ENGL 386 "this will be on the test" terms
Preface to Leaves of Grass (Walt Whitman)
"A new order shall arise and they shall be the priests of man, and every an shall be his own priest."
William Wordsworth (A slumber did my spirit seal)
"A slumber did my spirit seal; / I had no human fears: / She seemed a thing that could not feel / The touch of earthly years. / No motion has she now, no force; / She neither hears nor sees; / Rolled round in earth's diurnal course, / With rocks, and stones, and trees."
Mathew Arnold (Dover Beach)
"And we are here as on a darkling plain Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, Where ignorant armies clash by night."
Ozymandias (Percy Shelley)
"I met a traveller from an antique land / Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone / Stand in the desert...Near them, on the sand, / Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown, / And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, / Tell that its sculptor well those passions read / Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things / The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed: / And on the pedestal these words appear: / "My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: / Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!" / Nothing beside remains. Round the decay / Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare / The lone and level sands stretch far away."
William Carlos Williams
"No ideas but in things" "Only the imagination is real"
William Blake (The Tyger)
Fifth stanza: "When the stars threw down their spears / And water'd heaven with their tears, / Did he smile his work to see? / Did he who made the lamb make thee?" "tiger tiger burning bright on the forest of the night"
Walt Whitman (Song of Myself) uses anaphora
Section 25: "Dazzling and tremendous how quick the sun-rise would kill me, / If I could not now and always send sun-rise out of me." Section 32: "I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-contain'd," Section 52: "Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged, / Missing me one place search another, / I stop somewhere waiting for you."
Gerald Hopkins (God's Granduer)
The world is charged with the grandeur of God. It will flame out, like shining from shook foil; It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod? Generations have trod, have trod, have trod; And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil; And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod. And for all this, nature is never spent; There lives the dearest freshness deep down things; And though the last lights off the black West went Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs — Because the Holy Ghost over the bent World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.
Anne Bradstreet (The Author to Her Book) rhyme royal
Thou ill-formed offspring of my feeble brain, Who after birth didst by my side remain, Till snatched from thence by friends, less wise than true, Who thee abroad, exposed to public view, Made thee in rags, halting to th' press to trudge, Where errors were not lessened (all may judge). At thy return my blushing was not small, My rambling brat (in print) should mother call, I cast thee by as one unfit for light, The visage was so irksome in my sight; Yet being mine own, at length affection would Thy blemishes amend, if so I could. I washed thy face, but more defects I saw, And rubbing off a spot still made a flaw. I stretched thy joints to make thee even feet, Yet still thou run'st more hobbling than is meet; In better dress to trim thee was my mind, But nought save homespun cloth i' th' house I find. In this array 'mongst vulgars may'st thou roam. In critic's hands beware thou dost not come, And take thy way where yet thou art not known; If for thy father asked, say thou hadst none; And for thy mother, she alas is poor, Which caused her thus to send thee out of door.
William Butler Yeats (The Second Coming)
Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. Surely some revelation is at hand; Surely the Second Coming is at hand. The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert A shape with lion body and the head of a man, A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds. The darkness drops again; but now I know That twenty centuries of stony sleep Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
John Keats (When I Have Fears that I May Cease to Be)
When I have fears that I may cease to be Before my pen has gleaned my teeming brain, Before high-pilèd books, in charactery, Hold like rich garners the full ripened grain; When I behold, upon the night's starred face, Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance, And think that I may never live to trace Their shadows with the magic hand of chance; And when I feel, fair creature of an hour, That I shall never look upon thee more, Never have relish in the faery power Of unreflecting love—then on the shore Of the wide world I stand alone, and think Till love and fame to nothingness do sink.
concordinace
a book that lists every word used by an author through a body of works -an alphabetical list of words ex. emily dickinson which includes page #
aporia
a gap or absence
negative capability
ability to remain in a state of doubt and uncertainty without an irritable reaching after facts (John Keats)
volta
after the first 8 lines there's a turning point (in a sonnet)
image
an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time (Ezra Pound)
emily dickinson
as if all the heavens were a bell of hearing but an ear
blank verse
consecutive lines of unrhymed pentameter continuous lines written in iambic pentameter without rhythm
enjambment
continuation of a sentence (no pause)
enjambement
emphasizing the most important word (the last word) thoughts continue to the next line
caesura
internal pause in the middle of a line
William Wordsworth (Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey)
lines 35-37 on that best portion of a good man's life; his little, nameless, unremembered acts, of kindness and of love. Nor less, I trust (substance and meaning to life)
Dover Beach (Matthew Arnold)
lines 35-37: "And we are here as on a darkling plain / Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, / Where ignorant armies clash by night."
