The Poetry of Wallace Stevens

The fact that enjambment is used throughout the poem such as in the lines, “like a colour slide or press an ear against its hive” portrays a lack of structure and therefore emphasizes the initial enjoyment one feels when reading a poem before the chore of analyzing it begins. This is also emphasized through the fact that the poem is a free verse poem.

Since it does, when reading each line, there is a resilient connection that allows the reader to put together and feel for what the narrator is speaking of. As each line is metrically linked, the words are further recited in a durable voice and the poem is virtually put together, musically. In the first and second lines of the third stanza, an apostrophe, a figure of speech that directly addresses an absent person or entity, is presented, “We smile, but O great Christ, our cries to thee from tortured souls arise.”

The poem Tuesday 9:00 AM by Denver Butson is a beautiful piece of writing that uses metaphors to describe the baggage everyone carries throughout life. The setting is extremely plain and ordinary, a bus stop on a Tuesday morning, but the word choice is very dramatic. The narrator tells the story from an omniscient point of view, while describing the various people and their personal afflictions who wait at the bus stop. However, the only descriptions are metaphors, that explain the emotional state each character is in. The poem itself is a short free verse with four stanzas and only one use of punctuation. Due to this lack of punctuation a stream of consciousness effect is created for the reader. Overall, the tone of the poem is morbid

The poem, “Gospel” by Philip Levine gives a vivid description of what the narrator sees around them. The narrator focuses their description on nature. They make many references to types of plants like lupine and thistles. Throughout the poem, nature can be seen as and abstract creature. Nature is giving and lively. The conflict in the poem is between the speaker and nature. The narrator tries to show how nature can give nice outdoor views and how the earth gives people a place to walk on while people give nothing back to nature. Levine’s speaker uses repetition and comparisons to show how nature is constantly pleading for the narrators attention yet they cannot offer anything to the relationship they have with nature. The poem slowly evolves

with a cadence which holds true through out the whole poem (Team, Shmoop Editorial). Service’s application of literary devices like alliteration enhances the flow of the poem; “roam 'round, cursèd cold, foul or fair, half hid, and brawn and brains” (Service).

Apart from that, the poem consists of a series of turns that reflect different parts of the speaker’s feelings and the experiences he had. The significance of these turns is made possible through the use of stanza breaks. For example, the first

In the poem “Poem” the syntax is very interesting because of how each line is organized. The way the lines are organized gives an image of what the poem is trying to show us. The way the poem is laid out may leave some think it is awkward, but the way it is organized actually makes it more rhythmatic than it would just read out in 1 or 2 lines. When reading the poem I picture the cat climbing/walking with pauses every time the line ends. For example in lines 5-7, “first the right”(Williams 5) pause as the cat steps, “forefoot/carefully”(Williams 6-7) you can picture the cat going slowly and carefully.

It deciphers a vitality of nature and harmony. Meanwhile, the third stanza explains how it elicit the raw emotion of the narrator. Mckay purposely compares one scene as the reminiscent of the next. The comparison evokes a certain grief, where a hunger arisen. However, this hunger is a ‘yearning of the familiarity’ (p.148), a craving that paralyses him.

In the third stanza, a lot of imagery is used. The significant ones are present in the seventh and eleventh lines. In the first line, the poet writes, "A

In the poem “Those Winter Sundays” by Robert Hayden, the speaker is reflecting on his past with his father, but mainly the Sunday mornings he experienced during his childhood. Throughout the poem, there also happens to be a very dark and possibly even somber tone, which is shown by using several different types of literary devices. Hayden utilizes strong imagery supported by diction and substantial symbolism comprehensively. Furthermore, there are various examples of both alliteration and assonances. The poem does not rhyme and its meter has little to no order. Although the father labors diligently all day long, and he still manages to be a caring person in his son’s life. The poem’s main conflict comes from the son not realizing how good his father actually was to him until he was much older. When the speaker was a young boy, he regarded his father as a callous man due to his stern attitude and apparent lack of proper affection towards him. Now that the son is older, he discovers that even though his father did not express his love in words, he consistently did with his acts of kindness and selflessness.

Because the poem is long, it won’t be quoted extensively here, but it is attached at the end of the paper for ease of reference. Instead, the paper will analyze the poetic elements in the work, stanza by stanza. First, because the poem is being read on-line, it’s not possible to say for certain that each stanza is a particular number of lines long. Each of several versions looks different on the screen; that is, there is no pattern to the number of lines in each stanza. However, the stanzas are more like paragraphs in a letter than

The poem begins with two lines which are repeated throughout the poem which convey what the narrator is thinking, they represent the voice in

“Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words,” Robert Frost once said. As is made fairly obvious by this quote, Frost was an adroit thinker. It seems like he spent much of his life thinking about the little things. He often pondered the meaning and symbolism of things he found in nature. Many readers find Robert Frost’s poems to be straightforward, yet his work contains deeper layers of complexity beneath the surface. These deeper layers of complexity can be clearly seen in his poems “ The Road Not Taken”, “Fire and Ice”, and “Birches”.

In order to give “The Bard” literary standing, and thus provide an effective platform to broadcast his views, the poet makes several careful and deliberate choices in the poem’s structure and language to create a sense age and grandeur for the poem. By referring to both to classical Greek poetry and popular and influential literary pieces, like Milton’s Paradise Lost (Gray 20), Gray manufactures standing for his poem. The full title specifies the poem as a ‘Pindaric Ode’. Though this was not an uncommon form of ode – and one which Gray used frequently – specifying that “The Bard” is a classical style of poem immediately sets the reader up with the understanding that this poem will be written with the Greek style in mind, and thus gives it an almost classical credibility. Although it was written before the Romantic period of literature, Gray’s use of landscape and nature, ask the reader to contrast the landscape to the actions of the English army and begs comparisons between physical nature and human nature. Gray, whilst linking the poem to ancient works and