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Analyses of Poems Following are both partial and full analyses of poems for your consideration.. Please note that they do not necessarily meet the specific requirements of the paper you will write, as outlined above. In other words, when you write your own analysis, you will want to write it according to what appears above. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Analysis #1 (Partial) “Lord Randal” is a somber literary ballad of murder and betrayal. The poem succeeds in creating a mood and intriguing readers through rhythm and arrangement of facts, rather than, the customary imagery. The anonymous author recounts this dramatic irony in the form of five questions and five answers each of which is followed by a refrain and are the outline for all quatrains. My wonder at the emotional impact yielded through such a casual structure, is the inducement behind this particular selection. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Analysis #2 (Partial)
Relationsips with Fathers The narrator of “My Papa’s Waltz” by Theodore Roethke discusses a very heartbreaking and distressful situation when looking back at his childhood remembering a scene (perhaps one frequently enacted) where he and his drunken father waltz wildly through the house. An interpretation of “My Papa’s Waltz” takes into account the complexity of what the speaker feels that are bought about by the father. A dance is supposed to bring two people closer but here it has a darker side to it that makes one realize the powerfully unsettling emotion under the surface of the poem. Theodore Roethke manipulates our emotional response to the poem through a number of literary conventions, some of which play on the conventions of a waltz. The speaker sets a picture by establishing frightening images followed by some comforting ones. The speaker begins a sort of perturbing image: “The whiskey on your breath /could make a small boy dizzy” (line 8). By this line one can imagine the little boys plight of having to go along with this waltz. The second stanza begins with words “We romped until the pans/slid from the kitchen shelf” (line 5). Although delight in the romp are obvious, those feelings are shadowed . . . ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Analysis #3 (Full) Earth’s the Right Place for Love ------------------------------------- I. Introduction, with the last two sentences offering the thesis. ---------------------------------------------------- Robert Frost is often misread as a “Currier and Ives” poet, a verbal painter of pretty scenes with his focus on rural New England. His poems are much more than pretty pictures, and Frost himself speaks often about the symbolic meanings and underlying elements present in his poetry. Some of his pieces are sorrowful, pictures of characters who are emotionally estranged from life. Even his most optimistic poems are tempered by tension, anxiety, and uncertainty. “Birches” is an up-beat piece reflecting the emotions of a narrator who would gladly exchange heaven for a series of earthly lives, all because “Earth’s the right place for love” (52). Yet “Birches” is a lonely piece, as the only human figures present are the narrator and the boy of his imagination, both alone among the trees with no one in sight to share in either the poet’s wonder or the boy’s accomplishments. The poem begins with a description of birch trees leaning in a New England forest, and a narrator’s wistful dream that they might have been bent down by a boy---a boy who has made a passion of “swinging” birches (3). The narrator later explains how to swing birches, every detail from “not launching out too soon” (33) to flinging “outward, feet first, with a swish” (39). He even offers an imaginary boy, one who is “too far from town to learn baseball”(26) to swing the birches. Is the boy lonely? Is his life so narrow that he can find no entertainment but swinging birches? Is this an empty obsession and a hollow pleasure, even as he “subdue..[s] [all]… his father’s trees” (28)? Our poet does not seem to think so. He no more allows such emotions to intrude on the life of his fantasy boy than he allows reality into his poem earlier, in the segment where he claims, not quite accurately, that “Truth broke in” (21). Yes, there were ice storms, and it was ice storms and not a boy that bent the birches (5-16). Our narrator admits that much. But the poet’s ice storms are not cold and dismal. The storms are followed by sunny mornings, with the sun turning the trees’ icy coating to crystal prisms and the poet talking about the ice clicking on the breeze and then falling to earth as broken glass (16), at first suggesting waste and ruin, but then becoming the fallen inner dome of heaven (17), a vision more of magic than of loss. For the birches, dragged and bent by the load of ice (14), we may think of them as figures wearied by the loads life has placed on them, but our poet does not. He speaks of them as young girls drying their hair in the sun (16-20), an image of youth and scarcely veiled eroticism. In the real world, there are times when “life is too much like a pathless wood” (44) and when “…one eye is weeping / From a twig’s having lashed across it open”(46-47), but these times no more dampen our narrator’s dreams than does the “Truth” of the ice storms or the loneliness of the boy he describes. Indeed, he wishes to “get away from earth awhile” (48), but only for a while. He tempers his request for escape with the vigorous protest that he only wants a moment’s rest from his troubles. He does not want to leave earth and life behind (48-52). He does not want heaven, not yet and not ever. Instead he wants earth. He wants to be a child again, and to be a swinger of birches. Even more, he wants life to be like a boy’s climb up the birch tree. His desire, almost explicitly stated (54-59), is to repeat the efforts of life (the climb), to enjoy his moment of attainment (having climbed until the tree can bear no more: until there is nothing left of that life), to kick free of life (as he swings down), and to return to the ground (infancy? childhood?) to begin it all again. If each climb up a birch tree is a life, our narrator desires a near infinite number of earthly lives, enough to wear down and “subdue,” through repeated swingings, each and every tree in his father’s (God’s) realm--- that is, to experience every possibility of every life that could be lived. In spite of all the pathless woods (44), cobwebs (45), and dragging loads (14), our narrator wants