When I Was One-and-Twenty

By A. E. Housman
When I was one-and-twenty
I heard a wise man say,
Give crowns and pounds and guineas
But not your heart away;
Give pearls away and rubies
But keep your fancy free.
But I was one-and-twenty,
No use to talk to me.

When I was one-and-twenty

I heard him say again,
The heart out of the bosom
Was never given in vain;
Tis paid with sighs a plenty
And sold for endless rue.
And I am two-and-twenty,
And oh, tis true, tis true

Divided into two eight-line stanzas, this poem follows traditional ballad rhyme schemes: the
stanzas each break neatly in half, with the second and fourth lines of each group rhyming.
speaker gets some advice from an older, wiser person: don't bank too much on love. Like any
young person, he promptly ignores the advice. Did we mention that he's 21? Keep that in mind. It'll be
important later.

Flash forward: now he's 22. And as it turns out, the advice he got was pretty good. Love hurts. And
we're not just quoting that '80s song.
Fire and Ice
By Robert Frost
Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what Ive tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

Analyze:
The poem revolves around the two symbols of fire and ice. In the first two lines, we don't yet know that
they are symbols. Judging by these lines alone, this could be a poem about theories of modern science.
But when the speaker associates fire with desire and ice with hate, we know that fire and ice are
symbols for human behaviors and emotions. But the poem does not close down possibilities for your
imagination to run wild by telling us exactly what these two basic forces represent. You should feel
free to relate them to your own thoughts and experiences and come up with an interpretation.
Lines 1 and 2: These two lines have a parallel structure, beginning with "Some say." This phrase
is an example of alliteration. Fire and ice, as we mentioned above, are symbols. Specifically,
they represent emotions like "desire" and "hate." But be careful there's no reason to think that
these areall that fire and ice represent. Desire and hate are merely examples that fall in a broader
category.
Line 4: "Fire favor" is an example of alliteration. Both words begin with the same letter.
Line 8: The word "great" in this line means "powerful," not "fantastic."
Line 9: It is highly ironic to say that ice will "suffice" to destroy the world. "Suffice" is a word
that has connotations of restraint, not excess. You can imagine a stern parent lecturing a child,
"That will suffice, young man!" if he or she didn't want to say, "Cut it out!" But the end of the
world is the ultimate example of excess and violence. The tone at the end of the poem seems
almost absurd.
The Road Not Taken
By Robert Frost
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,

And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay

In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

Our speaker has come to a fork in a path in the woods. It's fall, and the leaves are turning colors.
He's unsure which way to go, and wishes he could go both ways. He looks down one path as far as he
can see, but then he decides to take the other. He thinks the path he decides to take is not quite as worn
as the other one, but really, the paths are about the same, and the fallen leaves on both look pretty fresh.

The speaker reflects on how he plans to take the road that he didn't take another day, but suspects that
he probably won't ever come back. Instead, far off in the future, he'll be talking about how his decision
was final and life changing.
This poem has a pretty complicated form. We'll start with the (relatively) simple stuff. The
poem consists of four stanzas with five lines each. These are called quintains. And in each quintain, the
rhyme scheme is ABAAB. For example, take the first stanza:

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, (A)

And sorry I could not travel both (B)
And be one traveler, long I stood (A)
And looked down one as far as I could (A)
To where it bent in the undergrowth; (B)

