5 Poetry (Fourth G - 2022-2023) Book

NINETEENTH AND
TWENTIETH
CENTURY POETRY
Victorian & Modern Poetry
Mohammad Al-Hussini Arab, Ph.D.

University of Nevada, Reno (USA)
Al-Hussini Mansour Arab, M. A.
American University, Cairo (Egypt)
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Mohammad Al-Hussini Mansour
Local Deposition No. 15309/2004

I.S.B.N. 977-17-1632-8
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Nineteenth & Twentieth Centuries Poetry: Victorian and Modern Poetry
PREFACE
Modern poetry has been variously characterized as romantic,

antiromantic, impersonal, high personal, chaotic, orderly, classical,
symbolist, wholly untraditional, reasoned and measured,
incomprehensible—depending upon the critic whom one reads. This
radical diversity suggests a fundamental problem with poetry in the
20th century: it has no clear path to follow. Finding previous poetry
inadequate to deal with the situation in which he finds himself, the
modern poet must create anew, must, in Stevens' phrase, "find out
what will suffice." The modern poem is an act of exploration. In the
absence of givens, it must carve out its own niche, make its own
raison d'être.
Modern poetry began with a sense of discontinuity, a sense
that the world of the twentieth century was not merely different as one
century always is from another but decisively different, qualitatively
different from all the centuries past. This sense of discontinuity was
shared by the other arts; it was "on or about December 1910," Virginia
Woolf wrote, that "human character changed." This shared conviction
of radical change gave rise to the far-flung, loosely defined movement
in the arts known as "modernism," characterized in poetry by the
fragmented, elliptical, allusive styles of Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot.
Modernism was not a unified movement. Moreover, there were
significant poets who did not buy into modernism at all. Against
Pound's famous injunction to "compose in the manner of the musical
phrase, not the metronome," there is Frost's equally well-known
statement that writing free verse is like "playing tennis without a net."
Against the heavily idea-laden poetry of Eliot and the New
Critic/Fugitive poets—Ransom and Tate, in particular—stand
Williams' "no ideas but in things" and MacLeish's "a poem should not
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mean but be." The pillars of what is commonly regarded as

modernism, then, found themselves flanked right and left by
dissenters, as well as faced by independent thinkers within their camp.
Modernist poetry, as commonly construed, represents a fairly limited
if important range of the whole of modern poetry.
Modern literature is less united in what it stands for than in
what it opposes. In a sense, almost all writing in the twentieth century
attempts to throw over the nineteenth, particularly those aspects of it
generally classified as "Victorian." Both the sociopolitical and the
literary elements of Victorianism come under fire from the modern
artist, and the combination of targets should not be surprising, since
politics and economics combine with literature in the nineteenth
century to form what appears to modern eyes to be a uniform culture.
While this uniformity may be largely mythical, it nevertheless has
become one of the données of discussions of Victorianism.
Nineteenth-century literature, particularly in England, mirrored

the development of thought in the period. It should not be surprising,
therefore, that the chief poet of High Victorianism, Tennyson, was
tremendously popular as well as critically acclaimed, and that the
same should be true for the novelist Charles Dickens. The artists of
mid-century specialized in giving the people what they wanted.
Whitman, the 19th century poet to whom American moderns so often
look, would seem to be an exception. One must remember, of course,
that Whitman's work was largely ignored during his lifetime, that he
was not a popular poet by any means when his work first appeared,
and that the recognized poets of the era, such as Whittier and
Longfellow, worked with the public's desires more firmly in mind.
Then, too, even Whitman wrote directly to his audience much more
than the typical modern poet, does and his great poem, Leaves of
Grass (1855), is a public celebration of the people.
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The late 19th century produced the expected

countermovement, in which the characteristic poem is much darker,
more decadent, suspicious of the openness and health of the High
Victorians. Under the influence of the darker Romantics and the
French symbolists, the late Victorians from the Pre-Raphaelites on
demonstrate a tendency toward the sinister and the unhealthy, toward
madness and dissipation. Prostitutes, drug addicts, criminals—all
those, in short, from the underside of society, from the social strata
largely ignored by Tennyson—figure heavily in the work of Dante
Rossetti and Swinburne, Dowson, Johnson, the early Yeats, and, of
course, Oscar Wilde. Their fascination with dark subjects and dark
treatments shows a suspicion of the methods and beliefs of the earlier
Victorians analogous to Adams' suspicion of progress. Their work
collectively embodies the fin de siècle sense of impending change, the
exhaustion of old modes, the existential ennui of a society in decline.
The late Victorian poets were not a new beginning but a clear end, a
cry for the new, while in America the cry was silence, the absence of
any major poetic talents. On both sides of the Atlantic, poetry in
English was a gap waiting to be filled, and awaiting of something as
yet unknown.
Our aim, here, is to trace the literary history of both the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries poetry and suggest how to read and
interpret poems. We try to keep the proceedings lively, because poetry
is the liveliest literature. To experience that—to experience the energy
and excitement of poetry—is to understand most of its meaning.
Mohammad Al-Hussini Arab

Al-Hussini Mansour Arab
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Table of Contents
PREFACE………………………………………………...………………….…….3
TABLE OF CONTENTS………………………..….….…………….……….....…….6
CHAPTER ONE: NINETEENTH CENTURY POETRY
Section One: THE ENGLISH VICTORIANS
Background……………………….…………........…………………………..8
Section Two: SELECTIONS OF VICTORIAN ENGLISH POEMS
Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861)
How do I love thee? Let me count the ways..……………..…...…….………..20
Lord Alfred Tennyson (1809-1892)
Ulysses……………………………...........................................……………..…27
Robert Browning (1812-1889)
My Last Duchess……………..……....………….………...….......….....…….37
Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882)
The Blessed Damozel…………………………………….……...………….44
Section Three: NINETEENTH CENTURY AMERICAN POETRY
Background……………….........….…………..…………….………...……..54
Section Four: SELECTIONS OF VICTORIAN AMERICAN POEMS
William Cullen Bryant (1794-1878)
To a Waterfowl……………………………………....……………..……….60
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
Brahma……………………..……….….…….…………..………….......…..66
Walt Whitman (1819–1892)
O Captain! My Captain!.......………………………...………...………….......72
Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)
I heard a Fly buzz—when I died…...……………………....……....….…...…78
CHAPTER TWO: TWENTIETH CENTURY POETRY
Section One: Background………………...………………….….....….……..…...84
Section Two: SELECTIONS OF 20th CENTURY ENGLISH POEMS
William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)
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Leda and the Swan…………………………...……...……………..…….....103

Thom Gunn (1929-2004)
On the Move………….……………………………….………..………….109
Seamus Heaney (b. 1939)
Digging……………………………………………....…...………..………116
Paul Muldoon (1951— )
Pineapples and Pomegranates………………...…………………..…...……123
Section Three: SELECTIONS OF 20th CENTURY AMERICAN POEMS
T. S. Eliot (1888-1965)
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock……………………...…………...……129
Robert Frost (1874-1963)..
Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening……...…….......………..………....139
Hilda Doolittle (1886-1961)
Helen………………………………………………....……………...………145
Wallace Stevens (1879-1955)
Of Modern Poetry………………………………………....……....………..152
James Wright (1927-1980)
Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio……………………………..………159
REFERENCES………………………….……..……………....…...…….……….165
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CHAPTER ONE
NINETEENTH CENTURY POETRY
SECTION ONE
THE ENGLISH VICTORIANS
BACKGROUND
There is no clear division, no obvious shift in values and taste,

between the Romantic and Victorian periods. Many critics date the
beginning of the Victorian period at 1832, the year of passage of the
First Reform Bill, which gave middle-class men the legal right to vote;
others use 1837, the beginning of Victoria's reign. However, historians
no longer refer unquestioningly to the "Victorian Age" as the precise
years associated with the monarch but instead concentrate on a shorter
period—a "high age"—from about 1830 to 1880. The Victorian era is
often associated with the growing size and influence of the middle
classes and with the ascendancy of certain values described as middle
class: "Victorian" virtues such as hard work, thrift, conformity, faith in
progress, and a generally serious outlook on life. These values were
expressed in poetry of the age. Similarly, the poetry of the age is
typified by doubt and anxiety, in spiritual matters as well as moral and
political issues.
The early Victorian years witnessed the emergence of a cluster
of values and beliefs that represented the central ideas of
Victorianism, such as the developments in governance, economic and
social life, science, and learning that capture the essential features of
Victorianism. In the age of Queen Victoria, the British people's long
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struggle for personal liberty was accomplished and democratic

government became fully well-established. The monarchy, which had
been established in the late medieval period, was now headed by a
symbol of the unity of the empire rather than an active ruler. The
aristocracy became a mere remnant of a faded social hierarchy. The
House of Commons was now the center of political power in Great
Britain. Parliament passed a series of electoral reform bills, entitling
the men of the nation to choose their leaders and representatives for
themselves.
In governance, one can look to the reforms which changed the
structure of parliament, leading to a tradition of evolutionary change
with a major Reform Act in 1832 enfranchising the middle class and
the expansion of local, middle-class political power with the
Municipal Corporations Act (1835). After 1832, it became clear that
social betterment would be achieved through legislation and education
rather than revolution. Poets such as Thomas Hood and E. B.
Browning depict the hard lot of the underprivileged, particularly
children and the working poor.
The slave trade had been abolished in 1807 and slavery itself
in 1832. It would last until 1864 in America. There was also feminist
protest, but this was a social revolution for which the Victorian world
was not yet prepared; Victoria herself (crowned in 1837) opposed it. A
remarkable transformation took place within mid-century England as
enlightened advocates exposed injustices old and new. Among the
revolutionary acts passed by reforming parliaments were the Factory
Act of 1833, regulating child labor; the Poor Law Amendment Act of
1834, regulating workhouses; the Municipal Reform Act of 1835,
unifying town governments; an act of 1842 prohibiting the
employment of women and children in mines; another in 1843
prohibiting imprisonment for debt; the first public health act in 1848;
another factory act, shortening hours and days, in 1850; a second
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major political reform in 1868; and, finally, the great public schools
act of 1870. If there were fewer reforming acts in less-developed
America, it was in part because fewer were needed. One of the few
European states, to avoid armed revolution during the 19th century,
Britain was perhaps the most socially advanced nation in the world, as
well as the most industrialized, for humanitarianism and progress had
become its prevailing creeds.
In technology, the Victorians were strongly associated with
industrialism, transport, communication, travel, technologies,
inventions and machines. Many developments such as steam
locomotion, which carries passengers on a public rail line, iron, steel
ships, and telegraphy helped the Victorians triumph over so many
challenges of distance and power that had held up such progress in
earlier times. The essential character of Victorian technological
determinism was that science and the practical men could change the
world through invention and implementation.
Leaps in technology were matched by developments in social

thought. Prophets of progress and the enemies of industrial modernity
competed for space, and both groups contributed to the sense of what
Victorianism was about. From the 1830s, the critics of Victorianism
grew. Modernity was feared by many and loathed by some. Tories,
such as the "Young England" group, which included Benjamin
Disraeli (1804–1881), looked back to a bygone age of preindustrial
harmony, where deference, social equilibrium, and a more agreeable
life were once thought to exist. Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) also
shared the "Young England" aversion to modernity but looked
forward, not back. He disliked the Victorian tendency to seek
mechanical solutions to human problems and sought, instead, a
reinvention of an earlier morality, but in a future setting. This style of
criticism connected many early 19th-century thinkers, such as Carlyle
and Robert Owen (1771–1858), to later socialists, such as William
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Morris (1834–1896). By the 1880s the critique of Victorianism was

powerful indeed. Unlike on the continent, where Marxism—Karl
Marx's telos, the goal or endpoint of civilization's quest for utopia—
was highly influential, most British socialism sought accommodation
with capitalism. Sidney Webb (1859–1947) represented an
administrative type of socialism, based upon efficiency and
organization. William Morris's utopian socialism was characterized by
a more fundamental attack upon capitalism and a pursuit of an
alternative moral and spiritual way of life.
Traditional interpretations of society as a static entity were
undermined as the period progressed. Charles Darwin's (1809–1882)
theories of evolution and Herbert Spencer's (1820–1903)
considerations upon human development radically altered classic
Victorian notions of society and how to manage it. Darwin's
evolutionary theory revolves around the notion that the result of the
fittest surviving to mate with one another is that newer and fitter forms
of life constantly come into being. The newest and fittest form,
naturally, is man. Social Darwinism combines evolutionary thought
with the already accepted mode of utilitarianism.
In economic life, the radical essentials of political economy
and utilitarianism reached a high point prior to the 1850s. The
utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, with its
emphasis on "the greatest good for the greatest number," shows that
act is best which, since it offers maximum benefits to the most
members of society, promotes the greatest social progress. Political
economy led to formation of the Poor Law Amendment Act in 1834.
Samuel Smiles' (1812–1904) Self Help, in 1859, had been pushed by
the tendency of the working class to collectivize in the face of
demands for individualism; hence, there was a rise of friendly
societies, trade unions, co-operative movements, and other examples
of collective identification by the people. There were also other
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progress-centered developments in thought such as American

"Manifest Destiny"1 and Mary Baker Eddy's "Every day in every way
things get better and better."
Against this concept of progress lies its opposite and what may
even be seen as its necessary complement. A society that is constantly
progressing is undergoing constant change, which in turn means that
traditional institutions and ways of life must break down. In The
Education of Henry Adams (1907), Adams expresses this idea in terms
of the twin images of virgin and dynamo. The virgin, representative of
traditional culture, symbolizes stability and order, a manageable, if
static, society. The dynamo, the modern society, spins constantly
faster, changing incessantly, leaving its members with a sense of
chaos and confusion. Whereas the idea of progress was a product of
mid-19th century thinkers, the notion of cultural breakdown achieved
its widest circulation late in the 19th century and into the 20th,
receiving its fullest development, perhaps, in the work of T. S. Eliot.
In religion, Victorianism balanced the ancient regime

Anglicanism of the Church of England with a growing pluralism
through alternative Christianities, new faiths, and the toleration of
unbelief. The Religious Census of 1851 revealed a general weakening
of popular interest in the established church, whilst Roman
Catholicism prospered through Irish migration. Victorianism may be
equated with spiritual piety and Christian morality, but alternative and
opposite forces also had some importance. Atheism, advocated most
notably by Thomas H. Huxley (1825–1895), offered, by the 1870s, an
alternative to faith in the attempt to answer profound questions about
1
This phrase was coined in 1845 to celebrate the seizure of Texas as evidence of the
nation's imperative to settle every corner of a "continent allotted by Providence." It
made it plausible for the United States to seize upon an 1846 border dispute in Texas
as a premise to declare war on Mexico and thereby gain much of California, Nevada,
Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas.
12
the nature of being. The high road to orthodoxy proved disastrous.

Christina Rossetti and Gerard Manley Hopkins, English poets after
1850, were orthodoxy religious.
Nineteenth century literature, particularly in England, mirrored
the development of thought in the period. Victorianism came to be
associated with patriarchal social values, stressing the importance of
family and an image of motherhood captured well in Tennyson's
poem, The Princess (1847):
Man for the field and woman for the hearth;
for the sword, and for the needle she;
Man with the head, and women with the heart;
Man to command, and woman to obey;
All else is confusion.
Thus, poetry, as well as prose, painting, and music, reflected
hegemonic notions. Yet, the stereotype of the Victorian family
perhaps assumed its importance precisely because there were so many
challenges to it. In the cities, drink and crime denied many children
the full influence of parental guidance, and the critics of industrialism
saw in female and child labor a collection of evils that had to be
addressed. But economic conditions placed women and children in
this position. Poverty, drunkenness, and alcoholism were sometimes
causes of prostitution.
The early Victorian poets admired and imitated the Romantics.
Indeed, Tennyson, perhaps the representative poet of his age, was also
in many ways the most Romantic of the great Victorians. He carried
on the Romantic style and subject matter and continued to experiment
with verse form and diction. Definitely, his poetry, as well as the verse
of Matthew Arnold, is typically Victorian in its depiction of a man's
struggle between spiritual doubt and faith. Tennyson's In Memoriam
(1850) represents the chief Victorian conflict between science and
faith more than any work of its era; and Tennyson's attempt to
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reconcile the religious doubts arising from his personal sorrow and the
effects of pre-Darwinian theories of evolution was hailed by thinkers
of his time as an intellectual landmark. Arnold's "Dover Beach"
(1851) is the fullest expression of its author's religious doubt and a
classic text of Victorian anxiety in the face of lost faith. It was written
soon after the publication of that epic of Victorian doubt, Tennyson's
In Memoriam of, and contemporaneously with the atheist poetry of
Arnold's friend Arthur Hugh Clough.
The Victorians as a group have been characterized as more

"realistic" than the Romantics. They were more apt to write poems
directly concerning the social and philosophical problems of the day.
Robert Browning's dramatic monologues explore the inner life of
many historical or eccentric figures, but in a "realistic" way. The
dramatic monologue is a poetic form in which there is only one
speaker. When there is only one speaker, we necessarily have to
weigh carefully what he or she is telling us, and we often have to
"read between the lines" in keeping an objective perspective on the
story or incidents that the speaker describes to us. The reader must
work through the words of the speaker to discover his true character
and the attitude of the poet toward the character. The poem is
"dramatic" in the sense that it is like a drama, a play, in which one
character speaks to another, and there is a sense of action and
movement as on stage.
In the 20th century Browning's dramatic form of the
monologue has been adopted most directly by Ezra Pound and T. S.
Eliot. Eliot's poem The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock creates a
monologue spoken without a direct dramatic auditor. This form is
directly related to the rise of the persona or mask in modern poetry. In
recent years such poems have been called mask-lyrics. Poems by
Pound and Eliot, for example, provide a monologic and dramatic
speaker like Tennyson's, one more closely identified with the lyric
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voice of the poet than with the dramatic voice of an imagined

character. Such poems can be distinguished from strictly dramatic
monologues, which set up a necessarily ironic distance between poet,
speaker, and reader. E. A. Robinson and Robert Frost all contributed
variations on the form; Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, and John
Ashberry subsequently employed a monologic mode that reveals a
tension between the poet and the speaker of the poem. Monologue is a
characteristic of all poems that strive to deny dialogue or control
possible responses to the utterance.
One by one, traditional verities disappeared from English and
American literature, and more rapidly in Britain. God was doubtful,
Nature cruel, History unkind, Love impossible, Man animalistic and
corrupt. Matthew Arnold is the poet, who articulated the new
disillusionment most forcefully. He saw himself as an isolated
wanderer through a post-Christian wilderness of historical and
personal estrangement. Arnold sought for love and could not find it.
Several later Victorian poets, including Browning, D. G. Rossetti, and
George Meredith wrote extensively of their relationships with women,
and of the failure of love; others turned from normal eroticism
altogether.
Throughout the century literature had been closely allied with
art. Much of its descriptive poetry, for example, was based upon
painted forebears or similar contemporary work; thus, Wordsworth is
often compared with John Constable, Shelley with J. M. W. Turner,
Coleridge with German Romantic art, Byron with Eugene Delacroix,
and Browning with the Impressionists. Several important writers,
including Blake, John Ruskin, Morris, and D. G. Rossetti, were
authentic artists in their own right; others combined their verbal work
with others' art to collaborate upon illustrated editions. That poets
were makers of pictures was assumed throughout the century. They
became interpreters of pictures also, as can be seen in Bowles,
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Wordsworth, and especially Browning. For many later nineteenth

century poets, however, the writer was no longer a prophet but a critic,
concerned less with cosmic purpose than with man's revelation of
himself through art.
It is symptomatic of the times that poetry became more

personal, less prestigious, and even private (Dickinson, Hardy,
Hopkins) as public utterances turned instead to evaluation of the
literary past. Thus, Arnold virtually abandoned poetry for criticism of
various kinds, while D. G. Rossetti, Lowell, Swinburne, and William
Watson all reveal critical aspirations overtopping creative ones. Major
anthologies of the time, edited by Edmund Clarence Stedman and
Francis Palgrave, show that poetry appealed to the later nineteenth
century more as conventional verbal prettiness than as original
thought; a great deal of it was essentially decoration. Fanciful, but not
imaginative (in the searching, Romantic sense), late Victorian poetry
soon became, with only a few exceptions, a minor art, as statements of
intellectual importance tended increasingly to be made in prose.
In mid-century, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood movement of
Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882) and his circle—including Dante
Gabriel Rossetti, Christina Rossetti, and William Morris—was a
major attempt to defend creative imagination against the economic,
social, and intellectual forces that were depressing it, which is to say,
against the impersonality of manufacture, the bad taste of the rising
middle class, and the unidimensional reality of empirical science.
They reacted to what many artists saw as the empty materialism of the
times, and attempted, through the use of symbolism and imagery, to
return to what they saw as the unity of spirit of the Middle Ages.
William Michael Rossetti (1829-1919) was, with his brother, largely
responsible for bringing Whitman, Joaquin Miller, and Edward
Fitzgerald (The Rubáyat of Omar Khayyám, 1859) to critical attention,
while reviving interest in the work of Blake and Shelley. Only a small
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coterie in London, however, fully appreciated how desperate the

artistic situation had become. From them emerged William Butler
Yeats (1865-1939), an Irish cultural nationalist influenced by Thomas
Moore and Sir Walter Scott, who based his major poems (mostly
twentieth century) upon the bold visions of Blake and Shelley, while
rejecting Tennysonian doubt and the depressing outlook of scientific
materialism. Tennyson, Browning, Whitman, Arnold, Hardy, and
Yeats are now regarded as the most significant poets of the latter part
of the nineteenth century, and all have had their impact upon
subsequent writers.
Tennyson's In Memoriam managed a doubtful immortality for

the young skeptic that it commemorated, but other poets of the time
were less sure, as Clough and Arnold remained agnostics at best. In
Christmas Eve and Easter Day (1850) Robert Browning rejected both
doctrinal and evangelical Christianity in favor of a theistic religion of
love, Arnold implying much the same in "Dover Beach" (1851).
While meeting the equivalent American spiritual crisis with more
gusto, Whitman observed in Leaves of Grass (1855) that "Creeds and
schools" were "in abeyance." His own faith derived from all religions
and did not include curiosity about God. In a poem of 1871 addressed
to Whitman, however, Swinburne admitted that "God is buried and
dead to us." Among American poets, Melville and Dickinson became
religious seekers; Emerson, Whittier, and Longfellow, among others,
remained relatively confident of supernatural goodness throughout the
1850's and 1860's, but their optimism (shared by Tennyson and
Browning to some extent) seemed increasingly tenuous to younger
readers.
The late nineteenth century produced the expected
countermovement, in which the characteristic poem is much darker,
more decadent, suspicious of the openness and health of the High
Victorians. Under the influence of the darker Romantics and the
17
French symbolists (who got their own dose of dark Romanticism from
Edgar Allan Poe), the late Victorians from the Pre-Raphaelites on
madness and dissipation. Prostitutes, drug addicts, criminals—all
those, in short, from the underside of society, from the social strata
largely ignored by Tennyson—figure heavily in the work of Dante
Gabriel Rossetti and Algernon Charles Swinburne, Ernest Dowson,
Lionel Johnson, the early William Butler Yeats, and, of course, Oscar
Wilde. Their fascination with dark subjects and dark treatments shows
a suspicion of the methods and beliefs of the earlier Victorians
analogous to Adams' suspicion of progress. Their work collectively
embodies the fin de siècle sense of impending change, the exhaustion
of old modes, the existential ennui of a society in decline. The late
Victorian poets were not a new beginning but a clear end, a cry for the
new, while in America the cry was silence, the absence of any major
poetic talents. On both sides of the Atlantic, poetry in English was a
gap waiting to be filled and awaiting of something as yet unknown.
Overall, the 19th century was a time in which the world
changed radically in ways that laid the foundation for our own. The
industrialization of the Western world began in Britain in the late 18th
century; the modern democratic state was created largely in response
to the social and economic changes accompanying industrialization.
At the end of Victoria's reign, relations between humans and nature as
well as social and family relations had changed beyond recognition.
The extent of these changes can be seen in comparing the countryside
and rural people of Wordsworth or John Clare, different though they
were, with the world described by the late 19th-century poet John
Davidson. The poetry of the time reflects the stress and challenges of
these changes. At the close of the Victorian era, the beginning of the
20th century brought challenges of its own. The violence of World
War I dealt a shattering blow to British and American society's faith in
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progress, a legacy of the Victorians. And in 1922 the publication of T.

S. Eliot's The Waste Land marked a new era in poetry, much as
Lyrical Ballads had 120 years earlier. Its obscurity, complexity, and
grim, anti-Romantic spirit would influence poets for the next several
decades.
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SECTION TWO
SELECTIONS OF VICTORIAN ENGLISH POEMS
Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861)

How Do I Love Thee? Let Me Count the Ways
How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.

