Poetry Analysis

Saggio critico d'introduzione al terzo volume di "tutte le poesie". Traccia una linea di congiunzione tra la teoria poetica, la lirica e l'attività critica di Hilde Domin utilizzando la composizione antologica del volume "Gesammelte Gedichte" come chiave di lettura.
Introductory essay to the third book of Hilde Domin's poetry editions (l coltello che ricorda. The complete poems in Italian translation, III).

Georgia Who told my mother of my shame, Who told my father of my dear? Oh who but Maude, my sister Maude, Who lurked to spy and peer. Cold he lies, as cold as stone, With his clotted curls about his face: The comeliest corpse in all the word And worthy of a queen's embrace. You might have spared his soul, sister, Have spared my soul, your own soul too: Though I had not been born at all, He'd never have looked at you. My father may sleep in Paradise, My mother at Heaven-gate: But sister Maude shall get no sleep Either early or late.

The Underground by Seamus Heaney is a poem set in retrospect as Heaney remembers rather nostalgically an experience with his beloved. The experience occurs in a 'vaulting tunnel' in London-between the underground and the Albert Hall. Heaney describes running after his beloved and the memory is full of action and excitement. We know that the narrator is talking of his wife as he states, 'you in your going-away coat'. This refers to the traditional clothing that the bride changed into before leaving on her honeymoon. In The Underground the narrator, first person, aims to communicate his sense of nostalgia and tension as he remembers the time spent with his beloved. The setting in terms of place although not romantic gives the poet an opportunity to communicate the love between the narrator and his beloved. The first line 'There we were in the vaulted tunnel running' uses the pronoun we pointing out that the narrator is one with his beloved. The line sounds nostalgic as the narrator uses the preposition 'there' as if telling with ecstasy the emotion that he felt whilst running after her beloved through the tunnel. The time however is inferred as late in the evening or night as the moon is mentioned severally. In stanza three the narrator states 'moonlighting' implying that it is night time as the two characters in the poem are relying on moonlight. The word 'moonlighting'also carries with it a mischievous and playful connotation. Perhaps this shows the two characters carefree nature at that moment in time when they are together; take note that the narrator states that they are 'late for the proms'. This may also explain why they are running through the tunnel. Although the poem is initially one of excitement, the poem has a sad and nostalgic mood. The reader empathises with the narrator as he recalls his experience and goes further to explain his present situation. Lines such as 'Our echoes die in that corridor' punctuate the poem with feelings of sadness as the narrator remembers (retracing the path back). He feels sad as he is all alone in a 'draughty lamplit' and wet train station. The sadness in the first two lines of the last stanza contrast sharply with the first three lines of the first stanza. The poem progresses from one of ecstatic nostalgia to one of sadness as the narrator accepts his current predicament with resignation. On the other hand, the tone is dramatic. The poem starts with fast paced words such as speeding, vaulting and fleet. The reader gets the sense of excitement as the characters run through the tunnel in the night. The use of emphatic verbs such as japped, flapped and sprang add to the warm and intimate atmosphere as the narrator illustrates his experience with his beloved. The rhythm of the poem is fast paced. The use of fast paced words such as speeding creates and adds to the excitement in the poem, prompting the use of a fast tempo when reading the poem. The fast pace is further alluded by the lines '…fleet god gaining upon you before you turned to a reed.' Here the narrator alludes to the Greek myth about Pan's pursuit of Syrinx. The narrator also foreshadows the eventual loss of his beloved as he runs after her fearing she'd turn into a reed just as Syrinx did to get away from the Greek god Pan. It is also worth noting that the narrator chooses words that further add to the pacing of the poem such as 'fleet', which is an adjective from Old Norse meaning swift. The poet also employs enjambment in stanza one and three. A line is cut short and proceeds in the next line, not to create a pose and add emphasis, but to give a dramatic effect where the reader has to quickly proceed to the next line to receive a complete message. The rhythm is further enhanced by the rhyme within the poem. Although minimal and subtle as in running and gaining and ahead and reed it adds to the poems tempo. In addition, the poet employs consonance and alliteration adding to the beats which when combined with the sporadic commas and enjambment illustrates the rush of the two characters in the poem. The rhythm however slows down when towards the end of the poem as the narrator stops at the train station, tense and resigned.

"My Last Duchess" by Robert Browning Robert Browning's "My Last Duchess" regales readers with a speech by the Duke of Ferrara on his departed former wife, whose death he arranged, as he uncovers her portrait for the envoy of his new bride. I argue that Browning uses punctuation to indicate important aspects of the Duke of Ferrara’s dialogue in the form of asides, which reveal how strongly social constraints motivate his actions, despite his boasts of power. Even though the Duke is the one in charge, he is controlled by the standards which, as an aristocrat, he must uphold. These limitations are apparent in his speech patterns where he uses the specific placement of language to impart information without risking his reputation. By failing to uphold the expectations of her station, the Duchess compromises his status, an intolerable act he warns his future wife against through conversation with her family envoy.

