Vladislav Khodasevichs Orpheus

TPCASTT
Title: The title Orpheus brings to mind the myth of the Greek singer and poet of the
same name, who given a lyre from Apollo could play such that even inanimate or
unhearing objects bent closer to listen but lost his wife Eurydice to an early death.
The most commonly known story about him concerns his descent into the
underworld following her death to broker a deal with Hades to get her back. His
music was able to gain him an audience and an agreement - that Eurydice could
return to be among the living if in their journey to the upper world she would walk
behind him and he would not look back. In his excitement at reaching the land of the
living once again and joy at having succeeded he turned around before she too had
reached the surface and Literal translations from the Russian render the title
Ballada, which doesnt carry the same specific weight but still suggests a ballad or
epic story in which something happens to the reader.
Paraphrase: Orpheus, or more accurately, the narrator (you get the sense hes a
poet or musician of some sort living in more modern times (possibly the author?) and
comparing himself to Orpheus rather than it actually being him) is sitting alone in his
room with no issues or life to weave lyrics about, and so slips into a nonsense
artistry of sound over meaning (Nabokovs lyrical translation renders this well) and
gradually works himself up to a state of transcendence wherein he sees himself
being handed Orpheuss lyre and all vestiges of reality in his room vanish
completely.
Connotation: Sixty-watt Sun, sky made of stucco - the room hes in to start feels like
a pale imitation of reality. Ordinary and dull by contrast to their natural counterparts.
Crooning, swoon, passionate murmur - all words of illogically losing oneself,
in the case of the first too often having a sappily romantic connotation.
Helpless expressions, poor things that listen to me- even as he reaches this
transcendent plane the descriptions of its effects on his surroundings are negative
yet sympathetic. The things themselves held transfixed by the beauty of his words
he feels sorry for, probably because he knows them to be empty
Attitude & shifts: The attitude of the speaker is bored to start, yearning for a previous
time or place where he was actually in the world and there were real problems to
rhapsodize about and he didnt spend all his time wondering what to do with his
hands. His attitude for the commonplace is clearly negative, yet as he begins to
take off into nonsense saying sound may be truer than reason and a word may be
stronger than man (a truth which his moment of transcendence confirms) the
audience seems to be expected to realize the tragedy of his becoming caught up in
his art with no audience, the room being blown away to reveal on the smoothness of
glossy black boulders, this is Orpheus standing alone. The tone of the words
seems at first to be triumphant, like he has conquered the 60-watt sun and stucco
ceiling and their total lack of direction or meaning yet when you consider the in
context meaning of the last line it seems less a note of triumph than one of
despondence. A tragic sadness that all this is really just him becoming more and
more involved within himself with no real connection to what he actually loves, which
is lost.

Title: The meaning of the title hasnt changed much but the first couple lines cut a
stark contrast to it, with a gradual building up into the lyrical mode expected yet the
story itself is about nothing. For this the intended title of Ballada probably serves the
poem best as it maximizes the contrast and the allusion to Orpheus takes place
within the poems last line regardless. Through the title, Khodasevitch seems to have
called into question the effectiveness of his own classical mode, considering that it
may be a fundamentally empty exercise in poetic form.
Theme (purpose): He seems to be criticizing both himself and his contemporary
Russian poets of utilizing the power of poetry without really taking into account its
purpose. Khodasevich himself was always a very content-oriented poet, so perhaps
this is not a critique on artistic trends of the time so much as it is a justification of his
own exercises in verse. Its probably best understood as both.