The rhythm of the poem is a bit trickier. It is basically iambic, which means that there is one unstressed
syllable followed by a stressed syllable (da DUM). There are many variations in this poem, most of
which are anapestic, which means that there are two unstressed syllables followed by a stressed syllable
(da da DUM).
SONNET 18
William Shakespear
Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm'd;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature's changing course, untrimm'd;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st;
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
The speaker begins by asking whether he should or will compare "thee" to a summer day. He
says that his beloved is more lovely and more even-tempered. He then runs off a list of reasons why
summer isnt all that great: winds shake the buds that emerged in Spring, summer ends too quickly, and
the sun can get too hot or be obscured by clouds.
He goes on, saying that everything beautiful eventually fades by chance or by natures
inevitable changes. Coming back to the beloved, though, he argues that his or her summer (or happy,
beautiful years) wont go away, nor will his or her beauty fade away. Moreover, death will never be
able to take the beloved, since the beloved exists in eternal lines (meaning poetry). The speaker
concludes that as long as humans exist and can see (so as to read), the poem hes writing will live on,
allowing the beloved to keep living as well
This is a classic Shakespearean sonnet with fourteen lines in very regular iambic pentameter.
With the exception of a couple relatively strong first syllables (and even these are debatable), there are
basically no deviations from the meter. There arent even any lines that flow over into the next line
every single line is end-stopped. There are two quatrains (groups of four lines), followed by a third
quatrain in which the tone of the poem shifts a bit, which is in turn followed by a rhyming couplet (two
lines) that wraps the poem up. The rhyme scheme is ABAB CDCD EFEF GG.
The form of this sonnet is also notable for being a perfect model of the Shakespearean sonnet
form. Just as in older Italian sonnets by which the English sonnets (later to be called Shakespearean
sonnets) were inspired, the ninth line introduces a significant change in tone or position. Here
Shakespeare switches from bashing the summer to describing the immortality of his beloved. This
poem also has the uniquely English twist of a concluding rhyming couplet that partially sums up and
partially redefines what came before it. In this case, the closing lines have the feel of a cute little poem
of their own, making it clear that the poets abilities were the subject of this poem all along.
My Heart Leaps Up
William Wordsworth, 1770 - 1850
My heart leaps up when I behold
A rainbow in the sky:
So was it when my life began;
So is it now I am a man;
So be it when I shall grow old,
Or let me die!
The Child is father of the Man;
And I could wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety.

The speaker is telling us about the feeling he gets, has always gotten, and will always get when
he sees a rainbow in the sky: his heart rejoices. He says that if he were ever to stop feeling this joy, he'd
want to die.
He presents the paradox (contradictory statement) that the child is the father of the man. In other words,
our adult selves still contain the kernel of our childhood selves. He wants his days to be, perhaps, like
the days of a child, filled withand tied together bya reverence for nature
The technical term for the rhythm of this poem is "iambic tetrameter," but don't get all freaked
out by those strange words. An iamb is a two-syllable combination, where an unstressed syllable is
followed by a stressed syllable. Think of the word "alarm," which is pronounced "uh-LARM." And
"tetra-" just means four. So, iambic tetrameter just means that the poem has four beats per line (with a
few exceptions), and these beats happen to be arranged in a repeating pattern of iambs, four in (almost)
every line. Check out an example of the basic structure, then we'll move on to the variations. Stressed
syllables are in bold:
The Child is fa ther of the Man;
If you read that line aloud, you should hear the iambic tetrameter pattern: da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM
da-DUM. Got it? Great. Now let's complicate things for you.
The Man He Killed
By Thomas Hardy
"Had he and I but met
By some old ancient inn,
We should have sat us down to wet
Right many a nipperkin!

"But ranged as infantry,

And staring face to face,
I shot at him as he at me,
And killed him in his place.

"I shot him dead because

Because he was my foe,
Just so: my foe of course he was;
That's clear enough; although

"He thought he'd 'list, perhaps,

Off-hand like just as I
Was out of work had sold his traps
No other reason why.

"Yes; quaint and curious war is!

You shoot a fellow down
You'd treat if met where any bar is,
Or help to half-a-crown."

The speaker recalls a time when he shot a man in war, and realizes that if they had met
at a bar instead of on the battlefield, they could have had a grand ol' time. The speaker then goes on to
describe how he killed the guy and tries to explain why. But in the end, the speaker doesn't have a good
reason for killing the man, because the other man was a complete stranger, and what did he ever do to
this guy?
Three things you might want to note:
Hear that daDUM daDUM? That's iambic meter at work. In this case, Hardy smushes three
iambs in the first, second, and fourth lines of each stanza, making it iambic trimeter, and he
drops an extra one in the third line of each stanza, making that line iambic tetrameter.
Each stanza has four lines, which makes it a quatrain.
And finally, the first and third lines rhyme (infantry and me) and the second and fourth lines
rhyme (face and place), giving this quatrain an ABAB rhyme scheme.
Each quatrain of the poem looks pretty much like this one. Easy peasy, right? Right. There are a few
places, though, where Hardy wants to keep you on your toes, but for the most part, this poem sticks to
its form like a magnet to a fridge.
Why be so traditional in a poem that's being spoken by a lowly foot soldier, just back from war? Why
not? might be the better question. After all, this poem still manages to sound like everyday speech,
despite the fact that it happens to be written in near perfect meter. The fact that Hardy can pull that off
tells us that he's one of the greats.
But more than that, it tells us something about his take on war, too. We often associate perfect meter
with serious subjects, deserving of careful attention. War certainly fits the bill. But this speaker is an
average Joe talking about how he wouldn't mind having a drink with the guy he killed on the
battlefield, which adds a hint of ironyto what should be a serious poem. Instead of hearing about glory
and sacrifice from some grand, mustachioed general, we hear about drinking and shooting from
someone who, as far as we can tell, is not much more than a barfly.

