demystifying poetry

1. Who is the speaker? What kind of
person is the speaker?
The concept of the persona
the mask
the voice

 Thy belt of straw and ivy buds,
 Thy coral clasps and amber studs,
 All these in me no means can move
 To come to thee and be thy love.

 But could youth last, and love still breed,
 Had joys no date, nor age no need,
 Then these delights my mind might move
 To live with thee and be thy love.

 Sylvia Plath (1932-1963)
 Mirror

 I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.
 Whatever I see I swallow immediately.
 Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike.
 I am not cruel, only truthful--
 The eye of a little god, four-cornered.
 Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall.
 It is pink, with speckles. I have looked at it so long
 I think it is a part of my heart. But it flickers.
 Faces and darkness separate us over and over.

 Now I am lake. A woman bends over me,
 Searching my reaches for what she really is.
 Then she turns to those liars, the candles or the
moon.
 I see her back, and reflect it faithfully.
 She rewards me with tears and an agitation of
hands.
 I am important to her. She comes and goes.
 Each morning it is her face that replaces the
darkness.
 In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me
an old woman
 Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible
fish.

 2. Is there an identifiable audience for the speaker?

John Frederick Nims
 Love Poem

 My clumsiest dear, whose hands shipwrecked vases,
 At whose quick touch all glasses chip and ring,
 Whose hands are bulls in china, burrs in linen,
 And have no cunning with any soft thing

 Except all ill at ease fidgeting people:
 The refugee uncertain at the door
 You make at home; deftly you steady
 The drunk clambering on his undulant floor.

 Unpredictable dear, the taxi driver’s terror,
 Shrinking from far headlights pale as a dime
 Yet leaping before red apoplectic streetcars—
 Misfit in any space. And never on time.

 A wrench in clocks and the solar system. Only
 With words and people and love you move at ease.
 In traffic of wit expertly maneuver
 And keep us, all devotion, at your knees.

 Forgetting your coffee spreading on our flannel,
 Your lipstick grinning on our coat,
 So gaily in love’s unbearable heaven
 Our souls on glory of spilt bourbon float.

 Be with me darling early and late. Smash glasses—
 I will study wry music for your sake.
 For should your hands drop white and empty
 All the toys of the world would break.

 My Funny Valentine

 My Funny Valentine,
 Sweet, Comic Valentine,
 You make me smile in my heart.
 Your looks are laughable
 Un-photographable
 Yet you’re my favorite work of art.


 Jennings, Elizabeth (1926- )
 Absence

 I visited the place where we last met.
 Nothing was changed, the gardens were well-tended,
 The fountains sprayed their usual steady jet;
 There was no sign that anything had ended
 And nothing to instruct me to forget.

 The thoughtless birds that shook out of the trees,
 Singing an ecstasy I could not share,
 Played cunning in my thoughts. Surely in these
 Pleasures there could not be a pain to bear
 Or any discord shake the level breeze

 It was because the place was just the same
 That made your absence seem a savage force,
 For under all the gentleness there came
 An earthquake tremor: fountain, birds and grass
 Were shaken by my thinking of your name.

 Pagkawala
 (hubad sa balak ni Elizabeth Jennings nga “Absence”)

 Gibisita nako ang lugar diin kataposan tang nagkita.
 Way kausaban, ang mga tanom maayo ra pagkaatiman.
 Makanunayon gihapon ang pagpasirit sa mga fountain.
 Way sinyales nga dunay natapos aning lugara.
 Ug way nagmando nako nga molimot.

 Ang mga way hanawng langgam nga nanukad sa mga kahoy,
 Nga gahuni’g himaya nga di nako mahimo’ng iambit,
 Abtik nga giduwaan akong hunahuna. Sigurado gyud nga ‘ning
 Gagmayng kalingawan, way angay’ng antoson nga kasakit
 O kaha kagubot nga makapatay-og sa huyohoy.

 Tungod kay way maskin unsang nausab ‘ning lugara,
 Mas nabati na nuon nako ang gibug-aton sa imong pagkawala.
 Kay taliwa sa kalinaw ug kahapsay, miabot
 Ang dakong linog: ang fountain, ang mga langgam, ug ang sagbot
 Kay gipang-uyog sa akong paghunahuna sa imong ngalan.

