MATERIAL FOR WORK IS UPLOADED 1.) “Select THREE central images in Alexie’s “Evolution.” In one 150-word paragraph per image, describe Alexie’s choice of language in crafting these images and why his word choice is vital to the poem’s larger theme of syst

20180430041228unit_3_read

MATERIAL FOR WORK IS UPLOADED

1.) “Select THREE central images in Alexie’s “Evolution.” In one 150-word paragraph per image, describe Alexie’s choice of language in crafting these images and why his word choice is vital to the poem’s larger theme of systematic Native American degradation. Your response must include at least one scholarly source. Be sure to properly cite.

2.) In 400 words explain your reaction to how Alarcón chose to structure his poem, “Mexican is Not a Noun.” Pay close attention to Alarcón’s word choice, word order, line breaks and use of stanzas. Hint: you might choose to discuss the impact/effect of such short lines and stanzas. Your response must include at least one scholarly source. Be sure to properly cite.

3.) “In 400 words explain your reaction to the imagery in Williams’ poem, “Red Wheelbarrow.” Questions to consider in your response: Why does Williams use the phrase “so much depends?” What does the speaker mean by saying that? Hint: pay close attention to the central images in this poem. What do they represent? What words does Williams choose to describe the images? Your response must include at least one scholarly source. Be sure to properly cite.

486

CHAPTER 1

UNDERSTANDING POETRY

MARIANNE MOORE (1887–1972)

Poetry (1921)

I, too, dislike it: there are things that are
important beyond all this �ddle

Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt
for it, on

discovers in it after all, a place for the genuine.
Hands that can grasp, ey

that can dilate, hair that can rise

if it must, these things are important not
because a

high-sounding interpretation can be put upon them but because
they are useful. When they become so derivative as to become
unintelligible, the same thing may be said for all of us, that we
do not admire what
we cannot understand: the bat

holding on upside down or in quest of something to

eat, elephants pushing, a wild horse taking a roll, a tireless wolf under
a tree, the immovable critic twitching his skin like a horse that
feels a �ea, the base-

ball fan, the statistician—
nor is it valid

to discriminate against “business documents and
school-books”;1 all these phenomena are important. One must

make a distinctio

Th
e

G
ra

ng
er

C
ol

le
ct

io
n,

N
YC

●●

1“business documents and school-books”: Moore quotes the “business documents and school-books”: Moore quotes the “business documents and school-books”: Diaries of Tolstoy (New York, 1917): “Where Diaries of Tolstoy (New York, 1917): “Where Diaries of Tolsto

the boundary between prose and poetry lies, I shall never be able to understand .… Poetry is verse; prose
is not verse . Or else poetry is everything with the exception of business documents and school books .”

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Wagner: How to Read a Poem: Beginner’s Manual 487

however: when dragged into prominence by half poets, the
result is not poetry,

nor till the poets among us can be
“literalists of
the imagination”2—above

insolence and triviality and can present

for inspection, “imaginary gardens with real toads in them,”3

shall we have
it. In the meantime, if you demand on the one hand,
the raw material of poetry in

all its rawness and
that which is on the other hand

genuine, you are interested in poetry.

PAMELA SPIRO WAGNER (1952– )

How to Read a Poem:
Beginner’s Manual*

First, forget everything you have learned,
that poetry is dif�cult,
that it cannot be appreciated by the likes of you,
with your high school equivalency diploma,
your steel-tipped boots,
or your white-collar misunderstandings.

Do not assume meanings hidden from you:
the best poems mean what they say and say it.

read

poetry requires only courage
enough to leap from the edge
and trust.

5
10
●●

2”literalists of the imagination”: A reference (given by Moore) to W: A reference (given by Moore) to W: . B . Yeats’s “William Blake and His
Illustrations” (in Ideas of Good and Evil, 1903): “The limitation of his view was from the very intensity of Ideas of Good and Evil, 1903): “The limitation of his view was from the very intensity of Ideas of Good and Evil
his vision; he was a too literal realist of the imagination as others are of nature; and because he believed
that the figures seen by the mind’s eye, when exalted by inspiration, were ‘external existences,’ symbols of
divine essences, he hated every grace of style that might obscure their lineaments .”
3”imaginary gardens with real toads in them”: Moore places these words in quotations, but the source is ”imaginary gardens with real toads in them”: Moore places these words in quotations, but the source is ”imaginary gardens with real toads in them”:
unknown .
*Publication date is unavailable .

