● 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 1 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). 2 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.