In this paper, I analyze the actions of the titular character of TS Eliot's poem "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" in the context of modern-day existentialism. I argue that Prufrock's social anxiety is an external manifestation of his deep internal conflict with the existential concerns, especially those of meaninglessness and loneliness.

EN

In this work, I offer a translation and an analysis of selected poems from the anthology Howling at the Moon (Tsuki ni hoeru, 1917), by Hagiwara Sakutarō, by means of bibliographic research, critique, and translation. The development of modern Japanese poetry will be presented first, followed by a discussion of the author’s biography and his position within modern Japanese poetry. I will also present the main thematic and formal contributions of the author. I will conclude by analyzing some of the most representative poems of the anthology Howling at the Moon. The review of the literature research includes readings on the author’s biography, from the original works and their published English translations, as well as from the body of critical writing about the author’s work. Translating and analyzing these poems is justified given the absence of studies in modern Japanese poetry produced in Portuguese. This work thus aims at introducing the Portuguese-speaking reader to the modern Japanese poetry, expanding the field of Japanese studies in Portuguese-speaking countries.

PT_BR

O presente trabalho propõe uma tradução e uma análise de poemas selecionados da coletânea Lamentos à Lua (Tsuki ni hoeru, 1917), de Hagiwara Sakutarō, por meio da pesquisa bibliográfica, da crítica e da tradução. Em um primeiro momento será apresentado brevemente o desenvolvimento da poesia moderna japonesa. Em seguida, nos desdobraremos sobre a biografia do autor e a sua posição na poesia japonesa moderna. Apresentaremos também as principais contribuições formais e temáticas do autor. Por fim, analisaremos alguns dos poemas mais representativos da coletânea Lamentos à Lua. A pesquisa bibliográfica inclui leituras da biografia do autor, da obra original e das versões publicadas em língua inglesa, bem como de fortuna crítica sobre o tema. A tradução e a análise dos poemas são justificadas pela ausência de estudos da poesia moderna japonesa em língua portuguesa. Desta forma, o presente trabalho tem a missão de introduzir o leitor lusófono à poesia japonesa moderna expandindo o campo de estudos japoneses nos países lusófonos.

The title of any written work is a name the author, or the critic, chooses for it. A book title is not important because it makes an identity for it or makes it different from other works, but it can indicate the quality and the importance in terms of structure as well.  The title is the first sign thet the reader confronts with, and the reader can recognize the works' content and its other media facilities due to the meaningful relation between the title and the text (or between the structure and the concept). Studying the title of Akhavan-Sales' works, their overall title or the title of each poem, is one of the effective methods for reading and understanding of his poetry. So, considering the title of a literary work, it is possible to realize its content and the authors or poet's thinking and emotional moods.  To achieve a suitable result, the content analysis method, as one of the proposed research methods in the field of humanities, was used. In addition, a survey methodology has been used to classify the obtained documents.

Radical Moderns of 1930s American poetry have different aesthetic strategies to communicate and to move masses. There are different aesthetics not only among poets but also at different periods in a poet's life. Rexroth's poetry, for example, can be roughly divided into two periods: avant-garde beginning with cubist techniques and the change into lyrical poetry with clear, plainspoken, and direct language. This paper only deals with the lyric poems of Kenneth Rexroth. The drastic transition in Rexroth's aesthetics is a result of historical pressures rather than being a personal choice. With the loss of the Spanish Civil War, despair took the place of hope. Though both Hughes' and Rexroth's poetry has a simple and colloquial language, their intentions differ. Hughes' goal is to make something happen, to fuel hope, and to literally move the masses towards victory. Rexroth's goal, on the other hand, stems from the despair of the political tragedies that are taking place. Because of the intense sense of urgency, time is not convenient to experiment with aesthetic styles. His tone is clear and as loud and understandable as possible. In this paper, I will compare the aesthetic strategies of Hughes and Rexroth to suggest that while making naked invocations of hope in an age of despair makes poetry temporary, poems that commemorate losses or dream of alternative realities are perpetual.

Elizabeth Burge's poem Ispahan Carpet narrates the terrible conditions of the young children who work in a carpet factory. It is delivered as a first person narrative of the protagonist's thoughts, feelings and observations as he or she took a tour of the factory. The poem employs various poetic devices such as contrasting imagery, anaphora and diction to highlight the terrible circumstances of child labour. Through the poetic devices the poet creates a dark atmosphere highlighting his feelings of pity and sympathy at the grave situation.

