Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Int. To Eng. Lit Poetry
Int. To Eng. Lit Poetry
POETRY
1.I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud
BY WILLIAM WORDSWORTH
I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.
1
“I wandered lonely as a cloud”
Summary
The speaker says that, wandering like a cloud floating above hills and
valleys, he encountered a field of daffodils beside a lake. The dancing,
fluttering flowers stretched endlessly along the shore, and though the
waves of the lake danced beside the flowers, the daffodils outdid the
water in glee. The speaker says that a poet could not help but be
happy in such a joyful company of flowers. He says that he stared and
stared, but did not realize what wealth the scene would bring him. For
now, whenever he feels “vacant” or “pensive,” the memory flashes
upon “that inward eye / That is the bliss of solitude,” and his heart fills
with pleasure, “and dances with the daffodils.”
Form
The four six-line stanzas of this poem follow a quatrain-couplet rhyme
scheme: ABABCC. Each line is metered in iambic tetrameter.
Commentary
This simple poem, one of the loveliest and most famous in
the Wordsworth canon, revisits the familiar subjects of
nature and memory, this time with a particularly (simple)
spare, musical eloquence. The plot is extremely simple,
depicting the poet’s wandering and his discovery of a field
of daffodils by a lake, the memory of which pleases him
and comforts him when he is lonely, bored, or restless. The
characterization of the sudden occurrence of a memory—
2
the daffodils “flash upon the inward eye / Which is the
bliss of solitude”—is psychologically acute, but the poem’s
main brilliance lies in the reverse personification of its
early stanzas. The speaker is metaphorically compared to a
natural object, a cloud—“I wandered lonely as a cloud /
That floats on high...”, and the daffodils are continually
personified as human beings, dancing and “tossing their
heads” in “a crowd, a host.” This technique implies an
inherent unity between man and nature, making it one of
Wordsworth’s most basic and effective methods for
instilling in the reader the feeling the poet so often
describes himself as experiencing.
3
2.Sonnet 18
(William Shakespeare)
Shall I/ compare/ thee to/ a sum/mer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date:
Summary: Sonnet 18
The speaker opens the poem with a question addressed to the beloved:
“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” The next eleven lines are
devoted to such a comparison. In line 2, the speaker stipulates what
mainly differentiates the young man from the summer’s day: he is
“more lovely and more temperate.” Summer’s days tend toward
extremes: they are shaken by “rough winds”; in them, the sun (“the
eye of heaven”) often shines “too hot,” or too dim. And summer is
fleeting: its date is too short, and it leads to the withering of autumn,
as “every fair from fair sometime declines.” The final quatrain of the
sonnet tells how the beloved differs from the summer in that respect:
4
his beauty will last forever (“Thy eternal summer shall not fade...”)
and never die. In the couplet, the speaker explains how the beloved’s
beauty will accomplish this feat, and not perish because it is preserved
in the poem, which will last forever; it will live “as long as men can
breathe or eyes can see.”
Commentary
This sonnet is certainly the most famous in the sequence of
Shakespeare’s sonnets; it may be the most famous lyric poem in
English. Among Shakespeare’s works, only lines such as “To be or not
to be” and “Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?” are better-
known. This is not to say that it is at all the best or most interesting or
most beautiful of the sonnets; but the simplicity and loveliness of its
praise of the beloved has guaranteed its place.
On the surface, the poem is simply a statement of praise about the
beauty of the beloved; summer tends to unpleasant extremes of
windiness and heat, but the beloved is always mild and temperate.
Summer is incidentally personified as the “eye of heaven” with its
“gold complexion”; the imagery throughout is simple and unaffected,
with the “darling buds of May” giving way to the “eternal summer”,
which the speaker promises the beloved. The language, too, is
comparatively unadorned for the sonnets; it is not heavy with
alliteration or assonance, and nearly every line is its own self-
5
contained clause—almost every line ends with some punctuation,
which effects a pause.