9781337509633, PORTABLE Literature: Reading, Reacting, Writing, Ninth edition, Kirszner – © Cengage Learning. All rights reserved. No distribution allowed without express authorization.
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488 Chapter 15 • Understanding Poetry

Treat a poem like dirt,
humus rich and heavy from the garden.
Later it will become the fat tomatoes
and golden squash piled high upon your kitchen table.

Poetry demands surrender,
language saying what is true,
doing holy things to the ordinary.

Read just one poem a day.
Someday a book of poems may open in your hands
like a daffodil offering its cup
to the sun.

When you can name �ve poets
without including Bob Dylan,
when you exceed your quota
and don’t even notice,
close this manual.

Congratulations.
You can now read poetry.

The history of poetry begins where the history of all literature begins—with
the oral tradition, information passed down from one generation to another
by word of mouth. In a time before literacy and the printing press, the oral tra-
dition was relied on as a way of preserving stories, histories, values, and beliefs.
These stories were usually put into the form of rhyming poems, with repeated
words and sounds used to make the poems easier to memorize and remember.

These extended narratives were eventually transcribed as epics—long
poems depicting the actions of heroic �gures who determine the fate of a
nation or of an entire race. Early epics include Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey,
the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Bhagavad Gita, and Virgil’s Aeneid. Early poetry can
also be found in various religious texts, including ancient Hindu holy books
like the Upanishads; sections of the Bible, including the Song of Solomon;
and the Koran.

During the Anglo-Saxon era (late sixth to mid-eleventh centuries),
poetry �ourished as a literary form. Unfortunately, only about 30,000 lines of
poetry survive from this period. Those poems that did survive are marked by
violence, carnage, and heroic deeds as well as Pagan and Christian themes.
The major texts of this time include Beowulf, Beowulf, Beowulf The Battle of Maldon, and The
Dream of the Rood, which is one of the earliest Christian poems. The theme
of Christian morality in poetry continued into the Middle Ages with poems

15
20
25

Origins of Modern Poetry

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Origins of Modern Poetry 489

such as William Langland’s Piers Plowman, which consists of three religious
dream visions, and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, a collection of narrative
poems told by pilgrims as they travel to Canterbury, England. Using a
slightly different approach
to similar subject matter,
Dante Alighieri wrote the
Italian epic poem The Divine
Comedy, which depicts an
imaginary journey through
hell, purgatory, and heaven.
In France, the troubadours,
poets of the Provençal region,
wrote complex lyric poems
about courtly love.

The next major literary
period, the Renaissance (late
fourteenth to mid-sixteenth
centuries), witnessed the
rebirth of science, philosophy,
and the classical arts. Perhaps
the most important writer of
this period was William Shake-
speare. A proli�c poet, Shake-
speare also wrote plays in verse,
continuing in the tradition of
the ancient Greek tragedian
Sophocles and the ancient
Roman playwright Seneca.
Other notable writers of the
Renaissance included Sir Philip
Sidney, Christopher Marlowe,
and Edmund Spenser.

During the seventeenth
century, several literary move-
ments emerged that con-
tributed to poetry’s growing
prevalence and in�uence. John
Milton continued the tradi-
tion of Christian poetry with
his epic Paradise Lost, which
told the tale of Adam and
Eve’s exile from the Garden
of Eden. The metaphysical

Illustration of Trojan horse from Virgil’s Aenied
Source: © Bettman/Corb

Image depicting the pilgrims from Geoffrey Chaucer’s
The Canterbury Tales
Source: Roy 18 D II f .148 Lydgate and the Canterbury Pilgrims Leaving Canterbury from
the ‘Troy Book and the Siege of Thebes’ by John Lydgate (c .1370–c .1451) 1412–22
(vellum) (detail of 8063), English School, (15th century) / British Library, London, UK /
© British Library Board . All Rights Reserved / Bridgeman Images

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490 Chapter 15 • Understanding Poetry

poets (John Donne, Andrew
Marvell, and George Herbert)
used elaborate �gures of speech
and favored intellect over emo-
tions in their writing. Their
poems were characterized by rea-
son, complex comparisons and
allusions, and paradoxes, and
they introduced the meditative
poem (a poem that abstractly
ponders a concept or idea) into
the literary world.