Sharon Olds is a confessional poet whose work is striking for its emotional intensity. Even the objects in her poems have emotional resonance. She is interested in a poem being ‘useful’ more than anything else, and for this reason perhaps, her language is generally lucid, with a seeming spontaneity of expression.

At first glance, therefore, the poem might seem simple and impulsive, going directly to the heart of the matter. But ‘The Promise’ is not simple at all; it is layered with multiple emotions and directions.


This essay was first published in The Writers' Hub (UK) in 2012.

Alice Dunbar Nelson’s poem entitled I Sit And Sew appears to utilize a contrasting lexicon and rhetoric in order to communicate the tension and power within a binary conception of gender. Written in the early 20th century during the first World War, the narrator appears to exist in a similar context as a domestic woman, likely an American. These characteristics intrude upon the poem through the voice of the narrator, which is very pervasive in each of the three stanzas. We learn of the narrator's inner thoughts through the mode of something similar to a soliloquy. She, a first glance, appears to be commenting on her role as a woman and the limited and constricting nature of her social role as a domestic individual in comparison to men, who at this time are off at war. Although the speaker may appear to be simply commenting on gender roles of the time, one can observe through the acute tension existing within Dunbar Nelson’s contrasting lexicon that the poem goes beyond this to communicate the power, or lack thereof, connected to gender.

was one of the greatest English-language poets of the 20th century that received a Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923. (Britannica, 2020) He is known for his works of the contemporary or the modern poetry that most of the works are using 'symbols' or symbolisms' as to represent 'something' on the poems. Yeats lives in the symbolism era and

Perceiving the meaning of literary texts requisites studying and understanding the language of these texts. Stylistic approach to literary texts does not only involve linguistic textual analysis but also encourages readers to interact with textual structure to infer meaning . This paper focuses on the relevance of stylistics approach for the analysis of poems in Teaching English as a Foreign Language contexts. To this end, Siegfried Sassoon`s The Rear-Guard and Wilfred Owen`s Anthem for Doomed Youth are taken into consideration. After having explained in what ways stylistic analysis helps the reader to come to terms with the process of coding the meaning embedded in the text by focusing on the linguistic features, the two poems are compared and contrasted via a stylistic approach. The paper does not solely focus on analysing the texts, but also argues in favour of exploiting language-based approaches in literature study in English as a Foreign Language contexts, since stylistics is interested in what writers do with and through language.

In the poem ‘I’m a man’ by Mzi Mahola the first person speaker recalls what seems to be his traditional initiation ceremony. In this critical analysis the poem’s diction and poetic devices will be discussed in relation to the conveyance of the speaker’s personal experience.

After World War II has ended, there was a mass migration of the people that resulted from the former British Empire colonies that had caused to bring a large number of authors and performers to the United Kingdom. However, that occasion seemed to be made Britain's multiple identities were viewed reductively by the people in the society. Particularly, the people of 'colored' or 'black' were seen to be marginalized at that time. This then leads to the stereotyping concept that is viewed based on racializations. "It has caused its generation to set the parameters of cultural change-even from the frequently marginalized positions in relations to Britain's institutions such as (arts, publishing, education, media, archives, museums)." (Osborne, D. 2020) This has giving one major impact on how people are resulting their artworks on the contemporary culture, including the ones that are made by a black British author named Benjamin Zephaniah. Benjamin Zephaniah or Dr. Benjamin Obadiah Iqbal Zephaniah is a black author that was born and raised in Birmingham, England. He is a black British writer, dub poet, and Rastafarian. Moreover, he was included in The Times list of Britain's top 50 postwar writers in 2008. (https://benjaminzephaniah.com/) Benjamin Zephaniah's poetry is considered to be the Black British poetry. Black British poetry provides a distinctly aesthetic vehicle for catalyzing intercultural communication, where the awareness of 'contexts' is crucial to appreciate not only the range of referents and allusions but also as an examination of poetry itself as a conduit for expression. (Osborne, D. 2020). Also, through his poems, Zephaniah was trying to educate the people on how it is felt like a Black living in a society that captured the life of Britain's colonialism. By that, Zephaniah's poems are found to be 'Didactic Poetics'.

This paper organizes traditional and modern literary standards and values into objective assessment matrices to establish frameworks for examining contemporary masterpiece poetry within the contexts of the changing roles of literary consumers as well as those of arbiters of literary taste.

