I.

POETRY
1.I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud
BY WILLIAM WORDSWORTH
I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine

And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance, hyperbole
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The waves beside them danced; but they

Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not but be gay, (happy)
In such a jocund company:
I gazed—and gazed—but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:

For oft, when on my couch I lie

In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.

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“I wandered lonely as a cloud”
Summary
The speaker says that, wandering like a cloud floating above hills and
valleys, he encountered a field of daffodils beside a lake. The dancing,
fluttering flowers stretched endlessly along the shore, and though the
waves of the lake danced beside the flowers, the daffodils outdid the
water in glee. The speaker says that a poet could not help but be
happy in such a joyful company of flowers. He says that he stared and
stared, but did not realize what wealth the scene would bring him. For
now, whenever he feels “vacant” or “pensive,” the memory flashes
upon “that inward eye / That is the bliss of solitude,” and his heart fills
with pleasure, “and dances with the daffodils.”
Form
The four six-line stanzas of this poem follow a quatrain-couplet rhyme
scheme: ABABCC. Each line is metered in iambic tetrameter.
Commentary
This simple poem, one of the loveliest and most famous in
the Wordsworth canon, revisits the familiar subjects of
nature and memory, this time with a particularly (simple)
spare, musical eloquence. The plot is extremely simple,
depicting the poet’s wandering and his discovery of a field
of daffodils by a lake, the memory of which pleases him
and comforts him when he is lonely, bored, or restless. The
characterization of the sudden occurrence of a memory—
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the daffodils “flash upon the inward eye / Which is the
bliss of solitude”—is psychologically acute, but the poem’s
main brilliance lies in the reverse personification of its
early stanzas. The speaker is metaphorically compared to a
natural object, a cloud—“I wandered lonely as a cloud /
That floats on high...”, and the daffodils are continually
personified as human beings, dancing and “tossing their
heads” in “a crowd, a host.” This technique implies an
inherent unity between man and nature, making it one of
Wordsworth’s most basic and effective methods for
instilling in the reader the feeling the poet so often
describes himself as experiencing.

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2.Sonnet 18
(William Shakespeare)
Shall I/ compare/ thee to/ a sum/mer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date:

Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,

And often is his gold complexion dimm’d;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature’s changing course untrimm’d;

But thy eternal summer shall not fade

Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander’st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou growest:

So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,

So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

Summary: Sonnet 18
The speaker opens the poem with a question addressed to the beloved:
“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” The next eleven lines are
devoted to such a comparison. In line 2, the speaker stipulates what
mainly differentiates the young man from the summer’s day: he is
“more lovely and more temperate.” Summer’s days tend toward
extremes: they are shaken by “rough winds”; in them, the sun (“the
eye of heaven”) often shines “too hot,” or too dim. And summer is
fleeting: its date is too short, and it leads to the withering of autumn,
as “every fair from fair sometime declines.” The final quatrain of the
sonnet tells how the beloved differs from the summer in that respect:
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his beauty will last forever (“Thy eternal summer shall not fade...”)
and never die. In the couplet, the speaker explains how the beloved’s
beauty will accomplish this feat, and not perish because it is preserved
in the poem, which will last forever; it will live “as long as men can
breathe or eyes can see.”

Commentary
This sonnet is certainly the most famous in the sequence of
Shakespeare’s sonnets; it may be the most famous lyric poem in
English. Among Shakespeare’s works, only lines such as “To be or not
to be” and “Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?” are better-
known. This is not to say that it is at all the best or most interesting or
most beautiful of the sonnets; but the simplicity and loveliness of its
praise of the beloved has guaranteed its place.
On the surface, the poem is simply a statement of praise about the
beauty of the beloved; summer tends to unpleasant extremes of
windiness and heat, but the beloved is always mild and temperate.
Summer is incidentally personified as the “eye of heaven” with its
“gold complexion”; the imagery throughout is simple and unaffected,
with the “darling buds of May” giving way to the “eternal summer”,
which the speaker promises the beloved. The language, too, is
comparatively unadorned for the sonnets; it is not heavy with
alliteration or assonance, and nearly every line is its own self-

