It is easy to dismiss “The Lamb” as a sentimental or naive poem. Simple in its structure and vocabulary, it leaves no difficulties of interpretation. Unlike some of the Songs of Innocence, it does not force the reader to consider ironies or ambiguities involved in the state of innocence. The only question the child speaker…
Tag: Analysis
Having A Coke With You – Analysis
Frank O’Hara’s love poem “Having a Coke with You,” written to his lover Vincent Warren, takes as its theme the function of aesthetics. Aesthetics is a branch of philosophy that concerns beauty and taste. Questions it attempts to answer include: what makes art, art?; why do we like some kinds of art and not others?;…
A Grafted Tongue by John Montague – Analysis
In his terse poem “A Grafted Tongue,” Montague presents a series of powerful snapshots of the process by which a colonizing power uses language to cement its control over a subject people. It also shows how this process wrenches apart the entire established order of the dispossessed culture and causes great personal suffering. Like the…
Filling Station – Poem Analysis
The American poet Mary Kinzie believes that no poem worthy of the art can depend only on a mastery of technique and craft. She claims that aesthetic talent alone cannot define a poem. Instead, she argues that “the aesthetic mission is also a moral one.” Craft, in other words, must be connected to morality insofar…
The Base Stealer – Poem Analysis
Baseball and poetry appear to be made for one another—they both are more entertaining for audiences that have a sly, hypersensitive appreciation of what is going on. Unfortunately, this makes both seem a little boring when compared to other, fast-paced entertainments that are available. The best baseball poetry, like the best pitching, fielding, and baserunning,…
An Arundel Tomb – Analysis
Larkin’s “An Arundel Tomb” is many things—a meditation on death, a tribute to the power of art, a celebration of love, an evocation of England’s long traditions and history. It can also be read as a rueful expression of doubt about the conclusions to which it points. The fascination the poem exerts perhaps lies in…
Anorexic by Eavan Boland – Poem Analysis
Anorexia nervosa is a complex disorder with causes that are not completely understood. But what is well documented is the effect on the body that results from the cycle of self-starvation and purging food, such as sallow skin, brittle bones, loss of hair, tooth decay, and, in some cases, heart failure. Females are most susceptible…
Two Friends by Guy de Maupassant – Analysis
In ‘‘Two Friends’’ Maupassant presents two contradictory and unresolved tendencies. On the one hand he deals with war as a universal evil for which government (as a structure—not any specific government) is responsible and of which the common man is the victim. But he just as insistently portrays the Germans as cruel, warlike savages. It…
Once Upon A Time by Nadine Gordimer – Analysis
At the heart of Gordimer’s ‘‘Once Upon a Time’’ are two groups of people: the whites who live ‘‘in a suburb, in a city,’’ and the ‘‘people of another colour’’ who live elsewhere. In the story’s South Africa during the last years of the racial segregation policy known as apartheid, the differences between the groups…
A Mystery of Heroism – Analysis
Stephen Crane and Joseph Conrad first met on October 15, 1897, beginning a warm friendship that lasted until Crane’s untimely death in 1900. The two men discussed their work, reviewed each other’s writings, and exchanged literary advice. Though Conrad was fourteen years older than Crane, he began writing late in life, following a long career…