I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of Being and ideal Grace.
I love thee to the level of every day's
Most quiet need; by sun and candle-light.
I love thee freely, as men strive for Right;
I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise.
I love thee with the passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints, —I love thee with the breath.
Smiles, tears, of all my life!—and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.
Sonnet XLII
from Sonnets from the Portuguese
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SONNET 43: HOW DO I LOVE THEE? LET ME COUNT THE WAYS
Author: Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861)

Type: Sonnet
Date: 1850, in Sonnets from the Portuguese, part of Poems
Introduction
This poem is the forty-third of forty-four Sonnets from the
Portuguese, a collection of interrelated poems in which the poet
chronicled her courtship with her husband, Robert Browning. These
poems are generally abstract impressions, though most are not as
abstract as "Sonnet 43." The Brownings had one of the great romances
in all of history. A character in one of her poems courted a woman by
reading a section from a Robert Browning poem; Robert wrote to
Elizabeth in January of 1845 to say how much he adored her work,
stating "I love your verse with all my heart" and, at the end of the
letter, "... I do, as I say, love these books with all my heart—and I love
you too." They corresponded and met in person for the first time that
May; and the following September they were married, against her
father's will. Elizabeth, who had been chronically ill to the point of
being bedridden most of the time since she was fifteen (she was forty
when they were married, six years older than Robert) compared their
romance to the fairy tale Sleeping Beauty, reminding her husband that
before he came along her life had, in effect, been over. It is easy to
guess, then, why she would use abstraction when exploring her love in
her poetry: with such a charmed, fortunate romance, the writer could
easily be excused for taking more interest in how well it worked out
than in what made it work. When Barrett Browning first published
these poems within her 1850 book Poems, she pretended that they
were translations of other poets' works at her husband's request,
because he felt that they were "too passionate" to be associated with
such a gentle and cultured lady: hence the title Sonnets from the
Portuguese.
21
The Poem
Sonnet 43 is an Italian sonnet, a fourteen-line iambic
pentameter poem written in a specific rhyme scheme. The first line of
the poem asks a question; the other thirteen lines answer it. The
question is simply, "How do I love thee?" The answer involves seven
different aspects of love, all of which are part of Elizabeth's feeling for
Robert, and the projection of an eighth, eternal love in the future.
As the poem proceeds, each variation on the theme of love is

introduced with the words “I love thee.” In the octave (the first eight
lines), the poem speaks of the spiritual side of her love, which aspires
toward God; then she mentions its earthly aspect, the love that
enriches daily life. More briefly, she mentions the fact that her love is
given freely, almost as if it were prompted by the conscience, and that
it is pure, in other words, selfless, like the action of a humble man
unwilling to accept praise.
In the sestet (the final six lines), the poet looks at her love in
three more ways. First, she explains that this love makes use of the
emotions once spent on grief or on religious faith. From this mention
of faith, she proceeds to a slightly different idea: that in loving
Browning, she has rediscovered a love like that she once felt for the
saints of religion. Finally, she explains that her love is all-
encompassing, involving her entire life, including moments of
unhappiness as well as happiness; that her love is as much a part of
her as breathing, that is, the very act of living. In conclusion, the poet
asserts that, God willing, this love can even transcend death and
continue in the next world.
In most sonnets, there are eight or twelve lines stating a

question, a conflict, a problem, or a possibility. In the final six lines,
or sometimes in a final couplet, the question is answered, the conflict
resolved, the problem solved, or the possibility denied or extended in
22
some way. This sonnet is unusual in that the question is stated in the
first line, and the rest of the poem is made up simply of various
answers to that question. Even the last line and a half, which could be
said to provide some kind of resolution, is really only another answer
to the original question, which might be restated as "What are the
various ways in which love affects the lover?"
Forms and Devices
It is a mark of Barrett Browning's skill that the repetition of the
phrase "I love thee"—nine times in a poem only fourteen lines long—
simply serves to make the poem more effective. The phrase is first
used in the question; then, when the poet sets out to “count the ways,”
she keeps score by introducing each new idea with exactly the same
words. Certainly, the repeated phrase is more than a marker; it
emphasizes the fact she is stating—that indeed she loves the man to
whom the poem is addressed. The repetition is also realistic; at least in
the early stages of the emotion, most people who are in love have a
tendency to reiterate the declaration frequently. The fact that the poem
is structured around the repetition of the phrase "I love thee" is,
therefore, one source of its effectiveness.
In addition to carefully crafted phrases, most poems as popular
as this sonnet have striking images. One thinks of the description of
the snow, even the sound of the horse's bells, in Robert Frost's
"Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening," or of the moonlit beach,
the lights of the French shore, and the final dramatic reference to
armed conflict in Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach." In contrast, "How
do I love thee?" has almost no descriptions. The only real images in
the poem are the mention of light in the sixth line and the reference to
"breath, / Smiles, tears" in the thirteenth. One might include the rather
vague stretching of the soul described at the beginning of the sonnet.
23
Instead of relying on sensuous imagery, Barrett Browning

describes the abstraction, love, by means of other abstractions. For
example, love is compared to that expansion of the soul in search of
"the ends of Being" (or the meaning of the world) and of "ideal Grace"
(evidently the grace of God). Similarly, the similes in lines 8 and 9
involve movement toward or away from two other abstractions,
“Right” and “Praise.” The later references to “griefs” and “faith,” even
to “lost saints,” are all made without an imagistic context. Because of
this lack of images, the almost incantatory repetition of the simple
phrase "I love thee" becomes even more important; it helps the reader
proceed through the abstractions, just as the word-pictures created by
images do in other poems.
It also should be pointed out that metrically this poem is

extremely regular. There are few variations from the iambic pattern.
Instead, the sonnet proceeds in a quiet and stately manner that seems
almost to deny, or at least to suggest a different definition of, the
"passion" the poet stresses in the ninth line. Only with the three
stressed syllables near the end of the sonnet, "breath, / Smiles, tears"
does the speaker reveal the depths of the emotion so reasonably
described; immediately thereafter, she returns to her dignified iambics
for the conclusion of the poem. In interpreting the poem, one must
look carefully at the point where the metrical pattern breaks; it seems
likely that it will be the thematic center of the sonnet.
Themes and Meanings
As a complete sequence, Sonnets from the Portuguese
describes the development of Elizabeth Barrett's love for Robert
Browning. As the forty-third poem in a sequence of forty-four, "How
do I love thee?" describes a fully realized love. Earlier poems often
had mentioned the past, when the poet did not dream that such
happiness would ever be hers. In this poem, she defines her present
24
happiness by explaining how her love incorporates and transcends her

past spiritual and emotional experiences.
For example, Barrett Browning speaks of her love as being the

striving of her soul for the divine, for the purposes of life and for that
"Grace" that is the gift of God. Similarly, the seventh and eighth lines
suggest that her love is like the spiritual quests for morality ("Right")
and for humility ("Praise"). Her love has brought her back to the kind
of innocent faith she knew in her childhood, but seemingly had lost.
All these descriptions indicate that the kind of love Elizabeth now
feels for Robert is akin to the love that enables a human being to love
God and to experience God's love in return.
Earlier poems in the sequence had referred to the unhappiness
and despair of the years before Elizabeth met Robert. In this sonnet,
the poet triumphantly announces that her love has redeemed those
years. For example, the capacity for intensity that she developed in
past sorrows now can be utilized, instead, in the joy of her love.
Similarly, the capacity for belief that she developed in her youth now
can be exercised in the complete faith that provides the security of
love.
Even though in Sonnet 43 many references stress the spiritual,
the poet also makes it clear that the relationship is solidly based on
earthly needs. In the temporal world, day alternates with night ("sun
and candlelight"), happiness with unhappiness ("Smiles, tears").
Barrett Browning does not expect a heaven on Earth; all she needs is
the presence of the beloved during the changes that define life in this
world. Finally, she emphasizes her awareness of the final change: that
from life to death. In the final lines, the heavenly and the earthly, the
spiritual and the temporal are united. The rhyme words are significant.
With the help of God, the lovers will proceed together from a last
"breath" into a new life and an even more devoted love "after death."
25
Barrett Browning's description of a love that thus encompasses

past, present, and future has appealed to both men and women for
almost a century and a half. Recent feminist critics have pointed out
another significance of the sequence, and especially of the later poems
within it, such as this. From the Renaissance on, sonnets have been
used by men for the expression of their own emotions, first for love-
complaints and later for expressions of friendship, anger, and religious
uncertainties. In Sonnets from the Portuguese, a woman poet
expressed her love for a man in her own unmistakably feminine voice.
Sonnet 43 focuses on Elizabeth, not on Robert; it is the revelation of a
woman's own heart and soul, fortunately inspired by a man who was
worthy of her.
26
Lord Alfred Tennyson (1809-1892)

Ulysses
It little profits that an idle king,

By this still hearth, among these barren crags,
Matched with an agèd wife, I mete and dole
Unequal laws unto a savage race
That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me.
I cannot rest from travel: I will drink

Life to the lees: all times I have enjoyed
Greatly, have suffered greatly, both with those
That loved me, and alone; on shore, and when
Through scudding drifts the rainy Hyades
Vexed the dim sea. I am become a name;
For always roaming with a hungry heart
Much have I seen and known—cities of men
And manners, climates, councils, governments,
Myself not least, but honored of them all—
And drunk delight of battle with my peers,
Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy.
I am a part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch where through
Gleams that untraveled world whose margin fades
Forever and forever when I move.
How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnished, not to shine in use!
As though to breathe were life! Life piled on life
Were all too little, and of one to me
Little remains; but every hour is saved
From that eternal silence, something more,
A bringer of new things; and vile it were
For some three suns to store and hoard myself,
And this gray spirit yearning in desire
To follow knowledge like a sinking star,
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.
This is my son, mine own Telemachus,

To whom I leave the scepter and the isle—
Well-loved of me, discerning to fulfill
27
This labor, by slow prudence to make mild

A rugged people, and through soft degrees
Subdue them to the useful and the good.
Most blameless is he, centered in the sphere
Of common duties, decent not to fail
In offices of tenderness, a pay
Meet adoration to my household gods,
When I am gone. He works his work, I mine.
There lies the port; the vessel puffs her sail;

There gloom the dark, broad seas. My mariners,
Souls that have toiled, and wrought, and thought with
me—
That ever with a frolic welcome took
The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed
Free hearts, free foreheads—you and I are old;
Old age hath yet his honor and his toil.
Death closes all; but something ere the end,
Some work of noble note, may yet be done,
Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.
The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks;
The long day wanes, the low moon climbs; the deep
Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,
'Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down;
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.
Though much is taken, much abides; and though
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are—
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
28
ULYSSES
Author: Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-1892)

Type: Lyric
Date: 1842, in Poems; revised and collected in Poems, 1842
Introduction
Alfred, Lord Tennyson's poem "Ulysses" is a dramatic
monologue, a popular poetic form in the nineteenth century in which
the entire poem is narrated by a single speaker. The title of this poem
indicates that the speaker is Ulysses, a legendary hero of ancient
Greek literature, but Tennyson has chosen to give the speaker his
Roman name rather than his Greek name, Odysseus, and this detail is
important to keep in mind when interpreting the poem.
Odysseus was the hero of the ancient Greek poet Homer's great
epic poem, the Odyssey. Homer's earlier epic, the Iliad tells the story
of Achilles and the other mythological heroes of the Trojan War. After
the Trojan Prince Paris abducted the legendary beauty Helen of Troy
from her husband, the Greek Menelaus, the Greeks launched a ten-
year war against the Trojans in an effort to win Helen back. After a
long and difficult war, the Greeks finally defeated the Trojans, and the
Greek warriors returned to their homes in Greece. Odysseus's
homeward journey, an arduous ten-year journey filled with many
dangers, distractions, and adventures, comprises the story of the
Odyssey.
One of the intriguing aspects of Tennyson's "Ulysses" is the
fact that he sets his monologue years after the events of the Odyssey—
after Odysseus's many adventures on his journey, and after his long
efforts to reclaim his household on the island of Ithaca. During his
twenty-year absence, a host of greedy suitors had been hanging
around his home, trying to convince Odysseus's lovely wife Penelope
to give up waiting for her husband to return and to marry one of them
instead. Tennyson's Ulysses is an old man, apparently addressing a
29
group of men in an effort to raise a new crew for one final adventure
at sea. The situation may have been suggested in part by the old
prophet Tiresias' mysterious prediction of Odysseus' death in Book 11
of the Odyssey, in which he predicted that Odysseus would return
home to Ithaca after many hardships, slay the suitors in his house, and
finally that death would come to Odysseus in some manner from the
sea, once he had become an old man.
The content of Tennyson's poem, however, follows the great
Italian poet Dante's version of the character more than Homer's. In
fact, Tennyson's choice of the Latinized name "Ulysses" as the poem's
title emphasizes this connection. In Canto 26 of Dante's Inferno, Dante
visits the many levels of Hell and meets Ulysses, who is being
punished there for his deceitfulness, a fact that also may affect one's
interpretation of Tennyson's "Ulysses" as being less than the "ideal"
hero. Ulysses tells Dante about his final voyage and describes his
quest to sail beyond the prescribed limits of the world at Gibraltar, the
edge of the Mediterranean Sea. After he and his men passed the Strait
of Gibralter and were within sight of the Elysian fields, the Greek
paradise, they were drowned (a chasm behind The Straits was
believed to lead to Hades).
Tennyson altered both versions of the story. Homer has
Ulysses return home alone, without his men; the Odyssey ends with
Ulysses preparing to defend himself against his enemies. In the
Inferno, Ulysses says that after his last adventure (his escape from the
sorceress Circe), he was not interested in retiring to Ithaca (in fact, his
language suggests that he did not go home). Tennyson's Ulysses
refuses to accept a gentle death: He returns home with his men but
becomes bored and leaves again.
The Poem
30
Elegiac in mood—Ulysses appears to be embarking on his last

journey—the poem resembles a dramatic monologue. Along with
Robert Browning, Tennyson developed the dramatic monologue as a
poetic form, although the form was so new at that point that initially
readers probably thought they were encountering a soliloquy. Because
it was a means of imitating William Shakespeare, such a monologue is
often in blank verse. As in "Ulysses," a speaker addresses an implied
audience, not to be confused with the reader. The speaker is not to be
confused with the poet, either, although Tennyson told friends that
there was more of him in this poem than in any other he wrote in
response to the death of Hallam.
The seventy lines of blank verse in the poem fall roughly into
three sections. Lines 1 through 33 are an internal monologue. In lines
1 through 5, a series of generalities, Ulysses expresses his
dissatisfaction with his position. Seeing his environment as sterile and
stifling and uncomfortably conscious of his age, he disparages his
private life, his role as king (he sees himself as reduced to performing
mundane administrative duties), and his subjects.
In lines 6 and 7, the tone shifts decidedly. Ulysses announces

his determination to quit Ithaca and move on, ready to embrace
whatever adventure he might find. In lines 8 through 18, he thinks
longingly of his life before his return. His passion was adventure; in
the course of his travels, he experienced extreme happiness and
extreme suffering, with his companions and in isolation, on land and
on sea. He has become famous and respected; he says with some
pride. His hunger for experience, his constant searching, has
acquainted him with “cities of men/ And manners, climates, councils,
governments”; he has become wise in the ways of men. Lines 19
through 32 express Ulysses' conception of life as an unending series of
opportunities to be seized. While he does not deny the satisfaction of
having made his presence felt among others ("I am a part of all that I
31
have met"), he cannot resist the urge to explore further. For him,
idleness is abhorrent.
In the second section, lines 33 through 43, Ulysses shifts his

tone again, speaking as a public man in relatively flat, “official”
language; the speech sets him apart from his conscientious son,
Telemachus, to whom he is transferring his power. This is a revised
version, edited for public consumption, of the sentiments expressed
earlier; "savage," for example, becomes "rugged." Telemachus, he
suggests, lacks his dreams, his aspirations, his restlessness. He does,
however, have the wisdom and the ability to transform Ithaca into a
peaceable and civilized kingdom. It is appropriate, Ulysses announces,
that each does the "work" best suited to his abilities.
The monologue concludes in the evening, curiously, when

Ulysses indicates he and his men are about to sail. In lines 44 through
70, he exhorts his companions to make the most of the time left to
them. He throws out the possible consequences of their voyage into
the unknown, citing the darker alternatives first—they could be swept
into Hades. On the other hand, they could reach the land of dead
heroes, where Achilles lives (Achilles, the hem of the Iliad, died in the
Trojan War; his armor was given to Ulysses). In the evening of their
lives, Ulysses asserts, they may yet set goals, make discoveries, and
savor their achievements.
Forms and Devices
The desire of Ulysses to leave for places unknown symbolizes
a yearning for intellectual discovery. Although he speaks of “the
Happy Isles,” most of his references to the physical world are
generalized enough to suggest that his goal is not to find an actual
place but to learn what is knowable. He says that he wants "To follow
knowledge […]/ Beyond the utmost bound of human thought."
32
Ithaca is no place for an active life of the mind, as the solemn,

declamatory eloquence of the opening lines indicates. The lack of
specificity (he is "an idle king" by a “still hearth,” with an unnamed
wife), the close repetition of identical forms (six nouns paired with
adjectives), and the metaphors for sterility (“still hearth,” “barren
crags,” “aged wife”) suggest his sense of dissociation from his
surroundings. Ulysses also sees no connection between himself and
his subjects, whose needs he describes as solely physical. They are
"savages" who do not understand him (they "know not me"), a
thinker; the heavy closing iambs of the fifth line announce with
resounding finality that Ulysses sees his subjects as animals: They
"hoard, and sleep, and feed." Wistfully, he thinks of his fellow sailors,
who have shared his work, his achievements, and his thoughts (they
"have toiled, and wrought, and thought with me—").
His needs are intellectual, although Ulysses uses images of

drinking and eating to express them—he will "drink/ Life to the lees
[dregs]," and he has "drunk delight of battle" and roamed the world
with a "hungry heart." Throughout the poem, the images reinforce the
sense of exhilaration he remembers having derived from battling life
head on, in safety and in danger ("on shore" and on rough seas, in
"The thunder and the sunshine"). With "Free hearts" and "free
foreheads"—metonymies for desires and minds—he and his men gave
both adversity and good fortune "a frolic welcome" (lines 47 through
49). In sailing toward the "western stars," "beyond the sunset," he will
be sailing into the unknown. Literally, he may sail to a "newer world"
because he will be leaving the familiar Mediterranean—the known
world—and entering the Atlantic Ocean, the unfamiliar sea beyond
The Straits. Symbolically, he will always be pursuing the ever-
widening boundaries of knowledge; "all experience is an arch
wherethrough/ Gleams that untraveled world whose margin fades/
Forever and forever when I move."
33
Moving toward the setting sun also symbolizes moving toward

death, about which Ulysses speaks in a variety of ways. "To pause"—
to live as he has been living for three long years ("suns")—is "to make
an end"; apparently, he sees pausing and ending as equivalents. This
idea is repeated when he applies to himself the metaphor of rusty
armor used by Ulysses in Troilus and Cressida (c. 1601-1602). Only
perseverance keeps honor bright, says Shakespeare's Ulysses; to
become idle is to become dull and lifeless, as unused metal does.
Death itself, however met, holds no promise—"Death closes all," and
Hades is "eternal silence." One comes alive, however, in a struggle
against death. In fact, says Ulysses, his struggle against it—his pursuit
of the western stars—may lead him to paradise.
Images throughout the first and last sections of the poem

reinforce the idea that unlike Faustus, who also sought the
unattainable, Ulysses has a desire for knowledge that will never be
satisfied. What attracts him is that "untraveled world" whose bounds
are constantly shifting. Beyond "the baths" of all the stars, beyond the
setting sun, Ulysses wants to sail until he dies.
Themes and Meanings
The significance of the will as expressed in "Ulysses" has
generated some conflicting views. In one sense, in his restless desire
to move on and to face new challenges, Ulysses is concerned only
with satisfying his own needs. "Life piled on life" has suggested to
some experience piled on experience rather than experience leading to
wisdom. With his rejection of Penelope, the incarnation of patience,
loyalty, and devotion ("Matched" even suggests that Ulysses sees their
union as having been imposed on him), and with his rejection of his
duty toward his subjects, Ulysses has been seen as a selfish hero, if
not an immature, elderly man who refuses to accept responsibility. He
exhibits an unattractive self-concern, however characteristic of the
34
hero it may be. His distaste for social and domestic responsibilities, in
fact, led W. H. Auden to call him a glorified heroic dandy.
A more common view is the one Tennyson himself supported:

The poem is about the need to battle life out to the end. Tennyson can
be seen as reflecting the spirit of the nineteenth century in approving
the determination of Ulysses to explore the unknown no matter what
the consequences; interestingly, the fact that Ulysses abandons his
wife and child is not treated as the violation of Victorian mores that it
was. In this view, his rejection of Penelope is in keeping with his
character. Her faithfulness reflects her will, certainly, but not
necessarily his. A refusal to see his return to her as his final goal is
consistent with the desire Ulysses expresses throughout the poem to
continue his search for knowledge. His needs are not physical but
intangible, intellectual; they can never be satisfied.
The message of "Ulysses" is not moralistic, although its last

line is among the most stirring and quotable in the works of Tennyson.
The focus is not on fulfilling one's duties to others. Expectations are
upset: Ulysses leaves the duties to his son and sails with a young
man's dreams into the unknown. The poem also explores loss (in part
the reason for the additional charge by Auden that the poem suffers
from indirection). In the opening lines, Ulysses, the wanderer, finds
himself stationary and isolated. He is not living wholly in the present.
He is choosing to sail westward rather than eastward, toward the dying
sun rather than the rising one. The description of the outcome of the
journey, beginning "It may be that the gulfs will wash us down," is far
from joyous. So, melancholy did Thomas Carlyle find these lines that
he told Tennyson that they "do not make me weep, but there is in me
what would fill whole Lachrymatories as I read."
The sense of loss the poem conveys suggests a certain
weariness with life. The references to himself as old, to old age, and,
35
later, to "old days" rather than to the days of his youth run counter to
the spirit of the ringing declarations in the last section of the poem.
The cadences of the long vowel sounds in lines 51 through 56, in
which Ulysses describes the approach of the evening of his departure,
suggest a contemplative stance rather than forward movement. Some
have sensed a loss of will toward the end of the poem, even an urge to
withdraw from life.
Despite the charges leveled against the poem of confused
constructions and intentions, the complexity of "Ulysses" permits it to
be read as a stirring affirmation or a poignant rejection of possibilities.
As long ago as 1855, Goldwin Smith argued that Ulysses “stands for
ever [sic] a listless and melancholy figure on the shore.”
36
Robert Browning (1812-1889)

My Last Duchess
Ferrara
That's my last Duchess painted on the wall,

Looking as if she were alive. I call
That piece a wonder, now: Frà Pandolf's hands
Worked busily a day, and there she stands.
Will't please you sit and look at her? I said
"Frà Pandolf" by design, for never read
Strangers like you that pictured countenance,
The depth and passion of its earnest glance,
But to myself they turned (since none puts by
The curtain I have drawn for you, but I)
And seemed as they would ask me, if they durst,
How such a glance came there; so, not the first
Are you to turn and ask thus. Sir, 't was not
Her husband's presence only, called that spot
Of joy into the Duchess' cheek: perhaps
Frà Pandolf chanced to say "Her mantle laps
Over my lady's wrist too much," or "Paint
Must never hope to reproduce the faint
Half-flush that dies along her throat": such stuff
Was courtesy, she thought, and cause enough
For calling up that spot of joy. She had
A heart—how shall I say?—too soon made glad,
Too easily impressed; she liked whate'er
She looked on, arid her looks went everywhere.
Sir, 't was all one! My favour at her breast,
The dropping of the daylight in the West,
The bough of cherries some officious fool
Broke in the orchard for her, the white mule
She rode with round the terrace—all and each
37
Would draw from her alike the approving speech,

Or blush, at least. She thanked men,—good! But thanked
Somehow—I know not how—as if she ranked
My gift of a nine-hundred-years-old name
With anybody's gift. Who'd stoop to blame
This sort of trifling? Even had you skill
In speech—(which I have not)—to make your will
Quite clear to such an one, and say, "Just this
Or that in you disgusts me; here you miss,
Or there exceed the mark"—and if she let
Herself be lessoned so, nor plainly set
Her wits to yours, forsooth, and made excuse,
—E'en then would be some stooping; and I choose
Never to stoop. Oh sir, she smiled, no doubt,
Whene'er I passed her; but who passed without
Much the same smile? This grew; I gave commands;
Then all smiles stopped together. There she stands
As if alive. Will't please you rise? We'll meet
The company below, then. I repeat,
The Count your master's known munificence
Is ample warrant that no just pretense
Of mine for dowry will be disallowed;
Though his fair daughter's self, as I avowed
At starting, is my object. Nay, we'll go
Together down, sir. Notice Neptune, though,
Taming a sea horse, thought a rarity,
Which Claus of Innsbruck cast in bronze for me!
38
MY LAST DUCHESS
Author: Robert Browning (1812-1889)

Type: Dramatic monologue
Date: 1842, in Dramatic Lyrics
The Poem
Robert Browning's poem "My Last Duchess" is a splendid
example of the irony that a poet can achieve within the format of the
dramatic monologue, a poetic form in which there is only one speaker.
When there is only one speaker, we necessarily have to weigh
carefully what he or she is telling us, and we often have to "read
between the lines" in keeping an objective perspective on the story or
incidents that the speaker describes to us. We can gather from this
poem's setting, "Ferrara," a town in Italy, as well as from the speaker's
reference to his "last Duchess," that the speaker in this poem is the
Duke of Ferrara. Scholars have found a viable prototype upon whom
Browning may have based this characterization in the figure of
Alfonso II, fifth Duke of Ferrara, who lived in the sixteenth century,
and whose first wife died under mysterious circumstances. Besides,
the poem is "dramatic" in the sense that it is like a drama, a play, in
which one character speaks to another, and there is a sense of action
and movement as on stage.
In the poem, the Duke of Ferrara speaks to an agent

representing the count to negotiate a second marriage to the niece of
the Count of Tyrol. The duke begins by referring to "my last
Duchess," his first wife, as he draws open a curtain to display a
portrait of her which is hanging on the wall. She looks "alive," and the
duke attributes this to the skill of the painter, Frà Pandolf. After saying
that he alone opens the curtain, the duke promptly begins a catalog of
complaints about the way his wife had acted.
The joyous blush on her cheek that can be seen in the portrait
was a result, the duke says, of her reaction to Frà Pandolf's
39
compliments about her beauty. The duke blames his late wife for
smiling back at Frà Pandolf, for being courteous to everyone she
encountered, for enjoying life too much. She failed to appreciate his
name, which can be traced back nine hundred years, and she failed to
see him as superior to others. The duke would not condescend to
correct her attitude. She should have known better, he says, and "I
choose/ Never to stoop."
The final characterization the duke gives of his former duchess
reveals his obsessive possessiveness and jealousy. He acknowledges
that she smiled when she saw him, but complains that she gave much
the same smile to anyone else she saw. His next statement reveals that
he caused her to be killed: "I gave commands; / Then all smiles
stopped together." He does not elaborate further. There is her portrait,
he says, looking as if alive. The duke tells the agent that they will next
go downstairs to meet others. Then, in less than five lines, the duke
refers directly to the proposed marriage arrangement. In the same
formal tones he has used throughout, he suggests that because the
count is so wealthy there should be no question about his providing an
"ample" dowry for his daughter to bring to the marriage. The duke
adds, however, that it is “his fair daughter's self” that he wants.
As the duke and the count's agent start down the stairs, the
duke points out a bronze statue of Neptune taming a seahorse and
notes that it was made especially for him by Claus of Innsbruck.
Although this appears to be a change in subject, it summarizes the
duke's clear message to the agent. In addition to the wealth she must
bring, the second wife, like the seahorse, must be "tamed" to her role
as his duchess. The clear implication is that if she does not meet his
requirements, she may well end up like the last duchess, "alive" only
in a portrait.
Forms and Devices
40
The duke claims that he does not have skill in speech, but his
monologue is a masterpiece of subtle rhetoric. While supposedly
entertaining the count's agent as his guest by showing him the portrait,
the duke by implication explains his requirements for his new wife.
His last duchess, according to his version of her, had a heart "too soon
made glad" by such things as watching a sunset or riding her white
mule around the terrace, and she should not have responded with
pleasure to anything or anyone but the duke himself. Browning allows
the reader to infer what kind of man the duke is by piecing together
the past and present situation. A basic device used throughout the
poem is irony. Instead of seeing an unfaithful wife as the duke
pictures her, the reader sees the jealous and egotistical mind of the
duke himself. The duke seems to assume that the agent will follow the
logic of why he commanded that his duchess be eliminated, and he
lets the agent know how easily it is within the duke's power to issue
such commands.
The poem is written in rhymed iambic pentameter lines. A

striking aspect of form in the poem is the repeated use of enjambment,
in which a line's sense and meaning runs on into the following line, so
that the rhymed couplets are "open" rather than closed. This
technique, in which the syntactical pauses rarely coincide with line
endings, creates a tension in the rhythm and places emphasis on the
horrors the duke reveals as the sentences end in mid-line (caesura).
The lines thus often appear irregular, an informalizing of a formal
pattern, as though the duke is relaxing his proud formality and
speaking casually.
The lines are extremely concentrated. Not a single word is

wasted. Throughout the poem there is a chilling meiosis, the words
imparting much more than they express. The apparent pauses, shown
by dashes, purportedly indicate a hesitation as the duke considers what
to say, but actually they suggest his consummate arrogance and
41
manipulative control of the situation. Twice the agent starts to

question or interrupt, but the duke smoothly deflects the interruptions
and continues speaking. He is in total control of the situation, however
casual he may pretend to be.
When the duke finally refers to the marriage arrangement

directly, he summarizes the situation succinctly. He first mentions the
money he will expect, then mentions the count's daughter. At first this
seems merely to confirm the duke's emphasis on money. Yet since he
had clearly stated his solution for ending his first marriage, the words
"his fair daughter's self … is my object" become particularly sinister.
Unless he can possess his next duchess as he possesses the portrait and
the bronze statue, she too may become only an artifact on the wall, as
nameless as the first duchess.
The pace of the poem builds toward the revelation that the
duke ordered his wife killed, then to the quick summation of his terms
for the marriage arrangement. The matter-of-fact tone that he uses
throughout the poem shows that the duke considers himself totally
justified, and he remains unrepentant and secure in his sense of power
over others.
Themes and Meanings
"My Last Duchess" shows the corrupt power of a domestic
tyrant. Spoken monologues often reveal more to the listener (and
reader) than the speaker intends, but this arrogant aristocrat has no
hesitation. The Duke of Ferrara obviously considers himself superior
to others and above laws and morality. He clearly states that he gave
the commands that stopped his wife's smiles altogether. After all, he
tells the agent, “she liked whate'er/ She looked on, and her looks went
everywhere.” The duke was irritated by such behavior and had it
eliminated. He uses his power to get others to do his will, including,
presumably, the agent. As he had others eliminate his wife, and as he
42
had a painter and a sculptor create objects of art to his specifications,

he assumes that the agent will provide the kind of duchess he wants.
He seems unconcerned about any hesitations a potential second wife
might have about how his first marriage ended. He appears confident
his demands will be met, both the ample dowry and the subservient
wife.
The jealousy and possessiveness that seem to accompany the

duke's assertion of power suggest that he will be equally suspicious of
any living wife, and indeed the portrait of his last duchess is more
satisfactory to him than was the duchess herself. He can open or close
the curtain as he pleases; he can exert complete control.
Browning's genius created a character whose own words
condemn him and show him as a ruthless, corrupt man who misuses
his power. What makes the Duke of Ferrara especially horrifying is
that he feels no repentance and no need for repentance. There have
been no checks on his abuses of power thus far, and there is nothing to
suggest that he will not continue his egotistical and tyrannical ways.
43
Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882)

The Blessed Damozel
The blessed damozel leaned out

From the gold bar of Heaven;
Her eyes were deeper than the depth
Of waters stilled at even;
She had three lilies in her hand,
And the stars in her hair were seven.
Her robe, ungirt from clasp to hem,

No wrought flowers did adorn,
But a white rose of Mary's gift,
For service meetly worn;
Her hair that lay along her back
Was yellow like ripe corn.
Her seemed she scarce had been a day

One of God's choristers;
The wonder was not yet quite gone
From that still look of hers;
Albeit, to them she left, her day
Had counted as ten years.
(To one, it is ten years of years.