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contained clause—almost every line ends with some punctuation,
which effects a pause.
Sonnet 18 is the first poem in the sonnets not to explicitly encourage
the young man to have children. The “procreation” sequence of the
first 17 sonnets ended with the speaker’s realization that the young
man might not need children to preserve his beauty; he could also live,
the speaker writes at the end of Sonnet 17, “in my rhyme.” Sonnet 18,
then, is the first “rhyme”—the speaker’s first attempt to preserve the
young man’s beauty for all time. An important theme of the sonnet (as
it is an important theme throughout much of the sequence) is the
power of the speaker’s poem to defy time and last forever, carrying
the beauty of the beloved down to future generations. The beloved’s
“eternal summer” shall not fade precisely because it is embodied in the
sonnet: “So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,” the speaker
writes in the couplet, “So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.”

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3.A Bird, came down the Walk
BY EMILY DICKINSON
A Bird, came down the Walk -
He did not know I saw -
He bit an Angle Worm in halves
And ate the fellow, raw,

And then, he drank a Dew

From a convenient Grass -
And then hopped sidewise to the Wall
To let a Beetle pass -

He glanced with rapid eyes,

That hurried all abroad -
They looked like frightened Beads, I thought,
He stirred his Velvet Head. -

Like one in danger, Cautious,

I offered him a Crumb,
And he unrolled his feathers,
And rowed him softer Home -

Than Oars divide the Ocean,

Too silver for a seam,
Or Butterflies, off Banks of Noon,
Leap, plashless as they swim.

“A Bird came down the Walk—...”

Summary
The speaker describes once seeing a bird come down the walk,
unaware that it was being watched. The bird ate an angleworm, then
“drank a Dew / From a convenient Grass—,” then hopped sideways to
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let a beetle pass by. The bird’s frightened, bead-like eyes glanced all
around. Cautiously, the speaker offered him “a Crumb,” but the bird
“unrolled his feathers” and flew away—as though rowing in the water,
but with a grace gentler than that with which “Oars divide the ocean”
or butterflies leap “off Banks of Noon”; the bird appeared to swim
without splashing.
Form
Structurally, this poem is absolutely typical of Dickinson, using iambic
trimeter with occasional four-syllable lines, following a loose ABCB
rhyme scheme, and rhythmically breaking up the meter with long
dashes. (In this poem, the dashes serve a relatively limited function,
occurring only at the end of lines, and simply indicating slightly longer
pauses at line breaks.
Commentary
Emily Dickinson’s life proves that it is not necessary to travel widely
or lead a life full of Romantic grandeur and extreme drama in order to
write great poetry; alone in her house at Amherst, Dickinson pondered
her experience as fully, and felt it as acutely, as any poet who has ever
lived. In this poem, the simple experience of watching a bird hop down
a path allows her to exhibit her extraordinary poetic powers of
observation and description.
Dickinson keenly depicts the bird as it eats a worm, pecks at the grass,
hops by a beetle, and glances around fearfully. As a natural creature
frightened by the speaker into flying away, the bird becomes an

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emblem for the quick, lively, ungraspable wild essence that distances
nature from the human beings who desire to appropriate or tame it.
But the most remarkable feature of this poem is the imagery of its
final stanza, in which Dickinson provides one of the most breath-
taking descriptions of flying in all of poetry. Simply by offering two
quick comparisons of flight and by using aquatic motion (rowing and
swimming), she evokes the delicacy and fluidity of moving through air.
The image of butterflies leaping “off Banks of Noon,” splashlessly
swimming though the sky, is one of the most memorable in all
Dickinson’s writing.

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William Blake
4.The Tyger
Tyger! Tyger, burning bright,
In the forests of the night;
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies.