nothing more than to live again and again, and, like the boy who has subdued all his father’s trees (28), our narrator does not wish to stop until he has run out of lives to live (which will never happen, as it is only ice storms (5) that permanently bend the trees). Caught up in the image the reader agrees, then notices that the narrator is asserting that “Earth’s the right place for love” (52) in a poem with a pensive narrator, an imaginary boy repeating a lonely evening errand, and the sole suggestion of human interaction in the poem the erotic imagery of the bent trees. Perhaps the narrator considers human interaction a given. Perhaps the narrator considers his expressed love for ice storms and swinging birches to be sufficient substitutes for images of human contact. Or perhaps the love expressed is not the desire for human love, but the love for life itself: for the earth, the ice storms, the birch trees, and maybe even the pathless woods. The argument, like the trip up and down the birch tree, is circular: “one loves earthly life because earthly life is where love is.” The narrator’s assertion may be good enough to take him “toward Heaven” (56), but only to the top of the tree. From the top of the tree he will inevitably be set back to earth, with nothing to do but begin the cycle again. It seems a matter of faith that such a fate is good enough: “One could do worse than be a swinger of birches” (59). If one has that faith or that sense of the beauty of life, it may be enough. One could do much worse, provided earth really is “the right place for love.” ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Analysis #4 (Full) The Bitterness of Loss As Expressed by Poe in “Annabel Lee” The death of Edgar Allen Poe’s young bride prompted a wealth of bitter resentment in the writer. While this is evidenced in many of his works, nowhere is his antipathy more explicit than in the poem, “Annabel Lee”. It is apparent from reading lines such as “the winds came out of a cloud, chilling My beautiful Annabel Lee” that Poe feels that he is somehow cursed and that the heavens stole his joy because the angels’ own discontent caused them to delight in destroying the happiness of others. This is further confirmed, and perhaps most overtly so, by the line, “The Angels, half so happy in Heaven, Went envying her and me”. For Poe, reality and fantasy seem to be intrinsically entwined (Postema, 1991). He seems to view the scenario of jealous angels stealing his love away as incontrovertible fact, rather than simply a manifestation of his rage, which it so obviously is. When he writes, “For the moon never beams without giving me dreams Of the beautiful Annabel Lee”, he seems to be aware of the distinction between fantasy and reality, however this is his only lucid moment. In addition to its alluring content, the language of the poem also serves to immerse the reader into Poe's fantasy-like realm of the transcendent love he shared with his child bride. Throughout the poem, Poe writes primarily with “a combination of iambic and anapestic feet, alternating between tetrameter and trimeter”. (Carlson, 1987) The word "chilling," in both places it is used, lines fifteen and twenty-five, retains a jarring meter. This, along with the capitalization of ANNABEL LEE, is done most probably to ensure that the death of Poe's loved one disturbs the rhythm of the poem and startles the reader. These tactics particularly stand out against the backdrop of repetitiveness that permeates the poem. For example, end rhymes in the poem alternate lines with very few variations, implementing frequently repeated, and alarmingly simplistic rhyming words such as: "Lee," "sea," "me," and "we." Furthermore, Poe's two breaks in the alternating rhyme scheme signify two important emotions typical of this late stage of his life. The first couplet ("older than we" "far wiser than we") is bitterly mocking in tone, showing undeniable resentment towards “his distinguished foes and oppressors” (Regan, 1967), or the angels in heaven. In the final stanza Poe writes that everything in this natural world reminds him of his beloved and that his heart still longs for his beloved wife. "and so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side of my darling, my darling, my life and my bride, in her sepulcher there by the sea- in her tomb by the sea". In this stanza the true feelings of Edgar Allen Poe are clearly evident. He pours his entire soul into this single stanza. He cries out to the world that his one true love is really gone; but he is only truly crying out to those who are able to view the tragedy of life and death through his eyes. Poe’s belief that fate somehow holds a grudge against him for finding love and happiness with a 13-year-old girl is begging to be justified. Akin to the barrenness that Poe was obviously feeling at the time he wrote this poem, most detail is stripped away except for the most basic imagery of the sea, the shore and the heavens. These elements seem to act as borders to the meeting place of life and death; earth and the afterlife; the survivor and the deceased. From this perspective, it seems only natural that "The high born kinsmen" and the jealous angels, which symbolize the universe conspiring against their love, is the dividing force that either disrupts or defines these borders. Though much of the imagery in “Annabel Lee” has a fairytale quality, it is interlaced with images representing the dark side of Poe’s imagination, which relies on the use of symbols of death such as the kinsmen, the sepulcher and the never rising stars. These symbols bear especially stark contrast to the simplistic settings and language used to describe the author’s perspective of his surroundings. Edgar Allen Poe was a man beleaguered with personal tragedy and besieged by the more unpleasant experiences of life. His certainty that fate had dealt him a bad hand served to fuel his rage, his alcoholism and his entire mission of self-destruction. However it also served to inspire him to write some of the most thought provoking and emotionally provocative poetry in the history of literature. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ WORKS CITED Carlson, Eric W., ed. Critical Essays on Edgar A. Poe. Boston: G.K. Hall, 1987 Postema, James. "Edgar A. Poe's Control of Readers: Formal Pressures in Poe's Dream Poems." Essays in Literature 18.1 (Spring 1991): 68-76. Regan, Robert, ed. Poe; a Collection of Critical Essays . Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1967. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
