Sexton’s ‘‘Young’’ consists of a single sentence extended over twenty-three lines of verse. It takes the form of a reminiscence of a summer evening in the narrator’s childhood. It is spoken in the voice of a first-person narrator, but this speaker should not be simply equated with the author herself. Although this voice seems to…
Tag: The United States of America
Thanatopsis – Poem – Analysis
William Cullen Bryant is one of those venerable poets from the distant past who have an established and honored place in literary history but are little read in the twenty-first century. As Bryant’s solemn face gazes out from formal nineteenth-century photographs, the textbooks inform us that in those long-gone days he helped to usher in…
Thanatopsis – Literary Devices – Simile – Blank Verse
Elegy An elegy is a formal and somber poem that either laments the death of a particular person or is a more general meditation on death. Thomas Gray’s ‘‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,’’ a poem that Bryant was familiar with, is an example of the form. ‘‘Thanatopsis’’ fulfills the requirements of the elegy since…
Thanatopsis – Themes
Overcoming Fear of Death For a poem written in the early nineteenth century, in which Christian belief was the norm in the United States, this is an unusual elegy in the sense that it offers none of the traditional consolations to humans faced with their own certain mortality. In ‘‘Thanatopsis’’ there is no Christian afterlife…
Thanatopsis – Poem – Summary
Lines 1–31 ‘‘Thanatopsis’’ begins by painting a verbal picture of the many different aspects of nature, which anyone who loves nature is able to discern. When a person is in a good mood, nature has a ‘‘voice of gladness,’’ and appears in great beauty. When a person is feeling sad, nature can quickly alleviate that…
The Taxi by Amy Lowell – Analysis
Lowell was often criticized in her time for her free-flowing poetry, which went against the strict rules of traditional English poetic form. This form was based on regimented patterns of rhyme and cadence, or rhythm. Words at the ends of lines often rhymed with one another. Lines were written in uniform patterns of stressed and…
The Taxi by Amy Lowell – Poetic Devices – Imagery
Free Verse In her introduction to her collection Sword Blades and Poppy Seed, Lowell refers to the French term vers libre (which means ‘‘free verse’’) to describe the form in which she wrote some of her poems. Lowell often used her own term, unrhymed cadence, to refer to this type of poetry. Today, most poems…
The Taxi by Amy Lowell – Themes
Passion Lowell is often praised for her skill in expressing her passion in her poems. ‘‘The Taxi’’ is a good example of how she instills passion in the poetic images she creates. Passion defines this poem and drives it forward. The word passion means any deeply felt emotion. In the case of Lowell’s poem, the…
The Taxi by Amy Lowell – Summary – Meaning
Title ‘‘The Taxi’’ is a poem that has nothing to do with a cab and yet everything to do with it. The word taxi is not once mentioned in the poem; rather, the reader experiences the speaker’s thoughts and sights as the cab carries her away through the streets of an unidentified city. This is…
Slam, Dunk & Hook – Analysis
The poems of Komunyakaa’s Magic City are often discussed in relationship to the poet’s life and to the historical context of the 1950s and 1960s. Angela M. Salas, for example, argues in an article in College Literature, ‘‘In Magic City Komunyakaa makes an imaginative return to his childhood home of Bogalusa, Louisiana.’’ She adds that…