A Work of Artifice
The bonsai tree
in the attractive pot
could have grown eighty feet tall
on the side of a mountain
till split by lightning.
But a gardener
carefully pruned it.
It is nine inches high.
Every day as he
whittles back the branches
the gardener croons,
It is your nature
to be small and cozy,
domestic and weak;
how lucky, little tree,
to have a pot to grow in.
With living creatures
one must begin very early
to dwarf their growth:
the bound feet,
the crippled brain,
the hair in curlers,
the hands you
love to touch.
A Work of Artifice, by the American poet Marge Piercy, is a small poem about a large
subject. The poem describes how a bonsai tree, which in nature has the potential to grow to an
enormous height, is instead carefully pruned so that it becomes something miniaturea mere, tiny
glimpse of its potential self. Some bonsai trees, for instance, are actually miniature versions of giant
redwoods, and it is clearly the latter kind of tree that the speaker has in mind when she mentions a tree
that could have grown eighty feet tall (3). Rather than celebrating the careful artifice involved in
producing a finely crafted tiny tree (as one might have expected at first), the poem laments the ways in
which the potential of people in generaland of women in particularcan be stifled by the ways they
are raised.
The satirical tone of the poem is already implied by its title: A Work of Artifice (emphasis
added). If Piercy had titled the poem A Work of Art, the tone would have been much more
unambiguously positive. By using the word artifice, however, she already begins to imply something
deceptive, crafty, subtle, and cunning. Whereas we normally consider bonsai trees admirable,
impressive examples of human skill, this poem finally suggests that miniaturization involves
diminution and distortion: something that might have been grand and unfettered is turned into
something neatly shaped and carefully controlled, but also puny. This process, the poem suggests, more
often happens to humans than to trees.
The first four lines of the poem celebrate the latent potential of the tree, which might have
grown to an enormous height. But then line 5 appears and reminds us that the giant tree would probably
someday have been split by lightning. This reminder is crucial, because it prevents the poem from
seeming nave, sentimental, and romantic. A bonsai tree can be carefully protected from harm and may
even live far longer than a tree exposed to the dangers of nature, of which lightning is only one. Yet the
poem implies that existence in nature, and the development of ones natural potential, are both more
valuable than a life that is safe, controlled, and limited. Line 5 is crucial because it acknowledges the
potential dangers of a life without limits, but the poem accepts and even welcomes those dangers as the
risks inherent in a life of freedom.
Later the poem suggests that the gardener not only limits the freedom of the tree he prunes but that he
also insists (falsely) that it is the trees nature / to be small and cozy (12-13). Is the gardener a
deliberate liar, or is he merely deceiving himself? In either case, he is not expressing the truth: the
nature of the tree is in fact to be anything but small. The gardener takes pride in shaping the tree to
his own purposes, imposing his own will on it so that it conforms to his wishes.
Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
By Robert Frost
Whose woods these are I think I know. A
His house is in the village though; A
He will not see me stopping here B
To watch his woods fill up with snow. A

My little horse must think it queer B

To stop without a farmhouse near B
Between the woods and frozen lake C
The darkest evening of the year. B

He gives his harness bells a shake C

To ask if there is some mistake. C
The only other sound's the sweep D
Of easy wind and downy flake. C

The woods are lovely, dark and deep. D

But I have promises to keep, D
And miles to go before I sleep, D
And miles to go before I sleep. D

Our speaker is in the woods, but (gasp) he's trespassing. He first wonders who owns these
woods. In the same breath, he tells us that he thinks he does know who owns them. The lucky
landowner lives in a house in the village. Phew. So, our speaker won't get into trouble for trespassing,
because there's no one to catch him trespassing. Little Horse is starting to really lose it. Fortunately, he
has some harness bells on his back, and he gives them a little shake in order to get his master's
attention. The only other sounds are of a slight wind and of falling snow. Shhhhhh. It's quiet.

