Poetry Unit Readings

Eagleton:
A poem is a fictional1, verbally inventive2 moral statement3 in which it is the
author, rather than the printer or word processor, who decides where the lines
should end.
1

Fictional means that even if the poem refers to real people and events, what we really care about
isnt its factual truth. Instead, we care about its moral truth. In other words we care whether or not the
poem is true about life in general.
2

Poetry uses language in original or surprising ways; but not all the timesometimes it can be very
plain. But even when the language is plain, it draws attention to itself. Breaking a text into lines is a cue
to pay attention to the language itself, to experience the words as material events, in vibrations (sound)
and ink (shape), rather than to read right through them to the meaning. Readers of poetry pay attention
to the bond between the physical word and its meaning.
3

The word moral here, isnt really about right and wrong. Instead, it is being used in an earlier sense.
Before religions took over the word morality, it meant the study of how to live most fully and enjoyably.
Poems are moral statements because they deal in human values, meanings and purposes. Like all art,
poetry is about living well.

Sonnet 18
by William Shakespeare

Interpretive focus: Metaphor and

Form
Form: Shakespearean sonnet

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 dimm'd;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature's changing course, untrimm'd;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st 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.

Sonnet 116
by William Shakespeare

Interpretive focus: Metaphor and

Form
Form: Shakespearean sonnet

Let me not to the marriage of true minds

Admit impediments1. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no; it is an ever-fixed mark,
That looks on tempests2, and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark3,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

Impediments: obstruction; hindrance; obstacle.

Tempest: a violent windstorm, especially one with rain, hail, or snow.
3
Bark: ship, sailboat
2

The Passionate Shepherd to His Love4

Interpretive focus: Rhythm and Meter

By Christopher Marlowe (1590s)

Come live with me and be my love,

A belt of straw and ivy buds,

And we will all the pleasures prove

With coral clasps and amber studs;

That hills and valleys, dale5 and field,

And if these pleasures may thee move,

And all the craggy mountains yield.

Come live with me, and be my love.

There will we sit upon the rocks,

Thy silver dishes for thy meat

And see the shepherds feed their flocks,

As precious as the gods do eat,

By shallow rivers to whose falls

Shall on an ivory table be

Melodious birds sing madrigals6.

Prepared each day for thee and me.

There I will make thee beds of roses

The shepherd swains shall dance and sing

And a thousand fragrant posies,

For thy delight each May-morning:

A cap of flowers, and a kirtle7

If these delights thy mind may move,

Embroider'd all with leaves of myrtle8;

Then live with me and be my love.

A gown made of the finest wool

Which from our pretty lambs we pull;
Fair lind slippers for the cold,
With buckles of the purest gold;

A carpe diem themed poem, meaning seize the day. Also a famous example of a pastoral poem (shepherds,
pasture, idyllic country life)
5
Dale: a broad valley
6
Madrigal: a lyrical poem suitable to be set to music. Popular in 16th and 17th centuries.
7
Kirtle: a loose gown
8
Myrtle: A shrub with evergreen leaves and white flowers

To His Coy Mistress

Interpretive focus: Hyperbole and

wordplay

By Andrew Marvell
Had we but world enough and time,

But at my back I always hear

This coyness9, lady, were no crime.

Times wingd chariot hurrying near;

We would sit down, and think which way

And yonder all before us lie

To walk, and pass our long loves day.

Deserts of vast eternity.

Thou by the Indian Ganges10 side

Thy beauty shall no more be found;

Shouldst rubies find; I by the tide

Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound

Of Humber11 would complain. I would

My echoing song; then worms shall try

Love you ten years before the

flood12,

That long-preserved virginity,

And you should, if you please, refuse

And your quaint14 honour turn to dust,

Till the conversion of the Jews.

And into ashes all my lust;

My vegetable13 love should grow

The graves a fine and private place,

Vaster than empires and more slow;

But none, I think, do there embrace.

An hundred years should go to praise

Now therefore, while the youthful hue

Thine eyes, and on thy forehead gaze;

Sits on thy skin like morning dew,

Two hundred to adore each breast,

And while thy willing soul transpires

But thirty thousand to the rest;

At every pore with instant fires,

An age at least to every part,

Now let us sport us while we may,

And the last age should show your heart.

And now, like amorous birds of prey,

For, lady, you deserve this state,

Rather at once our time devour

Nor would I love at lower rate.

Than languish in his slow-chapped power.

Let us roll all our strength and all
Our sweetness up into one ball,
And tear our pleasures with rough strife
Through the iron gates of life:
Thus, though we cannot make our sun
Stand still, yet we will make him run.