 Gratian Paul R. Tidor
 Iligan City, Philippines
 Jan. 30, 2012

 Herrick, Robert (1591-1674)
 To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time

 Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,
 Old time is still a-flying;
 And this same flower that smiles today
 Tomorrow will be dying.


 Donne, John (1573-1631)
 Sonnet 14, from The Holy Sonnet

 Batter my heart, three-personed God; for You
 As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
 That I may rise and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend
 Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.

 Donne, John (1573-1631)
 Sonnet 10, from The Holy Sonnets

 Death, be not proud, though some have called thee
 Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so;
 For those whom thou think’st thou dost overthrow
 Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me.


 3. What is the occasion?

 Hopkins, Gerald Manly (1844-1889)
 Spring and Fall: To a young Child
 Margaret, are you grieving
 Over Goldengrove unleaving?
 Leaves, like the things of man, you
 With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
 Ah, as the heart grows older
 It will come to such colder
 By and by, nor spare a sigh
 Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
 And yet you will weep and know why.
 Now no matter, child, the name:
 Sorrow’s springs are the same.
 Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
 What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
 It is the blight man was born for,
 It is Margaret you mourn for.

 Frost, Robert (1875-1963)
 Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
 Whose woods these are I think I know.
 His house is in the village though;
 He will not see me stopping here
 To watch his woods fill up with snow.

 My little horse must think it queer
 To stop without a farmhouse near
 Between the woods and frozen lake
 The darkest evening of the year.

 He gives his harness bells a shake
 To ask if there is some mistake.
 The only other sound’s the sweep
 Of easy wind and downy flake.

 The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
 But I have promises to keep,
 And miles to go before I sleep,
 And miles to go before I sleep.


 4. What is the setting in time (hour, season, century, and so on)?

 HARDY, THOMAS (1840-1928)
 The Darkling Thrush
 I leant upon a coppice gate
 When Frost was specter- gray,
 And Winter’s dregs made desolate
 The weakening eye of day.
 The tangled bine- stems scored the sky
 Like strings of broken lyres.
 And all mankind that hunted nigh
 Had sought their household fires.

 The land’s sharp features seemed to be
 The century’s corpse outleant,
 His crypt the cloudy canopy,
 The wind his death- lament.
 The ancient pulse of germ and birth
 Was shrunken hard and dry,
 And every spirit upon earth
 Seemed fervorless as I.

 At once a voice arose among
 The black twigs overhead
 In a full- hearted evensong
 Of joy illimited;
 An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,
 In blast-beruffled plume,
 Had chosen thus to fling his soul
 Upon the growing gloom.

 So little cause for carolings
 Of such ecstatic sound
 Was written on terrestrial things
 Afar or nigh around,
 That I could think there trembled through
 His happy goodnight air
 Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew
 And I was unaware.
December 31, 1900

 Yeats, William Butler (1865-1939)
The Wild Swans at Coole
 The trees are in their autumn beauty,
 The woodland paths are dry,
 Under the October twilight the water
 Mirrors a still sky;
 Upon the brimming water among the stones
 Are nine-and-fifty swans.


 5. What is the setting in place (indoors or out, city or
country, land or sea, region, country, hemisphere)?

 Nims, John Frederick
 Love Poem

 A wrench in clocks and the solar system. Only
 With words and people and love you move at ease.
 In traffic of wit expertly maneuver
 And keep us, all devotion, at your knees.

 Forgetting your coffee spreading on our flannel,
 Your lipstick grinning on our coat,
 So gaily in love’s unbearable heaven
 Our souls on glory of spilt bourbon float.

 Be with me darling early and late. Smash glasses—
 I will study wry music for your sake.
 For should your hands drop white and empty
 All the toys of the world would break.

 Kumin, Maxine (1925-- )
 After Love
 Afterwards, the compromise.
 Bodies resume their boundaries.

 These legs, for instance, mine.
 Your arms take you back in.

 Spoons of our fingers, lips
 admit their ownership.

 The bedding yawns, a door
 blows aimlessly ajar

 and overhead, a plane
 singsongs coming down.

 Nothing is changed, except
 there was a moment when

 the wolf, the mongering wolf
 who stands outside the self

 lay lightly down, and slept.