. . .Yet now, and in this place,
Surely she leaned o'er me—her hair
Fell all about my face . . .
Nothing: the autumn fall of leaves.
The whole year sets apace.)
It was the rampart of Cod's house

That she was standing on;
By Cod built over the sheer depth
The which is Space begun;
So high, that looking downward thence
She scarce could see the sun.
It lies in Heaven, across the flood

Of ether, as a bridge.
Beneath, the tides of day and night
With flame and darkness ridge
44
The void, as low as where this earth

Spins like a fretful midge.
Around her, lovers, newly met

'Mid deathless love's acclaims,
Spoke evermore among themselves
Their heart remembered names;
And the souls mounting up to God
Went by her like thin flames.
And still she bowed herself and stooped

Out of the circling charm;
Until her bosom must have made
The bar she leaned on warm,
And the lilies lay as if asleep
Along her bended arm.
From the fixed place of Heaven she saw

Time like a pulse shake fierce
Through all the worlds. Her gaze still strove
Within the gulf to pierce
Its path; and now she spoke as when
The stars sang in their spheres.
The sun was gone now; the curled moon

Was like a little feather
Fluttering far down the gulf; and now
She spoke through the still weather.
Her voice was like the voice the stars
Had when they sang together.
(Ah sweet! Even now, in that bird's song.

Strove not her accents there,
Fain to be hearkened? When those bells
Possessed the mid-day air,
Strove not her steps to reach my side
Down all the echoing stair?)
"I wish that he were come to me,

For he will come," she said.
"Have I not prayed in Heaven?—on earth,
Lord, Lord, has he not prayed?
Are not two prayers a perfect strength?
45
And shall I feel afraid?
"When round his head the aureole clings,

And he is clothed in white,
I'll take his hand and go with him
To the deep wells of light;
As unto a stream we will step down
And bathe there in God's sight.
"We two will stand beside that shrine,

Occult, withheld, untrod,
Whose lamps are stirred continually
With prayer sent up to God;
And see our old prayers, granted, melt
Each like a little cloud.
"We two will lie i' the shadow of

That living mystic tree
Within whose secret growth the Dove
Is sometimes felt to be,
While every leaf that His plumes touch
Saith His Name audibly.
"And I myself will teach to him,
I myself, lying so,
The songs I sing here; which his voice
Shall pause in, hushed and slow,
And find some knowledge at each pause,
Or some new thing to know."
(Alas! We two, we two, thou sayst!
Yea, one wast thou with me
That once of old. But shall God lift
To endless unity
The soul whose likeness with thy soul
Was but its love for thee?)
"We two," she said, "will seek the groves
Where the lady Mary is,
With her five handmaidens, whose names
Are five sweet symphonies,
Cecily, Gertrude, Magdalen,
Margaret and Rosalys.
46
"Circlewise sit they, with bound locks

And foreheads garlanded;
Into the fine cloth white like flame
Weaving the golden thread.
To fashion the birth-robes for them
Who are just born, being dead.
"He shall fear, haply, and be dumb:
Then will I lay my cheek
To his, and tell about our love,
Not once abashed or weak:
And the dear Mother will approve
My pride, and let me speak.
"Herself shall bring us, hand in hand,
To Him round whom all souls
Kneel, the clear-ranged unnumbered heads
Bowed with their aureoles:
And angels meeting us shall sing
To their citherns and citoles.
"There will I ask of Christ the Lord
Thus much for him and me: —
Only to live as once on earth
With Love, —only to be,
As then awhile, for ever now
Together, I and he."
She gazed and listened and then said,
Less sad of speech than mild, —
"All this is when he comes." She ceased.
The light thrilled towards her, filled
With angels in strong level flight.
Her eyes prayed, and she smiled.
(I saw her smile.) But soon their path
Was vague in distant spheres:
And then she cast her arms along
The golden barriers,
And laid her face between her hands,
And wept. (I heard her tears.)
47
THE BLESSED DAMOZEL
Author: Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882)

Type: Ballad
Date: 1850; 1870; 1881
The Poem
Dante Gabriel Rossetti was a poet and a painter, and his
writings reflect the confluence of both. Like many of his paintings,
"The Blessed Damozel," first written when he was eighteen years old
and subsequently revised, portrays a heaven that is warm with
physical bodies. Spirituality and sensuality are fused in Rossetti's
heaven, which is the place of dream, but also the location of a more
earthly kind of ecstasy. The word "Damozel" is a poetic version of
"damsel," and it signifies a young unmarried lady. This lady has died
at a young age and now inhabits heaven, longing for her previous life
and especially for her lover back on earth. She leans out from the
ramparts of heaven, watching the worlds below and the souls
mounting to God, and prays for the union with her earthly lover in the
shadow of the "living mystic tree."
From the beginning, the poem is immersed in medieval
sacramental symbolism. The damozel has three lilies in her hand,
seven stars in her hair, and a white rose in her robe. These are all
Christian attributes, which Rossetti borrows from Dante's Divine
Comedy, and they aim to symbolize, respectively, the Holy Trinity,
seven Christian virtues, and St. Mary. From these indicators we learn
that while she was alive the damozel was a virtuous lady (otherwise
she would not have ended up in heaven), trusting in God, committed
to superb moral conduct, and devoted to virginity.
Time does not exist in heaven. Although in worldly terms the
lady has been dead for ten years, she feels as though she has only been
in heaven for less than a day. The words in parenthesis in stanza four
are spoken by the grief-stricken lover, who still mourns for his
48
mistress and occasionally experiences strange feelings of closeness

with his lover: "Surely she leaned o'er me—her hair / Fell all about my
face . ." In the following stanzas, "the rampart of God's house" is
described, seeming like a citadel from which the blessed souls can
look down upon the world, which is tellingly compared to a "fretful
midge." In this world lovers constantly exchange "deathless" vows
and yet they also in no time give up their souls that go by her "like
thin flames." The damozel desires that her still living lover also come
to her. She imagines how she will take his hand and lead him to the
"deep wells of light." The two lovers will finally see their prayers
granted; the damozel will teach her lover the songs that are sung in
heaven while he will teach her all his knowledge. They will visit St.
Mary in her virginal beauty, worshipping her alongside her
handmaidens, and tell her about their love. St. Mary will approve their
love and bring them in front of her son Christ. The love between the
two lovers will last forever in the immortal realm of heaven.
So much for Rossetti's concept of an ideal Platonic love, the

last stanza of the poem, however, offers a surprising turn, because
after expressing her wish and anticipation of the restored union with
her lover in heaven, the blessed damozel first smiles then bursts into
tears, as if in total negation of everything she has said up to this point.
This is a surprising ending, because at this point heaven loses
something of its charm and beauty. Will the sensual character of their
love be compatible with their heavenly existence? Will the reunion
with the lover ever actually occur? How can love of God and love for
another person be reconciled in heaven? The damozel is left with her
doubts, as are the readers.
Forms and Devices

Originally, the ballad was a narrative lyric poem preserved by
oral tradition. The ballad meter of England derived from the
49
septenarius, a rhymed Latin hymn meter of seven feet or accents.

These long lines, technically known as "fourteeners," as they often
numbered fourteen syllables, were afterward broken up into four
shorter lines of iambic tetrameter alternated with iambic trimeter,
which accounts for the alternating unrhymed lines.
In the case of "The Blessed Damozel," Rossetti has broken
three long septenarian lines into six shorter lines of alternating
tetrameters and trimeters. Thus, the second, fourth, and sixth lines in
each stanza rhyme, as in stanza two: "adorn," "worn," and "corn." The
ballad was predominantly a medieval poetic form, and Rossetti's use
of it exemplifies the Pre-Raphaelite preoccupation with medievalism.
Another important aspect of Rossetti's poetry is his "painterly"
style. It is often said that reading one of his poems is almost like
looking at a painting. Rossetti himself said that the supreme perfection
in art is achieved when the picture and the poem are identical—that is,
when they produce the same effect. Rossetti achieves this effect by
paying meticulous attention to detail and by using concrete images.
The damozel's eyes are as deep as waters "stilled at even" (at twilight);
she wears seven stars in her hair, which is yellow like corn; holds
three lilies in her hand (seven and three are mystical numbers); and
wears a white rose on her robe. The earth spins in the void "like a
fretful midge"; the "curled moon" is a "little feather" in the gulf—all
of these are concrete images that present a portrait of the damozel, the
earth, and the moon.
Finally, the poem abounds with Christian imagery and

symbolism. Arising from the tradition of courtly love, one of the great
medieval themes was an idealized, platonic, spiritual love. Although
this tradition had its carnal aspects, the spiritualized love and
adoration are best exemplified by Dante Alighieri's mystical devotion
to Beatrice and his portrayal of her in paradise. True to his intention,
50
Rossetti has reversed the roles in this poem. By setting the poem in
heaven, within a medieval Christian framework, he has tried to
suggest the spiritual nature of the damozel's love for her earthly lover.
The heavenly lover wears the white rose—a symbol of virginity—and
is therefore fitted to be in the service of Mary, who is the ultimate
symbol of pure, chaste love. It is Mary herself who will approve their
love and bring the lovers before Christ (lines 115 to 126).
Themes and Meanings

Many years after the poem was written, Rossetti is said to have
attributed it to his admiration of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Raven"
(1845). Rossetti is reported to have said that Poe had done the most
that was possible to do with the grief of a lover on earth longing for a
lover in heaven and that he (Rossetti) was determined to reverse the
conditions in "The Blessed Damozel."
Both a poet and a painter, in 1848 Rossetti, along with Holman

Hunt and John Everett Millais, reacted against the neoclassic
tendencies and low standards of the art of their day, and sought to
express a new moral seriousness and sincerity in their works. Their
adoption of the name Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood expressed their
admiration for what they saw as the direct and uncomplicated
depiction of nature in Italian painting before the High Renaissance. In
general, both their painting and their literature are characterized by an
interest in the medieval and the supernatural, simplicity of style, love
of sensuous beauty, exactness of detail, and much symbolism.
"The Blessed Damozel" epitomizes the Pre-Raphaelite school.

Rossetti used the medieval form of damsel, "damozel"—a young,
unmarried woman of noble birth—in the title to emphasize the
medieval setting and visionary aspects of the poem. He was
commissioned in 1871 to do a painting of the poem and by 1879 had
given it a predella showing an earthly lover (wearing a cloak and a
51
sword) lying under a tree in the forest looking up at his beloved. The
poem is presented as his reverie.
The reader can see in "The Blessed Damozel" the expression

of an ancient and well-known theme: the desire of an isolated,
separated lover to achieve unity with the beloved. Rossetti has framed
this vision as a reverie, a daydream, a wish-fulfilling dream in the
mind of a lover. The heart of the poem is the ironic conflict between
the earthly bodily desire and the tradition that heaven is a place of
disembodied souls, comforted and joyful in the presence of God. This
irony is emphasized by the poem's religious framework.
The earthly, fleshly dimension of the lover in heaven is

unconsciously revealed in several places in the poem: Her bosom
"warms" the bar of heaven (line 46); she imagines taking her lover's
hand (line 75), lying together in the shadow of the mystic tree (lines
85 to 86), laying her cheek against his (line 116), and, finally, living in
heaven "as once on earth" (line 129).
These are all images of touching in the earthly sense. Yet, by

the standards of medieval theology which the whole framework of the
poem implies—she ought to be contemplating the joy of God and
exhorting her lover to lay aside grief and remember that she now
enjoys the real reward of life: eternal life with God.
The Christian imagery, which is largely derived from Dante
and other medieval Italian poets, is used decoratively and in this
context does not support the sensuous desires of the lover. As much as
Rossetti tried to emulate the austere spiritual idealization of Dante, his
own sensuousness prevented him from achieving it.
The heavenly lover yearns passionately, intensely, for her

earthly companion. In her yearning, she moves from a vision of their
reunion, to hope of everlasting unity, and finally to doubt and despair.
The void between heaven and earth is immense. What is emphasized
52
is the separateness of the lovers: The wish is not the thing itself; the
traditional Christian sops about being in heaven hold no comfort for
the bereaved lover, for without the beloved, the heaven becomes a
hell.
53
SECTION THREE
NINETEENTH CENTURY AMERICAN POETRY
BACKGROUND
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-82) marks the real watershed of

American poetry. Emerson immersed himself in English and German
romanticism and issued his manifesto Nature (1836). The prophet of
Transcendentalism drew many disciples, including Henry David
Thoreau (1817-62), and he spread his message on the lecture circuit
around the country, all the way to California. The "Sage of Concord"
assimilated Neoplatonism, German idealism, and Oriental mysticism
into a Yankee conviction that individuals who trusted their powers of
intuitive insight (which he called transcendental Reason) would
discover in their own experience, rather than in doctrines or
institutions, their harmony with nature and with the Oversoul
immanent in nature. He elaborated his philosophy in Essays (1841,
1844) and Representative Man (1850).
Philosopher as poet, poet as seer ("transparent eyeball," in the

phrase from the opening epiphany of Nature), seer as sayer: Emerson
enunciated an American poetics so powerful that both contemporaries
and succeeding generations have had to contend with it by
affirmation, qualification, or denial. The three axioms laid down in the
"Language" chapter of Nature postulated an intrinsic correspondence
between words, things, and absolute truth: "1. Words are the signs of
natural facts. 2. Particular natural facts are symbols of particular
spiritual facts. 3. Nature is symbol of Spirit." There is a clear line from
Edwards' declaration that "the material and natural world is typical of
the moral, spiritual, and intelligent world, or the City of God" to
54
Emerson's axioms. "The Poet," as Emerson expatiates in his essay of

that title (1844), is the receptive and expressive medium of the Spirit
in Nature, distinguished by the "power to receive and impart" his
typological experience. But Emerson's unchurched experience of types
rested not on the certitude of Scripture and doctrine but on the
instabilities of subjective experience: "the individual is his world," he
said in "Self-Reliance." That individualizing and psychologizing of
experience, which is the essence of romanticism, and which was itself
a result of the general decline of theological and philosophical
assurance in the West and of Puritanism in the U.S., served to
undermine the distinction between types and tropes; indeed, Emerson
tends to use the terms almost interchangeably.
But that ambiguity was the unacknowledged subtext; what

people responded to was Emerson's call to believe in "the infinitude of
the private man," his affirmation of the power both of imagination to
realize its perceptions and of America's natural sublimity as the source
of a new poetry capable of idealizing American materialism and
building a new society. Since realization required the seer to be also a
sayer or "Language-maker," Emerson proposed an aesthetic of
organicism. "Every word was once a poem. Every new relation is a
new word." Consequently, organic form is not antecedent to the poem;
even though the form and meaning coexist in the completed work,
form does not proceed ab extra—i.e. from the technique of following
out conventional rules and patterns—but from the impulse of the
insight: "a thought so passionate and alive that like the spirit of a plant
or an animal it has an architecture of its own and adorns nature with a
new thing." The shape of the poem ought to be the extension of the
generative experience into words. Emerson versified his
Transcendentalism in poems such as "Each and All," "Bacchus," and
"Brahma"; his image of the poet in "Merlin" and "Uriel"; and his
notion of organic form in "The Snow-Storm."
55
Edgar Allan Poe (1809-49), a poet by aspiration, struggled to

support himself through journalism, writing the famous short stories
and the voluminous reviews which make him the first American critic
of stature. The poem "Israfel" indicates his susceptibility to the idea of
the exalted seer-sayer and his disillusionment with it. What can we do
if "our flowers are merely—flowers," not types but phenomena in the
material flux? In compensation we make flowers into tropes and, with
conscious craft and calculated effect, construct from disordered nature
an intricately composed artifice. The imagination functions not to
discover typological truth but to devise metaphorical connection. By
explicating the text of "The Raven" as a rational construction of an
irrational narrative, "The Philosophy of Composition" (1846) mounts
a withering attack on the supposition of ecstatic inspiration in "the so
called poetry of the so called transcendentalists."
Out of Emerson's call for organic form, Walt Whitman (1819-

92) distilled a revolution in verse technique that came to be called free
verse: lines irregular in length and stresses, patterned not by meter or
rhyme but by repetition of phrase and rhythm. Out of Emerson's call
for an American seer-prophet, Whitman devised the persona whose
colloquial, expansive, often exclamatory voice sounded a "different
relative attitude towards God, towards the objective universe, and still
more (by reflection, confession, assumption) the quite changed
attitude of the ego, the one chanting or talking, towards himself and
towards his fellow humanity." He was "large" and sought to "contain
multitudes"—the city and countryside, the people and places of
America.
In July, 1855, Leaves of Grass appeared. Emerson's

enthusiasm cooled, however, with Whitman's continued emphasis on
the body as much as the soul and his identification of the life force
with the sexual "urge." But the self-reliant Whitman maintained his
independence and devoted his life ("that electric self-seeking types")
56
to the organic expansion of Leaves of Grass through a succession of

editions. With the third edition (1860) the sea-dirges "Out of the
Cradle Endlessly Rocking" and "As I Ebb'd with the Ocean of Life,"
written during the late 1850s out of a profound but mysterious
distress, explored the death theme coexistent from the beginning with
the celebration of life; and the "Children of Adam" and "Calamus"
sections celebrated alternatively love between men and women and
love between manly comrades. The edition of 1867 added Drum Taps,
the Civil War poems, and the Lincoln elegy "When Lilacs Last in the
Dooryard Bloom'd."
Emily Dickinson (1830-86) and Whitman represent

complementary aspects of the American poet stemming from
Emerson: the democratic projection of the self into nature and the city,
the hermetic absorption of the world into the private self. Dickinson
committed herself, in part, to recording with unwavering attention the
interior drama of consciousness. Adapting the quatrain of the hymnal
to her own purposes, Dickinson lines out, not sentence by sentence but
word by word, single moments of perception and emotion. Each taut,
spare poem expresses with unblinking fidelity the truth of its moment,
and the accumulation of poems charts the extremes of her experience:
God as present or absent, love as fulfillment or renunciation, nature as
harmonious or alien. A poem beginning "The loss of something ever
felt I" locates the first act of consciousness as an experience of radical
bereavement, after which the individual consciousness seeks
completion either through its relation to the other—nature, lover,
God—or through focusing on its own integration.
A recluse in her father's house by the age of 30, Dickinson

maintained the independence her poetry required from the demands
made on an unmarried woman in a bourgeois Victorian household. In
the late 1850s she began making fair copies of poems and binding
them with thread into packets which were found in a dresser drawer
57
after her death. During the early 1860s a crisis, perhaps involving
frustrated or thwarted love, precipitated an extraordinary creative
outburst: 681 poems between 1862 and 64, over a third of her 1800-
odd poems. The "He" in her love poems seems to be Jesus, or a human
lover, or the masculine aspect of her self—or overlays of all these. Her
word for the ecstatic fulfillment of consciousness in triumphant
selfhood was Immortality, sometimes expressed as a marriage, often
one deferred to the next life, and despite deprivation and renunciation
she experienced momentary intimations of Immortality in the upstairs
bedroom which often served as images of her secluded consciousness.
In 1862 Dickinson was sufficiently confident to write to the
critic Thomas Higginson, sending three poems and asking his advice.
His prompt expression of interest, she said, saved her life, but his
well-intentioned insensitivity to her oddities of phrasing, rhythm,
capitalization, and punctuation confirmed Dickinson's sense that she
would have to be content with posthumous fame. Though poems and
letters began to appear after her death, the unbowdlerized collected
Poems (1955) and Letters (1958) assured her place as the only woman
among the great romantic poets.
As a Harvard professor, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-
82) helped to introduce German literature to the U.S., and he
translated Dante. His most famous narrative poems are: Evangeline
(1847), a tragic romance in hexameters about the exodus of French
Canadians to Louisiana; The Song of Hiawatha (1855), an epic
rendering of American Indian legends into tetrameters imitative of the
Finnish Kalevala; and The Courtship of Miles Standish (1858), a
blank verse version of the famous Puritan love triangle. "The Psalm of
Life" answers human mortality with a call to the work ethic, and
"Excelsior" expresses a Browningesque summons to strive in the face
of failure. Longfellow's chief poetic interest now lies in lyrics like
"The Jewish Cemetery at Newport" and "The Cross of Snow."
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The contrast between Sidney Lanier (1842-81) and Stephen

Crane (1871-1900) illustrates the exhaustion of romanticism in
American poetry. The extreme musicality of Lanier's language and the
lush metaphorical straining for a diffuse effect indicate his admiration
for Poe; in The Science of English Verse (1880) Lanier used his
knowledge of music theory and his experience as a symphony flautist
to codify Poe's correlation of music and poetry into strict rules based
on the assumption that the metrical foot, like the musical bar, was
governed not just by pattern of stress but by syllabic duration. "Corn"
and "The Symphony" established his fame in 1875 with a fiercely
Southern denunciation of corrupt commerce in favor of a chivalric-
agrarian ideal. "The Marshes of Glynn" and "Sunrise," the latter
written in a high fever on his deathbed, express the last gasp of
romantic typology as they celebrate the dying of the individual back
into the sublimity of nature and nature's God. By contrast, the terse,
irregular verse in Crane's The Black Riders (1895) and War Is Kind
(1899), written in part in response to the angularity of Dickinson's
newly published poems, extends the anti-romantic naturalism of his
fiction, but Crane's tough-guy irony before man's fate in a universe of
chance does not mask the wistful vulnerability, even sentimentality, of
his tender heart.
The romantic ideology which had made for the energy and
experimentation of the middle years of the century had played itself
out. American culture needed the jolt of a new ideology—
modernism—to galvanize a generation of poets whose achievement
rivals that of the English Renaissance.
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SECTION FOUR
SELECTIONS OF NINETEENTH CENTURY AMERICAN POEMS
William Cullen Bryant (1794-1878)

To a 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 sing
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 has 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 tread alone,
Will lead my steps aright.
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TO A WATERFOWL
Author: William Cullen Bryant (1794-1878)

Type: Lyric
The Poem
Both lyric and didactic, "To a Waterfowl" creates a natural
scene in order to derive a moral lesson from it. The poem consists of
eight quatrains, or four-line stanzas. Each stanza is written in
pentameter and trimeter verse with an alternating rhyme scheme. The
poem subtly blends descriptive scenes with inward reflections on
them. The poem's title indicates an unspecified waterfowl, which
some critics have suggested must be a goose. By not specifying the
waterfowl's species, the poet suggests a more universal image that will
help in conveying his theme. The poem opens with a question and the
interrogative form is used in both the first and third stanzas.
The whole poem encompasses the flight of the waterfowl from
two viewpoints. It appears to the poet at dusk as it gently floats
overhead and gradually disappears into the horizon. The poet also
projects the journey of the bird over vast territories as it flies from its
winter abode to its summer home. The immediate image of the bird
has the poet reflect on the bird's destination and the nature of its flight.
In his whimsical meditating, the poet addresses the bird directly as
though to open up a dialogue between nature's creature and the poet's
inner soul. However, it is not until the last stanza that the poet reveals
himself and speaks out his message in the first person.
The poem is organized clearly around the scenic images
alternating with the poet's reflections. The first three stanzas describe
the bird's flight and possible destination, while the fourth meditates on
a "Power" that guides the bird's flight. The fifth through seventh
stanzas return to the description of the bird's excursion, and the last
stanza comes back to the guiding Power and brings out the poem's
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message. Thus, the poem twice repeats three descriptive stanzas

followed by a meditation.
The poem opens at sunset as the sky glows red and evening
dew falls. The poet sees a bird flying alone in the distance and muses
that it is safe from any would-be hunter who would do it harm. The
bird, alone and solitary, is silhouetted across the evening sky. As it
floats smoothly by, the poet wonders where it is going. Is it headed for
the edge of a lake in an area covered with weeds? Does it seek the
margins of a wide river, or is it heading for the oceanside, "chafed" by
the constant beat of the surf?
Then, the poet feels that some Power is leading the bird over
coastlines that have no path, over a wide aerial expanse. Because this
Power guides the bird, it can wander alone without ever getting lost.
The bird will be flapping its wings the whole day, far above the earth
in the cold, thin atmosphere. The bird may be weary, but it does not
land even when night comes on. Nevertheless, the poet realizes that
the bird's tiring journey will soon come to an end, and that the bird
will be able to rest in its summer home, make noise among the other
birds of the flock, and have the reeds cover its nest. The poet tells the
bird that it is gone, that it is "swallowed up" in the heavens. However,
the image of the bird leaves a message in the poet's heart. The poet
feels that the same Power that guides the bird from one area to another
will guide him in the right path in his solitary journey through life.
Forms and Devices