In the early eighteenth cen-
tury, British poets (such as Alex-
ander Pope and Samuel Johnson)
wrote poems, biographies, and
literary criticism. Toward the
end of the eighteenth cen-
tury, the movement known as
Romanticism began. Romantic poetry was marked by heightened emotion
and sentiment; a strong sense of individualism; a fascination with nature, the
Middle Ages, and mysticism; a rebellion against social and political norms;

John Martin’s painting The Bard (1817) The Bard (1817) The Bard
illustrating the mystical view of nature
characteristic of Romanticism
The Bard, c .1817 (oil on canvas), Martin, John (1789–1854) / Yale
Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection, USA / Paul Mellon
Collection / Bridgeman Images

Illuminated manuscript from William
Blake’s “The Tyger”
Source: ©Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge, UK/
Bridgeman Art Library

Illuminated manuscript (fifteenth century) from
Dante’s Divine Comedy depicting Dante and Virgil Divine Comedy depicting Dante and Virgil Divine Comedy
in Hell
Alfredo Dagli Orti/The Art Archive/Corbis

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Origins of Modern Poetry 491

and a return to �rst-person lyric poems.
The early British Romantics included
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William
Wordsworth, and William Blake. This
generation was followed by the later
Romantics, including Percy Bysshe
Shelley, John Keats, and George Gor-
don, Lord Byron. American Romantics
(called transcendentalists) included
Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo
Emerson, and Walt Whitman.

The nineteenth century was marked
by yet another shift in poetic conscious-
ness. This time, poets moved away from
the contemplation of the self within
nature that characterized Romanticism
and returned to a more elevated sense
of rhetoric and subject matter. Notable
British poets included Matthew Arnold, Robert Browning, Elizabeth Barrett
Browning, and Alfred, Lord Tennyson. American poets of the this period
included Edgar Allan Poe, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Emily Dickinson,
and Phillis Wheatley, a slave who became the �rst African American poet.

The twentieth century had perhaps the largest number of literary move-
ments to date, with each one re�ecting its predecessors and in�uencing
future generations of poets. In the early twentieth century, a literary move-
ment that became known as modernism developed. As writers responded to
the increasing complexity of a changing world, the overarching sentiment of
modernism was that the “old ways” would no longer suf�ce in a world that
had changed almost overnight as a result of the rise of industrialization and
urbanization, as well as the devastation of World War I. Key modernist poets
included W. H. Auden, William Butler Yeats, Ezra Pound, and T. S. Eliot,
whose epic poem The Waste Land expressed the fragmentation of conscious-
ness in the modern world.

After World War I, poets began to challenge the prevailing ideas of sub-
ject matter and form. Ezra Pound, along with Amy Lowell and other poets,
founded imagism, a poetic movement that emphasized free verse and the
writer’s response to a visual scene or an object. William Carlos Williams
wrote poems that were often deceptively simple, while the poetry of Wal-
lace Stevens was often opaque and dif�cult to grasp. Dylan Thomas and E.
E. Cummings also experimented with form, with Cummings intentionally
manipulating the accepted constructs of grammar, syntax, and punctuation.

In the 1920s, the United States experienced the Harlem Renaissance.
This rebirth of arts and culture was centered in Harlem, an area in New

Undated engraving illustrating Edgar Allan
Poe’s “The Raven”
Source: ©Bettmann/CORBIS

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492 Chapter 15 • Understanding Poetry

York City where, by the mid-1920s, the African American population had
reached 150,000. Harlem was teeming with creativity, especially in music
(jazz and blues), literature, art, and drama. The poets who were part of the
Harlem Renaissance—including Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, James
Weldon Johnson, and Jean Toomer—chose diverse subject matter and styles,
but they were united in their celebration of African American culture.

In the early 1930s, a group of poets gathered at a college in Black Moun-
tain, North Carolina, with the aim of teaching and writing about poetry in
a new way. The Black Mountain poets, as they were called, stressed the
process of writing poetry rather than the �nished poem. Notable poets in
this group included Robert Creeley, Denise Levertov, and Charles Olson.
Meanwhile, in Latin America, poetry was growing in importance, with poets
such as Pablo Neruda experimenting with subject matter, language, form,
and imagery.

