UIL
Capital Conference
2012
Literary Criticism
Explicating Poetry
The Solitary Reaper
Behold her, single in the field,
Yon solitary Highland Lass!
Reaping and singing by herself;
Stop here, or gently pass!
Alone she cuts and binds the grain,
And sings a melancholy strain;
O listen! for the Vale profound
Is overflowing with the sound.
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No Nightingale did ever chaunt
More welcome notes to weary bands
Of travellers in some shady haunt,
Among Arabian sands:
A voice so thrilling ne'er was heard
In spring-time from the Cuckoo-bird,
Breaking the silence of the seas
Among the farthest Hebrides.
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Will no one tell me what she sings?—
Perhaps the plaintive numbers flow
For old, unhappy, far-off things,
And battles long ago:
Or is it some more humble lay,
Familiar matter of to-day?
Some natural sorrow, loss, or pain,
That has been, and may be again?
Whate'er the theme, the Maiden sang
As if her song could have no ending;
I saw her singing at her work,
And o'er the sickle bending;—
I listened, motionless and still;
And, as I mounted up the hill
The music in my heart I bore,
Long after it was heard no more.
William Wordsworth 1807
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1
Luke Havergal
Go to the western gate, Luke Havergal,
There where the vines cling crimson on the wall,
And in the twilight wait for what will come.
The leaves will whisper there of her, and some,
Like flying words, will strike you as they fall;
But go, and if you listen she will call.
Go to the western gate, Luke Havergal—
Luke Havergal.
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No, there is not a dawn in eastern skies
To rift the fiery night that's in your eyes;
But there, where western glooms are gathering,
The dark will end the dark, if anything:
God slays Himself with every leaf that flies,
And hell is more than half of paradise.
No, there is not a dawn in eastern skies—
In eastern skies.
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Out of a grave I come to tell you this,
Out of a grave I come to quench the kiss
That flames upon your forehead with a glow
That blinds you to the way that you must go.
Yes, there is yet one way to where she is,
Bitter, but one that faith may never miss.
Out of a grave I come to tell you this—
To tell you this.
There is the western gate, Luke Havergal,
There are the crimson leaves upon the wall.
Go, for the winds are tearing them away,—
Nor think to riddle the dead words they say,
Nor any more to feel them as they fall;
But go, and if you trust her she will call.
There is the western gate, Luke Havergal—
Luke Havergal.
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Edwin Arlington Robinson 1897
swollen with snowmelt
rivers rise like raging beasts
hungry for the sea
John M. Forsberg 2010
his wife's garden:
certainly he has moved
every plant twice
Francine Porad 1986
long commuter ride
a stranger discusses
his incontinence
Francine Porad 1998
Mariner Man
2
"What are you staring at, mariner man,
Wrinkled as sea-sand and old as the sea?"
"Those trains will run over their tails, if they can,
Snorting and sporting like porpoises! Flee
The burly, the whirlygig wheels of the train,
As round as the world and as large again,
Running half the way over to Babylon, down
Through the fields of clover to gay Troy town—
A-puffing their smoke as grey as the curl
On my forehead as wrinkled as sands of the sea!—
But what can that matter to you, my girl?
(And what can that matter to me?)"
Edith Sitwell 1918
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Taken Up
Tired of earth, they dwindled on their hill,
Watching and waiting in the moonlight until
The aspens' leaves quite suddenly grew still,
No longer quaking as the disc descended,
That glowing wheel of lights whose coming ended
All waiting and watching. When it landed
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The ones within it one by one came forth,
Stalking out awkwardly upon the earth,
And those who watched them were confirmed in faith: _____________________________
Mysterious voyagers from outer space,
Attenuated, golden—shreds of lace
Spun into seeds of the sunflower's spinning face—
Light was their speech, spanning mind to mind:
We come here not believing what we find—
Can it be your desire to leave behind
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The earth, which even those called angels bless,
Exchanging amplitude for emptiness?
