Țurlea Mihaela

R-E,Anul lll,Semestrul ll

POETRY

SYLVIA PLATH
Lady Lazarus

Sylvia Plath was a bright, intelligent, and determined young woman with a need to
succeed and a burning desire to write. Sylvia had other needs that clashed with her
literary ambitions. She dreamed of the comfort of a home of her own where she
could belong and be loved for herself.Death Instinct in Sylvia Plath’s Poems Sylvia
Plath is famous as a confessional poet who expresses her idea intensely especially
in the theme of mortality. She had a large concern in death things. Depression,
suffering, despair, betrayal, losing was being friends of her life which pour most in
her work of poems or novel.
Sylvia Plath titles the poem ‘Lady Lazarus’ to let her readers know that there will be
references to death.Since we know that Lazarus was brought to life again, we might
assume that this poem will be one of victory over death, just as the biblical story of
Lazarus.
"Lady Lazarus" features a speaker telling a "peanut-crunching crowd" about her
most recent suicide attempt. It was her third time. She claims that "dying is an art,"
and that she performs it well. She wants to die and be reborn like a phoenix. Lady
Lazarus consists of twenty-eight stanza or tercets, of three line each. The structure,
the lyrical quality and relatively simple diction could be suitable for a light hearted
poem. The iambic structure of the poem provides a more masculine tone to the
speaker. Lady Lazarus' is a dramatic monologue which echoes and parodies 'The
Love Song of J. AIfred Prufrock'. The title alludes, of course, not only to the biblical
story of Lazarus but also to Prufrock's lines: 'I am Lazarus, come from the dead, |
Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all'.

Daddy

The poem daddy is a well known poem in the genre of "confessional poetry "
written by one of the most famous poet of this genre "Sylvia Plath " . This poem is
also a representation of plath's relationship with her father . "Daddy" is a bold and
violent poem directed at Plath's father. Chanting in an almost nursery-rhyme manner,
she compares him to terrifying patriarchal figures like a vampire, a Nazi, and a devil.
Comparing herself to a Jew at the concentration camps, she details how she needs
to finally be "through" with her father. At the end, she alludes to having placed her
husband, Ted Hughes, in a similarly lofty position, and decides she must kill both him
and her father.
The tone varies from childlike adoration and admiration to that of a contemptuous
and detached, yet fearful adult. The tone is found to be innocent, almost akin to a
lullaby at times, and incredibly manic and sinister at others.
She uses the second person throughout the poem, saying "you," who, as we find
out, is "Daddy." So that means that she's comparing her father to a shoe that she's
been living in very unhappily – but she's not going to put up with it anymore.
This poem is full of surreal imagery and allusion interspersed with scenes from the
poet's childhood and a kind of dark cinematic language that borrows from nursery
rhyme and song lyric.
"Daddy" is a poem Plath had to write. It's successful because you catch glimpses
of her real life bubbling up through metaphor and allegory, but she never makes it
fully confessional. You have to have courage to express such pain in this manner
and you could say that courage is a sign of great maturity.
So, Daddy is both simple and complicated, a bloody nursery rhyme from voodoo
land, a dark, lyrical train of thought exploring what is still a taboo subject.

THOM GUNN
Human Condition

"The Human Condition" by Thom Gunn is a very odd poem. Gunn uses the fog to
represent life. It is the distraction and struggles in life. He say that lights "press
beams painfully / In a yard of fog around." I think this Gunn is saying that light, which
usually represents good or a goal to reach, makes the distractions and struggles
painfully obvious.
The human condition is defined in many different ways, selfish, troubled, and
convoluted. The speaker illustrates a feeling of loneliness, and emits and strange
self conscious era. To him the fog represents troubles and the mysteries of his life.
The tone sends an eccentric tingle of sensitivity and confusion through my spine, an
uneasy feeling that we as humans are all too familiar with.
In the "fog" he is alone, and an individual, his consciousness is trying to decipher
himself, because there is no place to hide. The human condition is critical judgement
of oneself and the difficult journey to uncover what and who you are as a person. It
sounds easier to find yourself but in reality it takes a lifetime of trial and error, pain
and pleasure, lightness and darkness to discover the answers.
 When you read the first line, there seems to be a rhythm, but as you keep reading,
it seem as though the author is justing writing down thoughts and the rhyme scheme
seems forgetten. The result is a little bit unsettling. I feel like I want to rhyme at
different times than the author does and it makes me feel uncomfortable. This feeling
goes very well with the idea of the poem which seems to be the discomfort the
author feels with being exposed and alone. It is implied by the title that this feeling is
a very normal and almost an expected part of living life and being a human.