This poem, like most of Bryant's poems, is filled with nature
imagery. Bryant felt that the American poet should capture all the
wonders of the American landscape and should also bring forth his
own personal expression. This poem satisfies both goals. Bryant
captures the natural scene of the bird at sunset. He shows how the sky
glows with "the last steps of day." This metaphor unites the temporal
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with the spatial as day is seen in steps. There is also a unifying theme
introduced in the poem's very last stanza, which states that the Power
that guides the bird will "lead my steps aright." The metaphor of the
"last steps of day" combines with images of the "crimson sky" and
"rosy depths" to add the color of the natural sunset and to highlight the
silhouette of the bird "darkly seen." The imagery and figure of speech
help to create a vast and shaded background. However, the movement
is graceful as the figure "floats along."
In describing the bird's journey, Bryant again paints a vast

American landscape using vivid nature imagery, such as "plashy brink
/ of weedy lake," "marge of river wide," and "chafed ocean side."
Rivers, lakes, and oceans emerge in an immense vista. The bird
becomes a compelling force in the sky that Bryant compares to a
"desert" empty and vast; so high is the bird that the coast is "pathless."
The bird has "fanned" the air with its wings as it continues on its
strenuous journey. Bryant also uses dynamic auditory imagery to
show the mood of the bird when its journey is over. When it reaches
home, it shall "scream among" its "fellows." The use of "scream,"
instead of a word such as "cry," accentuates the bird's exhilaration.
Moreover, the sibilant alliteration of "scream," "shall," "soon," and
"sheltered" adds to the dynamics of the bird's homecoming.
In the final image of the bird, Bryant uses the metaphor of the
throat in which the "abyss of heaven / Hath swallowed up thy form . .
." This disappearance of the bird as a natural image lays the
groundwork for the analogy between its flight and the life of the poet.
Also, in showing the journey of the bird and comparing it to the life of
a person, the poem focuses on a figure that is "Lone wandering, but
not lost." "Lost" literally means not being able to find one's way; here,
however, it also signifies the damned, those who are morally lost. The
imagery and figurative language of the poem show a natural journey
and compare it to an inner spiritual journey.
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Themes and Meanings

According to one of his biographers, Bryant was inspired to
write "To a Waterfowl" when he was a twenty-one-year-old aspiring
lawyer on his way to a new town. As he walked through New England
hills, sad and concerned about what would happen to him in his new
life, he saw a solitary bird flying against a sunset and wondered about
its destiny. When he stopped at an inn, he wrote what became the
poem's last stanza.
Bryant not only wrote in the tradition of the Romantics, who
saw sublime images in nature, but also followed the American
Puritans, who saw natural events as signs of spiritual import. Like the
Puritans, he read Nature as God's book, which can deliver insightful
messages about the spiritual world. His poem depicts the figure of the
solitary bird in its natural pattern of migration. He shows how it has
no map to lead it across the "pathless coast"; yet it is "not lost." The
solitary bird pursues its way tirelessly; even through the night, it does
not land to rest. It continues on its way until it reaches its home or
shelter. From a moral point of view the poet sees the flight of the bird
as a metaphor for his own life. Like the bird, he is alone, a solitary
wanderer, unsure of his path through life. Moreover, just as the bird is
guided by a Power, the poet is also in the hands of providence, a
benign power who would watch him "tread alone" and would "lead"
his "steps aright."
Not only does this poem deliver a personal message that life is
not aimless or left to chance, but it is also an argument for God or
providence by use of design. The argument of design holds that the
world and all its parts are so well designed and so well run that there
must be some designer who put everything in order and keeps it that
way. Because the migratory bird has such a "certain flight" over vast
regions, there must be some Power to design and control its flight. The
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corollary to this argument is that the same power influences humans

on their journey through life.
Like much early American literature, this poem also celebrates

American individualism. The bird is not flying within a flock, but
alone. The poet also is walking his journey alone. Individuals are
responsible under the guidance of divine providence to walk their own
paths, not to follow the herd. There are no institutions, governments,
or social organizations to bolster individuals as they seek their
destinies. As well as celebrating the power of divine providence, the
poem acknowledges the individual's lonely struggle to discover
himself anew. The solitary individual, nature, and divine providence
are at the core of Bryant's poem.
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Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)

Brahma
If the red slayer think he slays,

Or if the slain think he is slain,
They know not well the subtle ways
I keep, and pass, and turn again.
Far or forgot to me is near;

Shadow and sunlight are the same;
The vanished gods to me appear;
And one to me are shame and fame.
They reckon ill who leave me out;

When me they fly, I am the wings;
I am the doubter and the doubt,
And I the hymn the Brahmin sings.
The strong gods pine for my abode,

And pine in vain the sacred Seven;
But thou, meek lover of the good!
Find me, and turn thy back on heaven.
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BRAHMA
Author: Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)

Type: Lyric
Date: 1857
Introduction
"Brahma" is an excellent reflection and representation of
Ralph Waldo Emerson's work as a whole. Stylistically, he uses the
same spiral or circular method that he does in his prose, rather than the
more straightforward linear development used by most poets of his
time. Thematically, he insists on the same spiritual and physical unity
and harmony in the universe, expressed in a similarly intensive and
dense language, as he does in his essays. These qualities demand
much from the reader.
"Brahma" is a poem of sixteen lines, divided into four
quatrains. In order to understand and appreciate this poem fully, one
must know something about Eastern religion, especially Hinduism. In
Hindu theology, Brahma (or, more commonly, Brahman) is the
supreme spirit or divine reality in the universe, the eternal spirit from
which all has come and to which all shall return (similar to what
Emerson more commonly called the Over-Soul). The "strong gods"
(line 13) are secondary gods who, like all mortals, seek ultimate union
with the supreme god, Brahma: They include Indra, the god of the
sky; Agni, the god of fire; and Yama, "the red slayer" (line 1), or god
of death. The "sacred Seven" (line 14) are the highest holy persons or
saints in Hinduism, who also seek union (or reunion) with Brahma.
The Poem
Brahma, the central figure and speaker in the poem, is, in
Hinduism, the supreme, eternal, creative spirit. Stanza one states that
the spirit of the universe is cyclical. Everything in the universe starts
and ends with the creative spirit. Death does not exist. The "red
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slayer" is Yama, the Hindu god of death. Death is only an illusion,

merely a transition of Brahma into another state.
To Brahma all things are joined together. The contrasts are
interconnected, permeable, and of equal value. "Far" and "near" refer
to distance and time, and both are joined in the same place and time in
Brahma. "Forgot" and "near" refer to memory and history; the past
continues to exist in the present moment. "Shadow" and "sunlight"
refer to night and day and to ignorance and knowledge, and all are the
same in Brahma. The vanished gods might be Hindu gods who have
been vanquished but still exist in Brahma. They also could refer to
history, ideas, and beliefs that are no longer held but that are still part
of the creative spirit of the world. Shame and fame refer to worldly
failure and success, which make no difference in the eternal spirit of
the universe.
In stanza three, Brahma, or the creative spirit, is omnipresent,
and therefore, impossible to disregard. Even if humans fail to grasp
it—to their own detriment—the creative spirit is still there and will
eventually be recognized. The third stanza also indicates that everyone
is part of and essential to the cyclical spirit of the universe.
The "strong gods" in Hindu belief include Indra, who rules the
sky, and Agni, the god of fire. All desire to be with the supreme god,
or Brahma. The "sacred Seven" are holy persons who also seek union
with Brahma. If we love the good, we will find Brahma, which
includes everything and, therefore, is open to all, rather than "heaven,"
from which, in Christian belief, many are excluded.
Forms and Devices

"Brahma" reflects Emerson's periodic use of the standard
poetic meter and rhyme of his time: The four quatrains are in iambic
tetrameter, and his use of coupled rhymes (abab) is a reflection of his
thematic sense of the inescapable polarity in the universe.
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The central figure in the poem is the speaker, who is Brahma,

or the Over-Soul, the creative spirit in the universe. Having the
Brahma as the speaker allows Emerson to posit the unity within the
world's polaric structure; though contradictions seem to exist, he
suggests, they are in fact meaningful paradoxes and not meaningless
contradictions. Emerson makes extensive use of irony in his poetic
strategy; he indicates that death is not really death, that shadow and
sunlight are the same, and that both the doubter and doubt are
contained within the Brahma, to which all persons aspire to return.
There are other ironies as well: It is clearly implied that it is the abode
of Brahma (line 13) which is to be sought rather than a Christian
heaven, and that those who adopt the Darwinian perspective of the
survival of the fittest miss the realization that, in reality, all survive.
Emerson has, in "Brahma," used a series of images borrowed
from Hindu scriptures to reflect the coordinated pattern and unity in
the physical universe, which is itself a reflected pattern of the same
unity in the spiritual universe.
Themes and Meanings
"We live in succession, in division, in parts, in particles,"
wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson in his essay "The Over-Soul,"
"Meantime within man is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the
universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related;
the eternal ONE." His poem "Brahma" similarly preaches the eternal
oneness of the cosmos by invoking the Hindu deity Brahma, the
supreme spirit of the universe, who transcends all dualities of thought.
Separations between knower and known, slayer and slain, nature and
spirit—all are transcended in the Over-Soul, the spirit which
encompasses all. Thus, the moral distinctions which mankind draws
vanish in the ultimate nature of Being. In Emerson's poem Brahma
speaks, denying death and time and all the spatial divisions that
mortals employ to understand their world. A number of paradoxes are
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elaborated to demonstrate the ultimate inability of reason to grasp the

mystery of the divine.
Emerson insists in his writings that it is only the spiritual
world which is "real"; the material world is simply an illusion, created
by human senses that must eventually be transcended. He frequently
used one segment of the world as a microcosm of the universe as a
whole, believing that if one could but understand all of one aspect of
the reality, one would have a clear entry into understanding the whole.
Another central Emersonian theme is implied in this poem, one
that has to do with the relationship between people and nature:
Physical nature can be a mirror to reflect back to humankind the
spiritual facts which lie behind and inform all physical facts. Shadow
and sunlight, for example, can reveal that they are inescapable parts of
one phenomenon, and thus one spiritual reality. Just as a person may
come to realize that shadow is only the absence of light, so may one
come to realize that evil is only the absence of good.
Other central themes in Emerson's work are reflected in this
poem: the idea of compensation, for example, which shows that there
is a principle of balance in the universe, since for everything that is
given, something is taken away, and vice versa. In the whole (or
spiritual) sense, nothing is ever lost. There is also a commentary on
the nature of experience, which Emerson saw—in a metaphor which
he used in several works—as being like beads strung on the string of
one's temperament. In other words, what one sees and finds in the
world is directly connected to one's perspective, or point of view,
since how one looks at things determines what one sees. It is much
like holding up a string of colored beads to the light and looking
through them with all their varied colors—except, as Emerson states
in his essay "Experience," that these beads are named desire, reality,
temperament, succession, and subjectiveness. It is also the case, as he
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argued in his essay "Fate," that the universe is structured as much or

more by one's internal fate or destiny as it is by any external fate.
Since everyone desires to return to the Brahma or Over-Soul, from
which they have come (whether they realize it or not), and since the
Brahma, Over-Soul, or creative principle in the universe is waiting to
accept or re-accept them when they are ready, the purpose of free will
is to lead people to choose what has already been chosen (another
paradox, and another polarity), to return to the ultimate unity and
harmony from which everyone originally came.
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Walt Whitman (1819–1892)

O Captain! My Captain!
O Captain! my Captain, our fearful trip is done,

The ship has weather'd every rack, the prize we sought is won,
The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,
While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring;
But O heart! heart! heart!
O the bleeding drips of read,
Where on the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.
O Captain! my Captain! rise up and hear the bells;
Rise up—for you the flag is flung—for you the bugle trills,
For you bouquets and ribbon'd wreaths—for you the shores a-crowding,
For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning;
Here Captain! dear father!
The arm beneath your head!
It is some dream that on the deck,
You've fallen cold and dead.
My Captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still,
My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will,
The ship is anchor'd safe and sound, its voyage closed and done,
From fearful trip the victor ship comes in with object won;
Exult O shores and ring O bells!
But I with mournful tread,
Walk the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen Cold and Dead.
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O CAPTAIN! MY CAPTAIN!
Author: Walt Whitman (1819-1892)

Date: 1865
Introduction
"O Captain! My Captain!," which incorporates more
conventional rhyme and meter, was written on the occasion of
Abraham Lincoln's assassination in a theater. While engaging fixed
patterns of rhyme scheme (aabbcded), iambic rhythm of unaccented
and accented syllables, and regular stanzaic shape, the poem manages
to communicate Whitman's heroic vision of Lincoln, the great Union
leader of the Civil War, as well as the horror, shock, and dismay
Whitman felt at learning of Lincoln's assassination. Whitman was
struck by the fact Lincoln was shot in a theater. For Whitman, the
Civil War—he called it the Secession War and the Union War—was a
storm that blasted the ship of state.
The fallen Captain of the poem is an allusion to President
Abraham Lincoln (president from 1861-65), and the ship is a
metaphor for the ship of state, or, the United States of America. In the
minds of Lincoln and Whitman, the "ship of state," the Union, must
withstand—even at severe cost of life and liberty—the storm or "rack"
(line 2) of the Civil War. The ship of state did, of course, hold and sail
into the Union "port," but at the cost of even Lincoln himself, who
was shot on April 14, 1865, by a Secessionist five days after the
Confederate General, Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox. The
surrender, the viability of the Union, and the end of slavery are all part
and parcel of the "prize we sought" (line 2) and the "object won" (line
20).
The speaker's difficulty in coming to grips with the death of

his Captain is the subject of the poem. While he knows his Captain is
dead, he hopes that he is dreaming, that he is somehow mistaken.
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However, the last line, in repeating the refrain "Fallen cold and dead,"
lends a sense of finality to the poem and leaves no doubt in the
reader's mind. The Captain (Lincoln), the speaker's father figure and
leader, is indeed dead, and what should have been a time of great
rejoicing at the end of the Civil War has been turned into a time of
national grief and mourning.
The Poem
The first lines of the poem serve to begin the controlling
metaphor upon which the rest of the poem builds. In this poem, the
"Captain" is a substitute for Abraham Lincoln, and the "ship" is the
United States of America. "The fearful trip" is the Civil War, which
had ended just prior to Lincoln's assassination. Thus the ship is
returning home to cheering crowds having won "the prize" of victory,
just as the Union, led by Lincoln, had returned victorious from the
Civil War. The utterance "O Captain! my Captain" is particularly
interesting in this light. In one sense the speaker is addressing his
Captain directly, but in another respect he seems to be speaking to
himself about his Captain. The repetition helps to assert the
uncertainty he feels at the Captain's loss.
Lines 5-8 communicate the unpleasant news that the Captain
has somehow fallen dead after the battle. More importantly, the
repetition of "heart! heart! heart!" communicates the speaker of the
poem's dismay and horror at realizing that his Captain has died. The
poem is then as much about the "I" of the poem and how he comes to
terms with his grief, how he processes this information, as it is about
the central figure of the Captain. The "bleeding drops of red" are both
the Captain's bleeding wounds and the speakers wounded heart.
Finally, these lines function as a broken heroic couplet, written in
iambic pentameter. The broken lines are called hemistiches and are
commonly used, as they are here, to the underlying rhythm of the
poem and to suggest emotional upheaval.
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In this pivotal second stanza, the speaker of the poem entreats

his Captain to "Rise up and hear the bells." In essence the speaker
laments that his Captain, having led his crew bravely to victory, will
not receive the fanfare that is his just due. At the same time Whitman
blends two distinct scenes: one in which crowds gather to receive and
celebrate the Captain (Lincoln) upon his return from military victory;
and the second in which people gather to lament him as a fallen hero.
The bells of the second stanza are presumably the bells rung in
celebration of military victory; however, knowing the great Captain
and leader has died the bells might also symbolize funeral bells tolled
in mourning. Similarly, the "flag," is flown in honor of the Captain
both as a symbol of rejoicing and victory and as a symbol of
lamentation—as in the tradition of flying the American flag at half-
mast when a respected American dies. The bugle, a quintessentially
military musical instrument, alludes to both military victory and to
"Taps," the requiem traditionally played at funerals of fallen soldiers.
Bouquets and wreathes are also common to both celebratory
receptions and funerals. Finally, the throngs of people become
symbolic as well. Not only are they representative of the people who
welcomed and rejoiced at the Union's victory in the Civil War, but
they represent the throngs of people who gathered across the nation to
mournfully view Lincoln's coffin as it was taken by train from
Washington, D.C., to Springfield, Illinois. The crowds remind the
reader that the speaker of the poem is not alone in lamenting his
Captain's death, but rather shares this experience with the masses. In
this manner the poem is in keeping with Whitman's experience. While
he himself had a powerful personal reaction to the news of Lincoln's
death, Lincoln was the Captain and father-figure of an entire nation
and so the poet's grief, while central to the poem, is shared by the rest
of the country.
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In the next group of lines, the speaker of poem again entreats

his Captain to "hear." In this case he may be referring to the bells of
the first stanza, or perhaps to himself, his pleas. More importantly, the
speaker for the first time calls his Captain "father." In this manner,
Whitman expands the metaphor for Lincoln beyond the more limited
scope of a military leader of men into a father figure, one whose
wisdom and teachings led his children into adulthood. The poem
celebrates Lincoln as more than simply a great military leader who led
the Union to victory during the Civil War and attaches to him a
broader significance as the father of this new, this post-slavery
country.
In Lines 15-16 the speaker asserts that this must all be a bad
dream. Here the poem captures the speaker's denial; the emotional
impact of Lincoln's demise has made it almost impossible for the
speaker to accept. The refrain "fallen cold an dead," is slightly altered
in this stanza in that it is apparently addressed to the Captain. The
effect is to again reinforce the speaker's difficulty in coming to terms
with his Captain's death; even though his Captain is dead, the speaker
continues to speak to him as though he were alive.
In lines 17-18, the speaker of the poem, no longer able to hold
out hope, faces up to the reality of his Captain's death. The details and
images evoked in these lines all serve to reiterate that the Captain is
deceased: his pallid lips, lack of a pulse, and lack of will. Unlike the
two previous stanzas, the speaker in no way addresses his Captain
directly but speaks of him entirely in the third-person. In this sense, he
has finally accepted that his Captain is dead.
Having finally faced up to his Captain's death, the speaker then

turns his attention back to the recent victory. Lines 19-24 suggest
again the internal division suffered by the speaker of the poem.
Having accepted that his Captain is indeed dead it would seem he can
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now return his attention to the military victory. After all, one could
surely argue that the plight of an entire nation of people far outweighs
the fate of a single man. Nevertheless, the speaker of the poem
chooses the individual over the larger nation. While "Exult O shores,
and ring O bells" is explicitly a call for rejoicing, the speaker himself
will not celebrate but will walk "with mournful tread," knowing that
his Captain is indeed "Fallen cold and dead." The speaker thus
celebrates the end of the Civil War but continues to express his need
to mourn his fallen hero.
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Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)

I heard a Fly buzz—when I died—
I heard a Fly buzz—when I died—

The Stillness in the Room
Was like the Stillness in the Air—
Between the Heaves of Storm—
The Eyes around—had wrung them dry—

And Breaths were gathering firm
For that last Onset—when the King
Be witnessed—in the Room—
I willed my Keepsakes—Signed away

What portion of me be
Assignable—and then it was
There interposed a Fly—
With Blue—uncertain stumbling Buzz—

Between the light—and me—
And then the Windows failed—and then
I could not see to see—
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I HEARD A FLY BUZZ—WHEN I DIED—
Author: Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)

Date: 1896
The Poem
Emily Dickinson did not give titles to most of her poems. They
are usually labeled by their first lines, and her modern editor, Thomas
Johnson, has numbered them according to his conclusions about their
order of composition (this poem is numbered 465). Publications of the
poem before Johnson's The Poems of Emily Dickinson (1955) are
usually of the text as it was altered by Mabel Loomis Todd when she
published Poems: Third Series (1896).
"I heard a Fly buzz—when I died—" consists of four stanzas,
with Dickinson's characteristic slant—or near-rhymes in the second
and fourth lines of each quatrain. The first-person speaker of the poem
is at some remove from Dickinson's lyric voice; these words come
from beyond the grave. Dickinson wrote a number of poems from this
point of view; perhaps the most famous is "Because I could not stop
for Death—" (poem 712). This subject held a particular fascination for
Dickinson, in part because she was interested in resolving religious
doubts about life continuing after death. In this poem, the dead
speaker looks back at the moment of death.
After announcing that she heard a fly buzz when she died, the
speaker describes the moments that led up to this event. The first
stanza describes the silence of the room before she died as like the
quiet between two phases of a storm. The second stanza describes the
people present at the deathbed. They are also quiet, exhausted from
their watch and preparing now for the final loss. In the third stanza,
she says she had just made her last wishes known when the fly
"interposed." The last two lines of this stanza begin the long sentence
that continues through the final stanza. This sentence describes how
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the fly seemed to blot out the light, and then all light ceased, leaving
her conscious but utterly blinded.
The poem announces at the outset that sound will be
important. The middle of the poem emphasizes the silence as
temporary, as a fragile period between storms of suffering and
weeping. The end of the poem returns to the sound of the fly's buzz,
seemingly quiet and inconsequential, not a storm at all and yet
marking indelibly the momentous instant of transition.
Forms and Devices
Dickinson's stanza form is not remarkable in itself; indeed,
students of her poetry take delight in finding comically inappropriate
melodies for singing her poems, the majority of which follow the
rhythms of familiar hymn tunes. What makes her stanzas remarkable
is the contrast between their conventional rhythms and the striking
metaphors, symbols, and points of view they contain. Two complexes
of comparison are especially interesting in this work: those conveying
the silence before the fly appears and those characterizing the fly.
When Dickinson compares the stillness in the room to the

"Stillness in the Air—/Between the Heaves of Storm," she conveys at
least three interesting things about this quiet moment. First, it is a
temporary lull that follows violence and is expected to precede more
violence. That violence, being associated with a storm, seems to
exceed the capacity of a mere room to hold it. By giving the storm
"heaves," she begins a second comparison between the storm and
weeping. This comparison is taken up in the second stanza by means
of synecdoche, in which a part of something is used to signify the
whole. She says "The Eyes around—had wrung them dry." Eyes
signify the mourners as do the breaths in the following line. Just as the
mourners have been heaving in their weeping, their eyes have been
wringing themselves dry, like wet cloths, or like clouds in a storm. By
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this means, Dickinson asks readers to imagine both the room and each
individual mourner as filled with a storm of grief that is beyond
encompassing. Finally, she reveals that the mourners are awaiting "the
last Onset," the image of the storm is extended to the speaker herself,
for there is a storm taking place in her as well, a storm of suffering
that might also be compared to a battle, in which this lull signals the
final, fatal onset.
What is expected next, then, is momentous sound, the climax
of mourning, grief, and suffering. When the expectation of painful
climax is clear, the poem turns to the idea of compensation or comfort.
The second stanza says that when the last onset comes, the "King" will
manifest himself. In the conventional view of death in nineteenth
century America, that "King" (capitalized for emphasis and to indicate
divinity) would be Christ, come to reap the soul of the dying
Christian. By not naming this "King" however, Dickinson creates an
ambiguity that reverberates through the whole experience of the poem.
The figure might just as well be Death as Christ. Furthermore, what
actually appears to the dying woman is not any recognizable king at
all but a fly.
When the fly appears, a double reversal takes place. The storm
metaphor and the expectation of a king lead the reader to anticipate
something momentous at the end of the poem. This expectation is
answered by the fly. These reversals invite the reader to explore the
connections between the fly and the king. Such explorations: lead into
further shocking violations of expectation regarding meaning in the
poem.
By exploring the metaphor of fly as king, one comes to the

realization of the fly as a symbol. The best-known "fly king" is
Beelzebub, lord of the flies and prince of devils. There is nothing in
the poem to suggest that the woman should expect eternal damnation,
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yet Dickinson seems to have made this connection with its surprising
connotations. Furthermore, flies are conventionally associated with
death; they swarm on carrion, and their larvae thrive there. The most
terrifying possible meaning for a religious person in the substitution of
a fly for a king is that death is final, that the soul dies with the body
and there is no afterlife.
Dickinson's technique emphasizes the violation of

expectations. In addition to the primary substitution (of fly for king),
she enacts a similar violation when she rhymes "me" and "fly" in the
third stanza, reintroducing the fly with a near-rhyme. Finally, she
repeats this pattern by shifting from sound to sight at the end of the
poem, when the buzz of the fly seems to blot out the speaker's light so
that the windows fail to let light into her room, and her consciousness,
still apparently operational, loses its connections by means of sight
and sound to the familiar physical world.
Themes and Meanings
Dickinson, like many of her contemporaries in the middle of
the nineteenth century, was deeply concerned about the truth of the
conventional Christianity taught and generally believed in her culture.
Like that of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and
Herman Melville, her religious questioning resulted in part from the
general decline of the authority of Christianity in Western civilization.
This decline had begun most visibly perhaps with the rise of rivals to
the Roman Catholic Church's secular power in nation-states and had
continued through the splintering of that church in the Reformation,
the intellectual and scientific critique of Christianity's traditional
interpretations of history and nature during the Enlightenment, the
challenges to Christianity's moral and political power in the American
and French revolutions, and the spread of knowledge about powerful
rival religious systems partly as a result of advancing world trade and
communication.
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Many of Dickinson's poems are about the various problems of

faith and doubt that would occur to a brilliant and imaginative mind in
her culture. This poem is an attempt to pierce through the absolute
barrier that stands between the poet and the life beyond death. It
attempts to answer the question: What comes in the moment that
follows death?
Dickinson places herself in the mind of a woman who has

died. She relives the moment of death, trying to imagine it and the
hoped-for illumination that should follow. She finds at the instant of
death a clarity of perception that she tries to extend through that
instant. Yet what her imagination provides at that crucial instant is the
fly, which ends illumination and leaves the consciousness in utter
darkness.
Nevertheless, consciousness remains. The voice speaks from
beyond the grave, but all it can reveal is what its senses could
apprehend before death, that instant when the senses ceased to
operate. Beyond that is a blank, toward which the fly as a symbol
points but about which it reveals nothing but questions: Who is the
King? Is it death? Is it Christ? Is it something unimaginably terrifying,
like Beelzebub? The fly ushers the poet across the threshold suggested
by its "Blue—uncertain stumbling buzz." The fly points the way, but
the living cannot interpret its buzz, and her voice stops.
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CHAPTER TWO
TWENTIETH CENTURY POETRY
SECTION ONE
BACKGROUND
Twentieth-century poetry has been variously characterized as

romantic, antiromantic, impersonal, high personal, chaotic, orderly,
classical, symbolist, wholly untraditional, reasoned and measured—
depending upon the critic whom one reads. This radical diversity
suggests a fundamental problem with poetry in the twentieth century:
it has no clear path to follow. Finding previous poetry inadequate to
deal with the situation in which he finds himself, the modern poet
must create anew, must, in Wallace Stevens' phrase, "find out what
will suffice." The modern poem is an act of exploration. In the
absence of givens, it must carve out its own niche, make its own
raison d'être.
Modern poetry began with a sense of discontinuity, a sense
that the world of the 20th century is qualitatively different from all the
centuries past. This sense of discontinuity was shared by the other
arts; it was "on or about December 1910," Virginia Woolf wrote, in
her 1924 essay "Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown," that "human character
changed."2 This shared conviction of radical change gave rise to the
far-flung, loosely defined movement known as "modernism,"
2
On or about December 1910, human character changed. I am not saying that one went
out, as one might into a garden, and there saw that a rose had flowered, or that a hen
had laid an egg. The change was not sudden and definite like that. But a change there
was, nevertheless; and, since one must be arbitrary, let us date it about the year 1910.
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characterized in poetry by the fragmented, elliptical, allusive styles of