walt whitman
memorize "I stopped somewhere waiting for you" "song to myself" acknowledged as the first long poem broken down in 52 sections but original was not numbered or broken down into sections (kept adjusting his works and eventually added the numbers)
anaphora
repetition of words/phrase at the beginning
epistrophe
repetition of words/phrase at the end
chiasm
reversal
iambic pentameter
total of ten syllab. written of iambs in alternating stressed and unstressed beats total of five beats (iamb, spondee. trachee, anapest, dactyl, pyrrhic)
rhythm
total sound of a line's movement (Karl Shappiro)
why does iambic pentameter have five beats?
uneven number and because of the caesura the line is going to split one way or the other (beginning or the ending of the line and every line has five beats all the way down) musical form
poetry vs. prose
written in lines, not sentences
Thomas Hardy
"Till the spinner of the years said "Now!" and each one hears and consummation comes, and jars two hemispheres."
Carl Sandburg (Grass)
Lines 10-11: "I am the grass. / Let me work."
Carl Sandberg (Grass)
Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo. Shovel them under and let me work— I am the grass; I cover all. And pile them high at Gettysburg And pile them high at Ypres and Verdun. Shovel them under and let me work. Two years, ten years, and passengers ask the conductor: What place is this? Where are we now? I am the grass. Let me work.
line
the words in a line of poetry surprise each other a group of words an instant of time
William Blake (London)
"I wander thro' each charter'd street / Near where the charter'd Thames does flow, / And mark in every face I meet / Marks of weakness, marks of woe. / In every cry of every Man, / In every Infants cry of fear, / In every voice, in every ban, / The mind-forg'd manacles I hear. / How the Chimney-sweepers cry / Every blackning Church appalls, / And the hapless Soldiers sigh / Runs in blood down Palace walls. / But most thro' midnight streets I hear / How the youthful Harlot's curse / Blasts the new-born Infant's tear, / And blights with plagues the marriage hearse."
William Shakespeare (Midsummer Night's Dream)
"Lovers and madmen have such seething brains, / Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend / More than cool reason ever comprehends. / The lunatic, the lover, and the poet / Are of imagination all compact. / One sees more devils than vast hell can hold; / This is, the madman. The lover, all as frantic, / Sees Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt. / The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling, / Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven; / And as imagination bodies forth / The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen / Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing / a local habitation and a name."
Robert Frost
"No surprise for the poet, no surprise for the reader"
William Shakespeare (The Tempest)
"Our revels now are ended. These our actors, / As I foretold you, were all spirits, and / Are melted into air, into thin air; / And, like the baseless fabric of this vision, / The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces, / The solemn temples, the great globe itself, / Yes, all which it inherit, shall dissolve / And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, / Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff / As dreams are made on, and our little life / Is rounded with a sleep."
Wallace Stevens (V "She says, "but in.." VI "Death is the mother of beauty, mystical")
"She says, "But in contentment I still feel The need for imperishable bliss." Death is the mother of beauty; hence from her, Alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreams And our desires. Is there no change of death in paradise? Does ripe fruit never fall? or do the boughs Hang always heavy in that perfect sky, Unchanging, yet so like our perishing earth, With rivers like our own that seek for seas They never find, the same receding shores That never touch with inarticulate pang?"
William Blake (Auguries of Innocence)
"To see a World in a Grain of Sand / And a Heaven in a Wild Flower / Hold Infinity in the palm of you hand / And Eternity in an hour"
William Shakespeare (Macbeth)
"To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow, / Creeps in this petty pace from day to day / To the last syllable of recorded time; / And all our yesterdays have lighted fools / The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle. / Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player / That struts and frets his hour upon the stage / And then is heard no more. It is a tale / Told by and idiot, full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing."