T.S.Eliot
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

“Prufrock” is a variation on the dramatic monologue, a type of poem popular with

Eliot’s predecessors. Dramatic monologues are similar to soliloquies in plays. The
poem reflects the thoughts of a person searching for love in an uncertain world.
Despite knowing what to say and how to express his love, he is hesitant.
One of the first true modernist poems, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock is a
shifting, repetitive monologue, the thoughts of a mature male as he searches for love
and meaning in an uncertain, twilight world.J. Alfred Prufrock, fictional character, the
indecisive middle-aged man in whose voice Anglo-American poet T.S. Eliot wrote the
dramatic monologue “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”. Prufrock compares
himself to Hamlet, and then dismisses his importance.However, Prufrock's
comparison to Hamlet contains more than a hint of irony because he does resemble
the Danish Prince. Similar to Prince Hamlet, Prufrock's greatest flaw is his failure to
act and his death at the end of the work.
From the beginning, the poem sets up a juxtaposition between action and
inaction. The first line states “let us go,” implying that the poem will move forward in
time and space—in other words, that it will go somewhere. But that momentum is
quickly stalled.
The structure of the stanza varies as the poem progresses. Stanzas of two,
seven and twelve verses have been used throughout the poem.Eliot has used a
simple rhyme pattern in this poem. In the first two lines, the poet has used rhyming
couplet. The rhyme pattern also changes between rhymed and unrhymed lines as
the poem progresses. here is a repetition of the phrase “let us go” in line one, four
and twelve. The line fifteen and sixteen also start with “the yellow” and ends with
“window-panes.” Similarly, the words “do I dare” have also been repeated in the
poem. The repetition of these phrases has enhanced the musical impact of the
poem. he lines repeated at some distance in the poems are called refrain. The
phrases such as, “the yellow” “window-panes” and “let us go” have been repeated.
Therefore, they have become a type of refrain.
Eliot has successfully blended poetic devices with literary devices and further
with his message to show that he understands the art of poetry and uses this art to
convey his message effectively.
W.B.Yeats
The second coming

“The Second Coming” is one of Yeats’s most famous and most anthologized
poems; it is also one of the most thematically obscure and difficult to understand.
Structurally, the poem is quite simple—the first stanza describes the conditions
present in the world (things falling apart, anarchy, etc.), and the second surmises
from those conditions that a monstrous Second Coming is about to take place, not of
the Jesus we first knew, but of a new messiah, a “rough beast,” the slouching sphinx
rousing itself in the desert and lumbering toward Bethlehem.
“The Second Coming” was intended by Yeats to describe the current historical
moment in terms of these gyres. Yeats believed that the world was on the threshold
of an apocalyptic revelation, as history reached the end of the outer gyre and began
moving along the inner gyre.
The poem's first line implies that something is turning and changing within the
universe. This first line serves to create a sense of mystery from the poem's very
beginning; it is obscure and complex, ominous withholding of any clues about what
might be happening.
The falcon and the falconer are each metaphors, representing humanity and a
controlling, prevailing force that sets humans on a specific path. The "blood-dimmed
tide" is a metaphor for waves of violence, and the "ceremony" of innocence is a
metaphor for the entirety of human innocence and goodness. The "rough beast" is
also a metaphor: for the mysterious, rapidly approaching Second Coming. The
poem's clearest protagonist is its speaker, who has a mind discerning enough to
realize what is happening. The antagonist is the "rough beast" and all the chaos and
violence it brings along with it.
The poem ends where it began: in a haze of ominous foreshadowing, the specter
of a looming monster of the future rapidly approaching, the universe spinning and
growing into something different than it was. Whether that future is an evil mess of
pure chaos, or whether it will offer some sort of freedom and possibility, remains
undecided.

Sailing to Byzantium

“Sailing to Byzantium” is Yeats’s definitive statement about the agony of old age
and the imaginative and spiritual work required to remain a vital individual even when
the heart is “fastened to a dying animal” (the body).
 The poem thus implies a separation between the body and soul, and presents old
age as both a burden and an opportunity for a kind of spiritual transcendence—a
chance to leave the earthly world, and all its limitations, behind.
In the first stanza, the speaker vividly evokes the beautiful world of the young.
The world is described through images of natural fertility and bounty: young people
embracing, singing birds, vast schools of fish. This world is intensely focused on
material pleasures and the creation of even more new life.
Man versus nature and eternity are the major themes of this poem. The poem
presents two things: the transience of life and the permanence of nature. The
speaker wants to escape from the world where wise people are neglected. The
young generation is so much caught up with life that they fail to understand what the
natural world offers to them. Being wise, he knows that man can find solace and
satisfaction in the lap of nature. Hence, he prefers leaving his country and happily
sailing to Byzantium, which offers him immense pleasure and fruits of eternity.
The poem is one of Yeats’s finest, and is worth the effort to analyse and unpick his
difficult imagery and symbolism. One of the great meditations on ageing and
wisdom, ‘Sailing to Byzantium’ is elusive and even mystical, but all the better for it.