Ezra Pound and Eliot.
As early as the first meetings of the Imagist group, led by Ezra
Pound in England in 1912, the diversity of talent, ideas, and aesthetics
among modernist poets was already clear. Modernism was not a
unified movement, even in its early stages as there were major poets
who did not buy into modernism at all. Against Pound's famous rule to
"compose in the manner of the musical phrase, not the metronome,"
there is Frost's equally famous statement that writing free verse is like
"playing tennis with the net down." Against the heavily burdened
poetry of Eliot stand William Carlos Williams' "no ideas but in things"
and Archibald MacLeish's "a poem should not mean but be." The
pillars of what is commonly regarded as modernism, then, found
themselves flanked right and left by dissenters, as well as faced by
independent thinkers within their camp. Modern poetry can be
understood as synonymous with 20th-century poetry, except the
occasional reactionary poet and carryover s from Victorianism.
Decadence
The late 19th century produced the expected
countermovement, in which the characteristic poem is much dark and
decadent. Under the influence of the darker Romantics and the French
symbolists, the late Victorians from the Pre-Raphaelites on
madness and dissipation. Prostitutes, drug addicts, criminals—from
the social strata largely ignored by Tennyson—figure heavily in the
work of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Algernon Charles Swinburne, the
early William Butler Yeats, and Oscar Wilde. Their fascination with
dark subjects and dark treatments shows a suspicion of the methods
and beliefs of the earlier Victorians analogous to Adams' suspicion of
progress. Their work collectively embodies the sense of impending
change and the exhaustion of old modes. The late Victorian poets
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were a clear end, a cry for the new, while in America the cry was
silence, the absence of any major poetic talents. On both sides of the
Atlantic, poetry in English was a gap waiting to be filled, and awaiting
of something as yet unknown.
Early Modern Movements
The early years of the 20th century produced three separate
groups of poetic innovators: the Georgian poets, the Sitwell group,
and the Imagists. Although all three failed to sustain movements, each
contributed elements to the larger field of modern poetry. Georgian
poetry, as Geoffrey Bullough has pointed out in The Trend of Modern
Poetry (1934), while a throwback to Romanticism, represents a break
with the Imperial poetry of the same period, and the established poets
of the day looked upon it with horror. Moreover, while the movement
itself died down, some of its work in loosening the reins on traditional
verse forms has survived, as one can see in the repeated comparisons
of Philip Larkin's work with the Georgian poetry of Edward Thomas.
The conversational diction and simplicity of their poetry, as Bullough
further notes, has become something of a standard feature in certain
strains of modern poetry. Similarly, the spiritual despair, the often-
forced gaiety, the combination of wit and bleakness of Sitwellian
poetry shows up in many other writers' work in the century.
Ultimately, their work is for the most part ignored or forgotten
because they had very little to say and their poetry lacked substance.
Imagism
Of the three, Imagism is by far the most important school for
modern verse at large. The goal of the movement was to bring to
poetry a new emphasis on the image as a structural, rather than an
ornamental, element.
While there were a number of very fine practitioners, among
them D. H. Lawrence, Hilda Doolittle, Richard Aldington, William
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Carlos Williams, Carl Sandburg, and Amy Lowell, it is Ezra Pound

who stands as the major spokesman and publicist for the group.
Pound, along with Aldington and H. D., formulated the three cardinal
rules of the movement in "A Retrospect": direct treatment of the thing
discussed; absolute economy of diction; and composition "in the
sequence of the musical phrase, not in the sequence of the
metronome."3
The poetry produced by the group shared certain
characteristics. First of all, it was an attempt to put the creation of
images at the center of the poetic act. The image is a sudden moment
of truth, or, as Pound describes it, "an intellectual and emotional
complex in an instant of time." The brevity of the Imagist poem is a
logical extension of the emphasis on the image. The Imagist poem
exists almost solely for the creation of the image and completes its
mission with the completion of that image.
Imagism would be a short-lived as the goals and techniques of
the movement were antithetical to sustaining even a poem of any
considerable duration. The tiny Imagist poem is much too limiting to
allow its creator much variety from one poem to the next. The chance
to explore themes, ideas, and beliefs simply does not exist, since that
sort of argument-oriented poetry is what Imagism sought to replace.
Nevertheless, even if Imagism lacked the qualities to make it a
sustained movement, its methods have been adopted in the great
majority of poems written in this century. Of course, Imagist
techniques appear in Williams' Paterson (1946-1958) and in the
Cantos, but they also appear in the work of such non-Imagists as
Allen Tate, Eliot, Sylvia Plath, and Dylan Thomas, and make possible
3
A metronome is any device that produces regular, metrical ticks (beats, clicks). These
ticks represent a fixed, regular aural pulse. The metronome is used by musicians to
help keep a steady tempo as they play.
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such later developments as surrealism and the "deep image" poetry of

James Wright and Robert Bly.
Symbolism
If Imagism was only one of a great many influences on
modern poetry, the single most important influence would be 19th
century French symbolism. Ironically, the source of much symbolist
theory was Poe, whose work was largely ignored by Anglo-American
critics. The French, however, saw in his darkly Romantic
speculations, in the bleakness and horror of his work, the vehicle
appropriate to poetry on the modern predicament. In his own country
he may have been a Gothic oddity; in France he was a prophet. The
work produced by his French followers—Jules Laforgue, Charles
Baudelaire, Stéphane Mallarmé, Arthur Rimbaud, and Paul
Verlaine—incorporated much from Poe: the darkness, the exploration
of life's underside, the penchant for urban landscapes, and, most
importantly, the centrality of the symbol.
Certainly, symbols have always been used in poetry; however,
the symbolists' insistence on the symbol as the structural raison d'être
of the poem was fresh and unique. The symbol became for them the
goal one actively sought to achieve in the poem. Like so many of their
modern followers, they were reacting against the loose, discursive
verse and the didactic, allegorical verse. Drawn by their mistrust of
language, they felt that the achievement of poetry must lie elsewhere
than in the play of words. Their solution was to place heavy emphasis
on the poetic moment, the symbol. They attempted to separate
radically the symbolic from the allegorical use of imagery.
Symbolism found its way into Anglo-American modern poetry
by so many routes. The earliest important mention of symbolism is in
Arthur Symons' famous book of 1899, The Symbolist Movement in
Literature. Symons introduced the work of these Frenchmen to
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English audiences not only through essays and defenses, but also
through original English poetry on symbolist models. Of Mallarmé
Symons says, "All his life he has been haunted by the desire to create,
not so much something new in literature, as a literature which should
be itself a new art." This sense of newness was immediately grasped
by writers and symbolism itself became a symbol.
T. S. Eliot was a major importer of symbolism into English.
He wrote extensively about the symbolists; he copied their style, even
to the point of writing in French in some early poems; he openly
acknowledged his debt in direct borrowings from their work; and,
most important, he produced the most complete example of a
symbolist poem in English, The Waste Land (1922). In the use of
urban landscape, the feverish, nightmarish quality of the imagery, the
darkness of the vision, the layering of symbols and images within
symbols and images, The Waste Land demonstrates its creator's
overwhelming debt to the symbolists. The poem's centrality in the
modern canon lends further weight to the significance of symbolism
for modern Anglo-American poetry. Knowingly or not, every poet
who has found himself affected by Eliot's great work has also been
affected by Laforgue and Baudelaire.
The Metaphysical Influence
Symbolism was not the only major influence on modern poetry
but Eliot's resurrection of the English Metaphysical poets as models
for modern verse is another major influence. Long ignored by English
critics, the Metaphysicals—John Donne, in particular—offer the
modern poet another use of a controlling metaphor. If the symbolists
reintroduced the poet to the symbol, Donne and his contemporaries—
Andrew Marvell, George Herbert, Henry Vaughan, Richard
Crashaw—showed him how to use it in extended forms. The conceit
of the Metaphysical poem, like the symbol of the symbolist poem, is
an example of figurative language used not as ornament, but as
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structural principle. Since the conceit of a Donne poem is used as a

way of integrating metaphor with argument, the model served to
overcome the limiting element of Imagism and symbolism itself. The
Metaphysical conceit (and what is the image of the wasteland if not a
conceit, a unifying metaphor?) allows Eliot to adapt Imagist and
symbolist techniques to a long, elaborately structured poem.
Whitman and Hardy
Walt Whitman's great contribution is in the area of open form.
The sometimes chatty, sometimes oratorial, style of his poetry has
done more than anything else to show the path away from iambic
verse. His influence is clear on such poets as Williams, Lawrence,
Ginsberg and his fellow Beat poets, and Charles Olson and the Black
Mountain poets, and virtually any poet who has experimented with
open forms owes him a debt.
Against this characteristically American model stands the
typically British example of Thomas Hardy. Where Whitman's poetic
is antitraditional, open and lively, Hardy's is traditional, tight-lipped
and bleak. However, Hardy often expressed the modern dissatisfaction
with form by bending it to suit his needs. He has affected many
modern poets such as W. H. Auden, Philip Larkin, and perhaps the
entirety of the British Movement of the 1950s. Both Whitman and
Hardy offer alternatives to the mainstream of modernist poetry as
embodied by Pound and Eliot, the Fugitive poets, William Empson
and Geoffrey Hill.
These three camps represent three attempts at dealing with the
world poetically. The poetics of the Eliot-Pound camp are essentially
cosmopolitan, the result of searching international literary history
from the classics and Chinese lyrics to the Provençal poets to the
symbolists. The other two schools are much more closely related to
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place, to national identity. Auden is not less modern than Williams; he

is more British, and so, Larkin is.
After World War II
After World War II, poetry seems to have undergone a mid-
century crisis, during which time it made a number of motions that
appeared to indicate rejection of the poetry that had immediately
preceded it. The Movement in England, the Beats and Black Mountain
poets in America, confessional poetry, and surrealist poetry are all
symptomatic of change, and the critical tendency has been to read that
change as a revolution.
The utter inability of the Georgian and Sitwellian and Imagist
poetry movements, which ran into World War I, to deal effectively
with a world in which such a cataclysm was possible forced poets to
abandon certain precepts that had failed them. The Imagist poem did
not offer sufficient scope for the creation of a work of "a certain
magnitude." Eliot's great contribution, as mentioned earlier, lay in
grafting Imagist (and symbolist) technique onto forms that allowed
greater expansiveness.
Similarly, the tremendous destruction brought about in World
War II caused a shift in attitudes and poetic practices. In World War I,
the destruction was limited largely to combatants; battle was a distant
thing. By the end of World War II, the bombing of population centers,
the unveiling of atomic weaponry, and the revelation of genocide had
made warfare both more personal and more terrible. The poetics of
impersonality and detachment as sponsored by Eliot suddenly seemed
outmoded, and the movement in much of modern poetry since that
time has been toward a renewed involvement with the self, where
many poets turned their verse inward, examining the self with all its
flaws, hungers, and hidden violence.
Surrealism
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Another branch of postwar American and English poetry has

been heavily influenced by surrealism. Whereas the early modernists
went directly to the symbolists, the postwar poets went to surrealism.
The French surrealism espoused by André Breton's 1924 "Manifesto
of Surrealism" which declared the movement's adherence to the
imagination, dreams, the fantastic, and the irrational and its emphasis
on exploring free association, automatism, and the unconscious4 has
had little impact in England, notably in Dylan Thomas, and even less
in America. Spanish surrealism, on the other hand, has been imported
into American poetry through the work of Robert Bly and James
Wright, and into English poetry through Charles Tomlinson's
association with Octavio Paz. The "deep image" poetry of Bly and
Wright, owes much to Federico Garcia Lorca, Cesar Vallejo, and
Pablo Neruda. The New York school of Frank O'Hara and John
Ashbery also demonstrates its indebtedness to earlier, continental
surrealists.
Renewed Romanticism
In the postwar period, Hardy has become more important to
some British poets than he was before the war, while the reappraisal
of Whitman and the discovery of Emily Dickinson as a poetic
resource have led American poets to a new sense of tradition. If Beat
poetry would be impossible without Whitman, then confessional
poetry would also be impossible without Dickinson. Her intense
concern with self and soul, her death obsession, her striking use of
associative imagery, all show up in the work of Robert Lowell, Sylvia
Plath, Anne Sexton, and John Berryman.
The renewed emphasis on the self in postwar poetry leads to a

new involvement with Romanticism. Often, though, it is with the
4
Their style features violent juxtapositions of unrelated images in an attempt to jog the
mind out of rational habits of thought.
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darker side of Romanticism—those elements that show the self on the

edge of disaster or oblivion—that modern poets interact with. The
return to favor of Romanticism might be the sole real break with
earlier moderns, with modernism, with Eliot's classicism. However,
the modern Romantics, like the modern classicists, select only those
elements that fit the modern platform they happen to be building.
Eastern, Mythic, and Archetypal Influences
Like the earlier moderns, the postwar poets have made forays
into exotic poetics. As the period of modern poetry might be called the
Age of Translation, in which English-language poetry is open to the
riches of world poetry, both Japanese and Chinese poetry have been
particularly influential in the postwar years, notably in the work of
Kenneth Rexroth and Gary Snyder. In this period there has been a
marked trend toward going below the surface of Asian culture to the
deep structure of its modes of thought. The several years that Snyder,
for example, spent in a Zen monastery in Kyoto caused him to
reexamine more familiar cultural forms in the light of another
perspective.
Another distinctive characteristic of modern poetry is its

preoccupation with myth and archetype. In modern poetry, everyday
life is frequently seen as a series of rituals, often acted out unawares,
by which mankind expresses its relation to the universal. In part this
distinctively modern awareness of myth and archetype can be
attributed to the influence of the new science of anthropology as
exemplified in Sir James Frazer's pioneering work The Golden Bough
(1890-1915). The work of Sigmund Freud and Carl G. Jung early in
the 20th century further added to the modern writer's interest in myth.
Where Frazer examined mythic patterns as cultural phenomena, Freud
and Jung demonstrated the ways in which individuals internalize such
patterns. Myth and archetype derive their power, then, from their
timeless hold on the individual consciousness.
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The result of this thinking was a tremendous explosion of

genuinely new literature, of poetry and fiction in which the quotidian
acts of ordinary individuals take on meaning beyond their
understanding. Among the fruits of this new flowering were the two
most important works produced in English in this century. One was
the story of a single day in Dublin in 1904, during which the
ramblings of an Irish Jew parallel the wanderings chronicled in the
Odyssey (c. 800 B.C.): James Joyce's Ulysses (1922). The other, of
course, was the The Waste Land. In his essay "Ulysses, Order, and
Myth," Eliot announced that in place of the traditional narrative
method, the modern artist could henceforth use the mythic method,
that fiction and poetry would gain power not from their isolated
stories, but through the connection of the stories to a universal pattern.
William Butler Yeats was a mythmaker. He had been actively
creating his own mythology, through his work A Vision (1925), for
several years. Lawrence, too, was a mythmaker in poetry and fiction.
Yet both of these writers' uses of myth are largely private, unusable by
others. The mainstream of poetic use of myth in the 20th century runs,
not through the mythmakers, but through myth-followers. From Eliot
and Pound to Sylvia Plath and Seamus Heaney, modern poetry has
produced a great deal of work that follows mythic patterns.
Moral Ambivalence
A final defining characteristic of modern poetry is its
ambivalence. The modern poet seems structurally incapable of
wholeheartedly loving or hating the world in which he lives. The
foremost example of ambivalence is the work of Yeats, in which he
simultaneously strives for release from the world and regret at the
possibility of release. Yeats provides an elaborate image of that
ambivalence with his "whirling gyres": the interlocking gyres stand
for ideas, beliefs, and qualities, which, while completely opposed to
one another, nevertheless require each other for completion. In Yeats,
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one idea is never whole; it must have its opposite idea, for only the
interlocking pair are completed. As a result, Yeats is virtually
incapable of rendering a wholehearted judgment in his poetry. He sees
both good and bad, the positive and the negative, in all things. In
"Easter 1916," he celebrates the courage of the insurrectionists, yet at
the same time questions their wisdom: he refuses either to denounce
the uprising or to praise it wholeheartedly. His two poems about
Byzantium is an example of such attitude. In "Sailing to Byzantium,"
the speaker is old and bored. He seeks the quietude, the tranquility of
the artificial world represented by Byzantium; he speaks longingly of
the work of the city's artisans, of escaping out of the world of flesh
into the world of pure beauty. In "Byzantium," he finds himself
looking back across the ocean, again longingly, at the world of flesh
and mire. Here he is tired of the world of timeless beauty, and the
imagery of the poem's desires is of living creatures, particularly of the
dolphin that could carry him back to the living world.
The Byzantium poems embody a fundamental feature of

modern poetry: the chaos and contingency of the modern world leads
the poet to distaste, to a desire for escape, to a retreat into a sheltered
world of aesthetics. So, the characteristic attitude is ambivalence; the
poet, while wishing to withdraw from the world, is nevertheless
caught in it, is a part of it, can never escape from it. His poetry,
therefore, still remains in contact with the world, and is constantly a
response to, not an escape from, life. However, British poetry tends to
be dominated by ambivalence more than American poetry does; the
Beats, for example, seem less ambivalent than the British Movement
poets. In general, however, modern poetry may be characterized fairly
as the poetry of ambivalence.
Confessional Poetry
One of the important divergences from the modernist program
in the wake of World War II was the turn toward a more personal
95
confessional poetry. No doubt the shift was motivated in part by

subject matter, thematic treatment, or political orientation. The
confessional school was, in its beginnings, a specifically regional
movement which has deep historical roots in Puritan New England.
Puritan literature characteristically revealed the struggle of the soul
with belief and with evil; in a world where the Devil was so
ominously and constantly present, the soul could never be at rest, and
the writings of Edward Taylor and Jonathan Edwards show the
vigilance that the believer must maintain in his war with the powers of
darkness. The function of such revelations is often public in nature;
however, in the poetry of Anne Bradstreet, the purpose of such
personal revelations is much more private; she seems to need release
from the pressures and torments of her life, and in writing about them
she externalizes them.
Emily Dickinson is another major model for confessionalism.
Her poetry, in its patterns of thought, its death-obsession, its
simultaneously domestic and violent imagery, its self-absorption, and
its turns toward the insane and the psychic, exemplifies many of the
themes and treatments that show up in confessional poetry. Like
Whitman, she insists on the genuineness of experience and shuns
conventions and received forms or modes of expression.
Modern confessional poetry began in 1959 when W. D.
Snodgrass' Heart's Needle and Lowell's Life Studies appeared. The
two works appeared in the same year and displayed such similarity in
their use of personal material. Snodgrass' Heart's Needle is
characterized by an ironic, melancholic, and regretful self-observation
of his relationship with his daughter in the wake of his divorce.
Lowell's Life Studies, similarly, is characterized by a wistful, mournful
tone, with its tension between the trivial and the painful. Moreover,
Berryman's The Dream Songs is characterized by hilarious and
grotesque mythology, while Sylvia Plath's and Anne Sexton's imagery
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and phrasing is characterized by power and ferocity. One of the most

disturbing features of the public reception of the work of Berryman,
Plath, and Sexton is the morbid fascination with the personal details
that their poems reveal.
Confessional poetry is a reactionary poetry, and like most
things reactionary it remains on the fringe; it is extremist. There has
been a marked movement in poetry after World War II toward
personal, autobiographical poetry. Writers as different as Robert
Duncan, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Creeley, Stevie Smith, Thom Gunn,
and Jon Silkin all make use of material from their own lives.
Confessional poetry, then, although not of the mainstream itself has
turned the course of poetry toward the personal.
Beat and Movement Poetry
Confessional poetry provided, if not the answer for modern
poetry after World War II, at least an articulation of the problem.
During the 1950's two other literary groups sprang up, one in America
and one in Britain, both of which were also concerned with the plight
of the individual in a difficult world. Beat and Movement poetries are
violently dissimilar expressions of similar revulsions to the same
world situation. Both react against the formalist art of the modernists,
against uptight, bourgeois, philistine society, against the repressive
political and cultural institutions of the period. The differences
between the two lie more in national attitudes and inclinations than in
first principles. Moreover, both show affinities with existentialism.
The Self underwent a series of shocks beginning with World
War II, with its death camps, its bombardments, its atomic bombs.
The 20th century is distinguished by a new scale of violence: the
virtual destruction of totalitarian suffocation of whole nations. In the
face of that intensified destruction, the individual is quite lost.
Furthermore, the prevailing ideologies of the time, like Communism
and Fascism, were anti-individual in their orientation, and quite
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willing to sacrifice the autonomy of the self for the good of the state.
As already mentioned, Eliot's impersonal theory of poetry coincided
historically as well as theoretically with the rise of totalitarian politics,
and it was that entire complex that writers of the 1950's sought to
overthrow.
Both the Beats and the Movement poets, then, wrestle with the
problem posed by existentialism; namely, how does the individual
maintain his autonomy in the face of an overwhelming, repressive
society? Their answers, while divergent, displayed certain similarities
that can perhaps be understood in terms of various strains of
existentialism. The Movement writers leaned more toward despair and
quiet rebellion from within the ranks, while the Beats were open
insurrectionists, confronting a hostile world with wild romanticism.
The Movement poets were in some respects a strikingly
homogenous group. They all attended one of the two major English
universities: Philip Larkin, Kingsley Amis, Robert Conquest, John
Wain, Elizabeth Jennings, and John Holloway went to Oxford, while
Donald Davie, D. J. Enright, and Thom Gunn were at Cambridge.
They were from middle-class or working-class backgrounds. Many
had their educations interrupted by the war, and as a result they
seemed, in Ted Hughes's analysis, to "have had enough." The Oxford
group, for the most part, emerged from the uncertainty of neo-
Romanticism of such 1940's poets as Dylan Thomas, David Gascoyne,
and Edith Sitwell. The Cambridge group took a more direct route
through their studies under F. R. Leavis. All three credit Leavis with
shaping their thought and their poetry. His skeptical rationalism
served as a natural catalyst to the highly rational, anti metaphorical
poetry of the Movement.
The Movement, then, was a cultural and social phenomenon as
well as a literary group. It was a reactionary school, looking back to
Edward Thomas and the Georgians as well as to the writers of the
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1930's for its models, looking away from both the modernism of Eliot
and Pound and the neo-Romanticism of the 1940's poets. It was
antiromantic, antimetaphorical, highly rationalistic, and formally very
traditional. It stressed colloquial diction and concreteness against both
highly wrought "poetic" diction and the airy abstraction of neo-
Romanticism and English surrealism. The tone is often flat and
neutral, while the chief mode is irony. The irony is a lodge against the
isolation and the alienation that lies behind much of this writing.
Nearly everything about the Movement writers points to their
alienation as an almost necessary state of young, thinking people of
that time. They were outsiders, either looking in the windows or
ridiculing those inside.
Conversely, to find the Dionysian poetry of the 1950's, one
must leap an ocean and a continent, to San Francisco. The Beat poetry
was also moved by the same basic rejection of values and suspicion of
social and cultural institutions that prompted the Movement. While the
Beats rejected the homely middle-class satisfaction of the Eisenhower
1950's, they did so with characteristically American flamboyance, as
opposed to the typically British reserve, tightness and control. The
Movement fought by withdrawing; the Beats fought by confronting.
In a movement that is overtly social as well as literary, there
are always social as well as literary sources. Black culture, especially
jazz, Mexican peasant culture for dress and even behavioral models,
Zen Buddhism, Hinduism (and Orientalism in general), were among
the origins of the exoticism of Beat life.
Generally speaking, these writers were obviously devoted to
individualism in life and art. The formal openness of Beat writing, in
fact, is a function of its emphasis on the unconscious, on some aspect
of humanity divorced from intellection. The Dionysian impulse is
always away from reason, from order, from control, and toward those
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elements that modern society would have mankind erase or submerge

under the great weight of orthodoxy. The use of drugs, of primitive
cultures, of Christian mysticism, and Oriental meditation are all aimed
at freeing the kernel of preconscious truth from the centuries-old and
miles-deep husk of social conformity and "rational" behavior. Most of
the Beats believe that if the inner being can be liberated and made to
speak for itself, society can be changed. Once the individual has
learned how to live, the new society can be developed.
Voices of Diversity
One of the major developments in late-century poetry was the
development of the voice of the outsider. American minority writers
have become increasingly strong. Certainly, there have been waves of
African American poetry throughout the century, from the Harlem
Renaissance between the wars through the Black Arts movement of
the 1960's and beyond, from such poets as Langston Hughes,
Gwendolyn Brooks and Robert Hayden to Amiri Baraka, Lucille
Clifton, Etheridge Knight, Sonia Sanchez, and Audre Lorde. African
American poets throughout the century have given voice to people too
often silenced by the mainstream culture, while bringing new and
dynamic rhythms and forms to American poetry.
The work of Native American poets, such as N. Scott
Momaday, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Louise Erdrich, often mixes
intimate knowledge of tribal life with strong academic influences. The
work of American Indian poets, as Simon J. Ortiz, is heavily grounded
in his home community, New Mexico. His concerns with Native
American identity, with resistance to assimilation, and with the role of
language and poetry in that resistance run through his books including
Going for the Rain (1976) and Woven Stone (1992). The waning
century also saw increases in Latino and Asian American voices.
Despite the many differences among these writers, they share a
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concern with both the place of their ethnic group in the larger culture
and the dynamics within the group.
Postcolonial Poets
The increasing presence of poets, who were either born in or
descended from residents of former European colonies, in Africa,
Asia, and the Caribbean, led to the rise of a movement in
contemporary poetry. E. A. Markham, Louise Bennett, James Berry,
A. L. Hendricks, and Edward Kamau Brathwaite from the Caribbean;
Fred D'Aguiar, Grace Nichols, Martin Carter, and Jan Carew from
Guyana; and Mahmoud Jamal and H. O. Nazareth from India testify to
the dynamic poetry scene in the minority communities of England and
in the former colonies.
Derek Walcott is clearly the towering figure among the
Caribbean writers—winner of the Nobel Prize in 1992. His reputation
was firmly cemented with the publication of Arkansas Testament
(1987) and Omeros The (1990). The latter is an epic poem about
Caribbean fishermen and their world seen through the filter of
Homer's 9th century b.c.e. Iliad and Odyssey ("Omeros" is a local
corruption or variant of "Homer"). In tracing out the passions,
rivalries, conquests, and calamities of his characters, Walcott reminds
readers that Homer's epics were themselves the tales of fishermen and
farmers forced out of their own normal orbits by circumstances larger
than themselves, and in so doing he invests his tale, and his people,
with a nobility and a grandeur as old as myth.
Finally, we might conclude that poetry has not found itself in
such turmoil since Western society careened its way out of the Middle
Ages and into the Renaissance. Perhaps when a society once again
settles onto some stable course then the course of poetry may also
become more uniform. As things stand, though, both society and
poetry appear to be headed for a very protracted period of transition. If
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that is so, then readers of verse will continue to be blessed, or cursed,

with the astonishing variety that has characterized modern poetry.
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SECTION TWO
SELECTIONS OF TWENTIETH CENTURY ENGLISH POEMS
William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)

