Poetry

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Poetry
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The Seven Ages of Man

• Part of a monologue from As You Like It
  Shakespeares play. Often quoted!
• 1st 2 lines life, destiny and providence
• The stage is .
• Our life is predetermined
• 7 typical parts/stages

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Stages 1-3

• Infant
• Schoolboy doesnt appreciate his youthful vigor
  and beauty.
• ref. to snail. Afraid of world and moving out of
  protective shell.
• lover sees world as bed of roses.
• Compared to a furnace

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Stages 4-5

• 4. soldier bearded as a pard or hairy as a
  leopard. Wants to take world by storm, impulsive
  and instinctive. Lives in the present.
• 5. Judge justice. round bellied because he is
  bribed with capons (delicacy of the day).
  Description of a formally, professionally dressed
  man with keen eyes. Wisdom is balanced with a
  modern outlook.

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Stages 6-7

• 6.Pantaloon foolish character, caricaturized as
  lean and slippered.
• Bespectacled and a pouch because of his failing
  memory?
• His voice is mellowed and he becomes childlike.
• Loss of masculinity.

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Modern Comparison Limelight by Rush

• How did the original piece inspire Limelight?
• What literary device is this?

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Death be not Proud by John Donne.. Who is he?

• (1572-1631)
• Born in London to prosperous Roman Catholic
  family.
• Educated at Oxford University and then returned
  to London at 19 to study law.
• Was a successful diplomat until married a minor,
  Ann Moore(17 yr old niece of his employer, a
  powerful aristocrat) and was then jailed.
• 1615 converted to Anglican faith and became a
  priest.
• Was chaplain to the King and became head of St.
  Pauls Cathedral in London in 1621.

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Donne Continued

• Wrote religious poetry and prose.
• Wrote poetry his entire life, but was not widely
  read or published until after his death.
• Then read in aristocratic and literary circles.
• Influenced Ernest Hemingways For Whom the
  Bell Tolls
• Famous phrase no man is an island taken from
  Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions.
• First poet to use sex in its present sense.

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Death Be Not Proud

• Opening line is an apostrophe (An address to an
  abstract figure death)
• Arguments to humble death
• You do not overthrow those you think you do.
• Rest and sleep are the pictures of death and the
  real thing must be more pleasant.
• If the good die young, why should we wait to
  avoid it?

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More DBNP

• Mark the alliteration
• Death is not mighty or dreadful because it is a
  slave to fate, chance, kings and desperate men
  and therefore not to be respected.
• Lives amongst poison, war and sickness where no
  one wants to rule (sucks to be you death!)
• Patronizing calls the Grim Reaper poor death
• Paradox Death will be more no more,
  death,thou shalt die.

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Dylan Thomas (1914-1953)

• Born in South Wales.
• father English Literature professor at the local
  grammar school and often recited Shakespeare to
  him before he could read.
• He loved the sounds of nursery rhymes,
  foreshadowing his love for the rhythmic ballads
  of Hopkins, Yeats, and Poe.
• a neurotic, sickly child who shied away from
  school and preferred reading on his own.
• Fascinated by language, he excelled in English
  and reading but neglected other subjects.
• dropped out of school at sixteen to become a
  junior reporter for the South Wales Daily Post.
• By December of 1932, he left his job at the Post
  and decided to concentrate on his poetry full
  time. It was during this time, in his late teens,
  that Thomas wrote more than half of his collected
  poems.
• In 1934,at twenty, he moved to London, won the
  Poet's Corner book prize, and published his first
  book, 18 Poems, to great acclaim. Became an
  alcoholic
• writing, with its intense lyricism and highly
  charged emotion, has more in common with the
  Romantic tradition.

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• left London in 1944 with wife to avoid air raids.
• eventually settled at Laugharne, in the Boat
  House where Thomas would write many of his later
  poems.
• was the archetypal Romantic poet of the popular
  American imagination he was flamboyantly
  theatrical, a heavy drinker, engaged in roaring
  disputes in public, and read his work aloud with
  tremendous depth of feeling and a singing Welsh
  lilt.

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Thomas technique

• "I make one imagethough 'make' is not the right
  word I let, perhaps, an image be 'made'
  emotionally in me and then apply to it what
  intellectual critical forces I possesslet it
  breed another, let that image contradict the
  first, make, of the third image bred out of the
  other two together, a fourth contradictory image,
  and let them all, within my imposed formal
  limits, conflict.
• Michael Schmidt writes "There is a kind of
  authority to the word magic of the early poems
  in the famous and popular later poems, the magic
  is all show. If they have a secret it is the one
  we all share, partly erotic, partly elegiac. The
  later poems arise out of personality."

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Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night

• Is a Villanelle
• What is that?
• nineteen lines
• divided into five three-line stanzas
• a sixth stanza with four lines.
• Often in iambic pentameter (not required)
• to have is an intricate rhyme scheme and two
  lines that are refrains
• The rhyme scheme is ABA ABA ABA ABA ABA ABAA, so
  there are only two rhymes that end all the lines.
  In addition, the first line and third line, the
  refrains, are repeated four times each
• Originally french form, later popularized in
  England

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Do Not Go Speaker

• Autobiographical? Why? Struggled with his death
  because of his fathers declining health and age.
• Uses the speaker to say things to an imaginary
  father that might have been too difficult to say
  face-to-face to his own father, or that his
  father (who was dying at the time) wouldn't have
  had the energy to hear or understand.
• Thomas's alter ego, composed of autobiographical
  elements, but not quite the same as the man
  himself

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Setting Metaphorical

• a lingering sunset to a bolt of lightning, from a
  green bay extending out from the seashore to a
  shooting star blazing across the sky, and finally
  to the top of a mountain
• metaphorical descriptions of life, death, and
  struggle,
• all grand aspects of nature. from the depths of
  the ocean, the "green bay," to the tallest peak,
  that "sad height," and everywhere in-between.
• Is he really traveling? NO! He is really at the
  bedside of his dying father.

