Stanza 1 The speaker of ‘‘What For’’ recalls the things he loved and looked forward to when he was six years old. In the first stanza, he describes his childhood sense of magic: a few Hawaiian words had the power to make it rain and sang through the nautilus like the sound of the sea….
Tag: Summary
Upon the Burning of Our House: Summary
Lines 1–6 Bradstreet’s ‘‘Upon the Burning of Our House, July 10th, 1666’’ is not formally broken into stanzas. (A stanza is a unit of poetry, or a grouping of lines that divides the poem in the same way that a paragraph divides prose. Bradstreet’s poem appears on the page as a fifty-four-line poem without any…
Two Eclipses by Shmuel Hanagid: Summary
Lines 1–15 The speaker in ‘‘Two Eclipses’’ begins by addressing an unseen friend who appears to still be sleeping in the morning. He urges the friend to wake up, to wake up the dawn, and to look at the sky, which has the mottled appearance of the skin of a leopard. He notes that the…
Sympathy by Paul Lawrence Dunbar – Summary – Meaning
Stanza 1 LINES 1–3 ‘‘Sympathy’’ is a lyric in iambic tetrameter, seven line stanzas of four metric feet per line. The last line of each stanza is shorter, with three feet. The first line establishes the poem’s controlling metaphor of the caged bird looking at a spring day, which mirrors the speaker’s situation. The speaker…
Shoulders by Noami Shihab Nye – Summary – Meaning
Lines 1–5 In the first lines of ‘‘Shoulders,’’ Nye gives the reader a focal point: a father carrying his sleeping son on his shoulder in the rain. He looks both ways and carefully crosses the street. The reader immediately knows he is a gentle and careful father, protective of his son. He is aware of…
On My First Son by Ben Jonson: Summary
‘‘On My First Son’’ is a poem of twelve lines, written in response to the death of Jonson’s first son, Benjamin, a victim of plague. The poem is written in couplets, with the following rhyme scheme: aabbccddeeff. The poem is also written in regular iambic pentameter. Iambic simply means that an unaccented syllable is followed…
The Old Stoic: Summary
In three stanzas, Bronte¨’s ‘‘The Old Stoic,’’ also known by its first line, ‘‘Riches I hold in light esteem,’’ briefly invokes several commonplaces about Stoicism (a form of Greek philosophy popular in the Hellenistic and Roman eras), appeals for the grace of Stoic liberty, and seeks to find a type of salvation within Stoicism. The…
Mushrooms by Sylvia Plath: Summary
Stanza 1 On the most literal level, ‘‘Mushrooms’’ is a description of the natural process of the growth of mushrooms. The poem opens with a description of how mushrooms appear seemingly out of nothing, quietly, unexpectedly, and without fuss. They appear overnight. Their white color is noted. Stanza 2 Using imagery of body parts that…
The Lotus Flowers by Ellen Bryant Voigt – Summary
‘‘The Lotus Flowers’’ consists of two long stanzas and is written in free verse. Each long stanza, however, is divided, roughly in the middle, by an offset or broken line. In fact, in both stanzas, the broken lines occur between the eighteenth and nineteenth lines. The first stanza consists of twenty-nine lines, and the second…
Jazz Fantasia: Summary
Line 1 “Jazz Fantasia’’ begins with the drums, the instrument most critical to any jazz musical performance. The drums lead the music by their steady rhythmic beat. They set the tone and mood: the cadence of a dance or shuffle. The rhythm of the first part of the fantasia starts out a steady andante (moderate)…