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?
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LEDA AND THE SWAN
Author: William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)

Type: Sonnet
Date: 1924, in The Cat and the Moon and Certain Poems
The Poem
"Leda and the Swan" is a sonnet that, like the Italian or
Petrarchan sonnet, divides into an octave that presents a narrative and
a sestet that comments on the narrative. Although the rhyme scheme
of the first eight lines follows the typical Shakespearean form (abab,
cdcd), the next six lines follow the expected Petrarchan (efg, efg)
rhyme scheme.
The octave essentially describes the god Zeus's forced and
unannounced impregnation of Leda and her ineffectual human efforts
at resisting this sudden implosion in her "loosening thighs." The
sestet's first sentence has been called Yeats's most brilliant sentence
and even the capstone of his magnificent The Tower (1928). This line
reveals the consequent engendering of the Greek Age of Homer (but
Aeschylus, Euripides, and even Vergil also profit), because springing
from this union of the king of the gods and the mortal woman were
both Helen of Troy, who caused the Trojan War, and Clytemnestra,
who slew the returning, conquering Agamemnon at the war's end—
primary themes of the Greek Age. The second sentence of the sestet
poses a question not so relevant to the Greeks, who, thinking often of
women as booty, rather accepted the inexorable, blind run of fate and
the inevitability of tragic human destiny. The poem's final question,
however, is highly relevant to Yeats's ultimate meaning. The fated and
tragic character of the Greek mentality, in which superhuman deities
(often all too human in their emotional rages of jealousy, anger,
vengeance, and lust) would sport with nearly helpless human
creatures, is immediately clear and powerfully felt at the opening of
the poem: "A sudden blow," Zeus never courted Leda, never
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announced his coming (as, say, God told Mary through His archangel
Gabriel), and never spoke a word throughout. The enormous tension is
heightened by the seeming casualness of the nearly regular iambic
pentameter of the first line. "Great wings" creates a midline spondee
(a double-accented foot), in order to stress Zeus's overwhelming
power. Leda, as a mere mortal (and a woman), has no active role in
this drama: She suffers the divine play of human destiny to be acted
out through the medium of her frail body. Like the Genesis story in
which the woman causes the fall from grace, this is a male-dominated
myth. Yeats, with his leading rhetorical questions, however, can at the
same time retain the inextricable bond between mortal beauty and its
tragic passing, even while he transcends the contexts of both the
Greek and the Judeo-Christian myths.
Forms and Devices
The sonnet's extreme precision allows much to be said and
implied, and Yeats further compacts this poem's terseness by using
synecdoche: Only the "wings," "webs," and "bill" are attacking; only
Leda's "fingers," "nape," and "thighs" are resisting. Only a "wall,"
"roof," and "tower" represent the Greek siege of Troy, though it was a
war waged for ten years to recover Helen. The richness of the
symbols, especially as they function organically within Yeats's overall
poetic context, is astounding.
References to Helen of Troy, in particular, and to many
enduring myths of the Greek, Celtic, Christian, Buddhist, or Byzantine
eras abound in Yeats's poems. Because the central dedication of all
Yeats's work as a poet-seer (the true bard of human culture) was
always to the mystical, he was drawn constantly to the deep, still
waters of humankind's most profound illuminations, which he
tirelessly labored all his life to mold into a unity of vision. The
framework upon which he would weave this unified tapestry of
mythology was provided by A Vision (1925, 1937); however, the
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mystical "voices" who communicated the ideas of A Vision (through

the medium of his wife Georgie's automatic writing) guided him
carefully so that he would not take the finger (of the system) for the
moon (of the mythological poetry): "We have come," they insisted, "to
give you metaphors for poetry."
Yeats's A Vision is an elaborate system of the cycles of human
ages, with archetypal as well as individual incarnations within the
various gyres—both Helen, sprung from Leda, and Yeats's own
beloved Maud Gonne, for example, appear in phase fourteen of the
"Phases of the Moon." Yet grasping all the terrifying, vague features
of Yeats's system may not be as important in this case as simply
catching the large clues Yeats offers at the start of the final book of A
Vision. There he explains that the present time, 1925, is nearing the
peak of one "Historical Cone" of the gyre (the spiraling wheel of time
that waxed from the year zero to the year 1050 and wanes to its nadir
in the twentieth century). The text of this fifth book of A Vision starts
off with the next critical clue, "One must bear in mind that the
Christian Era, like the two thousand years, let us say, that went before
it, is an entire wheel." As if to be certain that the complex gyres,
wheels, phases, and cones of his visionary symbology do not intrude
upon the poetry, Yeats calls the final book of A Vision "Dove or
Swan" and reprints there, as a kind of epigraph to the final chapter, the
entire text of "Leda and the Swan."
Yeats means for one to see "Leda and the Swan" in the broad
context of A Vision if one is to understand its meaning: As the Swan-
God's impregnation of Leda initiated the Greek age, so did the Dove-
God's impregnation of Mary initiate the Christian age. Since mythic
ages last about two thousand years, this age must be on the cusp of a
new revelation—an idea Yeats explores in "The Second Coming."
Themes and Meanings
106
In Yeats's mythological poetry, the Christian revelation is not

the only divinely inspired one; it is not unique. It does, however, share
an honored place in concert with the world's other great religious
myths-though its truth is not everlasting. Things thought to be true for
too long (for Yeats, that time is about two thousand years) eventually
can no longer be believed: Myth is symbols in motion, for Yeats as for
William Blake, and the symbols must always be renewed. After their
validity is exhausted, myths undergo change, flux, and rebirth. Indeed,
the very heart of the prevailing myth contains the seeds of its own
destruction. That is one reason why "Leda and the Swan," depicting
the very inauguration of the predestined Greek era, concludes with the
one question whose real answer is beyond the pale of the Greek
imagination: Could Leda fathom Zeus's knowledge before being
dropped? Perhaps more to the point, can the poem's reader
comprehend the heart mysteries here? The real answer is beyond the
merely logical categories of yes and no, since the real poem
transcends the categories of the myths it utilizes to lead the reader to
an inward vision. One might assume that no Greek would imagine
Leda, being but a vessel for that august era, could "put on his
knowledge with his power." The question simply would not pertain.
In sharp contrast to Leda, the Virgin Mary must have
understood much, since she was given a choice: the Christian
Annunciation is like a proposal, and Mary had free will in accepting
the role of being the mother of God because Christianity cherishes
informed free will as the Greeks cherished fated human destiny.
Unlike the "brute blood of the air," the Dove of the Christian age is
holy, aphysical, and otherworldly. To even think of the Virgin's
"loosening thighs" would be sacrilegious, and any question of her
sexual arousal would simply not pertain. There are built-in
parameters, limitations, and presuppositions in every mythology, yet
therein lies the nemesis of the Christian dispensation: Under Plato's
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influence, the body (the "mere flesh") for the Christian myth is all but
irrelevant. In the end, the reign of the Dove, like the reign of the
Swan, must pass away—for no myth can embody all truth, and
certainly not for all time. If Leda, as mortal life, as vehicle for beauty
that is inherently tragic, and as aesthetic affirmation, is momentarily
thought of as the poet, the artificer of eternity, the bard of wisdom,
then the implosion of the divine into the human can be understood in a
yet more profound manner: as Annunciation not divorced from
Epiphany.
Yeats intends ultimately to share with his reader the visionary
truth of this conjunction of the divine and the human: It is not merely
a symbol of what has already happened historically at Bethlehem or
beneath some Olympian cloud, for both Dove and Swan pass away.
The fortunate reader of Yeats, however, if not prejudiced against the
brute flesh or biased in favor of the flesh less spirit, can, by meditating
upon these symbols that pass away, attain the visionary moment of
knowledge and power, the timeless now where the dancer need not be
distinguished from the dance.
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Thom Gunn (1929-2004)

On the Move
The blue jay scuffling in the bushes follows

Some hidden purpose, and the gust of birds
That spurts across the field, the wheeling swallows,
Has nested in the trees and undergrowth.
Seeking their instinct, or their poise, or both,
One moves with an uncertain violence
Under the dust thrown by a baffled sense
Or the dull thunder of approximate words.
On motorcycles, up the road, they come:

Small, black, as flies hanging in heat, the Boys,
Until the distance throws them forth, their hum
Bulges to thunder held by calf and thigh.
In goggles, donned impersonality,
In gleaming jackets trophied with the dust,
They strap in doubt—by hiding it, robust—
And almost hear a meaning in their noise.
Exact conclusion of their hardiness

Has no shape yet, but from known whereabouts
They ride, direction where the tyres press.
They scare a flight of birds across the field:
Much that is natural, to the will must yield.
Men manufacture both machine and soul,
And use what they imperfectly control
To dare a future from the taken routes.
It is a part solution, after all.

One is not necessarily discord
On earth; or damned because, half animal,
One lacks direct instinct, because one wakes
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Afloat on movement that divides and breaks.

One joins the movement in a valueless world,
Choosing it, till, both hurler and the hurled,
One moves as well, always toward, toward.
A minute holds them, who have come to go:

The self-defined, astride the created will
They burst away; the towns they travel through
Are home for neither bird nor holiness,
For birds and saints complete their purposes.
At worst, one is in motion; and at best,
Reaching no absolute, in which to rest,
One is always nearer by not keeping still.
110
ON THE MOVE
Author: Thom Gunn (1929 - 2004)

Type: Lyric
Date: 1955; collected in The Sense of Movement, 1957
The Poem
"The Boys'' of "On the Move,'' the lead poem in Thom Gunn's
second collection, The Sense of Movement (1957), broke in 1957 as
figures of the existential restlessness popularized by a Marlon
Brando's film The Wild One (1954) and by Jack Kerouac's novel On
the Road (1957). The poem's posture owes as much to the
existentialism of Sartre and Camus which Gunn had imbibed as a
Cambridge undergraduate as to the careless lifestyle he found in
California, where he had gone to study with the scholar-poet Yvor
Winters, and the model for the tight rhyme scheme, traditional syntax
and stanza, and measured attitudes of the verse.
In keeping with its easy riding between low life and high
culture, the poem provided not only an image for the young bikers of a
generation in revolt, but also a manifesto and title for a literary
movement, called "The Movement,'' which in the 1950's declared its
opposition to the poetry of Yeats and Dylan Thomas, and chose
instead a straight metric, strict rhyme, and a plain language of
statement rather than exclamation and confusion.
"On the Move" is composed in five eight-line stanzas, with the
rhyme scheme abaccddb. The poem begins by observing the
movement of birds in their natural surroundings and comparing their
movement to human action. Whether driven by natural "instinct,"
acquired “poise,” or some combination of the two, the birds seem to
have some "hidden purpose" to give meaning to their motion. The
"One" of the poem who observes them wonders whether his own
"uncertain violence" of motion is driven by the same forces. Until now
he has been bewildered equally by both the instincts of "baffled sense"
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and "the dull thunder of approximate words." The rest of the poem
tries to make words yield their precise meaning in relation to the
experience of motion.
In the second stanza, the motorcyclists are introduced. They
mediate between birds and man, their movement seeming half
instinctual, half pilgrimage. First the reader sees the machines on the
road, then, from a distance, "the Boys," who look "Small, black, as
flies" in their leather jackets and goggles. Suddenly, "the distance
throws them forth" and they look and sound huge and heroic. Like
knights in armor with visors, they wear impersonal goggles and
"gleaming jackets trophied with dust." The observer questions their
attitude of confidence, however, suggesting that goggles and jackets
not only protect them from the elements but also "strap in doubt" to
make themselves appear "robust."
The third stanza continues this line of thought. Their

"hardiness/ Has no shape yet." They are undefined, their course
unknown. Like Don Quixote following his horse's steps, the
motorcyclists go "where the tires press." They are different from the
birds that they "scare across a field," whose instinct gives them
direction. They have only the manufactured "machine and soul,"
which they "imperfectly control/ To dare a future from the taken
routes." Yet the will "is a part solution, after all." They are not damned
because they are only "half animal" and lack "direct instinct." By
joining "movement in a valueless world" one can approach one's goal,
even if it is only "toward, toward."
The final stanza invokes the brevity of the interval one has to
define oneself. "A minute holds them, who have come to go: The self-
defined, astride the created will." Like birds and saints, the
motorcyclists cannot stop in "the towns they travel through"; they
must "complete their purposes," whatever they may be. Even if they
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do not reach the "absolute, in which to rest, / One is always nearer by

not keeping still." The worst that can happen is that "one is in
motion." The physical engagement in the activity for its own sake is
its own excuse.
Commentary
"On the Move" describes a charmingly threatening group of
Hells-Angels-like bikers, "the Boys," who race their motorcycles
across the landscape, tearing noisily from one barely noticed town to
another without any clear sense of direction. Around this central
description Gunn weaves a series of ideas that convert the
motorcyclists into a symbol for a particular response to life.
"On the Move'' contains in its penultimate stanza the crucial
shift which translates a simple fact of existence into an existential
philosophy of becoming. A "movement,'' one is passively born to,
becomes "the movement'' joined in an act of self-conscious choosing.
The poem is indeed full of movement, from its opening verbs
of glad animal motion, the blue jay "scuffling in the bushes,'' the gust
of birds that "spurts across the field,'' "the wheeling swallows'' through
to the final stanza's image of the bikers: "A minute holds them, who
have come to go: / The self-defined, astride the created will / They
burst away." The motorbike here emphasizes Gunn's belief in the
uncertainty of human motive and the "absurdity'' in an existentialist
sense, of all such activity in "a valueless world'' where direction is
simply "where the tyres press.'' The Boys have come simply to go:
they are always just passing through, the only point of their travelling
the journey itself, its "motive'' in the end simply flight from the
irritation of staying in one place. This is the conclusion of the poem.
The absolute is desired yet felt at the same time to be nugatory,
in contrast with the self-sufficient "hidden purpose'' of the blue jay in
the opening lines. The impulse of the epigraph, hovering between
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command and empty-headed self-justification, is not founded on any

basic conviction, for, lacking the "instinct'' and "poise'' of the animal,
"one moves with an uncertain violence.'' The repeated "one''
depersonalizes the human subject at the very moment that it separates
it off from the rest of creation as a self-conscious creature with a
species-being, able to make those generalizing statements which, in
the very universality to which they lay claim, deprive their utterers of
"direct instinct.''
The paradoxical nature of this highly intellectual search for an

instinctual poise is self-evident and indeed part of the poem's ironic
complexity of celebration. The human mind is admired in its perverse
quest for the impossible at the very moment that its absurdity is
displayed and apologized for. Existence precedes essence: before the
Boys can burst away, "self-defined'' on their "created will,'' they are
creatures of a distance that "throws them forth.'' In that distance they
are at first "Small, black, as flies hanging in heat.''
The most sophisticated system of belief by which we

rationalize our existence is no more adequate than the incoherent self-
justification of the biker's slogan, both alike "the dust thrown by a
baffled sense / Or the dull thunder of approximate words.'' Sense
(meaning here both the bodily senses and the idea of meaning, fused
in "the sense of movement'') is "baffled'' like the bike's engine, to
protect us from the roar of an amoral indifferent power which we have
to master while never fully understanding. The obscuring dust, the
merely approximate words, are necessary if we are to stay in control
of a power that could easily overwhelm us if we tried to subject it to
rational analysis. By strapping in doubt, the Boys assume a pose of
robustness which substitutes for any authentic identity, becoming that
which they pretend to be. In refusing to think about the meaning of
their existence they almost invent a kind of meaning out of the
meaningless noise of creation, fabricate a "shape'' which offers an
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imaginary "Exact conclusion [to] their hardiness.'' In the "donned

impersonality'' of goggles and leather jackets they contain from
moment to moment that bustle of energy which "Bulges to thunder,''
perpetually threatening to break out of human control. But if this
thunder is "held by calf and thigh'' they are in turn held in their
passage through space and time by the forces they negotiate, both
hurler and hurled. In this act of will, a difficult balancing act in which
only continuous unquestioning forward motion keeps them stable,
"Men manufacture both machine and soul, / And use what they
imperfectly control / To dare a future from the taken routes.''
Itself maintaining the balance and poise it admires in the Boys,

the poem stays firmly in the saddle of an energy that drives it
relentlessly forward towards unknown destinations. The poem moves
from concrete image to generalized assertion, juxtaposing
philosophical abstraction with verbs of intense physical action. For all
its insistence on part solutions, the poem comes to rest with
considerable finality on the idea of human restlessness, the last word
"still'' providing purpose and completion to the poem even as it denies
ordinary mortals that completed purpose reserved for birds and saints.
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Seamus Heaney (b. 1939)

Digging
Between my finger and my thumb

The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.
Under my window, a clean rasping sound
When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:
My father, digging. I look down
Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds

Bends low, comes up twenty years away
Stooping in rhythm through potato drills
Where he was digging.
The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft

Against the inside knee was levered firmly.
He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge
deep
To scatter new potatoes that we picked
Loving their cool hardness in our hands.
By God, the old man could handle a spade.

Just like his old man.
My grandfather cut more turf in a day

Than any other man on Toner's bog.
Once I carried him milk in a bottle
Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up
To drink it, then fell to right away
Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods
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Over his shoulder, going down and down

For the good turf. Digging.
The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and

slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head.
But I've no spade to follow men like them.
Between my finger and my thumb

The squat pen rests.
I'll dig with it.
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DIGGING
Author: Seamus Heaney (1939— )

Type: Lyric
Date: 1966, in Death of a Naturalist
The Poem
"Digging" is a relatively short poem (thirty-one lines) in free
verse. While it has no set pattern of doing so, it breaks up into stanzas
of two to five lines. The presence in the poem of the first person "I"
who wields a pen, and the family reminiscences, identify the speaker
as Seamus Heaney himself and the poem as autobiographical. The
poem is filled with the terminology of Heaney's native Ireland.
Heaney begins the poem with an image of himself, pen in
hand. He hears or is remembering the sound of digging under his
window. It is his "father, digging"; however, the reader is told in line 7
that it is an echo from the past. Knowing that, "to 'look down' " can be
understood to refer both to the memory of his father's presence below
the window and to looking back through time to it. The image of his
father as he "Bends low," can also mean two things: the bending that
accompanies digging and the stooping of age.
Because his father is dead, "twenty years away," the sound can
also echo the digging of graves, an image that is further reinforced by
the evocations of the smell and feel of the soil. The father who is dead
was a laborer, a potato farmer, as his father before him was a digger of
"turf," or peat.
The middle stanzas paint a picture of the activity of digging, as
it was part of Heaney's childhood: The father stoops "in rhythm," and
the spade is held "firmly." The separate parts of the father's body and
the spade are described as if they are entwined: The father's boot is on
the "lug" (the flat top of the metal scoop of the shovel), the "shaft"
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(wooden handle) is aligned with his knee. The potatoes themselves are
loved for their "cool hardness," and digging them is regarded as an art
that is boasted of generations later.
The memory of his father's work leads Heaney to the vivid
recollection of bringing a bottle of milk, "Corked sloppily with paper,"
to his grandfather on "Toner's bog." There, he dug up the dense, wet
soil, which was made up of decayed moss and other vegetable matter
and blocks of which were cut out, dried, and burned for fuel. Heaney
recalls the brief pause his grandfather took to drink the whole bottle
and the style with which he "fell to" work again. The double meaning
of the father's "Stooping" echoes in the "going down and down" of the
grandfather: It can mean both the labor he was engaged in and the
lowering of his body into the grave.
In the second to the last stanza, Heaney's recollection becomes
purely sensory: memories of his father in "The cold smell of potato
mould" and his grandfather in "the squelch and slap/ Of soggy peat."
What these memories have "awaken[ed] "are the "living roots" in
Heaney's head. The labor of his forefathers is his legacy, for better and
for worse, but he lacks something they had: He has "no spade to
follow men like them." In the final stanza, he states again that what he
does have is his pen; he will do with his instrument what they did with
theirs.
Forms and Devices
Heaney's precise description of the way he holds his
instrument is the first of many. It is echoed in the description of the
way his father holds his. Such a technique has two effects. First, the
reader's sensory experience of the poem is very strong: He or she sees,
feels, smells, and hears all that Heaney is remembering. Second, such
precision requires great control, and the implied power behind such
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control carries with it a further implication of the violence that might

be unleashed were it not controlled.
Heaney manages to reinforce this undercurrent of implied
violence with the way he uses and does not use rhyme and meter. The
first two lines of the poem are a rhymed iambic tetrameter couplet.
The first line has four strong or stressed syllables, alternating with
unstressed syllables. Each unstressed/ stressed pair is a foot, called an
iamb, and a four-foot line is a tetrameter; a two-line stanza is a
couplet. The meter in Heaney's poem is so neat as to be almost
singsong in rhythm. The second line is not as exact, but it still holds to
the metrical pattern established by the first; most important, in both
lines, the final syllable is strong and rhymes.
The second stanza shifts to a loose iambic pentameter (five
unstressed/stressed beats) and also continues to rhyme loosely. After
this, however, the poem takes a completely unrhymed, unmetrical
form until the final three lines. The first of those final lines repeats the
first, which is also the most perfectly metrical, line of the poem. In its
first appearance, the strength of the pattern within this line raised an
expectation of a continuation of the pattern, an expectation that was
met.
When that first line appears again, the same expectation is
raised. The first half of the second line also appears again, increasing
that sense of expectation. The final four words, however, do not
appear. Instead, the anticipated second line is cut into two blunt lines
("squat" as the pen), and there is no rhyme at all.
The poetic forms the first five lines take are those established
by English poets. When Heaney begins to recount his uniquely Irish
memories, he shifts out of English poetic style. By returning to the
metrical line in the last stanza but then severing it and rejecting the
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rhyme, Heaney communicates with this product of his pen exactly

what it is he intends to do by wielding that pen.
Themes and Meanings
The repeated association of instrument and weapon gives the
reader a hint as to the predominant theme of the poem. As the pen is
overtly named a weapon, so the spade can by implication also be
understood as a weapon. Many of the images then take on a double
meaning: Rooting "out tall tops" could be mowing down men, and
burying "the bright edge deep" could connote a blade cutting into
flesh. "Lug," "shaft," and "levered" are all words that could be
associated with weapons, and even the beloved "cool hardness in our
hands" could mean grenades, not merely potatoes. "By God, the old
man could handle a spade" might be said as admiringly by one rebel
of another as by farmers of one another: "Nicking and slicing neatly"
could apply to blade work as well as to spade work, and "heaving
sods," in slang, could refer to bodies as well as dirt.
This very wordplay on bodies and dirt, sods and clods, also
maintains the association of living and dead that the mixed images of
the poem have produced. Not only did the sound of digging begin a
recollection of the father's life, but it also was a reminder of his death
as well. The potato crop grows in "mould, " in decomposition, and turf
is itself concentrated decomposition. All digging, then, is in among
dead things, graves, "mould," "turf."
The mention of these two products and the hard labor
necessary to obtain them establishes the context in which Heaney is
writing: He comes from a family—and, on a larger scale, a culture—
that has struggled for survival. That the bog on which his grandfather
cut turf was "Toner's" implies further that the fruits of their labor may
not even have been their own.
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These were necessary commodities—potatoes were the staple

crop, and turf was the primary source of fuel—so necessary that their
failure meant the end of the community. Yet, while the father's and the
grandfather's digging was for the purpose of providing sustenance, it
has resulted in their deaths. Understanding that, the play between
words that mean both men and dirt also gives further impetus to the
implications of violence: These laboring men are "like dirt."
Yet, while the implication of violence is very strong,
embedded in the poem is the image of Heaney's spade-wielding
grandfather drinking milk. In sixteenth-century English accounts of
the Irish, one cultural characteristic regarded as strange is an Irish
preference of milk to meat. Such a preference is one that speaks
against blood-thirstiness. By raising this image, with its unavoidable
association with the "milk of human kindness," Heaney identifies the
tendency to violence that the poem displays as an imposition by
others.
Thus, in the same way as the poem cuts through the constraints
of English versification, it digs up "living roots." By taking to the pen,
Heaney participates in the process of reclaiming an Irish memory and
identity that has been long buried and that will provide sustenance and
fuel in its own way.
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Paul Muldoon (1951— )

Pineapples and Pomegranates
In Memory of Yehuda Amichai
To think that, as a boy of thirteen, I would grapple

with my first pineapple,
its exposed breast
setting itself as another test
of my will-power, knowing in my bones
that it stood for something other than itself alone
while having absolutely no sense
of its being a world-wide symbol of munificence.
Munificence—right? Not munitions, if you understand
where I'm coming from. As if the open hand
might, for once, put paid
to the hand-grenade
in one corner of the planet.
I'm talking about pineapples—right?—not pomegranates.
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PINEAPPLES AND POMEGRANATES

