Meter

Brooke Fraser is a New Zealand musician who has gravitated towards the acoustic, singer-songwriter genre for most of her music career. Her latest album (2013) ‘Brutal Romantic’ marked a significant shift in her music as she moved into more electronic sounds. ‘Arithmetic’ is a very simplistic, acoustic song off her first album ‘What to Do with Daylight’ (2003). ‘Kings and Queens’ is off her newest album and is a highly produced song containing elements of rock, pop and electronic sounds. These two

“My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun…” is a sonnet written by William Shakespeare and is also known as Sonnet 130. He wrote this poem to mock the conventional Petrarchan love sonnets which are about women who have unattainable beauty. This poem is written in the Shakespearean sonnet format which consists of a total 14 lines with the first 12 lines divided into three quatrains, and the last two lines make up a couplet. The quatrains establish the motif or problem of the poem while the ending

Conflict among contexts of the Victorian era, Catholicism and Gerard Manley Hopkins, has shaped Hopkins’ distinctive poetic exploration of religious faith in his poems. However, paradoxically he also challenges the role religion has played in making Victorians repress their natural desires, which compels them to doubt God’s ability. These are clearly evidenced in two of his famous Petrarchan sonnets, the nature poem, ‘God’s Grandeur’ (1877), and the ‘terrible sonnet’, ‘Carrion Comfort’ (1885-1887)

The Crisis of Lycidas’ Absent Body “Lycidas” is a pastoral elegy in which the speaker, a shepherd, mourns the death of his friend Lycidas, a fellow shepherd and talented poet, who had drowned at sea. However, as the poem progresses, the figure of Lycidas fades into the background as the writing of the poem becomes overwhelmed by the various crises that the speaker experiences and other poetic voices - those of Phoebus and St. Peter, for instance - interrupt. The ninth verse paragraph of “Lycidas”

Firstly, Heaney uses the structure of the poem to tell us about human nature. For example, the slow, familiar rhythm of the iambic pentameter creates a reflective tone where the voice in the poem looks back at the lessons learnt in the past. This shows how we glamorize the past even our bad experience so we can learn from them. The two uneven stanzas with gently half-rhyming couplets add a softness and a musical lilt without imposing too much rigidity. This also reflects the romantic memory and

Theodore Roethke in his poem “My Papa’s Waltz” tries to describe the relationship between the parents and children.The relationship that is portrayed in this poem is especially between a father and a son.Through imagery, this poem gives the impression of hardship as well as love between a son and his father. Imagery usage in poetry as a literary device is used to create vivid details dealing with one’s sense of sight, taste, smell touch and sound. Theodore Roethke imagery in his poem “My Papa’s Waltz”

Taylor Swift’s Shake It Off was released as the lead single from her record-topping album 1989 and became a smash hit across the world. Written with the help of Max Martin and Shellback, Shake It Off is an uptempo pop song that is in the key of G Major at a tempo of around 160 beats per minute. Vocally, Swift’s range in the song spans two octaves from G3 to G5. The rhythmic beats leave an impression on any music lover. The song begins with boisterous drums pertaining to the idiophone family that

David Lehman is an artist that speaks for the modern generations in his poetry collection “When a Woman Loves a Man.” In addition to producing his own works he teaches his craft at NYU and the New School in their graduate programs. While his prior-mentioned collection includes an entire section of love poetry, it is impossible to simply categorize Lehman as just a love poet because he is also a life poet. Considering that this work was produced and influenced by the tensions of post-9/11 New York

Out of all the readings assigned in the first four weeks of the semester I selected to write my midterm paper on Sonnet 18, by William Shakespeare, not only because I have admired Shakespeare’s works since I was in high school, but also because this particular sonnet appealed to be the most interesting poem we have read till now during this semester. Sonnet 18 is abundant with imagery and metaphors, but ultimately what sets it apart from the rest of the sonnets is its simplicity and the amount of

Gerard Hopkins “Gods Grander” is a poem illustrating a person concern over how the environment is being treated in the world. The narrator in the poem dislikes, how the world is being treated because of the human race not respecting or caring for the environment. The narrator wants the world to be treated with respect because God created the world with love and care. The poem introduces several literary elements like symbolism, imagery, and alliteration. The three literary elements help prove that