 Mirror
 I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.
 Whatever I see I swallow immediately.
 Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike.
 I am not cruel, only truthful--
 The eye of a little god, four-cornered.
 Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall.
 It is pink, with speckles. I have looked at it so long
 I think it is a part of my heart. But it flickers.
 Faces and darkness separate us over and over.

 Richard Wilbur (1921--)
 A Late Aubade

 …Think what a lot

 Of time, by woman’s reckoning,
 You’ve saved, and so may spend on this,
 You who had rather lie in bed and kiss
 Than anything.

 It’s almost noon, you say? If so,
 Time flies, and I need not rehearse
 The rosebuds theme of centuries of verse.
 If you must go,

 Wait for a while, then slip downstairs
 And bring us up some chilled white wine,
 And some blue cheese, and crackers, and some fine
 Ruddy-skinned pears.

 6. What is the central purpose of the poem?

 Marlowe, Christopher (1564-1593)
 The Passionate Shepherd to His love
 Mirror
 Love Poem
 The Wild Swans at Coole

 State the central idea or theme of the poem in a
sentence.

 Theme is the central or dominant idea in a literary work.
In poetry, fiction and drama, it is the abstract concept
which is made concrete through its representation in
person, action and image in the work. For example, the
theme of Paradise Lost, according to its author John
Milton, is “to assert Eternal Providence,/ And justify the
ways of God to men.” The equivalent of what we call the
thesis in a nonliterary work, the theme is stated in a
declarative sentence, usually ironic or paradoxical, and
always universally true. For example, “All that glitters is
not gold.” (Dili tanan gasidlak bulawan.) This could be the
theme of a poem like “Richard Cory” by E.A. Robinson.


 Marlowe, Christopher (1564-1593)
The Passionate Shepherd to His love
Mirror
Love Poem
The Darkling Thrush
The Wild Swans at Coole

 8. What is the tone of the poem? How is it
achieved?

 “The tone of a speech can be formal or
intimate, outspoken or reticent, abstruse or
simple, solemn or playful, arrogant or
prayerful, angry or loving, serious or ironic,
condescending or obsequious, and so on
through numberless possible nuances of
attitude and relationship.” (M.H. Abrams: A
Glossary of Literary Terms, 3rd ed.)


 Tone is the "writer's or speaker's attitude toward
his subject, his audience, or himself. It is the
emotional coloring, or the emotional meaning, of
the work and is an extremely important part of
the full meaning." In actual speech, there are
many ways of saying "No" depending on what you
mean; or a "No" may mean "Yes" if a woman
could say it more subtly. In literature, a reader
has not fully understood a poem until he/she has
sensed what the tone is. It is easy to
misunderstand what W.H. Auden is really saying
in "The Unknown Citizen" if the reader misses
the ironic tone of this poem. Or, for that matter,
Jonathan Swift's essay "A Modest Proposal."

 Some of the adjectives used to describe tone
are: playful, solemn, mocking, reverent,
calm, excited, affectionate, hostile, earnest,
flippant and sarcastic.
 The tone of actual speech is easy to
determine because of the inflections used by
the speaker, but it is not always so on a
printed page. Without the speaker speaking
to us, how do we determine what the
attitude of the speaker and/or the author is
toward the subject?

 X. J. Kennedy, in his An Introduction to Poetry, has a
brilliant answer:
 Strictly speaking, tone isn't attitude; it is whatever in
the poem makes an attitude clear to us: the choice of
certain words instead of others, the picking out of
certain details. In Housman's "Loveliest of Trees," for
example, the poet communicates his admiration for a
cherry tree's beauty by singling out for attention its
white blossoms; had he wanted to show his dislike for
the tree, he might have concentrated on its broken
branches, birdlime, or snail.
 Perrine adds that:
 Almost all the elements of poetry help to indicate its
tone: connotation, imagery, and metaphor; irony and
understatement; rhythm, sentence construction, and
formal pattern….It is an end product of all the elements
in a poem.

 9. a. Outline the poem so as to show its structure and development, or
 b. Summarize the events of the poem.

 Shakespeare, William (1564-1616)
 Sonnet 29
 When, in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes,
 I all alone beweep my outcast state,
 And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
 And look upon myself, and curse my fate,
 Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
 Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,
 Desiring this man's art and that man's scope,
 With what I most enjoy contented least;
 Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,
 Haply I think on thee--and then my state,
 Like to the lark at break of day arising
 From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven's gate;
 For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings
 That then I scorn to change my state with kings.