Wallace Stevens
"death is the mother of beauty, mystical" said twice in part 5 and 6
William Blake
"the crystal cabinet" THE MAIDEN caught me in the wild, Where I was dancing merrily; She put me into her Cabinet, And lock'd me up with a golden key. This Cabinet is form'd of gold 5 And pearl and crystal shining bright, And within it opens into a world And a little lovely moony night. Another England there I saw, Another London with its Tower, 10 Another Thames and other hills, And another pleasant Surrey bower, Another Maiden like herself, Translucent, lovely, shining clear, Threefold each in the other clos'd— 15 O, what a pleasant trembling fear! O, what a smile! a threefold smile Fill'd me, that like a flame I burn'd; I bent to kiss the lovely Maid, And found a threefold kiss return'd. 20 I strove to seize the inmost form With ardour fierce and hands of flame, But burst the Crystal Cabinet, And like a weeping Babe became— A weeping Babe upon the wild, 25 And weeping Woman pale reclin'd, And in the outward air again I fill'd with woes the passing wind.
William Butler Yeats (Leda and the Swan)
A sudden blow: the great wings beating still Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill, He holds her helpless breast upon his breast. How can those terrified vague fingers push The feathered glory from her loosening thighs? And how can body, laid in that white rush, But feel the strange heart beating where it lies? A shudder in the loins engenders there The broken wall, the burning roof and tower And Agamemnon dead. Being so caught up, So mastered by the brute blood of the air, Did she put on his knowledge with his power Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?
Langston Hughes (The Weary Blues) uses epiphora
Droning a drowsy syncopated tune, Rocking back and forth to a mellow croon, I heard a Negro play. Down on Lenox Avenue the other night By the pale dull pallor of an old gas light He did a lazy sway . . . He did a lazy sway . . . To the tune o' those Weary Blues. With his ebony hands on each ivory key He made that poor piano moan with melody. O Blues! Swaying to and fro on his rickety stool He played that sad raggy tune like a musical fool. Sweet Blues! Coming from a black man's soul. O Blues! In a deep song voice with a melancholy tone I heard that Negro sing, that old piano moan— "Ain't got nobody in all this world, Ain't got nobody but ma self. I's gwine to quit ma frownin' And put ma troubles on the shelf." Thump, thump, thump, went his foot on the floor. He played a few chords then he sang some more— "I got the Weary Blues And I can't be satisfied. Got the Weary Blues And can't be satisfied— I ain't happy no mo' And I wish that I had died." And far into the night he crooned that tune. The stars went out and so did the moon. The singer stopped playing and went to bed While the Weary Blues echoed through his head. He slept like a rock or a man that's dead.
Gerald Hopkins (The Windhover)
I caught this morning morning's minion, king- dom of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing, As a skate's heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding Stirred for a bird, - the achieve of, the mastery of the thing! Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier! No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear, Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion.
Percy Bysshe Shelley (Ozymandias)
I met a traveller from an antique land, Who said—"Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand, Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed; And on the pedestal, these words appear: My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair! Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away."
Edna St Vincent Millay (Sonnet IV) line 26 is continuos
I shall forget you presently, my dear, So make the most of this, your little day, Your little month, your little half a year Ere I forget, or die, or move away, And we are done forever; by and by I shall forget you, as I said, but now, If you entreat me with your loveliest lie I will protest you with my favorite vow. I would indeed that love were longer-lived, And vows were not so brittle as they are, But so it is, and nature has contrived To struggle on without a break thus far,— Whether or not we find what we are seeking Is idle, biologically speaking.