Crashing Waves, Breaking Memories -Stages of Grief in Tennyson's "Break, Break, Break" "Break, Break, Break" (1834) by Alfred Lord Tennyson conveys the speaker's despair over the death of a beloved friend. In the presence of the sea, the speaker stands as a desolate observer who mourns his loss, nostalgic for the youth and vitality that once existed in his friend as well as himself. The poem is most likely a narration of the poet's own grief, considering that his close friend, Arthur Hallam, had died a year before the poem was written (Carlone). Through

Explore the ways in which traditionally marginalized experience is foregrounded in the work of any two writers studied on the course] PLAGIARISM This is an extremely serious matter and any occurrence is always dealt with formally by the Board of Examiners. Please read carefully the following statement from the Examinations Office: "You are reminded that all work submitted as part of the requirements for any examination of the University of London must be expressed in your own words and incorporate your own ideas and judgements. Plagiarism -this is the presentation of another person's thoughts or words as though they were your own -must be avoided, with particular care in course-work and essays and reports written in your own time. Direct quotations from the published or unpublished work of others must always be clearly identified as such by being placed inside quotation marks, and a full reference to their source must be provided in the proper form. Remember that a series of short quotations from several different sources, if not clearly identified as such, constitutes plagiarism, just as much as a single unacknowledged long quotation from a single source. Equally, if you summarise another person's ideas or judgements, you must refer to that person in your text, and include the work referred to in your bibliography. Failure to observe these rules may result in an allegation of cheating. You should therefore consult your tutor or course convenor if you are in any doubt about what is permissible. Recourse to the services of 'ghost writing' agencies (for example in the preparation of essays or reports) is strictly forbidden, and students who make use of the services of such agencies render themselves liable for an academic penalty. Word-processing services which offer 'correction/improvement of English' should not be used". Clearly, any instance of plagiarism within an essay, examination or dissertation, makes the whole work suspect. It will render your work invalid for examination and assessment purposes and undermines the entire value of a personal and scholarly response to your subject. Self-plagiarism is also referred to in the following statement, also issued by the Examinations Office: "You are reminded that you may not present substantially the same material in any two pieces of work submitted for assessment, regardless of the form of assessment. For instance, you may not repeat substantially the same material in a formal written examination or in a dissertation it if has already formed part of any essay submitted for assessment. This does not prevent you from referring to the same texts, examples or case studies as appropriate, provided you do not merely duplicate the same material."

“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” is the quintessential work that shows the extent of the intertwining of discomfort with society and self-doubt in a state of emotional turmoil. Which is to be blamed—the world or himself? The shift between blaming society and blaming the self is one of the main confusions. To make Prufrock’s emotional turmoil obvious and objective correlative functional, Eliot creates “a combination of images, objects or descriptions evoking the appropriate emotion the character tries to express” (Aziz 2). If the problem is with himself; it can be the “bald spot in the middle of [his] hair” or his “simple pin” (Eliot “Prufrock” lines 40-43). If the problem is with the world; it can be the “formulated” cliches like, “’How his hair is growing thin’” or “But how his arms and legs are thin” (lines 41-56). In both cases, Prufrock’s emotional turmoil is presented with the use of imagery, which is the poem’s main literary device for objective correlative. Images evoke roughly three main emotions: discomfort with society, self-doubt, and finally, a sense of total impotence.

Il presente scritto si propone come obiettivo l’analisi e la traduzione di alcuni testi poetici di Aleksis Kivi, padre del romanzo finlandese. Nel primo capitolo viene descritto brevemente il contesto letterario e vengono presentati alcuni autori di spicco dell’epoca. In seguito è invece analizzata la produzione poetica di Kivi, accompagnata da un commento personale teso a illustrare le principali tematiche e le particolarità stilistiche dell’autore. Particolare attenzione viene prestata alle interazioni tra gli elementi di innovazione delle poesie d’amore e le componenti tradizionali che rimandano alla mitologia ugro-finnica. Questa compresenza dà vita a una poetica profondamente originale e rinnovata, in contrasto con gli scritti dei contemporanei.

بسامد رخداد چنين چينش هاي آوايي بهت آوري را در اين شعر كوتاه نبايد به تصادف محض نسبت داد و نيز نبايد تماما محاسبه شده از جانب شاعر دانست بلكه بايد پذيرفت كه فرايندي زبانشناختي و نيمه خودآگاه كه وجه مشخصه ي كاركرد متفاوت ذهن شاعر است در لحظه ي سرايش منجر به بروز چنين الگوهاي منظم گوشنوازي گردده است كه البته متابعت مطلق شان از سير معنا در شعر بواسطه ي تاثير روانشناختي-اكوستيك شان بر شنوايي خواننده بعضا محل بحث است. هر چند در اين شعر مثلا در تصوير دلخراش خورده شدن توسط مرغ هاي ماهيخوار تكرار صامت هاي سايشي /غ/ و /خ/ در انتقال حس خشونت و عمل فيزيكي پاره كردن طعمه موثر بنظر مي رسد و يا در سطور آخر تكرار مشهود صامت /س/ آرامش ساحل درياي آرام و نوسان امواج را در ذهن تداعي مي كند.