Analysis of “Poetry and Religion” by Les Murray. Poetry is an imaginative awareness expressed through meaning, sound, and rhythmic language choices so as to evoke an emotional response. It is also an ancient form that has gone through numerous and drastic reinvention over time. The nature of poetry as an authentic and individual mode of expression makes it nearly impossible to define. While religion is a collection of cultural systems, belief systems, and worldviews that establishes symbols that relate humanity to spiritual and, sometimes, to moral values.
Though this may be the case, however, in discussing poetry as literature, we should avoid overtly biographizing or psychologizing these works. Also, we should be cautious that the creative persona “I” may not be necessarily recognized as the poet herself. Northrop Frye once suggests that “we shall find Emily Dickinson most rewarding if we look in her poems for what her imagination has created, nor for what event may have suggested it.” (qtd. in Kher: 3) There are many poems to do with her feelings of being bereaved such as “I never lost as much but twice” (J 49), “After great pain, a formal feeling comes –” (J 341), “My Life closed twice before its close” (J 1732). In these poems, the lost object is never identified but only the feeling of lost is implied in the
. In Emily Dickinson’s “We grow accustomed to the Dark” and Robert Frost’s Acquainted with the Night, darkness is the key factor. But in that sole similarity lays their differences. In one poem the author seeks to find light in order to come out of the darkness they are in, and in the other poem the author doesn’t seek light at all. In fact they accept the darkness and just live with it not fighting it off.
It is a great power to be able to mold words that will affect one’s emotions and conscience. No poet, in my opinion, grabbed this power and used it to get across his feelings more than the Edgar Allan Poe. In his poetry, Poe seems to focus on one particular girl…“Poe Girl,” who he kills in most of his poems. This repeated death of the Poe Girl has grabbed the attention of many feminists. Though feminists are an intently focused group of people, advocating for women’s rights; that does not mean that all feminists interpret things the same way.
The selected sonnets from Aurora Leigh and Other Poems simultaneously conform with and challenge Barrett Browning’s context through the theme of mortality, and the notion that love transcends death. The concept of death is prominent throughout Barrett Browning’s sonnet sequence, and draws parallels to the excessive mortality that occurred within both the Victorian era and Barrett Browning’s personal context. However, Barrett Browning challenges her time by contrasting death and love, and overcoming the Victorian era’s fear of death by suggesting that love transcends death. In Sonnet I, Barrett Browning depicts conflict between death and love, setting up this theme for the remainder of the sonnet sequence and foreshadowing that death is to be conquered by love. Barrett Browning manipulates direct speech and colour symbolism in the passage “Guess now who holds thee?
[S]he who is without sin… Can we forgive the woman who transgresses? An examination of The Abortion as Anne Sexton’s participation in the pro-life/ pro-choice debate. The stark, painful disclosures of Anne Sexton’s poetry make a distinction between poet and persona difficult at times. The fact that her writing was encouraged as part of her therapy adds to the critic’s dilemma in separating fact from fiction when reading Sexton’s work. There is at times a tendency to assume that the troubled persona in the poems is necessarily Anne Sexton.
In the poem ‘I Could Not Stop for Death’, the speaker says: “And I had put away/My labor and my leisure too” (6-7). This suggests that with death, everything must stop. In this particular case, the speaker says that she “could not stop for death” suggesting that it is feared, but in this case, it came with some civility, not its
During the second and third stanzas one may see the speaker sort of longing to keep her life, which seems to make her envy the youth. In the second stanza the speaker talks about how they “slowly drove” and that Death “knew no haste” (Dickinson). One may pick up from this that the speaker is now focusing on what is going to happen in that moment rather than continuing to ignore that she is close to the end of her life, like she was doing before. In the third stanza the speaker tells how her and Death pass by the school where children are at play during recess (Dickinson). This obviously symbolizes youth, which is an age that is typically found far away from death; she may have referred to youth because she is longing to be young again so that she may continue living her life.
The form of Thomas’s poem, “Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night,” provides rhyme, repetition, and length that present the concealed theme to fight death. For one thing, adding rhyme to his poem, “Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night,” Dylan Thomas uses this technique of form to offer the dominant idea, fighting death. When Thomas uses rhyme in his poem he provides the audience with words that define the theme. For instance, in addition to rhyming, Thomas uses words metaphorically in each stanza of his work. Metaphoric words are used as a figure of speech to compare two objects, but not taken literally.
Three poems which are mainly based on time but also use time to bring forth other themes are Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress”, Emily Dickinson’s “Because I Could Not Stop for Death” and T.S Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. In Dickinson’s “Because I Could Not Stop for Death” there are two major themes time and death and as is the case with many other poems of the same nature, time is used to bring more emphasis to and progress the theme of death. The first stanza refers to Death as a gentleman for he “kindly stopped” for the speaker as he was to take her along her journey. This is in high contrast to a more common view of death in which it is personified as a sinister unforgiving character who is merciless and unforgiving in his task. The second stanza states “We slowly drove—He knew no haste” (line5) which points out how slowly Death’s carriage progresses while taking the speaker away as if time was of no importance.