 Not all Shakespeare’s sonnets (154 of them)
were written as Shakespearean or English
sonnet. Sonnet 29 in particular is written as a
Petrarchan or Italian sonnet. Notice that
according to the structure of the Petrarchan
sonnet, it is divided into two groups: the first
eight lines are called the octet/octave, and the
last six lines are called the sestet.
 But Sonnet 73 is Shakespearean. Its structure is
made up of three quatrains (one quatrain has
four lines) and a concluding rhyming couplet.


 Sonnet 73
 That time of year thou mayst in me behold
 When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
 Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
 Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
 In me thou see'st the twilight of such day
 As after sunset fadeth in the west;
 Which by and by black night doth take away,
 Death's second self, that seals up all in rest.
 In me thou see'st the glowing of such fire,
 That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
 As the deathbed whereon it must expire,
 Consumed with that which it was nourished by.
 This thou perceiv'st which makes thy love more strong,
 To love that well which thou must leave ere long.


 Because these two sonnets are pure lyric
poems, nothing external really happens. The
discourse is unadulterated mental
cogitations, pure thoughts and feelings. It
does not tell you whether it is indoors or
outdoors, what time of day, what year or
season, whether the speaker is in the garden
or in his room, etc.

 But look again at “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”
by Robert Frost: It is a lyric poem with a clear narrative
element so it is possible to write a summary of what
happens in it: A man, riding on a horse-driven cart, is
stopping by the woods in order to watch the snow falling
on the trees. He observes that his horse is shaking its
head, probably because the horse is asking if the master
has made a mistake in stopping at such a cold place at the
time of the year when it is extremely cold. He hears three
sounds: the bells on the harness of the horse, the sound of
the wind and the sound of soft snow falling. He wants to
stay longer at the place because he is enjoying the scenery
and probably the isolation of the place. The woods are
lovely. (Such austere beauty has a certain attraction to
people who do not want crowded places.) But the man has
to move on because he has miles to go before sleeping
time, and the woods are “dark and deep.”

 10. Paraphrase the poem.

 “When down on my luck and with people set against
me, all alone I lament my lot as an outcast: but I
reproach heaven in vain with my laments, looking
upon myself and cursing my fate. I wish myself like
one with more hope in life, like him in looks and
surrounded by friends; I find myself envying this
man’s art and that man’s range, least contented with
what I most enjoy. In this mood almost despising
myself, I happen to think of you: and then, like the
lark rising at dawn from sullen earth, I chant hymns
to heaven. For thinking of your love brings such
wealth to mind that then I change my state with
kings.” (A.L. Rowse, Shakespeare’s Sonnets)


 11. Discuss the diction of the poem. Point out words that are
particularly well chosen and explain why.

 Edmund Spenser (1552?-1599)
 Sonnet 75, from Amoretti
 One day I wrote her name upon the strand,
 But came the waves and washed it away.
 Agayne I wrote it with a second hand,
 But came the tyde, and made my paynes his pray.
 "Vayne man," sayd she, "that doest in vaine assay,
 A mortall thing so to immortalize,
 For I my selve shall lyke to this decay,
 And eek my name bee wiped out likewise."
 "Not so," quod I, "let baser things devize
 To dy in dust, but you shall live by fame:
 My verse your virtues rare shall eternize,
 And in the heavens wryte your glorious name.
 Where whenas death shall all the world subdew,
 Our love shall live, and later life renew."

 Agayne, tyde, paynes, vayne, sayd, doest, vaine,
assay, mortall, selve, lyke, eek, quod I, devize,
dy, wryte, whenas, subdew—these words are
either archaic words, or words with archaic
spelling. The poem was written in the 16th
century, 500 years ago, at the time of Queen
Elizabeth I, when the spelling of English words
has not yet been standardized.

 Compare the diction with that of Richard
Wilbur’s poem “A Late Aubade.” See how very
contemporary the words are, how easily we
recognize them, how colloquial in tone.

 Emily Dickinson’s “A Narrow Fellow in the Grass” uses a diction
that is particularly well-chosen when she describes the feeling of
a sudden encounter with a snake.