And in a single voice they answered Yes,
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Discord of human melodies all blent
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To the unearthly harmony of their assent.
Come then, the Strangers said, and those who were taken, went.
Charles Martin 1978
3
Sonnet LXI: Since There's No Help
Since there's no help, come, let us kiss and part,
Nay, I have done, you get no more of me,
And I am glad, yea, glad with all my heart,
That thus so cleanly I myself can free.
Shake hands for ever, cancel all our vows,
And when we meet at any time again
Be it not seen in either of our brows
That we one jot of former love retain.
Now at the last gasp of Love's latest breath,
When, his pulse failing, Passion speechless lies,
When Faith is kneeling by his bed of death,
And Innocence is closing up his eyes,
Now, if thou wouldst, when all have giv'n him over,
From death to life thou might'st him yet recover.
Michael Drayton 1619
Lady Lost
This morning, flew up the lane
A timid lady bird to our birdbath
And eyed her image dolefully as death;
This afternoon, knocked on our windowpane
To be let in from the rain.
And when I caught her eye
She looked aside, but at the clapping thunder
And sight of the whole earth blazing up like tinder,
Looked in on us again most miserably,
Indeed as if she would cry.
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So I will go out into the park and say,
"Who has lost a delicate brown-eyed lady
In the West End section? Or has anybody
Injured some fine woman in some dark way
Last night or yesterday?
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"Let the owner come and claim possession,
No questions will be asked. But stroke her gently
With loving words and she will evidently
Resume her full soft-haired white-breasted fashion
And her right home and her right passion."
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John Crowe Ransom 1927
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4
Sine Qua Non
Your absence, father, is nothing. It is naught—
The factor by which nothing will multiply,
The gap of a dropped stitch, the needle's eye
Weeping its black thread. It is the spot
Blindly spreading behind the looking glass.
It is the startled silences that come
When the refrigerator stops its hum,
And crickets pause to let the winter pass.
Your absence, father, is nothing—for it is
Omega's long last O, memory’s elision,
The fraction of impossible division,
The element I move through, emptiness,
The void stars hang in, the interstice of lace,
The zero that still holds the sum in its place.
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A. E. Stallings 2002
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Home is so Sad
Home is so sad. It stays as it was left,
Shaped to the comfort of the last to go
As if to win them back. Instead, bereft
Of anyone to please, it withers so,
Having no heart to put aside the theft
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And turn again to what it started as,
A joyous shot at how things ought to be,
Long fallen wide. You can see how it was:
Look at the pictures and the cutlery.
The music in the piano stool. That vase.
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Philip Larkin 1964
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You Can Take a Horse to the Water, but You Cannot Make Him Drink
Towards the running stream the sporting gal
May urge her equine quadruped to go,
But down its alimentary canal
What human skill can force the H2O?
Joyce Johnson
5
alliteration
allusion
analogue
anaphora / parallelism
anastrophe / hyperbaton / inversion
(while anastrophe and hyperbaton are the same, inversion is a bit different)
apostrophe
assonance
chiasmus
connotation
consonance
couplet
denotation
elegy
elision
enjambment / run-on line
(while a run-on line is a form of enjambment, the Handbook treats the run-on line as primarily
an occurrence within a stanza and enjambment as an occurrence between two stanzas)
eye rhyme
feminine ending
feminine rhyme
haiku / senryu (they are different—and not always seventeen syllables)
heteromerous rhyme/ mosaic rhyme
iambic pentameter (etc.)
idiom
imagery
inversion
masculine ending
metaphor
metonymy
meter
mood
numbers / lay
octave
onomatopoeia
oxymoron
paradox
ploce
prosthesis
quatrain
rebus
redende name / nominal symbolism
rhyme scheme
senryu / haiku (they are different—and not always seventeen syllables)
synecdoche
sestet
sigmatism
simile
sonnet
symbol
synaesthesia
tercet
terza rima
theme
tone
volta
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