Coyness: artfully or affectedly shy or reserved; slyly hesitant

Ganges: famous and important river in India
11
A river on the northeast coast of England. Marvell spent his childhood in Hull, situated along the river Humber.
12
The biblical flood as described in the book of Genesis
13
Vegetable love: inactive, unused
14
Quaint: can mean skillful or artful; also refers to a charming nature or attractiveness; Marvell would also be
referring to a slang name for female sexual organs (a.k.a. quinnie)
10

since feeling is first

by e. e. cummings (1926)

Interpretive focus: Form and Word Choice

Form: Free Verse

since feeling is first

who pays any attention
to the syntax15 of things
will never wholly kiss you;
wholly to be a fool
while Spring is in the world
my blood approves,
and kisses are better fate
than wisdom
lady i swear by all flowers. Don't cry
the best gesture of my brain is less than
your eyelids' flutter which says
we are for each other: then
laugh, leaning back in my arms
for life's not a paragraph
And death i think is no parenthesis16

15
16

Syntax: the rules for the formation of grammatical sentences in a language (sentence structure and punctuation)
Parenthesis: The symbols ( ); interrupt sentences without affecting their structure or ending them.

Sonnet 43 (How do I love thee?)

By Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1850)

Interpretive focus: Repetition,

Hyperbole
Form: Petrarchan sonnet

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.

I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of Being and ideal Grace.
I love thee to the level of every day's
Most quiet need, by sun and candlelight.
I love thee freely, as men strive for Right;
I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise.
I love with a passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints, -- I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life! -- and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.

"Aedh Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven"

By William Butler Yeats (1899)
Had I the heavens embroidered cloths,
Enwrought17 with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

17

Enwrought: worked in a decorative pattern

Interpretive focus: Repetition

If You Forget Me
By Pablo Neruda (1952)

Interpretive focus: Form

Form: Free Verse

I want you to know

If you think it long and mad,

one thing.

the wind of banners

that passes through my life,

You know how this is:

and you decide

if I look

to leave me at the shore

at the crystal moon, at the red branch

of the heart where I have roots,

of the slow autumn at my window,

remember

if I touch

that on that day,

near the fire

at that hour,

the impalpable18 ash

I shall lift my arms

or the wrinkled body of the log,

and my roots will set off

everything carries me to you,

to seek another land.

as if everything that exists,

aromas, light, metals,

But

were little boats

if each day,

that sail

each hour,

toward those isles of yours that wait for me.

you feel that you are destined for me

with implacable19 sweetness,

Well, now,

if each day a flower

if little by little you stop loving me

climbs up to your lips to seek me,

I shall stop loving you little by little.

ah my love, ah my own,
in me all that fire is repeated,

If suddenly

in me nothing is extinguished or forgotten,

you forget me

my love feeds on your love, beloved,

do not look for me,

and as long as you live it will be in your arms

for I shall already have forgotten you.

without leaving mine.

18
19

Impalpable: incapable of being perceived by the sense of touch; difficult for the mind to grasp
Implacable: not to be appeased, mollified, or pacified; merciless, unbending

"Holy Sonnet X"

By John Donne (1633)

Interpretive focus: Personification

Form: Petrarchan sonnet

Death be not proud, though some have called thee

Mighty and dreadful, for, thou art not so,
For, those, whom thou think'st, thou dost overthrow,
Die not, poore death, nor yet canst thou kill me.
From rest and sleepe, which but thy pictures20 bee,
Much pleasure, then from thee, much more must flow,
And soonest our best men with thee doe goe,
Rest of their bones, and souls deliverie.
Thou art slave to Fate, Chance, kings, and desperate men,
And dost with poyson, warre, and sicknesse dwell,
And poppie21, or charmes can make us sleepe as well,
And better than thy stroake; why swell'st thou then;
One short sleepe past, wee wake eternally,
And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die22.

20

Pictures: Donne is referring to dreams

Poppy: drugs, opiates.
22
The last line alludes to 1 Corinthians 15:26: "The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death".
21

Because I could not stop for Death

Emily Dickinson23, 1830 - 1886

Interpretive focus: Personification

and Metaphor

Because I could not stop for Death

Or rather He passed us

He kindly stopped for me

The Dews drew quivering and chill

The Carriage held but just Ourselves

For only Gossamer24, my Gown

And Immortality.