An excerpt from Frank Bidarts The Third Hour of the Night

Poetry Analysis Worksheet
1. The dramatic situation is that there is a creature stitched into the person being
addressed and it does not with them well. It is their twin and it is also the beast
within them - it exists to contradict and paralyze that which it feeds on.
2. We know hardly anything about the last line except it seems to know an inordinate
amount about the situation and the person being addressed (you, the reader). It is
an omnipotent narrator but it doesnt seem to be sympathetic with the reader or even
on their side. The only direct clue we have as to its intentions is the last line, these
are instructions for the wrangler, which could go either way. Either its intent is to
help you strangle the thing within you that cannot be filled, or the poem is an address
the wrangler itself, and that the speaker, like the beast it is addressing, also does
not wish you well.
3. Covered in the last question the reader is the intended audience, the reader or the
readers twin, the it that can drink till it is sick, but cannot drink till it is satisfied. It
does not wish the reader well and the reader does not wish it well. Both have
appetites that cannot be filled, each is painfully stitched into the flesh of the other,
each has a vested interest in turning the tongue of the other to stone.
4. Location is irrelevant but a bedroom seems a safe bet given that it is The Third
Hour of the Night.
5. The mention of invisibility vs visibility in the discussion of the twin duality suggests
that the war here may be one between conscious and subconscious, or the publicly
revealed and the privately hidden, the desires we allow to become a conscious part
of our identity and those we suppress. The world presented in this poem is not one
where moral grounds determine the conflict but one where the higher logic of space
and survival is all there is to think on. There are voices within you that want a
chance to speak and there is only so much of you to speak through.
6. Understand that when that when the beast within you succeeds again in
paralyzing you into unending incompletion whatever you had the temerity to try to
make its triumph is made sweeter by confirmation of its rectitude. Both sides are
you or at least have the added advantage of taking advantage of your convictions of
your own rightness. The conflict of the visible and the invisible, the admitted and the
suppressed is made with the intent to conquer but for the one kept hidden even
paralysis is victory.
7. He has felt it himself, presumably. He feels a conflict generally rendered as onesided to be more of a duality, it is not just us versus what would crush us as it is it
versus what would subdue it. He seeks to reach an understanding through a
personification of parts, a rendering of them as lives being perhaps closer to the
reality of our existence than our usual understanding.
8. The blocks of text proceed in unbroken one line two line chunks, but otherwise
there is no consistent cadence just a general even sense of line length and
consistent pattern.

9. The words themselves are seldom elevated out of conversation-level language

but the format is that of a mandate from higher than we are. Through remaining
impersonal the poem gains a sort of authority.
10. Asking what the most important line in a poem is mostly an impossible (not to
mention meaningless question to answer). Do you mean which one we the most
emotionally provocative? which one turned the meaning on its head? The poem is
the summation of its lines there are plenty of good poets with killer one liners but
those are more the signals that something is happening than the happening
itself. The line I brought up in question 2 is the one that caught my attention most
out of the poem if thats a valid interpretation of the question (These are instructions
for the wrangler) because while in one sense it ties the whole poem together
(though if these are instructions why does it give us no direction towards how to
defeat it?) it also flips it on its head as the reader realizes it may not have been
talking to him.
11. Twins born stitched into each others flesh at birth suggests an equality between
the two forces not obvious elsewhere in the poem, and the cloaks of invisibility and
not further develop the theme as a duality rather than a merely parasitic
relationship. The immigrant mothers death serves to show it knows you better than
you know yourself, it sees what you actually are not what you tell yourself you should
be. The tongue of stone shows what it will do to you, if you let it. The wrangler is an
apt name for it really. It will stop your efforts to create in their tracks and wring every
last breath from you.
12. The mood is dark throughout. You are in danger, this poem says. From what is
yourself but not yourself.

Albert Goldbarths Invisible

Poetry Analysis Worksheet
1. The primary situation is that of the parents conflict over trivialities while their child
crawls through it all, uncomprehending and incomprehensible. The second is the
paleontologists at their find who do not realize the significance of where they
stand. Then building up. The conflict being that we do not see the webs of
situations larger than ourselves, but for all that they are still there. There is much we
do not - cannot - understand.
2. The speaker is Goldbarth, the omnipotent parser of information who doesnt use a
computer probably because he views its capacities as competition (he is correct in
this regard, to an extent at least). It is not a poem where you can remain
unconscious of the narrators existence but its not a look at me doing this thing
type shtick so much as its a reminder of all we are as information processors is
trying to fit together information that interacts in ways larger than ourselves and what
we are capable of processing.
3. The audience is the reader. Anyone interested in understanding the world the can
see only remnant glimpses of.
4. It takes place in the home of the family, the paleontologists dig site, the trains, the
pharaoh exhibits in museums, underground cities and the poker games the dead
play in a world that is no longer with us.
5. Possible themes are that what we see and think about our seeing is so much
smaller than the networks we are part of, that most of life passes over our heads and
beneath our feet, invisible. That through trying to understand the connectedness we
can catch a glimpse of what we are a part of but understanding in the sense that
we search for a full set of explanations and reactions to what is will always elude us.
6. Somehow hell have to tell the two-year old: the parents are divorcing. You can
stroke a head to sleep and still not understand the universe an inch behind its
eyes. Ive rehashed that theme to the point of killing it too much already. It speaks
for itself far better than I could.
7. Like most poets, Goldbarth needs to speak out because he sees something we
are generally unconscious of. As to what he hopes to achieve by that I doubt even
he could explain it to you but its something as a race we strive for even as it is
unreachable.
8. The patterns are thematic rather than sonic. It flows and keeps a fairly even
tempo and that is the point of it. It is the lyrical explication of everything that is and
how it relates to itself.
9. His language tends to be elevated of necessity, but depending on the situation
hes describing his diction fluctuates accordingly.
10. Isnt a most important line but this last bit sums things up very well:

But the dead are down there,

Freed from time. And we cant see,
but they can of course,
the stilts
On which we walk through their cities.
We can see what has passed beyond what we were constructed to experience, but
the networks beyond our comprehension see us through our involvement in them
still.
11. Too many to count let alone mention and analyze. Girl skateboarding on street,
her world structured by headphones. The mummies being burned inside the
engines of 19th century trains. The code of the tapping knuckles of the rain. The
DNA carried in seeds through guano and released by the rain. All these are
structures, forms the information we are takes and enters and connects as
manifestations of the same forces.
12. The mood is contemplative, throughout. The emotion is in the content, not the
speaker.

Albert Goldbarths He Has

DIDLS - Id really like to discuss the content of this one but the assignment here isnt
very amenable to that unfortunately. (its probably okay in the long run this one
would be difficult to interpret cohesively. worthwhile though)
Diction: He connects words of normally conversational diction together in such a way
that he creates a sense of almost scientific jargon; he speaks a denser, more
descriptive language than most people are used to that catches the reader a little off
guard. One finishes the first line and knows something important has already
happened but couldnt say what. There arent much double meanings as the
worksheet asks for but everything is described in terms of how one would see it,
what meets the eye and what the mind connects that to.
Imagery: The entire poem is imagery. the high-boned taut-toned moody ink-eyes
beauty that beautiful cartouche of raw-sienna feathering and pucker then -step
back- the fatal sear of a jellyfish whip across the chest of one more luckless
tourist. A huge amount of descriptive build that left only the spaces in between
frames up to the imagination snaps out into action in a single sentence and into the
theme of the thing.
Details: Every sense other than sight was omitted. From the distance the reader
observes the poem at it might as well be on a television screen, we are limited to the
single sense and implied connection to our lives and what it all might mean. We find
the design of her death museum-worthy and in this hes referring to the distance
at which we are all spectators, harking back to the first four lines of description
where a much closer observer only sees and looks no farther.
Language: Alright so this is where what i put under diction should go. Ive been over
this sufficiently.
Syntax: The sentence structure is compact but by no means terse. As information
rich as it is the structure is simple and almost conversational in nature.

Laura Kasischkes Look

DIDLS
Diction & Language: Gets the readers immediate attention with the force of her
assertions and leaves no room for mistaking the intensity of her feelings. She talks
with the desperation of one who is still trapped in the situation they are describing
and again I dont know how to relate that to words having double meanings but since
it relates the language she keeps at almost violently conversational even as she
starts into more complex and elevated imagery - though perhaps complex isnt the
right word for even as the transcendental nature of her subject rises oceanless
forfeits in space, God pulled out of the darkness another God she makes it clear
that these examples are no greater than the feeling of her mother turning out the
light, the diamonds made of feeling and the desperate belief that there must be more
than what they tell us is.
Imagery: She depicts her mothers rage as diamonds and pearls, the former born of
great pressure and the latter of pained imitation. She then contrasts with the more
mundane public humiliation, an angry clerk, a man passed out at the train station,
and then proceeds to apply the built up anger for the futile manifestations of it she
just ran through to how there must be worlds beyond ours if this one worked out
against such ridiculously low odds, things have to be the way there are here
because how else could life work. These pressures are the same everywhere and
out of them a world was born. Out of her parents world she was raised. There must
be car accidents and operas. She sets her parents out as Gods of emotional duality.
Details: Again Im running into the problem of already having talked about most of
what Id want to say in the preceding section. Here it is the single-minded nature of
the focus even with diversity of examples to scream out at you. The details she
gives are more than just manifestations of the same force in the readers mind for just
a few brief moments (as long as the poem lasts) they are all the same
warring. There is no room for anything outside of it no perspective other than that of
the one caught in the middle of two warring deities.
Syntax: Short, terse declarations spark longer free-form lists that are neither ranting
or long winded just.. direct. She builds up and then abruptly drops off at the end,
resigns, realizes theres no further she can go. And with that her mother turns out
the light.