In the late 1940s, in the aftermath of World War II, a group of disil-
lusioned American poets turned to eastern mysticism and newly available
hallucinogenic drugs to achieve higher consciousness. They became known
as the Beat poets, and their work was known for social and political criti-

Cover of the first edition of Howl, published by City Lights Howl, published by City Lights Howl
Books in 1956
1956 by City Light Books

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Origins of Modern Poetry 493

cism that challenged the established norms of the time. These poets included
Allen Ginsberg, whose long poem Howl became an unof�cial anthem of the
revolutionary 1960s, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti.

Up until the late 1950s, subject matter in American poetry was largely
impersonal, concentrating chie�y on symbols, ideas, and politics. This
changed when a group of poets—including Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton, W.
D. Snodgrass, and Sylvia Plath—began to write confessional poems about
their own personal experiences, emotions, triumphs, and tragedies (includ-
ing mental illness and attempted suicide). Although there was considerable
backlash against these poets from writers who thought that such highly per-
sonal subjects were not suitable for poetry, contemporary poets such as Sha-
ron Olds continue to write confessional poetry.

The early 1960s witnessed the rise of the Black Arts Movement, which
had its roots in the ideas of the civil rights struggle, Malcolm X and the
Nation of Islam, and the Black Power Movement. The Black Arts poets
wrote political works that addressed the sociopolitical and cultural context of
African American life. Notable authors in this group included Amiri Baraka,
Gwendolyn Brooks, Jayne Cortez, and Etheridge Knight.

The next major literary movement in poetry had its beginnings in the
mid to late 1980s with slam poetry. Slam poetry, with origins in the oral
tradition, was in�uenced by the Beat poets, who stressed the live perfor-
mance of poems. In a slam, poets compete either individually or in teams
before an audience, which serves as the judge. (The structure of a traditional
poetry slam was created by Marc Smith, a poet and construction worker, in
1986.) Slam poetry is concerned with current events and social and political
themes, and often the winning poet is the one who best combines enthusiasm,

Staceyann Chin, acclaimed slam poet and the star of
Def Poetry Jam on Broadway
Richard Termine/The New York Times/Redux

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494 Chapter 15 • Understanding Poetry

presentation, and attitude with contemporary subject matter. A home base
for slam poetry is the Nyuorican Poets Café in New York City, which has
become a forum for poetry, music, video, and theater. Notable slam poets
past and present include Miguel Piñero, Maggie Estep, Jeffrey McDaniel,
and Bob Holman.

A spinoff of slam poetry is the spoken word movement, which, unlike
slam poetry, is a rehearsed performance. Spoken word performances have
captivated a broad audience due in part to television shows such as HBO’s
Def Poetry Jam (2002–2007). Hip-hop and rap, musical forms whose lyrics
rely heavily on rhyme, alliteration, assonance, consonance, and other poetic
devices, also owe a debt to slam poetry and the spoken word movement.

Contemporary poetry is an extremely diverse genre whose practition-
ers have been in�uenced by many of the literary movements discussed
above. Some contemporary poets embrace narrative poetry; others favor
the lyric. Some write free verse; others experiment with traditional forms
like the sonnet or the villanelle. Still others write concrete poetry, which
uses words as well as varying type sizes and type fonts to form pictures on
a page, or other forms of visual poetry.

With the advent of digital media, new forms of poetry have emerged
that use multimedia elements to create texts. Not just words, but also
sound, images, and video combine to create new poetic forms and new
levels of aesthetic experience. For example, hypertext poetry has links
to other texts (or visuals) that are available electronically. These links
can appear all at once on the screen, or they can be revealed gradually,
creating multiple levels of meaning. Kinetic poetry is a form in which
letters (or words) drift around the screen, gradually coalescing to form
phrases, lines, and possibly entire poems. Interactive poetry depends on
readers contributing content that enhances and possibly determines the
meaning of the poem. Code poetry is programming code expressed as
poetry. The most famous code poem is “Black Perl,” which is written in
Perl programming language. These and other forms of digital poetry use
digital technology to challenge and expand the notion of what poetry is
and should be.