William Blake (London)
I wander thro' each charter'd street, Near where the charter'd Thames does flow. And mark in every face I meet Marks of weakness, marks of woe. In every cry of every Man, In every Infants cry of fear, In every voice: in every ban, The mind-forg'd manacles I hear How the Chimney-sweepers cry Every blackning Church appalls, And the hapless Soldiers sigh Runs in blood down Palace walls But most thro' midnight streets I hear How the youthful Harlots curse Blasts the new-born Infants tear And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse
Langston Hughes (The Negro Speaks of Rivers)
I've known rivers: I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human views. My soul has grown up like the rivers. -making use of anaphora and repetition of words at the end of lines by using anaphora and epiphora
Emily Dickinson #510
It was not Death, for I stood up (#510) Emily Dickinson, 1830 - 1886 It was not Death, for I stood up, And all the Dead, lie down— It was not Night, for all the Bells Put out their Tongues, for Noon. It was not Frost, for on my Flesh I felt Sirocos—crawl— Nor Fire—for just my Marble feet Could keep a Chancel, cool— And yet, it tasted, like them all, The Figures I have seen Set orderly, for Burial, Reminded me, of mine— As if my life were shaven, And fitted to a frame, And could not breathe without a key, And 'twas like Midnight, some— When everything that ticked—has stopped— And Space stares all around— Or Grisly frosts—first Autumn morns, Repeal the Beating Ground— But, most, like Chaos—Stopless—cool— Without a Chance, or Spar— Or even a Report of Land— To justify—Despair.
Richard Cory (Edwin Arlington Robinson)
Last stanza: "So on we worked, and waited for the light, / And went without meat, and cursed the bread; / And Richard Cory, one calm summer night, / Went home and put a bullet through his head."
W.B. Yeats (Easter 1916)
Line 16: "A terrible beauty is born."
John Keats (On the Grasshopper and Cricket)
Line 1: "The poetry of earth is never dead" What does the grasshopper represent? The essence of living.
God's Grandeur (Gerard Manley Hopkins)
Line 1: "The world is charged with the grandeur of God."
Anne Bradstreet (Contemplations)
Line 26: "Soul of this world, this universe's eye" metaphor
William Shakespeare (Sonnet 18)
Line 3: "Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May"
Wallace Stevens (Sunday Morning)
Line 88: "Death is the mother of beauty"
W.B. Yeats (The Second Coming)
Lines 1-3: "Turning and turning in the widening gyre / The falcon cannot hear the falconer; / Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;" Lines 20-22: "Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, / And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, / Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?"
Endymion (John Keats)
Lines 1-5: "A thing is a joy for ever: / Its loveliness increases; it will never / Pass into nothingness; but still will keep / A bower quiet for us, and a sleep / Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing."
Wallace Stevens (Snowman)
Lines 13-15: "For the listener, who listens in the snow, / And, nothing himself, beholds / Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is."
William Blake (The Crystal Cabinet)
Lines 21-24: "I strove to seize the inmost form / With ardor fierce and hands of flame, / But burst the Crystal Cabinet, / And like a weeping Babe became"
The Convergence of the Twain (Thomas Hardy)
Lines 31-33: "Till the Spinner of the Years / Said "Now!" And each one hears, / And consummation comes, and jars two hemispheres."
William Wordsworth (Tintern Abbey)
Lines 35-37: "On that best portion of a good man's life; / His little, nameless, unremembered acts / Of kindness and of love." Lines 91-94: "For I have learned / To look on nature, not as in the hour / Of thoughtless youth, but of hearing oftentimes / The still, sad music of humanity"
Samuel Coleridge (The Eolian Harp)
My pensive Sara! thy soft cheek reclined Thus on mine arm, most soothing sweet it is To sit beside our Cot, our Cot o'ergrown With white-flowered Jasmin, and the broad-leaved Myrtle, (Meet emblems they of Innocence and Love!) And watch the clouds, that late were rich with light, Slow saddening round, and mark the star of eve Serenely brilliant (such would Wisdom be) Shine opposite! How exquisite the scents Snatched from yon bean-field! and the world so hushed! The stilly murmur of the distant Sea Tells us of silence.
Edgar Allan Poe (The Raven)
Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary, Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore— While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping, As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door. "'Tis some visitor," I muttered, "tapping at my chamber door— Only this and nothing more." (last stanza) And the Raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting On the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door; And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon's that is dreaming, And the lamp-light o'er him streaming throws his shadow on the floor; And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor Shall be lifted—nevermore!
