Crashaw, and Thomas Traherne. Extended through modern times, the School of Herbert includes Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emily Dickinson, Gerard Manley Hopkins, T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, Elizabeth Bishop, Anthony Hecht, and, perhaps Robert Frost—although these later poets are far less simply derivative and single-minded in their devotion to Herbert than were his seventeenth-century followers.

38) Money by Dana Gioia (1950-)

Money is a kind of poetry. - Wallace Stevens Money, the long green, cash, stash, rhino, jack or just plain dough. Chock it up, fork it over, shell it out. Watch it burn holes through pockets. To be made of it! To have it to burn! Greenbacks, double eagles, megabucks and Ginnie Maes. It greases the palm, feathers a nest, holds heads above water, makes both ends meet. Money breeds money. Gathering interest, compounding daily. Always in circulation.

Money. You don't know where it's been, but you put it where your mouth is. And it talks.

1) Michael Dana Gioia (/ˈdʒɔɪ.ə/; born December 24, 1950) is an American poet and writer. He spent the first fifteen years of his career writing at night while working for General Foods Corporation. After his 1991 essay "Can Poetry Matter?" in The Atlantic generated international attention, Gioia quit business to pursue writing full-time. He also served as the chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) between 2003 and 2009. Gioia has published five books of poetry and three volumes of literary criticism as well as opera libretti, song cycles, translations, and over two dozen literary anthologies. Gioia is the Judge Widney Professor of Poetry and Public Culture at the University of Southern California, where he now teaches.[1] In December 2015 he became the California State Poet Laureate.[2] He currently divides his time between Los Angeles and Sonoma County, California. 2) Tone The tone of the poem "Money" is ironic, sarcastic, and pejorative 3) All of these things are used ironically as other nicknames for money. Here, the author shows other financial assets: coins (“double eagles”), lottery (“megabucks”) and mortgages (“Ginnie Maes”). It is one more proof from Dana Gioia that money is everywhere around. 4) In stanza three the speaker describes the importance of money for a persons mere survival. feathers a nest / holds heads above water / makes both ends meet 5) The imagery of feathering a nest is used to illustrate a person who needs to provide for their family. Money keeps people afloat because it allows them to pay their bills therefore they aren’t “drowning” . I think that money can make people drown though because people can get themselves in debt. Since many people rely so heavily on money because of family and also to keep up their lifestyle it brings the obsession of it from stanza one.