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Repetition and Themes

• Repetition for emphasis of point/theme
• Themes
• Mortality
• Old age
• Transience
• Wisdom and knowledge
• Old age

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Theme Mortality

• What metaphors does the poem use to characterize
  death? What are the implications of these
  metaphors how do they change your pre-conceived
  ideas about how death works and what it means?
• Is death an inevitability in this poem? Is there
  any way to effectively resist death?
• In the speaker's opinion, is it useful to
  struggle against certain death? Why or why not?
  What do you think?
• Are there any clues in the poem that the speaker
  might be concerned about the possibility of his
  own death?

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Theme Old Age

• What's the relationship between age and strength
  in this poem? What kinds of strength do old men
  (and women!) have? What kinds of strength do they
  lack?
• "Old age should burn and rave at close of day"
  (line 2). What does it mean to "burn and rave"?
  What kind of behavior do you think the speaker is
  describing with this abstract image?

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Theme Transcience

• All pass away in this poem daylight, meteors,
  and lightning strikes, but also men, their words,
  and their deeds.
• Given the way the speaker presents the world, is
  there anything that persists, lasts, or can't be
  destroyed? If so, what is it?
• Why are lightning and meteors used as metaphors
  for the words and deeds of men?
• line 4, "wise men at their end know dark is
  right." Does this mean that passing away is the
  proper thing to do, the natural order of things?
  Or does it simply mean that death and change have
  triumphed over life and stability?

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Wisdom and knowledge

• first refers to "wise men," he tells us "their
  words had forked no lightning" (line 5). What
  kind of "words" do you think the speaker is
  describing?
• In the fourth stanza, the speaker describes the
  chagrin of the "wild men" who thought they were
  celebrating the sun's "flight," not realizing how
  quickly it would set. Why does their knowledge of
  the rapid nature of the "sunset," or their
  impending death, change the way they celebrate
  the "sun," or life? In other words, why does the
  knowledge of death change how we feel about life?
  
• Why does the speaker think his father should
  "curse" and "bless" his son, as the elder is
  dying?

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Theme Family

• How would this poem be different if there was no
  reference to the speaker's father in the last
  stanza, so that it was entirely about "old age"
  in general?
• What if the reference were to a son instead of a
  father?
• Did you guess, before the last stanza, that the
  speaker was thinking about a member of his family
  or someone close to him? What clues can you find
  in the first five stanzas that might lead to this
  guess, even if you didn't make it?
• Why does the speaker advise his father to "Rage,
  rage against the dying of the light"? Who is
  helped by this advice the father or the son?
  Both? Neither?

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Robert Frost (1874-1963) The Road Not Taken

• Went to Dartmouth and Harvard, never earned a
  formal degree
• Drifted through many occupations
• Writer, cobbler, teacher, newspaper editor
• wife inspired his poetry until her death
• 1920s most celebrated American poet
• Work focuses on landscape, but is complex and
  infused with layers of ambiguity and irony.
• American Bard
• Compared to Mark Twain because of his mastery of
  literary vernacular

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JFK said

• He has bequeathed his nation of imperishable
  verse from which Americans will forever gain joy
  and understanding.

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TRNT Literary Devices and Meaning

• Symbolism and Metaphors Nature
• Line 1 setting fall symbolism writer making
  choices in the fall of his life as he grows old?
• Line 5 undergrowth and thick forest are like
  aspects of speakers future that are unclear
• Lines 11-12 leaves that are freshly fallen cover
  path taken by others points out sometimes no way
  to tell which way/choice is better.
• Line 18 repetition line is repeated, but word
  yellow left out. Nature still important to
  speaker.

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TRNT Literary Devices and Meaning

• Symbolism and Metaphors Roads
• Literal and Figurative Roads
• Line 1 fork in road (extended metaphor)
• Lines 4-5 description of road metaphor for
  future
• Line 6 speaker chooses different path even
  though hes been looking one way for awhile. Ex.
  Sudden decisions
• Lines 13-15 metaphor for decision that changes
  everything.
• Lines 18-20 back to extended metaphor. Line 19
  affirms one road is less traveled.
• and that has made all the difference solidifies
  the metaphorical meaning the road the speaker
  took(the choice he made) has changed his life.

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Langston Hughes Bio
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Coca Cola and Coco Rio by Martin Espada

• Bio Martin Espada was born in Brooklyn, New
  York. His father was Puerto Rican and his mother
  was of Jewish descent. Coca-Cola and Coco Frio
  is a true account of his first trip to Puerto
  Rico at the age of ten. In an interview, Espada
  was asked what he was feeling when he wrote this
  poem and replied as follows
• "What I discovered at the time was that my family
  seemed to prize all things
• 'American' at the expense of the small daily
  miracles around them."

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The Negro Speaks of Rivers
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The Negro Speaks of Rivers
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Theme for English B
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Theme for English B
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Analysis