Sonnet 18 is the first poem in the sonnets not to explicitly encourage
the young man to have children. The “procreation” sequence of the
first 17 sonnets ended with the speaker’s realization that the young
man might not need children to preserve his beauty; he could also live,
the speaker writes at the end of Sonnet 17, “in my rhyme.” Sonnet 18,
then, is the first “rhyme”—the speaker’s first attempt to preserve the
young man’s beauty for all time. An important theme of the sonnet (as
it is an important theme throughout much of the sequence) is the
power of the speaker’s poem to defy time and last forever, carrying
the beauty of the beloved down to future generations. The beloved’s
“eternal summer” shall not fade precisely because it is embodied in the
sonnet: “So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,” the speaker
writes in the couplet, “So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.”
6
3.A Bird, came down the Walk
BY EMILY DICKINSON
A Bird, came down the Walk -
He did not know I saw -
He bit an Angle Worm in halves
And ate the fellow, raw,
8
emblem for the quick, lively, ungraspable wild essence that distances
nature from the human beings who desire to appropriate or tame it.
But the most remarkable feature of this poem is the imagery of its
final stanza, in which Dickinson provides one of the most breath-
taking descriptions of flying in all of poetry. Simply by offering two
quick comparisons of flight and by using aquatic motion (rowing and
swimming), she evokes the delicacy and fluidity of moving through air.
The image of butterflies leaping “off Banks of Noon,” splashlessly
swimming though the sky, is one of the most memorable in all
Dickinson’s writing.
9
William Blake
4.The Tyger
Tyger! Tyger, burning bright,
In the forests of the night;
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
11
The poem is comprised of six quatrains in rhymed couplets. The meter
is regular and rhythmic, its hammering beat suggestive of the smithy
that is the poem’s central image. The simplicity and neat proportions
of the poems form perfectly suit its regular structure, in which a string
of questions all contribute to the articulation of a single, central idea.
Commentary
The opening question enacts what will be the single dramatic gesture
of the poem, and each subsequent stanza elaborates on this conception.
Blake is building on the conventional idea that nature, like a work of
art, must in some way contain a reflection of its creator. The tiger is
strikingly beautiful yet also horrific in its capacity for violence. What
kind of a God, then, could or would design such a terrifying beast as
the tiger? In more general terms, what does the undeniable existence
of evil and violence in the world tell us about the nature of God, and
what does it mean to live in a world where a being can at once contain
both beauty and horror?
The tiger initially appears as a strikingly sensuous image. However, as
the poem progresses, it takes on a symbolic character, and comes to
embody the spiritual and moral problem the poem explores: perfectly
beautiful and yet perfectly destructive, Blake’s tiger becomes the
symbolic center for an investigation into the presence of evil in the
world. Since the tiger’s remarkable nature exists both in physical and
moral terms, the speaker’s questions about its origin must also
encompass both physical and moral dimensions. The poem’s series of
12
questions repeatedly ask what sort of physical creative capacity the
“fearful symmetry” of the tiger bespeaks; assumedly only a very
strong and powerful being could be capable of such a creation.
13
The reference to the lamb in the penultimate stanza reminds the
reader that a tiger and a lamb have been created by the same God,
and raises questions about the implications of this. It also invites a
contrast between the perspectives of “experience” and “innocence”
represented here and in the poem “The Lamb.” “The Tyger” consists
entirely of unanswered questions, and the poet leaves us to awe at the
complexity of creation, the sheer magnitude of God’s power, and the
inscrutability of divine will. The perspective of experience in this poem
involves a sophisticated acknowledgment of what is unexplainable in
the universe, presenting evil as the prime example of something that
cannot be denied, but will not withstand facile explanation, either. The
open awe of “The Tyger” contrasts with the easy confidence, in “The
Lamb,” of a child’s innocent faith in a benevolent universe.
14
5. Langston Hughes, 1902 - 1967
I, Too
I, too, sing America.
Tomorrow,
I’ll be at the table
When company comes.
Nobody’ll dare
Say to me,
“Eat in the kitchen,"
Then.
Besides,
They’ll see how beautiful I am
And be ashamed—
I, too, am America.
15