 Several of nature’s people
 I know, and they know me;
 I feel for them a transport
 Of cordiality;

 But never met this fellow,
 Attended or alone,
 Without a tighter breathing,
 And zero at the bone.

 No poet has described the feeling of fear as well as
Dickinson has in the last two lines of this poem. “…a tighter
breathing,/And zero at the bone.”

 Richard Wilbur (1921--)
 A Late Aubade

 It’s almost noon, you say? If so,
 Time flies, and I need not rehearse
 The rosebuds theme of centuries of verse.
 If you must go,

 Wait for a while, then slip downstairs
 And bring us up some chilled white wine,
 And some blue cheese, and crackers, and some
fine
 Ruddy-skinned pears.

 12. Discuss the imagery of the poem.
What kinds of imagery are used? Is there
a structure of imagery?
 Let’s go back to Thomas Hardy’s “The
Darkling Thrush.”

 I leant upon a coppice gate
 When Frost was specter- gray,
 And Winter’s dregs made desolate
 The weakening eye of day.
 The tangled bine- stems scored the sky
 And all mankind that hunted nigh
 Had sought their household fires.

 The land’s sharp features seemed to be
 The century’s corpse outleant,
 His crypt the cloudy canopy,
 The wind his death- lament.
 The ancient pulse of germ and birth
 Was shrunken hard and dry,
 And every spirit upon earth
 Seemed fervorless as I.

 At once a voice arose among
 The black twigs overhead
 In a full- hearted evensong
 Of joy illimited;
 An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,
 In blast-beruffled plume,
 Had chosen thus to fling his soul
 Upon the growing gloom.

 So little cause for carolings
 Of such ecstatic sound
 Was written on terrestrial things
 Afar or nigh around,
 That I could think there trembled through
 His happy goodnight air
 Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew
 And I was unaware.
 December 31, 1900

 Imagery--is any object in the poem that can
be apprehended by the senses. Thus, there
are usually five types:
 a. visual imagery--objects that can be
apprehended by the sense of sight
 b. auditory imagery--those that can be
apprehended by the sense of hearing
 c. olfactory imagery--those that can be
apprehended by the sense of smell
 d. tactile imagery--those that can be
apprehended by the sense of touch
 e. gustatory imagery--those that can be
apprehended by the sense of taste

 Other types may include organic imagery,
internal sensations such as hunger, thirst,
fatigue, or nausea; and kinesthetic imagery like
"the movement or tension in the muscles or
joints." A special kind of imagery is called
synesthetic, that image which combines two or
more imagery in one phrase such as "loud red" or
"screaming red," where the visual and the
auditory senses are combined.
 Probably the most memorable haiku ever
written is the one by Basho, and the imagery
seizes the imagination and stays there forever:
 Into the old pond
 A frog suddenly plunges.
 The sound of water.

 In Anglo-American poetry, Ezra Pound, who
was influenced by Chinese and Japanese
poetry, and was the founder of a poetic
movement called Imagism, wrote a haiku-like
couplet:
 The apparition of these faces in a crowd,
 Petals on a wet, black bough.

 My favorite example of imagery comes from
the concluding stanza of Wallace Stevens’s
“Sunday Morning:”

 Deer walk upon our mountains, and the
quail
Whistle about us their spontaneous cries;
Sweet berries ripen in the wilderness;
And, in the isolation of the sky,
At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make
Ambiguous undulations as they sink,
Downward to darkness, on extended wings.

 But these lines may have been influenced by another poem, some
hundred years earlier in John Keats’s “To Autumn:”

 Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
 Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,--
 While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
 And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue:
 Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
 Among the river-sallows, borne aloft
 Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
 And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
 Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
 The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;
 And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.


 13. Point out examples of metaphor,
simile, personification, and metonymy,
and explain their appropriateness.

 A. The tangled bine- stems scored the sky

 B. Which by and by black night doth take
away,
 Death's second self, that seals up all in
rest.


 Sonnet 116
 Let me not to the marriage of true minds
 Admit impediments: love is not love
 Which alters when it alteration finds,
 Or bends with the remover to remove.
 O, no! it is an ever-fixéd mark
 That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
 It is the star to every wondering bark,
 Whose worth's unknown, although his height be
taken.
 Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
 Within his bending sickle's compass come;
 Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
 But bears it out even to the edge of doom:
 If this be error and upon me proved,
 I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

 In this famous sonnet by Shakespeare, we
have figures of speech galore. Love is
metaphorized as “an ever-fixéd mark that
looks on tempests and is never shaken,” and
as a “star to every wandering bark.” Time is
personified as a man with a sickle, but Love
lies outside its compass though lovers, aptly
represented by the synechdoche of “rosy lips
and cheeks,” are the fools of time.