Author: Paul Muldoon (1951- )
Date: 2002
The Poem
The title of Paul Muldoon's "Pineapples and Pomegranates"
indicates that the poem's subject is fruit, and the poem begins as a
personal tale with the speaker recalling his first experience with the
pineapple. In the long opening sentence, the speaker muses on the
fruit's exotic appeal, its seductiveness to his thirteen-year-old,
relatively naive self. However, Muldoon's associations soon lead the
reader away from the familiar world of objects to more complex and
disturbing issues below the surface of daily life. Muldoon makes this
transition from one mode to another flawlessly, by employing his
distinctive use of rhyme, word-shifting, and repetition.
It recalls the speaker's first encounter with a pineapple, as a

thirteen-year-old boy growing up in Northern Ireland. The speaker
muses on the pineapple's significance as a symbol of generosity or
"munificence." The speaker then comments on the difference between
"munificence" and "munitions" and expresses a wish for peace
somewhere on the planet. The poem concludes with the speaker's
assertion that he is talking about pineapples and not pomegranates.
Muldoon dedicated the poem to the memory of Israeli poet Yehuda
Amichai, who died in 2000.
Although the poem is partly about the difference between two
fruits, it also alludes to the ongoing conflicts in Muldoon's native
country of Northern Ireland and in Amichai's home of Israel.
"Pineapples and Pomegranates" addresses the slippery quality of
language, as well as the elusive nature of peace. In this poem,
Muldoon also employs a deft and unique use of rhyme, word-shifting,
and repetition to emphasize his themes.
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The poem began as a personal recollection of an innocent and

mostly enjoyable adolescent memory. However, rather than offering a
definitive answer to the octave, the poem's last 6 lines, or sestet,
contrast with the first 8 lines by focusing on adult doubts and
preoccupations with world violence. The short sentences, rhymes,
repetitions, and word shifts in the last six lines bolster the sense that
memory and reality are hard to pin down.
A master of poetic technique, Muldoon frequently uses
association to juxtapose divergent ideas. In this poem, the speaker
begins free-associating in lines 6-8, as he recalls that even as a young
adolescent, he knew the pineapple "stood for something other than
itself alone / while having absolutely no sense / of its being a
worldwide symbol of munificence." These lines contrast the
innocence of a younger boy with the informed, literary consciousness
of the adult, poet-speaker. The contrast hints at more ominous things
to come.
In the next line, the shift to more complex and disturbing

concerns begins. As the speaker continues to free-associate from his
initial memory of the pineapple, he begins to muse on the words that
arise, stating "Munificence—right? Not munitions, if you understand /
where I'm coming from." The association seems believable, as the two
words "munificence" and "munitions" sound similar. However, these
words convey very different meanings, as "munificence" refers to
generosity and "munitions" are explosive weapons. This Muldoonian
word-shifting juxtaposes two different ideas, which are held together
by sound. By invoking this word-shift, Muldoon ushers in the theme
of mutability.
These types of shifts continue throughout the last part of the
poem: this movement tends to go from good intentions to something
more sinister. Sometimes the word-shift involves the repetition of a
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word, as in lines 10-12, when Muldoon writes, "As if the open hand /
might, for once, put paid / to the hand grenade." The word "hand" is
repeated but in entirely different contexts, as the generous, peace-
extending "open hand" becomes the explosive munitions "hand
grenade" two lines later. In these lines, the speaker expresses a desire
for peace, but that wish is undermined by the word-shifting. As with
the fluid transition from "munificence" to "munitions," the verbal
closeness of the two phrases "open hand" and "hand grenade"
indicates how easily one thing can become another and vice versa.
Muldoon's slippery use of language emphasizes how spongy the
borders can be between two opposing modes.
A final instance of word-shifting occurs in the poem's last line,
as the speaker concludes, "I'm talking about pineapples—right?—not
pomegranates." After all the free-associating in the poem's first
thirteen lines, the speaker returns to the idea of the fruit that sparked
the chain of associations in the first place. He immediately interrupts
himself by comparing the subject to another fruit, one that sounds
somewhat similar, as both multisyllabic words begin with the "p"
sound. Once again, the two similar-sounding words convey very
different ideas, and the shift is from positive to ominous. The
expressed symbolism of the pineapple is generosity, whereas the
pomegranate recalls a descent into hell.
In Greek legend, Persephone, the daughter of Demeter, eats six

pomegranate seeds and thereafter must live in the underworld for six
months of every year. In Muldoon's poem, both the pineapple and the
pomegranate are, like the apple in the Garden of Eden, symbols of
temptation. The pineapple is associated with adolescent sensual
longing, as in the first five lines, in which the speaker compares the
first pineapple to a breast. This relatively innocent desire contrasts
sharply with the temptation associated with the pomegranate, which
leads to life in the underworld. Or does it?
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The pineapple's function as a "worldwide symbol of

munificence" may not be as nice as it first seems to be. "Munificence"
is a very liberal giving or bestowing. Gifts can be double-edged, and
while the pineapple is symbol of generosity, it is also a symbol of
empire and colonialism. Christopher Columbus first encountered the
pineapple when he "discovered" the West Indies, bringing European
domination to the New World. Like Muldoon, Columbus wrote about
the fruit, helping to spread its proliferation throughout the planet on
plantations that often-exploited laborers. In Muldoon's poem, the
juxtaposition of pineapples with the ominous pomegranate incites the
reader to reconsider the connotations of the first fruit. Similarly, the
slip from "munificence" to "munitions" leads the reader to think about
the less benevolent aspects of gift-giving associated with the first
word.
Words and their meanings become more complex in the world

of the poem, because the poet's word-shifts encourage the reader to
question first-glance meanings. In this poem, definitive, black-and-
white definitions disintegrate in the face of word-play, creating a
sense of uncertainty. Muldoon's poem is not the usual personal
anecdote ending in a reassuring realization about the self, or "rather
than a subjective journey of discovery, or a drama of consciousness,
the poem offers an arena in which layers of meaning, image, story
jostle one another, and slip into one another, mutating and
transforming in the process." With all the shifting of words and
meanings, the reader may feel that there is no firm ground on which to
stand in the poem.
Muldoon compounds the sense of uncertainty by using another

repetition. He has the speaker use the questioning phrase "right?"
twice, once in line 9 and again in the middle of the final line. This
phrase serves to undermine the speaker's confidence. In line 9, the
phrase immediately precedes the first disturbing word-shift to
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"munitions." In line 14, the phrase enables the shift from pineapples to
pomegranates. Rather than ending the poem on a declarative hope or
wish for peace, Muldoon has his speaker question whether or not he
even knows what he is talking about. This sense of persistent doubt
seems to stem from the musings on munitions, grenades, and
pomegranates, which harken back to the violence of the Troubles in
Northern Ireland during Muldoon's teen years and adulthood. The
whimsical word-play leads to serious and distressing memories, which
lay beneath the surface of the innocuous-seeming recollection of the
pineapple.
In spite of the feelings of doubt and anxiety inspired by the

instability of both words and peace in Northern Ireland and elsewhere,
to which Muldoon alludes, the poet does not leave the reader hanging
in the poem. In the face of this instability, Muldoon meticulously
creates structure. This poem is a version of the sonnet, with fourteen
lines and an almost entirely regular rhyme scheme of two-line rhymed
couplets. In addition to this formal structure, Muldoon's repetitions of
words and sounds serve to create a cohesive pattern that holds
divergent meanings together. The full end-rhymes throughout the
poem, such as "bones / alone" and "understand / hand," generate a
sense of satisfying expectation. In addition, the more inventive
echoings of sound in instances such as "pomegranates / grenade" add
to the sense of structure and cohesion. In a Muldoonian twist, the
poem's last word also mimics the meaning of "grenade" when read as
the pun "palm-grenade." Although the poem ends with this would-be
explosive, the feeling imparted is merely unsettling—not devastating.
Using sound and word-play, Muldoon shifts the emphasis back to a
sense of security by creating an intricate edifice to house both
expansive and destructive impulses in a place where wry musing, and
not the weapon, wins the day.
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SECTION THREE
SELECTIONS OF TWENTIETH CENTURY AMERICAN POEMS
T. S. Eliot (1888-1965)
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
S'io credessi che mia risposta fosse

a persona che mai tornasse al mondo,
questa fiamma staria senza piu scosse.
Ma per cio che giammai di questo fondo
Non torno vivo alcun, s'i odo il vero,
Senza tema d'infamia ti rispondo.5 Dante Alighieri (Inferno)
Let us go then, you and I,

When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherised upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question . . .
Oh, do not ask, "What is it?"
Let us go and make our visit.
In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.
The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes,
Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,
5
Dante, Inferno 27.61-66. These words are spoken by Guido da Montefeltro, whom
Dante and Virgil have encountered among the false counselors (each spirit is
concealed within a flame): "If I thought my answer were given/ to anyone who
would ever return to the world, / this flame would stand still without moving any
further. / But since never from this abyss / has anyone ever returned alive, if what I
hear is true, / without fear of infamy I answer you."
129
Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,

Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,
Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,
And seeing that it was a soft October night,
Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.
And indeed there will be time
For the yellow smoke that slides along the street
Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.
In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.
And indeed there will be time
To wonder, "Do I dare?" and, "Do I dare?"
Time to turn back and descend the stair,
With a bald spot in the middle of my hair—
(They will say: "How his hair is growing thin!")
My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,
My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin—
(They will say: "But how his arms and legs are thin!")
Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.
For I have known them all already, known them all—
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
I know the voices dying with a dying fall
Beneath the music from a farther room.
So how should I presume?
And I have known the eyes already, known them all—
The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,
And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,
When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,
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Then how should I begin

To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?
And how should I presume?
And I have known the arms already, known them all—
Arms that are braceleted and white and bare
(But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!)
Is it perfume from a dress
That makes me so digress?
Arms that lie along a table, or wrap about a shawl.
And should I then presume?
And how should I begin?
..........
Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets
And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes
Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows? . . .
I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.
..........
And the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully!
Smoothed by long fingers,
Asleep . . . tired . . . or it malingers,
Stretched on the floor, here beside you and me.
Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,
Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?
But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed,
Though I have seen my head (grown slightly bald) brought in upon a
platter,
I am no prophet—and here's no great matter;
I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,
And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,
And in short, I was afraid.
And would it have been worth it, after all,
After the cups, the marmalade, the tea,
Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me,
Would it have been worth while,
To have bitten off the matter with a smile,
To have squeezed the universe into a ball
To roll it towards some overwhelming question,
To say: "I am Lazarus, come from the dead,
Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all"—
If one, settling a pillow by her head,
Should say: "That is not what I meant at all.
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That is not it, at all."

And would it have been worth it, after all,
Would it have been worth while,
After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets,
After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the
floor—
And this, and so much more?—
It is impossible to say just what I mean!
But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen:
Would it have been worth while
If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl,
And turning toward the window, should say:
"That is not it, at all,
That is not what I meant, at all."
..........
No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two,
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence,º but a bit obtuse; sententiousness
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous—
Almost, at times, the Fool.
I grow old . . . I grow old . . .
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.
Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.
I do not think that they will sing to me.
I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.
We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.
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THE LOVE SONG OF J. ALFRED PRUFROCK
Author: T(homas) S(tearns) Eliot (1888-1965)

Date: 1915; collected in Prufrock and Other Observations, 1917
The Poem
"The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" is considered one of
Eliot's finest and most important works. With the help of Ezra Pound,
the poem was accepted for publication in Poetry in 1915—four years,
it is believed, after Eliot completed it. Through this poem Eliot
established himself as a modern voice in literature, creating
profoundly innovative, erudite poetry which mixes classical references
with industrial 20th-century images. It is the first work among many
which would earn him a place as one of the most important and
revolutionary poets of the twentieth century.
"The Love-Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" is prefaced by a
passage from Dante's Inferno. Spoken by Guido da Montefeltro,
imprisoned in a flame as punishment for being a false counselor in his
life, the lines can be translated as, "If I thought that my reply would be
to one who would ever return to the world, this flame would stay
without further movement; but since none has ever returned alive from
this depth, if what I hear is true, I may answer you without fear of
infamy." Montefeltro will speak to Dante of his shameful life only if
he can be sure that Dante will never return to earth to repeat the tale.
The passage proves relevant—and prophetic—to Eliot's fearful
narrator, who likewise can only express himself in a void.
The ironies of the poem begin with a title promising a "love
song" from the lips of a person with a decidedly unromantic name.
Still, a lover's name should not be held against him, and the first two
lines of the poem do seem to promise a graceful lyric: "Let us go then,
you and I, / When the evening is spread out against the sky." In the
third line, however, the reader is jolted by an unexpected and
133
decidedly unromantic simile. The evening is spread out "Like a patient

etherised upon a table."
After arousing, then abruptly defying, expectations, T. S. Eliot

intimates that the "you" of the poem is not Prufrock's ladylove but a
confidante—in effect, the reader—who will accompany him on a visit
to some sort of evening party or soiree. The reader is led on a route
through a shabby urban neighborhood on a foggy October evening to
a place where "women come and go / Talking of Michelangelo."
Prufrock, who has "an overwhelming question" to ask, is fearful. He
suspects that he will not be acceptable. If he starts up the stair to the
party and then turns back, "they" will have a perfect view of his
balding head. Clearly, Prufrock is a middle-aged bachelor—thin,
fussy, and self-conscious. How can he "presume" to ask his question?
Although he shrinks from the inevitable scrutiny of the women
in general, his question is for "one" who may refuse to respond
favorably to it. The question is, it appears, a marriage proposal, or at
least a declaration of love. He agonizes over the possibility of
rejection and rehearses all the likely reasons for it. He is an
insignificant man who has "measured out [his] life with coffee
spoons." He is timid, ineffectual, and inarticulate, but he is driven by a
desperate wish to escape the ranks of the men he has seen leaning out
of windows along his route to the party.
Prufrock briefly fancies himself a heroic character: a beheaded

John the Baptist, a Lazarus returned from the dead, a Hamlet who can
assert himself and win the admiration of the woman and her friends.
He quickly realizes, however, that he can never be "Prince Hamlet,"
only "the Fool." He makes a last effort to compensate for his failings.
Perhaps he can comb his hair in such a way as to disguise his bald
spot. Can he walk on the beach and attract the attention of mermaids
in the surf? No, he concludes, and he wakens from his reverie with a
134
sinking sense of drowning ill in reality. The question will never be

asked, and Prufrock will remain a lonely and unhappy man.
The use of the first person plural might be convincing

confirmation of the reading of "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"
as a soliloquy or interior monologue of a divided self. Eliot uses the
image of the sea and "sea-girls," and the repetition of "singing," as
well as the associations now accumulated around the word
"overwhelming" (with its meanings of "submerging" and "engulfing")
to symbolize the deeply emotional place which Prufrock could not
reconcile with human life in the real world, thus necessitating the
division in himself.
It is another of Eliot's ironic touches that Prufrock's "lovesong"
could only be sung to him by human voices that would wake his
divided self to drown in the sea of his own emotions.
Forms and Devices
"The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" is a lyrical, dramatic
monologue of a middle-class male persona who inhabits a physically
and spiritually bleak environment. The title of the poem is misleading
since it is neither a love poem nor a song in the classical sense.
Approximately 130 lines long, it follows the ramblings of J. Alfred
Prufrock, the would-be suitor of an unnamed and nebulously
developed woman. While Eliot provides little description of Prufrock's
person, he does reveal a great deal about Prufrock's personality and
state of mind.
Eliot's monologue differs markedly from those of nineteenth
century poets such as Robert Browning and Alfred, Lord Tennyson.
Unlike the protagonists of Browning's "My Last Duchess" and
Tennyson's "Ulysses," Prufrock cannot control his situation, and he
does not speak logically or coherently. Listening to him is more like
overhearing one musing to oneself. The "you" of the poem disappears
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early; after line 12 ("Let us go and make our visit"), Prufrock is

entirely self-absorbed.
The poem comprises 131 lines of various lengths with flexible
rhythm and rhymes. Eliot uses couplets, cross rhymes, and unrhymed
lines. The result is a blend of traditional poetic sound effects and free
verse. The unpatterened nature mirrors the distracted state of Prufrock,
who would like to produce a true love song but can manage only a
confidential confession of his own ineptitude.
Prufrock's repetitions reveal his anxieties: "Do I dare?"; "how
should I presume?"; "I have known them all." He also repeats the
answer he expects from the woman if he ever does succeed in making
his declaration to her: "That is not what I meant at all." Like other
features of the poem, these iterations come at irregular intervals.
The poem's imagery is antiromantic: Like a "patient etherised
upon a table." The city streets are tawdry and depressing; the women
Prufrock will meet chatter meaninglessly of "Michelangelo"; he feels
himself "pinned and wriggling on the wall." He contrasts "the cups,
the marmalade, the tea" with the more momentous matters he would
like to broach, but his grand visions always give way to bric-a-brac
and bored tea drinkers. He sees himself as going down, descending a
stair in defeat or drowning in the sea.
Eliot introduces in this poem a technique he would make
famous in The Waste Land (1922): the ironic interjection of quotations
from earlier poets. This poem commences with a six-line epigraph
from Dante in which one of the denizens of his Inferno confides in his
visitor because he cannot conceive of the latter ever escaping from
hell, but whereas Dante will return to write his poem, Prufrock cannot
escape his private hell. There are also references to or scraps from
such varied sources as Hesiod's Works and Days (c. 700 B.C.), William
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Shakespeare's Hamlet (c. 1600-1601), Andrew Marvell's "To His Coy

Mistress" (1681), and the Gospels.
When spoken by Prufrock, however, all sublimity drains from
these passages. The comparison with Hamlet is particularly ironic.
Hamlet, too, is an indecisive man who muses and delays, but he
ultimately acts when sufficiently pressured. Prufrock has no prospect
of such pressure: no ghostly father, no enormous wrong to rectify, not
even an Ophelia—only a languid lady friend who will not take him
seriously. He feels impelled to an antiheroic stance and compares
himself to literary and biblical figures for the sake of denying any
resemblance.
Themes and Meanings
Unlike the principal characters of most previous poets and
storytellers, Prufrock is neither hero nor villain—he is simply a
failure. Even heroes destined to fail normally begin with hopes and
possibilities, but not far into "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,"
one senses the impossibility of this man fulfilling his aspirations. He is
already middle-aged, set in his ways, and hopelessly irresolute; he is
more like someone resigned to reading about heroes than someone
who will ever take action.
Thus Eliot permits the reader no vicarious successful
experience. Prufrock is a figure to be pitied, but he is also a disturbing
presence because his weaknesses, his mediocrity, and his sense of
isolation are all too common in the modern world. When an optimist
such as Walt Whitman insisted that all people are potential heroes, he
meant that they chiefly lacked recognition. The stuff of heroism
abounds, Whitman would say, in a democratic society that permits the
individual to develop a sense of personal worth. For the most part,
these heroes remain anonymous; collectively, they constitute the
strength of society.
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Prufrock has something that Whitman's heroes lacked—a

name—but he has precious little else. He has done nothing
constructive with his freedom, and his keen awareness of his
shortcomings destroys the self-esteem that theoretically ought to
flourish in a free society. If Prufrock could compose a real love song,
or any valid song, he would be achieving a victory of sorts, but he
lacks the capacity to express his situation. "It is impossible to say just
what I mean!" he exclaims at one point. The meaning emerges not
from what he says but from what Eliot, through the images, the ironic
quotations, and the obsessive repetitions, shows. The eloquence is
Eliot's. Prufrock lives in a world that is no better than he is.
Prufrock is full of self-doubts, with a pessimistic outlook on
his future, as well as the future of society and the world. This
pessimistic view renders him unable to declare his love to the
unnamed woman. He describes himself as "almost ridiculous,"
"almost . . . the Fool." Although aware of the possibility of personal
fulfillment, Prufrock is afraid to act, unable to claim for himself a
more meaningful existence. The poem also contains numerous biting
images of the industrial landscape with its insidious "yellow fog,"
"narrow streets," "lonely men in shirt-sleeves," and "soot that falls
from chimneys." "Prufrock" is also replete with classical references to
such literary and historical figures as John the Baptist, Lazarus, and
Hamlet and to the literary works of Hesiod, Andrew Marvell, Dante,
and Jules Laforgue.
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Robert Frost (1874-1963)

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening6
Whose woods these are I think I know.

His house is in the village, though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.
My little horse must think it queer

To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.
He gives his harness bells a shake

To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.
The woods are lovely, dark and deep,

But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
6
The arrangement of the adjectives in the thirteenth line may be puzzling: the woods
are lovely and dark and deep, or they are lovely because they are dark and deep. The
second reading lends a measure of subtlety not evident in the simpler sequence.
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STOPPING BY WOODS ON A SNOWY EVENING
Author: Robert Frost (1874-1963)

Type: Lyric
Date: 1923, in New Hampshire: A Poem with Notes and Grace Notes
The Poem
"Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" illustrates Frost's
attention to natural detail, the relationship between humans and
nature, and the strong theme suggested by individual lines. The poem
consists of four quatrains that have the following rhyme scheme:
aaba, bbcb, ccdc, dddd. The poem's central narrative is simple, and
the scene is understated, even stark, bare of elaboration or detail. The
setting is clarified as a winter evening in a rural environment. The
speaker desires to watch snow fall quietly in some woods. While these
woods belong to someone, that person is not present and so will not
protest if the speaker trespasses. A traveler pauses late one snowy
evening to admire the woods by which he passes. He reflects that the
owner of the woods, who lives in the village, will not see him
stopping to "watch his woods fill up with snow."
The plot of the poem is straightforward: a man (we assume)

narrates his experience of driving some sort of horse-drawn vehicle by
privately owned woods on a snowy evening. He stops, and then
contemplates how strange his halt must seem to the horse, given that it
is cold and dark and there is no farmhouse in sight. The horse shakes
his harness bell, an action that the man interprets as the animal asking
"if there is some mistake." The man then listens to the wind and the
snow and ends his account with some remarks on his experience, his
responsibilities to the world, and the distance he needs to travel before
he sleeps. The story could easily be true—it certainly aims to be "true
to life"—but it is hard not to interpret it symbolically. Many readers
over the years have felt that the man's journey toward sleep represents
life's "journey" toward death, though Frost himself insisted that the
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last two lines were not an invocation of death. Another popular way of
reading the poem is to understand the man's rejection of the woods as
an acceptance of social duty and personal responsibility.
Forms and Devices
"Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" is written in iambic
tetrameter. "Iambic" means that each metrical foot contains two
syllables, an unstressed one followed by a stressed one. "Tetrameter"
means that each line contains four metrical feet. So, a poem written in
iambic tetrameter would contain a total of eight syllables in each line.
Occasionally, a line will vary from the established pattern, which
often emphasizes the importance of that line.
"Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" also relies on
rhyme to achieve some of its music. For the first three stanzas, the
rhyme scheme is consistent. Its pattern is aaba bbcb ccdc. The fourth
stanza, however, rhymes every line with d. This means that in the first
stanza, lines one, two, and four rhyme with each other, with line three
("here") seeming odd. However, in stanza two, lines one, two, and
four rhyme with "here," while the rhyme on line three, "lake," is
picked up in stanza three. Such a pattern links the stanzas together and
indicates that the ideas contained in the stanzas are strongly related.
Robert Frost's "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" is

not only remembered for its simple and accessible narrative, which
contains only sixteen words that are more than one syllable, but also
for its end-stopped lines, accentuated by the insistent rhyme.
However, the poem gains its power by suggestion and implication,
powerfully conveying a depth and fullness of human experience. It is,
as Frost remarked, "loaded with ulteriority."
In this poem, the speaker indicates that his horse thinks it
"queer" for them to stop, though it is evident that whatever the horse
may think or feel, it is the speaker who projects his own anxiety onto
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the horse. The poem is constructed as the speaker's reflections of the

event, and the first line indicates the speaker's sense that the woods are
owned. Thus, some nameless feeling of impropriety or perhaps social
violation keeps him from his ease. Consequently, his abrupt dismissal
of the wood's allure and his lofty response that he has "promises to
keep," though idealistic and possibly true, sounds like a move.
To read "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" as simply

a story about a weary traveler longing for the comforts of home, or
even to allegorize it as the journey of Everyman, is to miss the subtle
qualities that identify it as a Frost lyric. For one thing, Frost balances
the onward rhythmic pull of the verse against the obvious stasis of the
poetic scene itself: The speaker never arrives, nor really leaves; he is
simply always stopping. Frost also arranges the natural scene so as to
heighten the drama of the encounter and to reveal its symbolic density.
Finally, Frost's sense of dramatic and contextual irony undercut the
simplicity of the narrative. After all, despite the speaker's confident
assurance about where he is going and the miles he has yet to go, his
restiveness (projected onto the horse) and the vagueness of the future
"promises" he must keep reveal his assurance to be, in a word, a
fiction. This is an important point for Frost. Frost celebrated the
necessity of imaginative extravagance in human affairs, but he knew
well enough that the imagination traps as well as frees.
Themes and Meanings
"Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" contains tensions
and oppositions that are characteristic of Frost's symbolic terrain in
general and of his poetics as well. The woods is a pervasive image in
Frost's poetry, evident in his earliest poems as well as in his last. Dark
and unowned, woods are a metaphor of life's wildness, and Frost
contrasts them, generally, with places owned by human beings and
made artful by their craft. Domesticated spaces such as pastures,
clearings, even homes, show the presence of human beings; in these
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places they make themselves at home, spiritually and physically. In

"The Constant Symbol," Frost observes that "strongly spent is
synonymous with kept." The human spirit must risk and spend itself,
paradoxically, in order to fulfill its nature.
Poets risk themselves and their skill as they create a poem out
of the wildness of language. Consequently, readers of Frost's verse,
like the speaker stopping to watch the woods fill with snow, find
themselves in a typically Frostian place: The poem is a partly wild,
partly domesticated place, demanding risk and commitment,
involvement and acceptance. Poems, like woods, are lovely, dark, and
deep, but only if one will risk entering them more deeply and will let
them work upon the imagination.
"Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening," then, directs one's

attention to that moment when one stops, or at least pauses, between
two equally delicious possibilities, and this insistence upon human
choice is characteristic of Frost. The "woods" that are "lovely, dark
and deep" echo and suggest other sorts of "woods"—the "woulds," the
limits, conventions, and oughts by which poets and readers alike live
and write. Fenced around with social convention and imaginative
need, facing wild woods and dark choices, one must balance and
choose.
Frost commented that "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy
Evening" is a "commitment to convention." It is also a commitment to
risk and to extravagance, especially imaginative extravagance, in
order to possess something aesthetically—the woods, for example—
that one cannot possess or "own" in any other way. The poem is about
patterns and predictability, about rhythms and the complex ways
human beings respond to patterns. It contrasts the horse's habituated
responses to the human, if less predictable, response of the speaker.
The human being must be able to break conventions and rhythms as
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well as create them. The poem is, finally, about more abstract
conventions and rhythms, those of knowledge and understanding, or
those of history and the movement of time; it is about how one
discovers beauty within these rhythms. It also is about smaller
patterns—social manners and expectations, habits enforced by hunger
and sleep. The poem is about the boundaries and limits within which
human beings live and—Frost's denials to the contrary—the limits
within which one must die.
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Hilda Doolittle (1886-1961)

Helen7 (1924)
All Greece hates

the still eyes in the white face,
the lustre of olives
where she stands,
and the white hands.
All Greece reviles

the wan face when she smiles,
hating it deeper still
when it grows wan and white,
remembering past enchantments
and past ills.
Greece sees unmoved,

God's daughter, born of love,
the beauty of cool feet
and slenderest knees,
could love indeed the maid,
only if she were laid,
white ash amid funereal cypresses.
7
In Greek legend, she is the wife of Menelaus. Helen was abducted by the Trojan
prince Paris which started the Trojan War. H.D. felt connected to Helen because she
saw an image of herself in Helen. She was annoyed at the fact that the story of the
Trojan War was told entirely from the male point of view. H.D. wrote her reflective
epic of more than fourteen hundred lines, Helen in Egypt. This poem was written
between 1951 and 1955 and consists of three books which follow Helen's mission.
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HELEN
Author: Hilda Doolittle (1886-1961)

Date: 1924
Introduction
Helen of Troy was considered the most beautiful woman on
earth, who was so desirable to men that they fought the twelfth-
century B.C. Trojan War over her. "Helen" is a picture poem, a verse
in which the picture or image of a marble statue of Helen is conveyed
in words. This statue of Helen, H.D. tells us, has been reviled by
Greeks throughout history. The primary reason is that Helen is blamed
for starting the ten-year Trojan War. The poem is a cautionary tale
describing how a woman's beauty can be doubly tragic: deadly not
only for the men risking all to possess it, but for the woman victimized
by the beauty so coveted.
The Poem
The poem has an unexpected beginning. Here Greek statuary
engenders hate instead of awe or adoration; the still eyes and white
face represents that which deserves hate, not the visage of
otherworldly tranquility. Helen draws this hate because she is blamed
for starting the Trojan War (c. 1200 B.C.), a war begun when she
eloped to Troy with the handsome youth Paris. But the Greece H.D. is
talking about is one in which Helen has long been dead, a place where
Helen lives on only in myth and in a monument H.D. seems to have
sculpted out of words for her.
Helen's face has the luster of olives, a product of Greece and
famously identified with it. The fact that it is not olive-colored skin,
but skin as smooth as olives—skin showing like olives "where she
stands"—indicates further that the subject of this poem is not a living
Helen, but a classical statue of her. While Greek statues were once
painted, almost all have come down to us with the color worn off by
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time. H.D. seems to understand this white as a purification of Helen's

image through time, a purity that the Greeks, however, are all the
more angered by.
This is a smiling statue of Helen, an insult to the Greeks
reviling her. Yet the face is sickly, or wan. Which is it? Can it be that
Helen is simultaneously both happy and gloomy? Greece apparently
hates the statue of Helen the more it ages, the purer it looks, because
Greeks remember how so many died to have her or rescue her.
The unmoving statue of Helen mimics what to Greeks

