John Ashbery's April Galleons

Just by reading these three lines, others can clearly tell that there is some deep meaning with the creepy metaphors used. Through metaphors, it is believable that the deeper meaning, or the theme, of this poem is that feeding one’s imagination too much could make their imagination run wild. The first stanza, “Ink runs from the corners of my mouth. There is no happiness like mine.

In Marianne Moore’s poem, “Poetry,” the reader is taught to face difficult topics head on by the speaker discussing how poetry seems hard, but is really beneficial and interesting. Through the use of periodic sentences, imagery, and a pedagogical tone, the speaker is able to convince the reader than poetry can be interesting. The first stanza starts off differently from what the reader expects. The speaker says, “I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle.” It’s ironic how the speaker claims to not like poetry, yet writes a poem about her disliking to it.

Although the title of this poem doesn't have an obvious meaning, it can be easily understood when the poem is analyzed.

The poem suddenly becomes much darker in the last stanza and a Billy Collins explains how teachers, students or general readers of poetry ‘torture’ a poem by being what he believes is cruelly analytical. He says, “all they want to do is tie the poem to a chair with rope and torture a confession out of it”. Here, the poem is being personified yet again and this brings about an almost human connection between the reader and the poem. This use of personification is effective as it makes the

The poet uses many metaphors, repetition and morbid diction to illicit the response I had to this poem. Firstly, Butson compared the emotions and internal struggles of a

In these few lines, the speaker abruptly switches the tone from bitter to sympathetic. The poem becomes urgent, with a need to know. “The peculiar screeching of strings” characterizes the man’s thoughts, and “the luxurious fiddling with emotion” directly refers to the man’s emotional state.

Since we figured out the meaning of the poem was metaphorical, based on the evidence from the previous stanzas, now we can come to conclusions that this state of mind, once having visited you hope that you won’t be there forever. This decision for her to develop the poem from literal to metaphorical helped us find the deeper meaning. In the first stanza when she said “They are not imaginary but accessible only intermittently,” we automatically thought this poem would be about real life places. Then, when we got to the second stanza, this opened up our thinking from a literal to metaphorical meaning. The last stanza helped us figure out the deeper meaning to the poem. Since we have concluded that the poem was about a state of mind or a feeling someone experiences we could start to interpret the poem. Let’s say a person feels pure joy, this feeling isn’t imaginary, but for her this feeling is only reachable at certain times. This feeling of pure joy is so beautiful, in the way of exquisite high parts of

Nearing the end of the poem, the poet states, “We watch the world around us bleed” (110). Similar to other literary elements, this hyperbole adds extra drama and furthers a point. While the world is not actually bleeding, the idea of bleeding relates to suffering. The world is suffering, and in the context of this poem, the world is suffering from greed. This exaggeration of what is truly happening dramatizes the poem, catching the audience’s attention and captivating them.

In this poem, Edgar brings books to life using personification. Line 1 says, "They have their stratagems too, though they can't move." Edgar brings the main idea in the first line which signifies the power books posses and how they don't

This poems shows emotion from the crowed in the line " A struggling few got up to go in deep despair ." the rest dung to the hope which spring eternal in the human breast ;" But Flynn preceded Casey , as did also jimmy Blake , and the farmer was a hoodoo , while the latter was cake. " Ten thousand eyes were on him as he rubbed his hand with dirt: five thousand tongues storm warm on a stern and distant shoes."kill

This establishes Eliot's and the readers relationship to the images and ideas presented. When the poem begins "We are

Lines 7-10 indicate that a comparison is made between a manufactured item and a natural object (Encyclopedia.com). In interesting analogy is when the Martian says “Mist is when the sky is tired of flight,” the speaker is suggesting that the sky is some sort of “spaceship”, this plays along with the connotations of a Martian being an extra-terrestrial. Similarly in line 9-10 “engravings under tissue paper” Is a riddle that is left to the reader to decipher, but also points out how strange our world is to an “outsider”. Another example from the poem is the comparison of rain to a television emphasizing the natural in contrast to the man-made environment. This is effective as defamiliarisation causes us to experience the strangeness of our daily lives.

The last two lines act as a slap in the face. Every element works toward death, and the speaker almost slips into eternal rest. One can see him, putting the

In the second stanza, the speaker beholds a piper joyfully playing under the tress for his lover to find him with song. “Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on; not to the sensual ear, but, more endeared. The use of imagery of the senses is effective here. For I consider poetry to be more musical in nature than literary text. The speaker claims to be hearing melodies emanating from the urn, which for me the sound transmission from the urn correlates to the finite aspects of fleeting love. While the nature of art of the urn seems to me to represent the exquisiteness and infinity of the universe. Indeed, the sounds of silence from art is akin to vastness of space and time. “She cannot fade, though, thou hast not thy bliss,” (line19). Keats is asking the readers to not grieve for him. Because, her beauty will not diminish over time it is everlasting.

In this essay, I will observe the way Stevens and Ashbery deal with imagination as a mayor theme of their poetic oeuvre. However, it is important to stress that in both cases I will address only general concerns about the role of imagination in poetry and that this essay is not an attempt to simplify the richness of the work of Wallace Stevens and John Ashbery, but rather an effort to understand the importance of the poetic tradition. I shall proceed in the following way. I shall first study three poems of Wallace Stevens, “The Snowman”, “The Idea of Order in Key West” and “Tattoo” in order to understand Stevens’ notion of the role of imagination in poetry. Finally, I shall compare Stevens’ notion with Ashbery’s idea of imagination, displayed in “The instruction manual” so as to observe resemblances and differences between each poetics of the imagination.