 14. Point out and explain any symbols. If
the poem is allegorical, explain the
allegory.

 Symbol is something that stands for
something else, like the flag is a piece of
cloth with a certain design but it stands for a
country. In Dylan Thomas's poem "Do Not Go
Gentle into That Good Night," the term "good
night" is a symbol of death.

 Dylan Thomas (1914-1953)
 Do Not Go Gentle into That Goodnight (1952)
 Do not go gentle into that good night.
 Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
 Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

 Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
 Because their words had forked no lighting they
 Do not go gentle into that good night,

 Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
 Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,


 Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
 And learn, too late, they grieved it in its way,
 Do not go gentle into that good night.

 Grave men, near death, who see its blinding sight
 Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,

 And you, my father, there on the sad height,
 Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray,
 Do not go gentle into that good night,

 Archibald MacLeish demonstrates the use of
symbol in "Ars Poetica" in the following lines:
 For all the history of grief
 An empty doorway and a maple leaf.

 For love
 The leaning grasses and two lights above the
sea.

 Laurence Perrine makes a distinction between image,
metaphor and symbol. Here is what he says:
 …an image means only what it is; the figurative term in a
metaphor means something other than what it is; and a
symbol means what it is and something more, too. A
symbol, that is, functions literally and figuratively at the
same time. If I say that a shaggy brown dog was rubbing its
back against a white picket fence, I am talking about
nothing but a dog (and a picket fence) and am therefore
presenting an image. If I say, "Some dirty dog stole my
wallet at the party," I am not talking about a dog at all and
am therefore using a metaphor. But if I say, "You
can't teach an old dog new tricks," I am talking not only
about dogs but about living creatures of any species and
am therefore speaking symbolically. Images, of course, do
not cease to be images when they become incorporated in
metaphors and symbols.

 15. Point out and explain examples of paradox,
overstatement, understatement, and irony. What is their
function?

 Paradox is either a situation or a statement that contains
an apparent contradiction but is nevertheless true, or, at least,
has a grain of truth. That the Philippines is a Catholic country
and at the same time is listed as the number two most corrupt
country in the world is indeed a paradoxical situation. This is
illustrated in a sign at one airport: The Philippines is the only
Catholic country in Asia. Beware of pickpockets. A paradoxical
statement, or a verbal paradox, is found in Alexander Pope's
statement about a literary critic who would "damn with a faint
praise." How could one damn by praising? It is said that some
statements in the Sermon on the Mount are paradoxical. For
instance, Blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the earth.
Or Blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the kingdom of God.
He who is first shall be last, and the last shall be first. If
somebody throws stones at you, throw him bread.

 Overstatement, or hyperbole, is exaggeration for emphasis
or "in the service of truth." Some examples from common
speech are: "I'm starved!" "You could have knocked me over
with a feather!" "I'll die if I don't pass this course!" "I
almost died laughing!" From poetry we have Tennyson's
line from the poem "The Eagle:" "Close to the sun in lonely
lands." It appears to be literally true, but the sun is 93
million miles away from the earth. In his poem "I
Wandered Lonely as a Cloud," Wordsworth describes the
daffodils as stretching "in never-ending line/ Along the
margin of a bay." Visually, it appears to be true to the
observer, but there is, in reality, no such thing as "never-
ending line," as every line has to stop somewhere.
Probably the best example of poetic overstatement is
found in Andrew Marvel's "To His Coy Mistress." In
expressing his idea of perseverance in courting the woman,
the speaker says that if there were enough time he would
love her as long as time itself:

 My vegetable love should grow
 Vaster than empires, and more slow;
 An hundred years should go to praise
 Thine eyes, and on thy forehead gaze;
 Two hundred to adore each breast,
 But thirty thousand to the rest;

 Understatement is saying less than what you
mean. Somebody referred to the Atlantic
Ocean as "the drink," or the Deluge as "the
pond," or the Sahara Desert as being "made
of fine sand." Describing a loaded dinner
plate as "a nice snack" is also an
understatement. When Rizal was asked if he
spoke Spanish, he said "a little." That seems
like an understatement from someone who
lived and studied in Spain and who wrote his
novels in Spanish.