Our speaker admits to having a hankering for the dark woods, but he tells us he's got things to do,
people to see and places to go. He's got a long way to go before he can rest his head on his little pillow,
so he had better get going.
You may or may not have noticed that "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" has a nice
ring to it, almost like a song. There's rhythm and there's reason, and even some rhyming in this poem.
Composed of four four-lined stanzas, this poem is a classic example of the Rubaiyat Stanza. Do not be
scared by the number of vowels in that word. "Rubaiyat" is a beautiful Persian word for "quatrain,"
which means a stanza composed of four lines. The Rubaiyat Stanza has a rhyme scheme of AABA.
Let's take a look:

What are all of those strange letters in bold, you ask? Well, we (along with other scholars) like to pick
poems apart and look at how they work and at how they sound. When poems contain lines that rhyme
with one another, we like to map out theserhyme schemes, so that we can see what words are rhyming
with each other. You'll notice that the first two lines and the last line of each stanza rhyme together,
whereas the pesky third line introduces a new rhyme altogether. When the next stanza begins, three of
the four lines rhyme with the third line of the previous stanza.

Have we thoroughly confused you? Take a look at "whose woods these are I think Iknow./ His house is
in the village though./ He will not see me stopping here/ To watch his woods fill up with snow" (1-4).
In this case, "know," "though," and "snow" all rhyme together, but "here" is like the ugly duckling of
the group, not fitting in. Fortunately, "here" rhymes with the first, second, and fourth lines in the next
stanza. That's just the way a Rubaiyat stanza works. You'll notice that there's an exception to this
rhyming business in the final stanza. In this grand finale of a stanza, each line rhymes together no
new rhyme is introduced. In this way, we know the poem has come to an end.

Let's talk about rhythm. If you've heard about or read any Shakespeare, the word "iambic pentameter"
might ring a bell. Shakespeare liked to write most of the lines in his plays with a particular rhythm of
stressed and unstressed syllables. His lines usually have ten syllables, or five pairs of syllables
(pentameter). Frost's lines in "Stopping by Woods of a Snowy Evening," however, have eight syllables.
Frost uses iambic tetrameter (think Tetras=four). Because it has a regular rhythm, and because each
line only has eight syllables, the poem moves along at a brisk pace. It's a very neat and tidy poem. Look
at the syllables in the first line (stressed syllables are in bold font):
"whose woods these are I think I know." The iambic (unstressed/stressed) nature of these lines is what
allows us to hear this poem in the way that we've been hearing it all of our life in that slightly sing-
songy way.

Call us crazy, but we went ahead and counted every word in this poem: 108. Out of those 108 words,
only 20 have more than one syllable. In other words, this poem is built mostly of monosyllabic words.
What does that mean exactly? Well, we're not quite sure, but monosyllabic words do help to keep up
the pace, and they also seem to make the poem sound simpler than it really is. No fancy
schmancy, New York Times crossword puzzle words clutter up this poem; and yet, we could argue
about it's meaning until the cows come home. It's that multi-dimensional.
The Tyger
By William Blake
Tyger Tyger, burning bright,
In the forests of the night;
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies.

Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand, dare seize the fire?

And what shoulder, & what art,

Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand? & what dread feet?

What the hammer? what the chain,

In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp,
Dare its deadly terrors clasp!

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?

Tyger Tyger burning bright,

In the forests of the night:
What immortal hand or eye,
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

The poem is often interpreted to deal with issues of inspiration, poetry, mystical knowledge,
God, and the sublime (big, mysterious, powerful, and sometimes scary. Ever heard the phrase, "To love
God is to fear him"? Thats talking about something sublime). But its not about any one thing: this
is William Blake.