Throughout history and across national and cultural boundaries, poetry has
occupied an important place. In ancient China and Japan, for example,
poetry was prized above all else. One story tells of a samurai warrior who,
when defeated, asked for a pen and paper. Thinking that he wanted to write
a will before being executed, his captor granted his wish. Instead of writing
a will, however, the warrior wrote a farewell poem that so moved his captor
that he immediately released him.

Defining Poetry

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Defining Poetry 4

To the ancient Greeks and Romans, poetry was the medium of spiritual
and philosophical expression. Today, throughout the world, poetry contin-
ues to delight and to inspire. For many people in countless places, poetry is
the language of the emotions, the medium of expression they use when they
speak from the heart.

But what exactly is poetry? Is it, as Pamela Spiro Wagner says, “language
saying what is true / doing holy things to the ordinary” (p. 488)? Or is a poem
simply what Marianne Moore (p. 486) calls “all this �ddle”?

One way of de�ning poetry is to examine how it is different from other
forms of literature, such as �ction or drama. The �rst and most important
element of poetry that distinguishes it from other genres is its form. Unlike
prose, which is written from margin to margin, poetry is made up of indi-
vidual lines. A poetic line begins and ends where the poet chooses: it can
start at the left margin or halfway across the page, and it can end at the right
margin or after only a word or two. A poet chooses when to stop, or break,
the line according to his or her sense of rhythm and meter.

Poets also use the sound of the words themselves, alone and in conjunc-
tion with the other words of the poem, to create a sense of rhythm and
melody. Alliteration (the repetition of initial consonant sounds in consecu-
tive or neighboring words), assonance (the repetition of vowel sounds), and
consonance (the repetition of consonant sounds within words) are three
devices commonly used by poets to help create the music of a poem. Poets
can also use rhyme (either at the ends of lines or within the lines them-
selves), which contributes to the pattern of sounds in a poem.

In addition, poets are more likely than writers of other kinds of literature to
rely on imagery, words or phrases that describe the senses. These vivid descrip-
tions or details help the reader to connect with the poet’s ideas in a tangible
way. Poets also make extensive use of �gurative language, including metaphors
and similes, to convey their ideas and to help their readers access these ideas.

Another way of de�ning poetry is to examine our assumptions about
it. Different readers, different poets, different generations of readers and
poets, and different cultures often have different expectations about
poetry. As a result, they have varying assumptions about what poetry
should be, and these assumptions raise questions. Must poetry be written
to delight or inspire, or can a poem have a political or social message?
Must a poem’s theme be conveyed subtly, embellished with imaginatively
chosen sounds and words, or can it be explicit and straightforward? Such
questions, which have been debated by literary critics as well as by poets
for many years, have no easy answers—and perhaps no answers at all. A
haiku—a short poem, rich in imagery, adhering to a rigid formal struc-
ture—is certainly poetry. To some Western readers, however, a haiku
might seem too plain or understated to be “poetic.” Still, most of these
readers would agree that the following lines qualify as poetry.

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496 Chapter 15 • Understanding Poetry

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE (1564–1616)

That time of year thou mayst in me behold (1609)
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 �re,
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.

This poem includes many of the characteristics that Western readers
commonly associate with poetry. For instance, its lines have a regular pat-
tern of rhyme and meter that identi�es it as a sonnet. The poem also develops
a complex network of related images and �gures of speech that compare the
lost youth of the aging speaker to the sunset and to autumn. Finally, the pair
of rhyming lines at the end of the poem expresses a familiar poetic theme: the
lovers’ realization that they must eventually die makes their love stronger.

Although most readers would classify Shakespeare’s sonnet as a poem,
they might be less certain about the following lines.

E. E. CUMMINGS (1894–1962)

l(a (1923)
l(a
le
af
fa
ll
s)
one
l
iness

5
10
9781337509633, PORTABLE Literature: Reading, Reacting, Writing, Ninth edition, Kirszner – © Cengage Learning. All rights reserved. No distribution allowed without express authorization.
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Recognizing Kinds of Poetry 497

Unlike Shakespeare’s poem, “l(a” does not seem to have any of the
characteristics normally associated with poetry. It has no meter, rhyme, or
imagery. It has no repeated sounds and no �gures of speech. It cannot even
be read aloud because its “lines” are fragments of words. In spite of its odd
appearance, however, “l(a” does communicate a conventional poetic theme.