Robert Frost (Out, Out)
The buzz saw snarled and rattled in the yard And made dust and dropped stove-length sticks of wood, Sweet-scented stuff when the breeze drew across it. And from there those that lifted eyes could count Five mountain ranges one behind the other Under the sunset far into Vermont. And the saw snarled and rattled, snarled and rattled, As it ran light, or had to bear a load. And nothing happened: day was all but done. Call it a day, I wish they might have said To please the boy by giving him the half hour That a boy counts so much when saved from work. His sister stood beside him in her apron To tell them 'Supper.' At the word, the saw, As if to prove saws knew what supper meant, Leaped out at the boy's hand, or seemed to leap— He must have given the hand. However it was, Neither refused the meeting. But the hand! The boy's first outcry was a rueful laugh, As he swung toward them holding up the hand Half in appeal, but half as if to keep The life from spilling. Then the boy saw all— Since he was old enough to know, big boy Doing a man's work, though a child at heart— He saw all spoiled. 'Don't let him cut my hand off— The doctor, when he comes. Don't let him, sister!' So. But the hand was gone already. The doctor put him in the dark of ether. He lay and puffed his lips out with his breath. And then—the watcher at his pulse took fright. No one believed. They listened at his heart. Little—less—nothing!—and that ended it. No more to build on there. And they, since they Were not the one dead, turned to their affairs.
Paul Laurence Dunbar (We Wear the Mask)
We wear the mask that grins and lies, It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,— This debt we pay to human guile; With torn and bleeding hearts we smile, And mouth with myriad subtleties. Why should the world be over-wise, In counting all our tears and sighs? Nay, let them only see us, while We wear the mask. We smile, but, O great Christ, our cries To thee from tortured souls arise. We sing, but oh the clay is vile Beneath our feet, and long the mile; But let the world dream otherwise, We wear the mask!
Langston Hughes (What Happens to a Dream Deferred) uses epiphora
What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun? Or fester like a sore— And then run? Does it stink like rotten meat? Or crust and sugar over— like a syrupy sweet? Maybe it just sags like a heavy load. Or does it explode?
William Cullen Bryant (To The Waterfowl)
Whither, 'midst falling dew, While glow the heavens with the last steps of day, Far, through their rosy depths, dost thou pursue Thy solitary way? Vainly the fowler's eye Might mark thy distant flight, to do thee wrong, As, darkly seen against the crimson sky, Thy figure floats along. Seek'st thou the plashy brink Of weedy lake, or marge of river wide, Or where the rocking billows rise and sink On the chaféd ocean side? There is a Power, whose care Teaches thy way along that pathless coast,— The desert and illimitable air Lone wandering, but not lost. All day thy wings have fanned, At that far height, the cold thin atmosphere; Yet stoop not, weary, to the welcome land, Though the dark night is near. And soon that toil shall end, Soon shalt thou find a summer home, and rest, And scream among thy fellows; reeds shall bend, Soon, o'er thy sheltered nest. Thou'rt gone, the abyss of heaven Hath swallowed up thy form, yet, on my heart Deeply hath sunk the lesson thou hast given, And shall not soon depart. He, who, from zone to zone, Guides through the boundless sky thy certain flight, In the long way that I must trace alone, Will lead my steps aright. -symbollic didactic poem -symbol is the water fowl which is a bird -theme: trust and you will be rewarded and guided
synesthesia
blending of senses and can occur in non verbal manner but poets use verbal ex. emily dickinson "then I heard a blue un-stumbling buzz" reference to a fly
John Keats (To Autumn)
for summer has o'er-brimm'd their clammy cells p104 line 11
metrical feet
iamb, spondee. trachee, anapest, dactyl, pyrrhic
anthroposcene
irreversible ecological impact
William Carlos Williams (Poem)
poem As the cat climbed over the top of the jamcloset first the right forefoot carefully then the hind stepped down into the pit of the empty flowerpot (cat is a flower or transforms) A flower is beautiful but just for a brief moment--it's beauty does not last forever so it's a perception of time and beauty.
chaism
reversal of terms where the first term and the second term change statements influences a way the imagination works ex: because I couldn't stop for death, death stopped for me
rhyme royal stanza
seven lines ABABCCC introduced to poetry by Chaucer
synesthesia
synaptic connection of senses, adopted by writers to present ideas, characters, or places in such a manner that they appeal to more than one sense
Antinomian Principle
the notion of every person being able to understand the text you interpret text and have resources
anaphora
the repetition of words and groups of words in the beginning of a line/sentence/claus
end stop line
thought comes to a stop due to the period at the end of the line
thomas harding
til the spinning of the twain the titanic poem p 256
