Essay on This Be the Verse by Philip Larkin

Being punished as a young child, life seemed harsh and uneasy. The way parents would yell at you, tell you what to do, what not to do, and they always seemed to have gotten in the way of doing what us children wanted to do. It was all done for a reason however. The "cruelty" our parents showed us was out of love. They just want to use their experience to help guide our lives to success. With their guidance we are given opportunities to change some of the things we do for the better. Parents were raised a generation before us, therefore making them not as "chat-friendly" as someone whose our age. Mom and dad have helped in so many ways that we would not be able to name them all. From teaching us about nutrition to what words not to

Richard Blanco is a Cuban- American poet who was given the oppurunity to write an inaugaration poem for Barack Obama's second swearing-in. He wrote a poem titled "One Today" that praised the good and unique things about the United States and also the everyday people who's daily routines help to make America the proud country that it is.

Frost further points out that the stretch of woods being viewed is very rural. This is made possible by the reference to the location between the woods and frozen lake. In closing the final sentence of the second stanza Frost reiterates the fact that this occurs on “the darkest evening of the year” stating the darkness of the mood.

Compare how poets present the effects of conflict in ‘Belfast Confetti’ and one other poem from Conflict.

He continues to use romantic almost even melodramatic language to bring to mind images of earlier times that were better than the dreary world of his day. In the last lines of the poem the language changes and expresses grief over the fact that the general public only recognizes him for his Dialect works. Dunbar writes "But ah, the world, it turned to praise/ A jingle in a broken tongue" (Dunbar 7-8). Here he is mocking the Dialect tradition, as he doesn't consider it to be poetry. He refers to it as a "jingle", which causes the reader to think of advertisements and "selling out". We know that he was talking about the Dialect tradition by his use of the words "broken tongue". By calling Dialect tradition a "broken tongue", Dunbar is referring to his own feelings that the white's attempt at capturing the African-American's speech by Dialect tradition is a poor, if not incorrect, representation. Even though not many blacks in the day thought the Dialect tradition illustrated their true speech, they were confined to use what they had. Because that style of writing was so popular at the time, Dunbar's Dialect pieces got more notoriety than his standard English; and unfortunately the latter he felt was of higher quality.

Peter King’s comment on Phillip Larkin’s novel is reasonable because Larkin’s main themes are about death and failure. It is possible to outline both sides of the argument and Larkin’s use of imagery and characterisation supports this.

Prompt: Write a unified essay in which you relate the imagery of the last stanza to the speaker’s view of himself earlier in the poem and to his view of how others see poets.

Most poets use diction to fit the style of their writing, Brooks manages to incorporate diction to convey style, and add an extra element that allows the reader to personally connect with the problems she displays within her poems. For example in one of her award winning poems called “We real cool” one of the stanzas reads “ we lurk late, we strike straight, we die soon”. She uses certain words to portray the literal and connotative meaning behind the poem. We real cool describes how the life of careless teens lives will end quickly do to their own negligence. The diction is simple and easy just as the meaning of the poem. The teens live life care free and without rules just like her diction. Her diction is also explicit, when she wants to convey something that goes beyond a straightforward comprehension, so she explicitly describes it to an extent that even a teenager will understand. For example in her poem “kitchenette Building”, she manages to talk about the degrading roles women have like making it their job to continuously “satisfy a man”and how men abuse them by holding their freedoms within the walls of a kitchen. Brooks manages to describe the roles of women in a way that many can understand while also conveying the negative context behind their jobs back in that time. Brooks successfully uses diction as an element that lets the reader connect to her poems.

Reflections Within is a non-traditional stanzaic poem made up of five stanzas containing thirty-four lines that do not form a specific metrical pattern. Rather it is supported by its thematic structure. Each of the five stanzas vary in the amount of lines that each contain. The first stanza is a sestet containing six lines. The same can be observed of the second stanza. The third stanza contains eight lines or an octave. Stanzas four and five are oddly in that their number of lines which are five and nine.

Poetry is a reduced dialect that communicates complex emotions. To comprehend the numerous implications of a ballad, perusers must analyze its words and expressing from the points of view of beat, sound, pictures, clear importance, and suggested meaning. Perusers then need to sort out reactions to the verse into a consistent, point-by-point clarification. Poetry utilizes structures and traditions to propose differential translation to words, or to summon emotive reactions. Gadgets, for example, sound similarity, similar sounding word usage, likeness in sound and cadence are at times used to accomplish musical or incantatory impacts.

It was during the Elizabethan age that England felt the complete effect of the Renaissance. There occurred a revival of the old and classical literature of Greece and Rome and this was manifested in the poetry of the age. The Elizabethan age was characterized by an extreme spirit of adventure, aestheticism and materialism which became the characteristic features of Elizabethan poetry. Many poets displayed their skill in versification during this time and England came to be called The Nest Of Singing Birds.

In the next stanza, he starts to compare his life to other’s. He mentions how he heard that one man “walked out on the whole crowd”, and this leaves him feeling uncomfortable. It is not normal for someone to go against the majority, and Larkin acknowledges that. However, the author later says “Surely I can, if he did?”. Now we know that the anxious feeling Larkin had was actually restlessness, and maybe jealousy too. He wants to defy the norm, and do things his own way, yet something is holding him back. He knows that he could do it if he tried, but he fails to take action. Perhaps, just the reassuring thought of “I am capable of doing my own thing” is enough for him; just like how we

"The greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor." [It is] "a sign of real genius, since a good metaphor implies an intuitive perception of the similarity in dissimilars." Aristotle in Poetics.

Larkin put "The Building" in the middle of his collection for a reason, it is a pillar that supports the rest of the collection with its long lines and many verses, and because of this, is maybe a bit more clearer than some of his other poems in the ideas and views that are expressed through it. Of course, being a Larkin a poem, there is the obligatory underlayer which so many people miss, but in "The Building" it is easier to discern and comprehend.

(146) Larkin thus gives the impression that the reality of life as it presents itself to him falls blatantly short of what he expected. This disillusionment is particularly prominent when it comes to an assessment of what he has, or rather has not, achieved so far in life. More than once Larkin indicates the feeling that his lifetime passes unused. He talks about 'time/