When reconstructed, the words Cummings broke apart have the fol-
lowing appearance: “l (a leaf falls) one l iness.” In a sense, this poem is a
complex visual and verbal pun. If the parenthetical insertion “(a leaf falls)”
is removed, the remaining letters spell “loneliness.” Moreover, the form of
the letter l in loneliness suggests the number 1—which, in turn, suggests
the loneliness and isolation of the individual, as re�ected in nature (the
single leaf). Like Shakespeare, Cummings uses an image of a leaf to express
his ideas about life and human experience. At the same time, by breaking
words into bits and pieces, Cummings suggests the �exibility of language
and conveys the need to break out of customary ways of using words to
de�ne experience.

As these two poems illustrate, de�ning what a poem is (and what it is
not) can be dif�cult. Poems can rhyme or not rhyme. They can be divided
into stanzas and have a distinct form, or they can �ow freely and have no
discernable form. These and other choices are what many poets �nd allur-
ing about the process of writing poetry. As a form, poetry is compact and
concise, and choosing the right words to convey ideas is a challenge. As a
literary genre, it offers room for experimentation while at the same time
remaining �rmly grounded in a literary tradition that stretches back through
time to antiquity.

Most poems are either narrative poems, which recount a story, or lyric
poems, which communicate a speaker’s mood, feelings, or state of mind.

Narrative Poetry

Although any brief poem that tells a story, such as Edwin Arlington Robin-
son’s “Richard Cory” (p. 783), may be considered a narrative poem, the two
most familiar forms of narrative poetry are the epic and the ballad.

Epics are narrative poems that recount the accomplishments of heroic
�gures, typically including expansive settings, superhuman feats, and gods
and supernatural beings. The language of epic poems tends to be formal,
even elevated, and often quite elaborate. In ancient times, epics were handed
down orally; more recently, poets have written literary epics, such as John
Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667) and Nobel Prize–winning poet Derek Walcott’s
Omeros (1990), that follow many of the same conventions.

Recognizing Kinds of Poetry

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498 Chapter 15 • Understanding Poetry

The ballad is another type of narrative poetry with roots in an oral tra-
dition. Originally intended to be sung, a ballad uses repeated words and
phrases, including a refrain, to advance its story. Some—but not all—ballads
use the ballad stanza. For an example of a traditional ballad in this book, see
“Bonny Barbara Allan” (p. 734). Dudley Randall’s “Ballad of Birmingham”
(p. 529) is an example of a contemporary ballad.

Lyric Poetry

Like narrative poems, lyric poems take various forms.
An elegy is a poem in which a poet mourns the death of a speci�c person

(or persons), as in “To an Athlete Dying Young” (p. 557).
An ode is a long lyric poem, formal and serious in style, tone, and subject

matter. An ode typically has a fairly complex stanzaic pattern, such as the
terza rima used by Percy Bysshe Shelley in “Ode to the West Wind” (p. 786).
Another ode in this text is John Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” (p. 773).

An aubade is a poem about morning, usually celebrating the coming of
dawn. For example, see Bill Coyle’s “Aubade” (p. 750).

An occasional poem is written to celebrate a particular event or occasion.
An example is Billy Collins’s 2002 poem “The Names,” read before a joint
session of Congress to commemorate the �rst anniversary of the terrorist
attacks on the World Trade Center.

A meditation is a lyric poem that focuses on a physical object, using
this object as a vehicle for considering larger issues. Edmund Waller’s seven-
teenth-century poem “Go, lovely rose” is a meditation.

A pastoral—for example, Christopher Marlowe’s “The Passionate Shep-
herd to His Love” (p. 777)—is a lyric poem that celebrates the simple, idyllic
pleasures of country life.

A dramatic monologue is a poem whose speaker addresses one or more
silent listeners, often revealing much more than he or she intends. Robert
Browning’s “My Last Duchess” (p. 503) and “Porphyria’s Lover” (p. 520) and
Alfred Lord Tennyson’s “Ulysses” (p. 790) are dramatic monologues.

As you read the poems in this text, you will encounter works with a wide
variety of forms, styles, and themes. Some you will �nd appealing, amus-
ing, uplifting, or moving; others may strike you as puzzling, intimidating, or
depressing. But regardless of your critical reaction to the poems, one thing is
certain: if you take the time to connect with the lines you are reading, you
will come away from them thinking not just about the images and ideas they
express but also about yourself and your world.