T S Eliots Portrait of a Lady

Explication
This poem deals with the conflict between an middle-aged aristocratic lady seeking
friendship and a younger man who seems to find little of value in their conversations
and presumably only returns to speak with her when circumstance necessitates it. It
is the flip side of Prufrock (and possibly a precursor to it? Im not certain of the dates)
in that while Prufrock deals with the internal deliberations of a man too insecure to
be understood or loved Portrait of a Lady concerns a man whos unfeeling and
critical nature prevent him from responding to the advances of another.
While the opening quote from The Jew of Malta and his description of the room as
having an atmosphere of Juliets tomb suggest that the advances of the woman are
of a romantic nature, with an already established relationship possibly being the
extenuating circumstance that forces their meetings, but the infrequency of their
meetings (from December to October there are presumably only the three described
in the poem; based on the Ladys side of the conversation we are privy to they do
not see each other often) suggests that for all the ladys talk along the lines of I
have saved this afternoon for you her fear that [they] have not developed into
friends is closer to the truth of what is happening and the focus of the poem. During
their first meeting the lady discusses the intimacy of Chopins music and then, as the
conversation slips, moves in to tell him through how in her life composed so much
of odds and ends her friends mean everything to her and she sees promising
qualities in him (all this is revealed through her half of the conversation, the reader
sees her respond to cues from the narrator but only gets the narrators thoughts, not
his words). At this the theme of music running through the section turns to cracked
cornets inside the narrators head and a capricious monotone begins to beat there,
suggesting he is bored or set aback by the conversation, leading into a description of
higher society small talk that he could be yearning for in the face of an
uncomfortable situation or merely further criticising as an empty pursuit.
At their second meeting, the reader begins to get a sense that the lady in question is
at a very different stage of her life than the narrator as she talks about the cruelty of
youths tendency to smile at situations that it cannot see. The narrators
description of his response (I smile of course, and go on drinking tea) relays a
shrugging off of both her words and her authority as unimportant; it is obvious he
does not sympathize with her sentiments. As she turns her subject to friendship
once again and tries to directly express her feelings, the narrator begins to regard
her voice this time as the insistent out-of-tune of a broken violin. The lady feels
that he has crossed the gulf to understand her but that she has nothing to offer in
return but her own friendship and sympathy - two qualities the narrator himself is
sorely lacking though he hides it well enough that she does not perceive it until later.
He does not care for the companionship of one about to reach her journeys end
and would again it seems prefer to build up his relationships around the trivialities of
news, the worn-out common song[s] that recall things other people have desired.
This a contrast to her love of Chopin and distaste for a life of odds and ends. There
may be a tendency to blame one or the other for the failure of their friendship but
T.S.Eliot seems to be painting it out to be less a problem of a lack of sympathy and
more and issue of their having two mutually incompatible ways of being. He can

tolerate her presence but cannot connect with her in any meaningful way, and this
lack of understanding is evident in his surprise at her wishing him well in his
journeys after learning he intends to go abroad. He does not understand the truth in
what she knows from experience, while her misunderstanding lies in not being able
to figure why their feelings cant relate, wishing to give it one more chance at least
and write to each other as he travels.
He knows it to be hopeless and tries to find some mode of expression through
borrowed shape since since he has no shape his own but is met with no
success. He talks of the music being successful with a dying fall but obviously
does not understand the feeling that makes it so. If the lady in the poem is overly
sentimental and prone to lose control over emotions, the reader is left to wonder if
the young narrator has any strong emotion at all. He feels guilt certainly, and some
amount of desperation leads him in their last meeting to at least try at some
connection, but on considering her dying in his absence doesnt know quite what to
feel, and uncomprehending wonders should I have the right to smile?