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

And what shoulder, & what art,

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

What the hammer? what the chain,

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

When the stars threw down their spears

And water’d heaven with their tears:
Did he smile his work to see?
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Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

Tyger Tyger burning bright,

In the forests of the night:
What immortal hand or eye,
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?
Summary
The poem begins with the speaker asking a fearsome tiger what kind
of divine being could have created it: “What immortal hand or eye/
Could frame they fearful symmetry?” Each subsequent stanza
contains further questions, all of which refine this first one. From what
part of the cosmos could the tiger’s fiery eyes have come, and who
would have dared to handle that fire? What sort of physical presence,
and what kind of dark craftsmanship, would have been required to
“twist the sinews” of the tiger’s heart? The speaker wonders how, once
that horrible heart “began to beat,” its creator would have had the
courage to continue the job. Comparing the creator to a blacksmith,
he ponders about the anvil and the furnace that the project would
have required and the smith who could have wielded them. And when
the job was done, the speaker wonders, how would the creator have
felt? “Did he smile his work to see?” Could this possibly be the same
being who made the lamb?
Form

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The poem is comprised of six quatrains in rhymed couplets. The meter
is regular and rhythmic, its hammering beat suggestive of the smithy
that is the poem’s central image. The simplicity and neat proportions
of the poems form perfectly suit its regular structure, in which a string
of questions all contribute to the articulation of a single, central idea.
Commentary
The opening question enacts what will be the single dramatic gesture
of the poem, and each subsequent stanza elaborates on this conception.
Blake is building on the conventional idea that nature, like a work of
art, must in some way contain a reflection of its creator. The tiger is
strikingly beautiful yet also horrific in its capacity for violence. What
kind of a God, then, could or would design such a terrifying beast as
the tiger? In more general terms, what does the undeniable existence
of evil and violence in the world tell us about the nature of God, and
what does it mean to live in a world where a being can at once contain
both beauty and horror?
The tiger initially appears as a strikingly sensuous image. However, as
the poem progresses, it takes on a symbolic character, and comes to
embody the spiritual and moral problem the poem explores: perfectly
beautiful and yet perfectly destructive, Blake’s tiger becomes the
symbolic center for an investigation into the presence of evil in the
world. Since the tiger’s remarkable nature exists both in physical and
moral terms, the speaker’s questions about its origin must also
encompass both physical and moral dimensions. The poem’s series of

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questions repeatedly ask what sort of physical creative capacity the
“fearful symmetry” of the tiger bespeaks; assumedly only a very
strong and powerful being could be capable of such a creation.

The smithy represents a traditional image of artistic creation; here

Blake applies it to the divine creation of the natural world. The
“forging” of the tiger suggests a very physical, laborious, and
deliberate kind of making; it emphasizes the awesome physical
presence of the tiger and precludes the idea that such a creation could
have been in any way accidentally or haphazardly produced. It also
continues from the first description of the tiger the imagery of fire
with its simultaneous connotations of creation, purification, and
destruction. The speaker stands in awe of the tiger as a sheer physical
and aesthetic achievement, even as he recoils in horror from the moral
implications of such a creation; for the poem addresses not only the
question of who could make such a creature as the tiger, but
who would perform this act. This is a question of creative
responsibility and of will, and the poet carefully includes this moral
question with the consideration of physical power. Note, in the third
stanza, the parallelism of “shoulder” and “art,” as well as the fact that
it is not just the body but also the “heart” of the tiger that is being
forged. The repeated use of word the “dare” to replace the “could” of
the first stanza introduces a dimension of aspiration and willfulness
into the sheer might of the creative act.

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The reference to the lamb in the penultimate stanza reminds the
reader that a tiger and a lamb have been created by the same God,
and raises questions about the implications of this. It also invites a
contrast between the perspectives of “experience” and “innocence”
represented here and in the poem “The Lamb.” “The Tyger” consists
entirely of unanswered questions, and the poet leaves us to awe at the
complexity of creation, the sheer magnitude of God’s power, and the
inscrutability of divine will. The perspective of experience in this poem
involves a sophisticated acknowledgment of what is unexplainable in
the universe, presenting evil as the prime example of something that
cannot be denied, but will not withstand facile explanation, either. The
open awe of “The Tyger” contrasts with the easy confidence, in “The
Lamb,” of a child’s innocent faith in a benevolent universe.

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5. Langston Hughes, 1902 - 1967
I, Too
I, too, sing America.

I am the darker brother.

They send me to eat in the kitchen
When company comes,
But I laugh,
And eat well,
And grow strong.

Tomorrow,
I’ll be at the table
When company comes.
Nobody’ll dare
Say to me,
“Eat in the kitchen,"
Then.
Besides,
They’ll see how beautiful I am
And be ashamed—

I, too, am America.

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