For better or worse, there really is no narrative movement in "The Tyger": nobody really does anything
other than the speaker questioning "the Tyger." The first stanza opens the central question: "What
immortal hand or eye, / Could frame thy fearful symmetry?" The second stanza questions "the Tyger"
about where he was created, the third about how the creator formed him, the fourth about what tools
were used. The fifth stanza goes on to ask about how the creator reacted to his creation ("the Tyger")
and who exactly was this creator. Finally, the sixth restates the central question while raising the stakes;
rather than merely question what/who could create the Tyger, the speaker wonders: who dares.
The stuffy way of talking about form and meter in "The Tyger" is to say it's written in six
quatrains of rhyming couplets with a pulsing, steady, mostly-trochaic rhythm. OK, now is the time to
ask, "What the heck does that mean?"

Let's start from the beginning. A quatrain is a stanza with four lines. Rhyming couplets are pairs of
lines, the last words of which rhyme. We know what you're thinking: in the first and last stanzas, "eye"
doesn't rhyme with "symmetry." However, they do rhyme if you pronounce "symmetry" in an old-
fashioned way, as "simm-a-try" (as in "Im gonna try"). So two lines make a couplet, and two couplets
make a quatrain or stanza. Lastly, six stanzas make a poem its neat, clean, and simple.

The "trochaic" refers to the "trochee," of one stressed syllable followed by one unstressed one (DUM-
da, DUM-da, etc.). "The Tyger" isn't all trochaic, because there are several exceptions, but the general
rhythmic march when you read it out loud is quintessentially trochaic.
A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning
By John Donne
As virtuous men pass mildly away,
And whisper to their souls to go,
Whilst some of their sad friends do say
The breath goes now, and some say, No:

So let us melt, and make no noise,

No tear-floods, nor sigh-tempests move;
'Twere profanation of our joys
To tell the laity our love.

Moving of th' earth brings harms and fears,

Men reckon what it did, and meant;
But trepidation of the spheres,
Though greater far, is innocent.

Dull sublunary lovers' love

(Whose soul is sense) cannot admit
Absence, because it doth remove
Those things which elemented it.

But we by a love so much refined,

That our selves know not what it is,
Inter-assured of the mind,
Care less, eyes, lips, and hands to miss.

Our two souls therefore, which are one,

Though I must go, endure not yet
A breach, but an expansion,
Like gold to airy thinness beat.

If they be two, they are two so

As stiff twin compasses are two;
Thy soul, the fixed foot, makes no show
To move, but doth, if the other do.

And though it in the center sit,

Yet when the other far doth roam,
It leans and hearkens after it,
And grows erect, as that comes home.

Such wilt thou be to me, who must,

Like th' other foot, obliquely run;
Thy firmness makes my circle just,
And makes me end where I begun.

Donne's speaker begins with the very weird metaphor of an old man dying. Romantic,
right? He says that the parting between him and his wife should be like the gentle death of an old
manyou can't even tell when he's stopped breathing. You had us at 'dead guy,' John.
Then he shifts gears and compares shallow love to earthquakes that make a big scene and cause a big
fuss, but don't have tremendous lasting effects. On the contrary, his love is like the unnoticed, subtle
movements of the stars and planets that control the fates of every person (well, according to popular
belief). That super-handsy couple can't stand to be apart because their love is based solely on physical
contact, but the love he has can stretch any distance because the pair share one soul. Now he's turning
on that old Donne charm.
To further prove the greatness of their love, he gives his last metaphor: a mathematical compass
because nothing says sex appeal like mathematical apparatus. But he says that he and his wife are like a
compass when drawing a circle. One foot of the compass (Donne) goes way out and travels around,
while the other (his wife) stays planted at home and leans after it. But those two compass feet are part
of one unit and will always end up back together. And we give props to anyone that can drop the
microphone with that as a closing image.

"A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning" is not written in a specific, named form. But that doesn't
mean it isn't formal. The poem follows a very strict structure of its own making and shows remarkably
little deviation. It is composed of nine four-linestanzas called quatrains, each with an alternating
ABAB rhyme scheme.
The meter is iambic tetrameter, which may or may not mean anything to you at all. An iambic meter
means that the syllables alternate between unstressed and stressed syllables. Tetrameter means that
there are four stressed syllables per line. (Tetris gets its name from its shapes made up of four square
blocks.) This means that each line has eight syllables. For example:
Though I must go, endure not yet. (22)
If you read this line aloud (go ahead, nobody's looking), you should hear four iambs in a row: da-DUM,
da-DUM, da-DUM, da-DUM.