(according to H.D.) was Helen's nature: cold and unmoved. Here
Helen is a pure object, an object of desire that lacks desire. Helen was
the daughter of Zeus and, thus, "God's daughter." From color (wan
and white), H.D. moves to Helen's temperature, her coolness. Again,
the statue of Helen is an object absent of the warmth of desire or
emotion—a fitting representation of a woman thought to possess the
wan, white coolness of the statue. Helen's feet and "slenderest knees"
point to Helen's beauty, not only to the usual foci of female beauty,
but to the unusual; Helen is so perfect that even her feet and knees
provoke longing.
The last three lines indicate that Greece cannot love Helen as a
statue, for her beauty only annoys. Even after death and in effigy, the
beautiful statue of beautiful Helen provokes desire and anger among
viewers. Are the viewers who want to see Helen's monument turned
into a pile of ashes both men and women? Or do only men curse the
beauty of the femme fatale who, they think, leads them to their doom?
Perhaps women, as well as men, hate Helen for setting the standards
of beauty too high—for being the object of so much desire. If so, the
pure white beauty of Helen must be reduced to pure white ashes
scattered among cypresses, symbols of life after death and, therefore,
planted in graveyards. The paradox is that Helen cannot be loved in
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remembrance unless dead and gone from sight. But lost from sight, it
would also be impossible to love her. Helen stands in an impossible
position—the point where hate equals love, a position trembling with
instability.
Forms and Devices

“Helen” is an early modernist poem in free verse. Ezra Pound
wrote in 1912 that poetry, to be modern, must follow three principles:
“1. Direct treatment of the ‘thing’ whether subjective or objective. 2.
To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the
presentation.” These two principles apply to modern verse and, more
specifically, to Imagism, an image being defined by Pound as “that
which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of
time.” Pound’s third and last principle, however, describes only free
verse: “3. As regarding rhythm: to compose in the sequence of the
musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome.” A more recent
definition of free verse is Laurence Perrine’s (1956): “Free verse, by
our definition, is not verse at all; that is, it is not metrical. It may be
rimed or unrimed. The word free means that it’s free of metrical
restrictions. The only difference between free verse and rhythmical
prose is that free verse introduces one additional rhythmical unit, the
line…. Beyond its line arrangement there are no necessary differences
between it and rhythmical prose.”
“Helen” is partially rhymed free verse. For example, the rhyme

scheme in the first stanza is, loosely, aabbb. However, the b lines only
partially rhyme by way of the plural “s” sound. Full and partial rhyme
is used throughout the poem, as is occasional assonance. There are
three stanzas, each reading as a single sentence. The second stanza is
one line longer than the first, and the third stanza is one line longer
than the second. The lines are mostly short and concise, conforming to
Pound’s first and second principles listed previously. The poem also
148
adheres to Pound’s third principle in that the poem’s meter is not

regular. Yet overall, “Helen” contains a ragged regularity. The first
stanza wholly consists of lines of two accents in a variety of
combinations of accented with unaccented syllables. The second
stanza is irregular but does begin and end with lines of two accents.
The last stanza consists of lines mostly of three accents, with the last
line of the poem having as many as four or five accents, depending on
how it is read. In this respect, as the stanzas accrete lines, the lines
accrete accents. While the reader moves down the poem, an image of
Helen is built up mostly downward—from the face and hands of the
first two stanzas to the knees and feet of the third.
The poem's structure parallels the ideas being presented in it
and mirrors the buildup of malice. As the poem develops, the stanzas
lengthen—from five lines in the first stanza, to six in the second, to
seven in the third. This structural expansion reveals H.D.'s need to
enlarge her poem's framework in order to accommodate the Greeks'
increasing hate for Helen. The poet repeats "All Greece" at the
beginning of the first two stanzas, followed by "hates" and "reviles,"
to denote that their hostility is continuously renewed. She drops the
"All" at the start of the third stanza and simply states "Greece sees
[…]." Whereas the implied meaning of "All Greece" is "All the people
of Greece," the single word "Greece" marks that culture's entire
identity—its land, customs, history, and traditions—in addition to
every Greek citizen. By eliminating one word, the poet demonstrates
that profound spite pervades the whole of a civilization and does not
simply distinguish a group of its inhabitants.
H.D.'s rhymes also help to reinforce the sense of ceaseless

menace and tension in the poem. Several of the rhyming pairs contain
one word related to the Greeks and their perspective and one affiliated
with Helen and her qualities. The words "hates" and "face" create a
slant rhyme in the first stanza. In the second, "reviles" and "smiles"
149
are rhymed, and in the third "unmoved" is connected with "love,"

while "maid" is joined with "laid." The similar sounds link these
opposing pairs, as if to signify that neither the Greeks' antipathy nor
Helen's stature could exist without the other. Certainly H.D.'s poem
shows that to consider one in the absence of the other would be to
oversimplify a complicated and enduring myth, even at the risk of
leaving Helen vulnerable to further attacks on her character. It is
perhaps because she does leave Helen unprotected, that H.D. can
return again and again to this rich subject for poetic study, pursuing
more radical revisions of the myth and rendering more clearly
sympathetic visions of her controversial heroine.
Themes and Meanings
H.D.’s “Helen” is a chain of objectifications, a near mise-en-
abyme (a picture of a picture of a picture, etc., all the same) in words.
The first picture is of Helen objectified in her time. She is a woman
always described in terms of her appearance, her beauty; a woman
desired and coveted by so many men; a woman with numerous suitors,
three husbands, and two lovers. Ever since she was young, Helen had
been an object of desire, first carried off by Theseus. This is Helen
objectified, a complex person of flesh and blood reduced to
appearance, at least during the Trojan War. The second Helen is
Homer’s, an object of beauty by way of words that, through time, has
given birth—directly or indirectly—to numerous other images of
Helen in picture and word. The next image containing the Helen of
myth is the statue, or the painted or carved image of Helen in H.D.’s
poem, an artwork that, if it exists, is not at all well-known. In its
dubious existence, the artwork is an object flickering between
insubstantiality and substance, an object seen through the imagination,
then as an object in space and time. Next, there is the Helen of the
poem titled “Helen” that depicts a real or imaginary artwork. Lastly,
there is the image of Helen in the reader’s mind. The point of noticing
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all of this is that the early objectification of Helen might have

contributed to the further objectification of Helen—and even, perhaps,
of women in general. While H.D.’s poem might simply be one more
in this chain of Helens, it also attempts to break the chain whereby
women are held to their status as objects judged by their appearance.
Why does H.D. write a poem in which Greeks stand around
hating a statue of Helen? Is this poem more about Helen or about the
Greeks reviling her? If we conclude it is the latter, what is H.D.
attempting to convey through showing this hatred of Helen? It is
probably safe to say that because the Greeks are shown in the process
of hating, it is they who are being “reviled” by H.D. The chain of
hatred would thus begin with Greeks hating Helen and end with H.D.
“hating” the Greeks for hating Helen. H.D. probably finds these
Greeks distasteful, because Helen seems much further from blame
than do the Greeks, who would blame Helen for their own desire for
the beauty Helen embodied. Was it Helen’s fault she was born
beautiful, a state of affairs over which she had no control? Not to
mention that her abduction by Paris was foretold and almost fated by
Aphrodite. Why do these Greeks hate Helen? For one thing, she might
arouse in them overwhelming desire through her reputation as the
most beautiful woman in the world. This kind of desire makes people
lose control and makes them vulnerable to actions they themselves
might disdain. Others find Helen guilty and hate her for all of the
deaths during the ten years of trying to rescue her from the walled city
of Troy. But this amounts to something similar in that she is hated, not
for the desire the viewers themselves feel, but for the desire the
Greeks and Trojans felt for Helen. Lastly, she might be seen as first
cause or most prominent symbol of the political problems throughout
history between Greece and Turkey. In all, Helen becomes the
unfortunate marker at the crossing where genders and nationalities
meet in mutual distrust and war.
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Wallace Stevens (1879-1955)

Of Modern Poetry
The poem of the mind in the act of finding

What will suffice. It has not always had
To find: the scene was set; it repeated what
Was in the script.
Then the theatre was changed
To something else. Its past was a souvenir.
It has to be living, to learn the speech of the place.

It has to face the men of the time and to meet
The women of the time. It has to think about war
And it has to find what will suffice. It has
To construct a new stage. It has to be on that stage
And, like an insatiable actor, slowly and
With meditation, speak words that in the ear,
In the delicatest ear of the mind, repeat,
Exactly, that which it wants to hear, at the sound
Of which, an invisible audience listens,
Not to the play, but to itself, expressed
In an emotion as of two people, as of two
Emotions becoming one. The actor is
A metaphysician in the dark, twanging
An instrument, twanging a wiry string that gives
Sounds passing through sudden rightnesses, wholly
Containing the mind, below which it cannot descend,
Beyond which it has no will to rise.
It must
Be the finding of a satisfaction, and may
Be of a man skating, a woman dancing, a woman
Combing. The poem of the act of the mind.
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OF MODERN POETRY
Author: Wallace Stevens (1879-1955)

Type: Lyric
Date: 1940; collected in Parts of a World, 1942
Introduction
Wallace Stevens' "Of Modern Poetry" delineates how a poem
must be engaged in the process of "finding what will suffice"—or,
rather, what will enable a poem to help people live their lives. Thus,
"Of Modern Poetry" is a meditation on the search for significance and
the role that the imagination plays in that search. Using theatrical
metaphors, the speaker insists that traditional poetry, with its
predetermined scenes and script, cannot provide a sense of meaning in
the actual contemporary world, and so a new modern poetry must take
on the challenge. Stevens outlines in the remainder of the poem
arguments for a poetry that pays attention to the details of the living
world, which includes both the personal and the political. Modern
poetry, he insists, must observe the reality of the place and also the
subject of that place, for example, the look of a man skating or a
woman dancing or combing her hair. Ultimately, Stevens illustrates
how the interplay of poem, poet, and reader can result in
understanding and a sense of contentment, which, he insists, must
become the ultimate goals of modern poetry.
The Poem
The first line of "Of Modern Poetry" is a sentence fragment
focused on the creative powers of the mind searching for something
that will bring a form of satisfaction. The first line breaks after the
word "finding," which highlights the act of finding rather than what is
found, suggesting that the act of finding something significant is never
completed or the significance found is never permanent. Since the first
line does not make up a complete sentence, it could also be read in the
153
form of a question about what will satisfy the mind's poem. The title
and the first line read together announce the connection between
finding significance in the world and modern poetry, which is the
focus of the entire poem.
In the second line, a distinction is drawn between the act of the

mind searching in the past and in the present. In the past, the mind has
not always had to find what will satisfy it because it relied on
conventional forms of poetry already determined to be appropriate.
These conventional forms are represented in the poem by a theatrical
script and scene that are read and played over and over again. The
suggestion that the poem of the mind is searching for something new
relates to the title, which focuses on modern rather than an earlier
form of poetry. The word modern could refer to modernism, a literary
movement that reached its height in the United States during the
1920s. Modern could also mean contemporary in this instance.
The fifth line starts more than half way across the page,
announcing an important break. The speaker states that at one point
the conventions that guided the mind's search for significance were
changed, but by using the word theater, with its accompanying scenes
and scripts, he suggests that new conventions were established. Yet he
does not dismiss the old completely, saving it as a souvenir.
The new way for the mind's poem to find significance, which
is announced in the seventh line, is for it to interact with real
experience in the moment. The creative mind has to be open to its
surroundings, to speech, and to men and women who are living in the
present. It also has to engage with the political as noted when the
speaker insists that the mind must find significance in the face of war.
The speaker is most likely referring to World War II since the poem
was written in 1942, one year after the United States entered the war.
154
At the end of the tenth line, the speaker returns to theatrical

metaphors, insisting that the mind's process of creation necessitates
constructing a new stage and that the mind, which is the creator of the
poem, must be an actor on that stage. The mind/actor repeats words to
itself as it constructs the modern poem. Here the speaker introduces
the third element in the process, the reader, who though invisible, is
listening to the actor speaking. During this process, the poem's
audience becomes one with the poet and the poem.
In the closing lines of the middle section, the speaker describes

how the mind/actor forges this link between him or her and the
audience. The poet first becomes a metaphysician, someone who
explores the fundamental nature of reality, searching for significance
in the shadows, and then a musician playing a stringed instrument that
helps stir the audience's imagination, thus forging a sympathetic
connection between the two.
The final section of the poem, indicated again not by a new
stanza but by an indentation, reiterates the connection that the modern
poem must make with the living: with a man skating and with woman
dancing and one combing her hair. This connection will provide the
poet and the audience with the satisfaction they desire.
Forms and Devices
The form of the poem as a whole reflects its insistence that
form not be prescribed for modern poetry. The twenty-eight lines are
arranged according to no set pattern, but the suggestion of blank verse
underlies the poem and gives a feeling of coherence to it. The poem is
broken into sections which provide its major propositions. It is not a
syllogism or formal argument, but it makes three main points. It
begins by introducing the issue of modern poetry and the difference
between past and present poetry. In its most extended section, it then
155
describes the new demands made on poetry by a complicated and

skeptical age. Finally, it comments on possible subjects for poetry.
The metaphors in this poem all point in the same direction;

they are all attempts to describe modern poetry in such a way as to
make "Of Modern Poetry" both explanation and example. Traditional
poetry is described as a theater in which "the scene was set." Past
poets could repeat "what was in the script": Their powers of invention
were not taxed in the same way as those of poets now are. To
introduce the new poetry, the poem personifies or animates poetry
itself, saying that it has to "learn the speech of the place," and "think
about war." Poetry is then compared with an actor who is speaking
into "the delicatest ear of the mind." In turn, the actor is compared
with yet another figure, a metaphysician, who is then presented as a
musician. All these shifting comparisons are confusing if analyzed
logically, but they serve to characterize a poetry that is itself shifting,
grounded on uncertainty, and reflective of lived life rather than
tradition or convention. That drama, metaphysics, music, and poetry
are in some ways equivalent and that they can flow from and into one
another is a part of the theme of the poem. The metaphors demonstrate
what the poem explains.
That action is a necessary part of contemporary poetry is
suggested by the flowing run-on lines and by the number of present
participles and gerunds that appear throughout the poem, such as
"passing," "twanging," "skating," and "dancing." The modern poetry
that is the "poem of the act of the mind" reflects the particular actions
which are contemporary life.
Themes and Meanings

"Of Modern Poetry" is one of Stevens' most frequently
anthologized poems, and it may be the most commonly encountered
poem from the collection that contains it, Parts of a World. Its
156
popularity may be attributable in part to the relative clarity with which

it presents its themes. The quest for "what will suffice" appears in
other Stevens poems as well, including "Man and Bottle." The search
for a fiction that will be sustaining or nourishing to human beings in
their uncertain lives is Stevens' major theme. In this poem, the theme
is not hidden or presented indirectly.
The poem explores what characteristics poetry must have if it

is to "suffice"—that is, to be enough or to satisfy. It is the uncertainty
of the time that places so many demands on poetry, because poetry, to
satisfy, must not violate reality. Therefore, wartime demands poetry
which confronts war issues rather than hides from them. As each age
speaks its own language, so the speech of the poem must reflect and
partake of the discourse of the time. Otherwise, it will not satisfy. It is
axiomatic in Stevens that building a romantic world, which can serve
as a shelter from the unpleasantness of reality, is not the function of
poetry. Some of Stevens' early critics thought of him as an escapist, an
ivory-tower poet who had little contact with the real world and little
interest in it. He fought such dismissal vigorously in both poetry and
essay, claiming that the poet must confront reality. The work of the
imagination lies in its interactions with the real, not in disguises or
evasions of reality.
The presentation of what modern poetry is actually like or
should be like is more complex, presented as it is in a series of
metaphors of actors, musicians, and metaphysicians. The substance of
poetry is its sounds; these sounds ideally have all the dimensions that
they could be given by those other art forms and disciplines.
Still more subtle is the description of the response to this ideal

poetry. The audience is really listening "not to the play, but to itself."
If the reality of the present is adequately represented in sound, the
reader will find himself or herself in the poem. There will be an
157
identification, described in the poem in terms of music that is

somehow metaphysical: "The actor is / A metaphysician in the dark,
twanging / An instrument." Poetry is thus presented as a metaphysical
music that helps the mind define itself and learn of its own limits and
possibilities. The identity of mind and music is a positive pleasure,
consisting of "Sounds passing through sudden rightnesses, wholly/
Containing the mind."
The conclusion of the poem retreats from the intensity of the
middle section as it presents some of the materials of poetry. The
subject matter of poetry is far less significant than the creative act
itself, suggests the poem, and only as an afterthought should poetic
subjects even be mentioned. Nevertheless, the images of the three
people, two women and a man, caught in their acts of living, provide
appropriate closure. It may be true that all of Stevens' poetry is about
writing poetry, but that does not make it—or this poem—narrow or
exclusive. Stevens describes the creative drive as a basic force that is
part of what it is to be human.
158
James Wright (1927-1980)

Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio
In the Shreve High football stadium,

I think of Polacks nursing long beers in Tiltonsville,
And gray faces of Negroes in the blast furnace at
Benwood,
And the ruptured night watchman of Wheeling Steel,
Dreaming of heroes.
All the proud fathers are ashamed to go home.

Their women cluck like starved pullets,
Dying for love.
Therefore,
Their sons grow suicidally beautiful
At the beginning of October,
And gallop terribly against each other's bodies.
159
AUTUMN BEGINS IN MARTINS FERRY, OHIO
Author: James Wright (1927-1980)

Type: Lyric
Date: 1963, in The Branch Will Not Break
The Poem
"Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio" is a short poem in
free verse, its one-dozen lines divided into three unequal stanzas,
forming an argument with two premises and an inescapable
conclusion. The title of the poem both identifies the poem's locale and
suggests the cyclical, seasonal, almost ritual quality of the football
game which is the poem's central focus. In the bleak industrial
Midwest of James Wright's poetry, the stylized violence of the
gridiron takes the place of the traditional harvest festival celebrated by
more peaceful, agrarian folk.
Wright wrote "Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio" in the

first person, and it is typical of many poems that he wrote, not behind
the mask of a fictional persona, but in his own passionate voice.
Wright was an advocate for both the confessional style and the poetry
of personality, which were in vogue in the 1960's. It is quite logical,
therefore, to identify the speaker of this poem with Wright himself,
especially since Wright was born in Martins Ferry, Ohio, and grew up
in that working-class community watching his father and others being
brutalized by grueling factory work.
The first stanza of "Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio"
takes place in the Shreve High football stadium, where the first game
of the season teases Wright "out of thought," much as John Keats is
put into a reverie by his famous Grecian urn. As he sits in the stadium
and observes the men around him, he cannot help but think of their
lives outside the event, and he presents the reader with a grim picture
of men whose work is physically and emotionally draining as well as
160
ultimately unsatisfying. It is these broken men, these "Polacks" and

"Negroes," who sit in the stadium "Dreaming of heroes." The poem
strongly suggests that these men are both reminiscing about their own
former greatness and reveling in the present victories of their sons.
In stanza 2, Wright extends his imagination to encompass the

women of the community who, equally affected by the squalor of their
lives, are "Dying for love." In a very short stanza of only eighteen
words, Wright is able to characterize the family life of the spectators
and the players of the game. These thwarted, needy women are one of
the reasons "All the proud fathers are ashamed to go home."
Stanza 3 is a direct result of what the reader now understands

was the argument of the first two stanzas. Men such as these, with
wives such as these, mired in a situation such as this, are responsible
for the spectacle of football, where all the combined frustrations of the
parents are acted out in the beautiful and terrifying bodies of their
sons, who are doomed to repeat the cycle of flowering and death as
surely as the seasons perennially repeat themselves.
Commentary
As is the case with many of Wright's poems, the entire work is
crafted around the application of sharp, focused images that carry the
weight of a statement that borders on narrative. Almost a series of
tableaux, "Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio," presents several
"scenes" of life in the town revolving around the game of football and
the working classes for whom the game is the great social leveler: the
"Polacks nursing long beers in Tiltonsville," the "gray faces of
Negroes in the blast furnace at Benwood," the "ruptured night
watchman of Wheeling Steel." They are all "dreaming of heroes." For
them, the game is an alternative reality beyond the confines of their
daily existence, and like a religion they perceive the actions of football
as a ritual bordering on martyrdom.
161
What lies at the root of this "ritual" is, as Wright terms it, a
kind of passion where the "sons grow suicidally beautiful / At the
beginning of October." There is a sense, just as there is in Housman's
poem, that the champions are martyrs and that their sacrifice is
reminiscent of the Adonis/Tammuz myth where the protagonist must
die to ensure life and renewal for his society. The word "gallop" in the
final line seems to suggest that the young men, the "sons," are like
animals being led to a slaughter, and the seasonal theme ties the
"galloping" and "suicidal beauty," to the autumnal rituals of the
harvest and Samhain. What must be remembered is that the Celtic
festival of Samhain, the traditional root of the Halloween celebration,
was originally a slaughter festival when the fattened and beautiful
animals were ritualistically killed for a feast in order to save the
precious feed grains for human consumption during the long winter
months. At the root of Wright's rather elliptical perceptions of the
football ritual is a sense of a bloodsport, or at least a blood ritual,
where sacrifice and martyrdom lurk behind the images with a eerie
sense of unspoken presence. It is this 'presence,' this sense of
haunting, that makes the poem so intriguing—just as the game itself,
its imaginative associations and poetic perceptions offer an alternative
reality to both players and spectators alike.
The middle stanza of the poem reinforces the idea of football
as an escape from reality. The first stanza, in its rather documentary
use of the images of working class occupation, shows the dignity
inherent in hard, physical labor. The second stanza, however,
underscores the difficulty and banality of the working class life. The
"proud fathers" are "ashamed to go home," a strange statement that
suggests both the agony of defeat and the focused elevation and
esteem in which they venerate the game. The suggestion here is that
the difference between the banal reality of home life and the
heightened reality of the game are absurdly distant for those "proud
162
fathers." The gap between the two realities is underscored further by

the delightfully absurd image of the "women" who are "like starved
pullets / Dying for love." These hen-like creatures are both delightful
and absurd in that they express the same sense of driving, passionate
desire that the fathers and sons express through their devotion to the
sport.
It is this sense of passion, of an unspoken undercurrent of

desire, that is the most haunting element of the poem. True to Wright's
vision of working-class virtues, what must be said cannot be said in
words but in the poetry of motion and performance, whether that
performance takes place in the reality of a daily job or in the playful,
imaginative "sport" of the game of football. It is the power of the
imagination in raw, physical action that so attracts and fascinates the
poem's persona. After all, the first line of the poem locates the entire
work in the imagination. As the persona sits in the "Shreve High
football stadium," he "thinks" of the reality behind the game and
forms a list of all those workmen who toil at their various occupations.
This sense of physical dedication to a purpose is the poetry in the
process of the poem. The images unfold not as a poetic record of the
passion and the pride that the figures in the poem bring to both the
game and to life, but as a series of pointers that allude to the depth of
living and action that lie embedded in every deed. The beauty of the
"suicidal sons" is not just in the downs and plays on the field, or in the
score on the board, but in the living and the imaginative aspirations
that those of the world around the game pour into the yards and
downs. For Wright, poetry is not just the images or the narrative but
the meaning one brings to the structures and ideas of a work—and it is
this process, of bringing meaning to something one believes in that
lies at the core of our most profound and spiritually driven desires.
Football is a religion, and as far as Wright is concerned in this poem,
so is poetry. Both present the structures into which a huge amount of
163
experience can be read, and both leave the beholder searching for
more meaning, more interpretation and more imaginative possibilities.
164
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167

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NINETEENTH AND

Victorian & Modern Poetry

Mohammad Al-Hussini Arab, Ph.D.

Local Deposition No. 15309/2004

Modern poetry has been variously characterized as romantic,

mean but be." The pillars of what is commonly regarded as

Nineteenth-century literature, particularly in England, mirrored

The late 19th century produced the expected

Mohammad Al-Hussini Arab

Leda and the Swan…………………………...……...……………..…….....103

NINETEENTH CENTURY POETRY

THE ENGLISH VICTORIANS

There is no clear division, no obvious shift in values and taste,

struggle for personal liberty was accomplished and democratic

Leaps in technology were matched by developments in social

Morris (1834–1896). By the 1880s the critique of Victorianism was

progress-centered developments in thought such as American

In religion, Victorianism balanced the ancient regime

the nature of being. The high road to orthodoxy proved disastrous.

The Victorians as a group have been characterized as more

voice of the poet than with the dramatic voice of an imagined

Wordsworth, and especially Browning. For many later nineteenth

It is symptomatic of the times that poetry became more

coterie in London, however, fully appreciated how desperate the

Tennyson's In Memoriam managed a doubtful immortality for

progress, a legacy of the Victorians. And in 1922 the publication of T.

SELECTIONS OF VICTORIAN ENGLISH POEMS

Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861)

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.

SONNET 43: HOW DO I LOVE THEE? LET ME COUNT THE WAYS

Author: Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861)

As the poem proceeds, each variation on the theme of love is

In most sonnets, there are eight or twelve lines stating a

Instead of relying on sensuous imagery, Barrett Browning

It also should be pointed out that metrically this poem is

happiness by explaining how her love incorporates and transcends her

For example, Barrett Browning speaks of her love as being the

Barrett Browning's description of a love that thus encompasses

Lord Alfred Tennyson (1809-1892)

It little profits that an idle king,

I cannot rest from travel: I will drink

This is my son, mine own Telemachus,

This labor, by slow prudence to make mild

There lies the port; the vessel puffs her sail;

Author: Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-1892)

Elegiac in mood—Ulysses appears to be embarking on his last

In lines 6 and 7, the tone shifts decidedly. Ulysses announces

In the second section, lines 33 through 43, Ulysses shifts his

The monologue concludes in the evening, curiously, when

Ithaca is no place for an active life of the mind, as the solemn,

His needs are intellectual, although Ulysses uses images of

Moving toward the setting sun also symbolizes moving toward

Images throughout the first and last sections of the poem

A more common view is the one Tennyson himself supported:

The message of "Ulysses" is not moralistic, although its last

Robert Browning (1812-1889)

That's my last Duchess painted on the wall,

Would draw from her alike the approving speech,

Author: Robert Browning (1812-1889)

In the poem, the Duke of Ferrara speaks to an agent

The poem is written in rhymed iambic pentameter lines. A

The lines are extremely concentrated. Not a single word is

manipulative control of the situation. Twice the agent starts to