Stanza 1 In ‘‘I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud’’ the speaker describes what he saw one spring day when he was walking in the English countryside. The first two lines state that he was alone as he walked, and he compares himself to a solitary cloud high in the sky. Then suddenly he comes upon…
Tag: Summary
The Hollow Men: Poem Summary
I In a ten-line verse, the speakers claim to be empty yet full, evoking references to the straw men burned in effigy in England on Guy Fawkes Day (a holiday that commemorates the anniversary of the Gunpowder Plot conspiracy to blow up the British Parliament and King James 1st on November 5, 1605). Made of…
Fully Empowered by Pablo Neruda: Poem Summary
Stanza 1 ‘‘Fully Empowered’’ is a poem about how the poet writes, how he mines the material for his work. It is also a celebration of the entire range of his life as a human being. The poem must be understood metaphorically, since there is no literal meaning to many of the phrases he uses….
Elena by Pat Mora: Poem Summary
Lines 1–7 Mora’s poem ‘‘Elena’’ does not follow any patterns in terms of formal structure and is not divided 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). There are, however, lines that are linked in terms…
The Wives of the Dead – Summary
Part One In the first part of “The Wives of the Dead,” the narrator assures readers his tale is “scarcely worth relating,” then proceeds to tell it in detail. A hundred years ago, in the early eighteenth century, two “young and comely” (attractive) women in a Massachusetts seaport town married brothers and set up house…
Winter Dreams by F. Scott Fitzgerald: Summary
Part I At the beginning of the story, fourteen-year-old Dexter Green is a caddy at Sherry Island Golf Club. He works there only for pocket money, since his father owns “the second best grocery-store in Black Bear.” In the winter, Dexter frequently skis over the snow-covered fairways, a landscape that fills him with melancholy. During…
To Da-Duh, in Memoriam: Summary
“To Da-duh, in Memoriam” is an autobiographical story told from the point of view of an adult looking back on a childhood memory. The story opens as the nine-year-old narrator, along with her mother and sister, disembarks from a boat that has brought them to Bridgetown, Barbados. It is 1937, and the family has come…
That in Aleppo Once by Vladimir Nabokov: Summary
Nabokov’s story is written in the form of a letter from an unnamed narrator to V., his Russian expatriate friend living as a novelist in the United States. The narrator begins by telling V. that he has arrived in America. While in New York City, he fortuitously met a mutual friend of theirs (Gleb Alexandrovich…
The Replacement by Alain Robbe-Grillet: Summary
The narrative weaves together three separate scenes. The first involves a schoolboy who is standing by a tree, peering intently at something in the branches. He repeatedly tries to reach a branch that seems within his grasp. After failing to grasp it, he lowers his arm, appears to give up, and continues to stare at…
The Interlopers by Saki: Summary
The characters in “The Interlopers,” Ulrich von Gradwitz and Georg Znaeym, have been enemies since birth. Their grandfathers feuded over a piece of forestland. While the courts ruled in the Gradwitz family’s favor, the Znaeym family has never accepted this ruling. Throughout the course of Ulrich and Georg’s lifetime, the feud has grown into a…