In Wild Oats It explains that a person, over the course of time, comes to realise that his greatest desires of love, are unattainable, and second best things will have to suffice. The central purpose of this poem is to show that love is one of these great desires and despite flashes of promise it contains scarcely anything that is more than fragmentary. Larkin reveals this through tone and diction. Both poets seem to focus a lot on the physical side of love where lust and desire are involved however Abse makes it sound more sensual and even spiritual when he speaks of Eros in his poem. Larkin portrays this sense of objectification in his poem with regards to woman as he describes a woman as a ‘bosomy English rose’ and then follows on to call her ‘beautiful’ throughout the poem portraying the sexual lust involved with love.
To what extent are there common threads in the poetry of at least two poets you have studied this year? Futility is an inevitable aspect of human nature. Throughout the creative elements of poetry, the poets Sylvia Plath and Wilfred Owen have extensively explored the central concept of futility through varying perspectives. By the utilisation of poetic techniques such as metaphors, symbolism, and irony, the effects of conformity, death, and loss of self-identity have been reflected upon by the poets. A society is a place where people should feel a sense of belonging, but a society exhibiting a lack of compassion is one that is sure to crumble.
The puzzle of the outside sphere of Maud, for example, the point of view of Maud herself, remains unresolved. The poem is a distorted view of a single reality, and the variation in meter can be seen to reflect the manic-depressive emotional tone of the speaker. While the poem was Tennyson's own favourite (he was known very willingly to have recited the poem in its entirety on social
n the poem "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" by T. S. Eliot, the main character, J. Alfred Prufrock is seen as an anti-hero. His character and identity comes through strongly in the poem as a shy and introverted man who is socially inept, extremely self conscious, lacking in self confidence and wallowing in self-pity, yet desiring for people to notice him. The composer shows this through his use of allusions, powerful imagery to create vignettes of Prufrock's life and the form of the poem as a disorderly train of thought, implying rather than telling. Throughout the poem, T.S. Eliot uses many allusions in order to illustrate Prufrock's character and identity.
Edgar Allan Poe once said, “I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity” (Cummings). Poe’s somewhat pessimistic outlook on life can be found in many of his writings as a theme. “The Fall of the House of Usher,” published by the afore mentioned pessimist in 1839, is a short story about the master of a mansion, Roderick Usher, who suffers mental deterioration caused by his paranoia. His paranoia causes him to defile the mansion’s residents and also leads to the decay of the mansion itself. In the story, Usher recites the poem “The Haunted Mansion.” It is a poem about a palace, once glorious and mighty, becomes “pallid” and “desolate.” At first glance, it may appear to the reader that this is the true meaning of the poem and all that Poe had sought to express.
All that can save them is the speaking tone of voice somehow entangled in the words and fastened to the page for the ear of imagination.” Robert Frost, a renowned poet, stresses that the speaking voice of the poem is more important than the words itself and the poetry of Pablo Neruda could not agree more. Throughout his life, there are two major speaking voices which he puts on; that of lust and insatiable longing in his youth, as shown in poems such as “Body of a Woman”, and that of acceptance in his later years, as shown in “Sonnet XVII”, although his feelings of yearning never quite disappear. His interpretations of his feelings causes the reader to step back and reassess what they thought to be familiar emotions and the subtlety in which he does this just seems to emphasise the emotions. In “Body of a Woman”, Neruda’s speaking voice is full of longing and desire, and this shows through the various imagery he creates for us, the reader. The poem is essentially a poem in praise of the female body and Neruda speaks as though he worships it.
He explains the most popular meaning pertaining to this literary genre is the dark emotional aspect, and that dark romanticism can also be a general ethos related to a person’s individual outlook on life (1). This poem’s first stanza, introduced the Soul as being in a “bandaged” situation. The reader interprets the Soul as being restrained and unable to move: The Soul has Bandaged moments – When too appalled to stir – She feels some ghastly Fright come up, Santos 2 And stop to look at her – (1-4) According to her biography, by the age of 20, Dickinson had begun the path to seclusion that would take control of the rest of her life. Therefore, it is easy for the reader to connect this stanza to Emily’s lifestyle of living isolated from society. Leverkuhn adds, “As a literary genre, dark romanticism tends to be engaged with the idea of darkness in the human soul, the concept of original sin, or a certain dark outlook on society in general” (1).
Many people were taken in by this nineteenth-century writer’s harsh outlook on life in his work. One is capable of only imagining the things that Edgar Allan Poe has, throughout his deeply saddening and depressing time here on earth, brought to life in his writing by simply printing in words different sections and scenarios of his ambiguous life. Edgar A. Poe lived a very somber orphan life which later became the foundation to the origin of his gothic nature and writing. Poe is recognized as a genius who reinvented the gothic tale of mystery and horror for his time (Introduction 1). Poe placed the reader inside the tortured minds and lives of people confronting the supernatural.
Unknown Darkness To write about things nobody likes to talk about or even mention in real life makes Nathaniel Hawthorne a great poet and a famous one at that. Hawthorne wrote so much about the American Colonies and how they lived their lives, he captured the smallest details of that time. Imagine being a writer in those times trying to find things to write about, in some of his poems you can see what a morbid mind he had, and it’s possibly due to his environment. Some of his Ancestors were direct descendants of Puritan judges. Which might have influenced his all famous “Scarlet Letter” and “The Minister’s Black Veil”, both these poems evoke each readers own personal judgments on human nature.
In the poem, Roethke establishes the connection between his self and the self’s labor of love. Although his art is natural, it is so difficult that it is painful. His secrets do not speak; they “cry aloud” (line 1) Saying that his “truths are all fore-known,” (line 7) Roethke acknowledges a personal clairvoyance, as though he has meditated on the self-many times. “This anguish self-revealed,” (line 8) the journey through his own house, the anguish self, has taken him inward to a place of universal mystery, a deep room of creativity. Roethke only approaches rage at the end of the poem, as if pure creativity is like fire life-enhancing or all consuming.