 Irony involves a discrepancy between what is
and what is not. It is verbal irony if what is
said is not exactly what is meant. So if I call
you Einstein and I know that the only
mathematics that you know is the
mathematics of jai-alai, I mean to be ironic
and sarcastic. Or if I refer to somebody as
looking like Pierce Brosnan and you know
that he has a face only his mother could
love, you know that I am being ironic and
sarcastic. But irony is not always sarcasm.
Perrine gives a fine distinction between
irony, sarcasm and satire:

 Sarcasm and satire both imply ridicule, one on the
colloquial level, the other on the literary level.
Sarcasm is simply bitter or cutting speech, intended
to wound the feelings…Satire is a more formal term,
usually applied to written literature rather than to
speech and ordinarily implying a higher motive: it is
ridicule (either bitter or gentle) of human folly or
vice, with the purpose of bring about reform or at
least of keeping other people from falling into similar
folly or vice. Irony, on the other hand, is a literary
device or figure that may be used in the service of
sarcasm and satire because it is so often used as their
tool; but irony may be used without either sarcastic
or satirical intent, and sarcasm and satire may exist
(though they do not usually) without
irony….Sarcasm… is cruel, as a bully is cruel; it
intends to give hurt. Satire is both cruel and kind, as
a surgeon is cruel and kind: it gives hurt in the
interest of the patient or of society. Irony is neither
cruel nor kind: it is simply a device, like a surgeon's
scalpel, for performing any operation more skillfully.

 Textbook writers like Perrine always give
three kinds of irony: verbal irony, dramatic
irony and irony of situation. Dramatic irony
occurs when there is a discrepancy between
appearance and reality; irony of situation
when the discrepancy is between what is
expected and what actually happens. As a
more limited term though, dramatic irony is

 the discrepancy not between what the
speaker says and what the speaker means
but between what the speaker says and what
the author means. The speaker's words may
be perfectly straightforward, but the author,
by putting those words in a particular
speaker's mouth, may be indicating to the
reader ideas or attitudes quite opposed to
those the speaker is voicing.


 This kind of irony is best illustrated in
dramatic monologues such as Robert
Browning's "My Last Duchess."
 Still a more specific use of this term is in
Greek drama where the audience seems to
know more than the characters. For
example, we know who killed Laois but
Oedipus does not know until much later in
the play.

 The third kind of irony, irony of situation,
happens when there is a discrepancy between
expectation and actual circumstances, between
what one anticipates and what really happens.
Some famous examples of this are the O. Henry
short story "The Gift of the Magi," the fable
about King Midas who wished that everything he
touched would turn to gold, and Samuel Taylor
Coleridge's "Rime of the Ancient Mariner," where
the sailors were surrounded by water but there
was not a "drop to drink." In poetry, the best
examples come from Percy Bysshe Shelley's
"Ozymandias" and E. A. Robinson's "Richard
Cory."

 Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)
 Ozymandias
 I met a traveler from an antique lam, on the sand,
 Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
 Stand in the desert…Near them, on the sand,
 Half-sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
 And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
 Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
 Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
 The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:
 And on the pedestal these words appear:
 “My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
 Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
 Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
 Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
 The lone and level sands stretched far away.

 Edwin Arlington Robinson (1896-1935)
 Richard Cory (1897)
 Whenever Richard Cory went down town,
 We people on the pavement looked at him:
 He was a gentleman from sole to crown,
 Clean favored, and imperially slim.

 And he was always quietly arrayed,
 And he was always human when he talked;
 But still he fluttered pulses when he said,
 “Good morning,” and he glittered when he
walked.

 And he was rich- yes richer than a king,
 And admirably schooled in every grace:
 In fine, we thought that he was everything
 To make us wish that we were in his place.

 So on we worked, and waited for the light,
 And went without the meat, and cursed the
bread:
 And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,
 Went home and put a bullet through his
head.

demystifying poetry

More Related Content

What's hot (19)

Similar to demystifying poetry (20)

Recently uploaded (20)

demystifying poetry