Sylvia Plaths Lesbos & Child

TPCAST
Lesbos
Title: The most immediate association is of course a romantic relationship between
two women, though it also could be a reference to a Greek island that often crops up
as a resting place in Greek mythology (Orpheus was buried there) and that has in
more recent times become a vacation spot for tourists.
Paraphrase: Lesbos deals with the difficulties involved with adjusting to the
drudgery of domestic life and the lack of solutions for a mother who has been driven
to the edge by her responsibilities. Through a monologue directed at another
woman in a similar situation the narrator (in this case the details match up well
enough that the narrator can be assumed to be an isolated part of Sylvias own
emotions on the matter) explores the helplessness of being held captive by the same
oblivious creatures her life revolves around and having no way out.
Connotation: The potatoes hiss. It is all Hollywood, windowless. fluorescent light
coy paper I, love, am a pathological liar, and my child why she is schizophrenic
- Through these overly dramatized words Sylvia puts her life in the context of a
terrible game, someones overblown Hollywood movie thats fake and too bright and
more than she can handle being a part of.
they crap and puke and cry sick cats acid baths blood-loving bats you who
have blown your tubes like a radio doped and thick from my last sleeping
pill There are constant allusions to animals and basic animal-type
functions. Medical terminology like the sun gives you ulcers, the wind gives you TB
as a contrast to the hollywood start, the once you were beautiful.
Her focus is on the most basic, least controllable function of her subjects of which
she herself is one. In this poem we are to her all sick, twisted animals.
Attitude: She sets the poem up as if it is written to a female lover who she considers
running away with (I should have an affair. We should meet in another life, we
should meet in air, me and you.) but this cuts a stark contrast to her general attitude
towards the object of her address that tends to be caustic and cruel. The tone she
uses towards her husband and kids is if anything even more bitter and dismissive:
the impotent husband slumps out for a coffee. I try to keep him in, an old pole for
the lightning the baby smiles, fat snail, but it is as if she is fighting with herself over
this attitude, even as both speaker and subject express a similar revulsion for the
situation (You say I should drown the kittens. Their smell! You say I should drown
my girl.) it seems the reason she is fighting with her lover she would run away with
is her (the lovers) urging to do away with these burdens.
Shifts: The first couple sections are more or less universally derisive and cruel
except for the one bit about meeting together in air, but as she begins to delve even
deeper into the hate she feels towards her husband and her life now it becomes
obvious that the strength of her negativity is somehow a symptom of her love. She
writes O vase of acid, it is love you are full of. You know who you hate, He is
hugging his ball and chain down by the gate every day you fill him with soul-stuff,

like a pitcher. You are so exhausted. Her feelings toward her husband are more
than just revulsion then, but she feels that for everything she puts into that
relationship the pain of it only grows deeper; much like her kids she seems to view
her spouse as an insatiable parasite - a viewpoint that makes a particular sense in
the context of Sylvia Plaths own marriage to Ted Hughes where his infidelity caused
them to separate and left her to look after the children on her own (its a lot more
complicated than that and there was no formal breaking off but it seems likely that
this while this poem was written she had to bear the burden of the children alone).
Title: Which brings me to the last bit of information from her personal life which is to
all appearances the title Lesbos refers to an imagined romantic relationship
between Sylvia and the woman her husband was having an affair with - Assia
Wevill. The business of connecting the individual details of the poem to Assias life
and Sylvias actual relationship with her is probably left best to others since there
isnt much space here but insofar as it relates to the meaning of the poem Assias
background in advertising seems to connect well with the narrators comments about
Hollywood and the complex mix of bitter sympathy for a shared domestic plight and
outright anger towards the lover in the poem ( sad hag. Every womans a whore. I
cant communicate.) makes sense in the context of Sylvias feelings towards her
husbands mistress.
Theme: I dont think theres a theme here so much as an overwhelming current of
bitterness and love turned to unbearable pressure in a mind that can spin people
and their lives into a network that makes sense without actually opening itself up to
any outside perspective. Lesbos is a letter or a one-way missive of some other
sort - it is definitely not a conversation. The narrator frames the life of her subject in
terms of her own and discounts any differences as delusions or superstitions (even
in your Zen heaven we shant meet). What Sylvia Plath has done here is preserved
the closed off nature of a life that is probably not nearly as uniquely self-destructive
and self-pitying as skeptical readers tend to assume. Even had she been willing to
attempt understanding and communication with the instigators of her torment the
distances between their private hells arent something easily breached. I cant
communicate being something of a universal mantra in this case, a condition of
loneliness and private pain often exacerbated by cultural norms like those that made
it the narrators duty to care for her children alone but by no means unique to
situations with those outside pressures.