My Tippet25 only Tulle26

We slowly drove He knew no haste

We paused before a House that seemed

And I had put away

A Swelling of the Ground

My labor and my leisure too,

The Roof was scarcely visible

For His Civility

The Cornice27 in the Ground

We passed the School, where Children strove

Since then 'tis Centuries and yet

At Recess in the Ring

Feels shorter than the Day

We passed the Fields of Gazing Grain

I first surmised the Horses Heads28

We passed the Setting Sun

Were toward Eternity

23

Emily Dickinson was a social recluse who rarely left her house. Her poems were found amongst her things after
she had died, later to be published and recognized as some of the finest verse of the English language.
24
Gossamer: a fine, filmy cobweb seen on grass or bushes or floating in the air in calm weather, especially in
autumn
25
Tippet: a scarf or neck covering
26
Tulle: A thin netting, in her time made of silk
27
Cornice: in architectural terms, near the roof of the house
28
Horses heads: referring to the four horsemen of the apocalypse death, war, famine, disease

Crossing the Bar

Interpretive focus: Metaphor

Lord Alfred Tennyson (1889)

Sunset and evening star,
And one clear call for me!
And may there be no moaning of the bar29,
When I put out to sea,
But30 such a tide as moving seems asleep,
Too full for sound and foam,
When that which drew from out the boundless deep
Turns again home.
Twilight and evening bell,
And after that the dark!
And may there be no sadness of farewell,
When I embark;
For tho from out our bourne of Time and Place
The flood31 may bear me far,
I hope to see my Pilot32 face to face
When I have crossd the bar33.

29

Moaning of the bar: the sound of the ocean flowing into a sandbar (think low tide)
Substitute but for rather. Tennyson is comparing low tide to a high, full tide here
31
Flood: when the tide is rising, or flooding in
32
Pilot: the person who steers the ship
33
Bar: bar this time refers to the horizon
30

Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night

Dylan Thomas34, (1947)

Interpretive focus: Form and Tone

Form: Villanelle

Do not go gentle into that good night,

Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

34

A famous Welsh poet, he died in New York City at age 39 from pneumonia no doubt complicated by alcoholism
and his refusal to get proper medical treatment

Sonnet XVII - On His Blindness (When I consider how my light is spent)

By John Milton (1673)
Form: Petrarchan sonnet

When I consider how my light35 is spent

Ere36 half my days in this dark world and wide,
And that one talent which is death to hide
Lodg'd37 with me useless, though my soul more bent
To serve therewith my Maker, and present
My true account, lest he returning chide38;
"Doth God exact day-labour, light denied?"
I fondly ask. But Patience to prevent
That murmur, soon replies: "God doth39 not need
Either man's work or his own gifts; who best
Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best. His state
Is kingly. Thousands at his bidding speed
And post40 o'er land and ocean without rest41:
They also serve who only stand and wait."

35

John Milton went blind, a result of staying up late into the night to read and write by candlelight. His light refers
to both his life and his sight
36
Ere: before
37
Lodgd: lodged, or stuck
38
Chide: express disapproval, scold
39
Doth not: does not
40
Post: travel
41
Milton is referring to thousands of angels, but possible also other devout servants like Milton

Dover Beach42

Interpretive focus: Extended

Metaphor, Imagery, Tone

Matthew Arnold, 1867

The sea is calm tonight.

The Sea of Faith

The tide is full, the moon lies fair

Was once, too, at the full, and round earths shore

Upon the straits; on the French coast, the light

Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled47.

Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,

But now I only hear

Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.

Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,

Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!

Retreating, to the breath

Only, from the long line of spray

Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear

Where the sea meets the

moon-blanched43

land,

And naked shingles48 of the world.

Listen! you hear the grating roar

Ah, love, let us be true

Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,

To one another! for the world, which seems

At their return, up the high strand,

To lie before us like a land of dreams,

Begin, and cease, and then again begin,

So various, so beautiful, so new,

With tremulous cadence44 slow, and bring

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

The eternal note of sadness in.

Nor certitude49, nor peace, nor help for pain;

And we are here as on a darkling50 plain

Sophocles long ago

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

Heard it on the Aegean45, and it brought

Into his mind the turbid ebb and

Where ignorant armies clash by night.

flow46

Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

42

The cliffs of Dover (in England) are tall, sheer a stunning landscape. In good conditions, the coast of France can
be seen across the English Straight.
43
Blanched: whitened
44
Tremulous cadence: a nervous, slow rhythm
45
Sophocles was an ancient Greek author of tragedies. The Aegean Sea is on the east coast of Greece.
46
Ebb and flow: tidal imagery; the tide ebbs out (recedes) and then floods (rises)
47
bright girdle furled: a girdle was like a sash or fabric belt worn around the waist
48
Shingles: in this context, shingles are small, waterworn stones or pebbles such as lie in loose sheets or beds on a
beach.
49
Certitude: freedom from doubt, especially in matters of faith or opinion; certainty.
50
Darkling: darkening

The Second Coming

W. B. Yeats, (1919)
Turning and turning in the widening gyre51
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Interpretive focus: Imagery,

Metaphor
Form: Free Verse

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide52 is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction53, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming54 is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi55
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant56 desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem57 to be born?