Child
The meaning of the title here is more or less self-evident. She is talking to or about
(quite possibly both) her kids.
The situation of this poem is the love she lets be overrun by despair in poems by
Lesbos.
Here she (the narrator, if you insist on formality, but for this poem almost more than
any of her other works I think it necessary to look at the speaker not as an imagined
projection of self but simply as the author) is fighting the same emotions she gave
into in the poem analyzed previously and reminding herself of the reasons for the
struggle.
In a poem as short as this the connotations are mostly explicit in nature. With her
talk of color and ducks, this Little
Stalk without wrinkle
calling an image of innocence and an attitude of responsibility for its protection and
development to mind. She wants to fill this blank slate of a life with all the images
she remembers as being simple and beautiful, but the turn is that her own mental
state keeps getting in the way.
The last three lines shift to
this troublous
Wringing of hands, this dark
Ceiling without a star.
Creating an image no less simple in its immediacy but with connotations of a
complexity the author cant control. An emptiness that defies all explanation even as
there is so much for her to come back and be there for. Its not that simple,
something says.
And theme: Its even simpler than that.

Charles Wrights Bedtime Story

Explication
This poem is not about the dramatization of any conflict so much as its an
exploration into the music not of sound but of images. Not of images either really but
of words as units of meaning. I guess just the point of poetry as a thing unto itself,
more than anything.
The title calls to mind a lulling to sleep, a recitation of tales just before
passing into the unconsciousness that is itself a distinct and unconnected
entity. The first line is the generators hum as a ding an sich. German for a thing not
as it is perceived but as it can be known only through and with reference to itself. An
impossibility then but of course it was only a comparison - time, like the dog it is
represents a little more of a problem in terms of self-reference, being compared to
the thing it is being simultaneous. Its a soft poem, a before bed poem, but there is
an element of foreboding to and will be fed, dont doubt it, will be fed, my small
one. It introduces the monster traveling through the night and all spaces between
but it is not the monster we imagined it to be. It does not wish us ill as such, it does
not wish us anything and as it gets closer only sets into stark contrast the
strangeness of ourselves. The reader gets the sense that this something stringing
through the world is somehow more integral to it than they are and they are at its
mercy. It is not it that is strange but us as it is something we have lost. The
perspective of unconscious, sleep. Such a poem is possible to analyze perhaps but
it has a way of confusing whether it is wrapping around you or you are falling into
it. A way of making direction irrelevant as fading and being come into their own not
as same but simultaneously coexistent.
The narrator calls forth images I do not understand to bring to our attention
what we do not understand, not for some higher purpose but for incomprehensibility
own sake. Our comprehension is irrelevant. Our irrelevance is unrelated to our
being.
My insecurities in writing this without any sort of understanding and private
convictions of its futility in the context of a class, assignment, problems that need
solving daily and responsibilities that need to stop being shirked and pushed aside in
favor of..
To be conscious of the world below your consciousness is not to defeat that which
you cannot understand, but if you take it as your meaning you will defeat
yourself. Something along those lines anyway. I dont have the heart to mangle
them to make them less pithy right now. For waking, child as a mantra.
Cormac McCarthys The Road.
grant me a little opportunity for somewhat sentimental(?) meaning, if you will Conn,
assuming that you read this far.
This is a better goodbye than a handshake, after all. Maybe. I dont know much of
anything and thanks for putting up with that in the context of a class. if you read this
far sorry for the time loss. Theres not much I could say that wouldnt mean more
coming from just about anyone else but good luck with being a school administrator

and everything else. Carry the fire or whatever other way there is to say something
that means to someone you dont know.