51

Gyre: a ring-like, circular course of motion. Think of a tornado, or a large whirlpool. This image is central to the
poem and signifies confusion and discord
52
Written in 1919, the blood-dimmed tide is a certain reference to the killing fields of the First World War; it could
also, however, be referring to the communist revolution in Russia (blood = red)
53
Conviction: a fixed or firm belief. Think backbone.
54
The second coming of Christ, signalling the apocalypse
55
Spiritus mundi: the universal soul, or collective [un]consciousness. Yeats was somewhat of a mystic, and used
his poetry to develop his own mythology and spirituality
56
Indignant: feeling, characterized by, or expressing strong displeasure at something considered unjust, offensive,
insulting
57
Bethlehem: the birthplace of Jesus

The World Is Too Much With Us

William Wordsworth (1807)

Interpretive focus: Allusion

Form: Petrarchan Sonnet

The world is too much with us; late and soon,

Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!58
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers,
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not.--Great God! Id rather be
A pagan suckled in a creed outworn59;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea60,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus61 rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton62 blow his wreathd horn.

58

Sordid boon: a base or selfish exchange, favour

Pagan suckled in a creed outworn: brought up with pre-Christian / monotheistic beliefs, generally worship of the
earth, sun, moon, and elements
60
a tract of open ground, especially grassland; meadow.
61
Proteus: An early Greek god of the sea, related to the elusive nature of the sea or its constantly changing, liquid
quality; Old Man of the Sea
62
Triton: Greek messenger god of the sea, who used a conch shell as a trumpet to calm or raise waves.
59

Precision
By Enos Watts (1974)

Interpretive focus: imagery, word

choice
Form: Free Verse

According to the elemental proposition

the island
should not have been there;
but it withstood the assault
from all compass points
of unpunctilious63 waves
that struck out blindly
taking only
the weakest parts of the rocks:
And the men
were not broken by the sea.
But other
horn-rimmed, vertically moving
half-men
knowing nothing of the taste of tears
drew neat, symmetrical
paradigms64
and did
on some leisurely afternoons
what the sea could not do
in a thousand years.

63
64

Unpunctilious: Imprecise, careless, without aim

Paradigms: patterns, frameworks (possibly of ideas)

Birches

Interpretive focus: Imagery

Robert Frost (1916)

When I see birches bend to left and right

One by one he subdued his fathers trees

Across the lines of straighter darker trees,

By riding them down over and over again

I like to think some boys been swinging them.

Until he took the stiffness out of them,

But swinging doesnt bend them down to stay

And not one but hung limp, not one was left

As ice-storms do. Often you must have seen them

For him to conquer. He learned all there was

Loaded with ice a sunny winter morning

To learn about not launching out too soon

After a rain. They click upon themselves

And so not carrying the tree away

As the breeze rises, and turn many-colored

Clear to the ground. He always kept his poise

As the stir cracks and crazes their enamel.

To the top branches, climbing carefully

Soon the suns warmth makes them shed crystal shells

With the same pains you use to fill a cup

Shattering and avalanching on the snow-crust--

Up to the brim, and even above the brim.

Such heaps of broken glass to sweep away

Then he flung outward, feet first, with a swish,

Youd think the inner dome of heaven had fallen.

Kicking his way down through the air to the ground.

They are dragged to the withered bracken 65 by the load,

So was I once myself a swinger of birches.

And they seem not to break; though once they are bowed

And so I dream of going back to be.

So low for long, they never right themselves:

Its when Im weary of considerations,

You may see their trunks arching in the woods

And life is too much like a pathless wood

Years afterwards, trailing their leaves on the ground

Where your face burns and tickles with the cobwebs

Like girls on hands and knees that throw their hair

Broken across it, and one eye is weeping

Before them over their heads to dry in the sun.

From a twigs having lashed across it open.

But I was going to say when Truth broke in

Id like to get away from earth awhile

With all her matter-of-fact about the ice-storm

And then come back to it and begin over.

I should prefer to have some boy bend them

May no fate willfully misunderstand me

As he went out and in to fetch the cows--

And half grant what I wish and snatch me away

Some boy too far from town to learn baseball,

Not to return. Earths the right place for love:

Whose only play was what he found himself,

I dont know where its likely to go better.

Summer or winter, and could play alone.

Id like to go by climbing a birch tree,

And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk
Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more,
But dipped its top and set me down again.
That would be good both going and coming back.
One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.

65

Withered bracken: old clumps of fern in the forest

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

By Robert Frost (1922)

Interpretive focus: Imagery, tone,

sound effects

Whose woods these are I think I know.

His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.
My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year66.
He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sounds the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.
The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

66

Evidently this poem is set during winter solstice the shortest day and longest night of the year.