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CHAPTER 16

VOICE

Langston Hughes
Library of Congress Prints and Photographs
Division[LC-USZ62-43605]

Loüise Glüc

Robin Marchant/Getty Images
Loüise Glück

Robert Browning
AP Images

Janice Mirikitani

David Paul Morris/ Getty Images
Entertainment/Getty Images

Janice Mirikitani

EMILY DICKINSON (1830–1886)

I’m nobody! Who are you? (1891)
I’m nobody! Who are you?
Are you—Nobody—Too?
Then there’s a pair of us?
Don’t tell! they’d advertise—you know!

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500 Chapter 16 • Voice

How dreary—to be—Somebody!
How public—like a Frog—
To tell one’s name—the livelong June—
To an admiring Bog!

When they read a work of �ction, readers must decide whether the narrator
is sophisticated or unsophisticated, trustworthy or untrustworthy, innocent
or experienced. Just as �ction depends on a narrator, poetry depends on a
speaker who describes events, feelings, and ideas to readers. Finding out as
much as possible about this speaker can help readers to interpret a poem.
For example, the speaker in Emily Dickinson’s “I’m nobody! Who are you?”
seems at �rst to be not just self-effacing but also playful, even �irtatious. As
the poem continues, however, the speaker becomes more complex. In the
�rst stanza, she reveals her private self—internal, isolated, with little desire
to be well known; in the second stanza, she expresses disdain for those who
seek to become “somebody,” whom she sees as self-centered, self-promot-
ing, and inevitably super�cial. Far from being defeated by her isolation, the
speaker rejects fame and celebrates her status as a “nobody.”

One question readers might ask about “I’m nobody! Who are you?” is
how close the speaker’s voice is to the poet’s. Readers who conclude that
the poem is about the con�ict between a poet’s public and private selves
may be tempted to see the speaker and the poet as one. But this is not nec-
essarily the case. Like the narrator of a short story, the speaker of a poem
is a persona, or mask, that the poet puts on. Granted, in some poems little
distance exists between the poet and the speaker. Without hard evidence
to support a link between speaker and poet, however, readers should not
simply assume they are one and the same.

In many cases, the speaker is quite different from the poet—even when
the speaker’s voice conveys the attitude of the poet, either directly or indi-
rectly. In the 1789 poem “The Chimney Sweeper” (p. 738), for example,
William Blake assumes the voice of a child to criticize the system of child
labor that existed in eighteenth-century England. Even though the child
speaker does not understand the economic and social forces that cause his
misery, readers sense the poet’s anger as the trusting speaker describes the
appalling conditions under which he works. The poet’s indignation is espe-
cially apparent in the biting irony of the last line, in which the victimized
speaker echoes the moral precepts of the time by innocently assuring readers
that if all people do their duty, “they need not fear harm.”

Sometimes the poem’s speaker is anonymous. In such cases—as in William
Carlos Williams’s “Red Wheelbarrow” (p. 563), for instance—the �rst-person

The Speaker in the

Poem

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Glück: Gretel in Darkness 501

voice is absent, and the speaker remains outside the poem. At other times,
the speaker has a set identity—a king, a beggar, a highwayman, a sheriff, a
husband, a wife, a rich man, a murderer, a child, a mythical �gure, an explorer,
a teacher, a faithless lover, a saint—or even a �ower, an animal, or a clod of
earth. Whatever the case, the speaker is not the poet but rather a creation that
the poet uses to convey his or her ideas. (For this reason, poems by a single poet
may have very different voices. Compare Sylvia Plath’s bitter and sardonic
poem “Daddy” [p. 589] with her nurturing and celebratory work “Morning
Song” [p. 517], for example.)

Sometimes a poem’s title tells readers that the poet is assuming a particular
persona. In the following poem, for example, the title identi�es the speaker as
a �ctional character, Gretel from the fairy tale “Hansel and Gretel.”

LOUISE GLÜCK (1943– )

Gretel in Darkness (1971)
This is the world we wanted.
All who would have seen us dead
are dead. I hear the witch’s cry
break in the moonlight through a sheet
of sugar: God rewards.
Her tongue shrivels into gas. . . .
Now, far from women’s arms
And memory of women, in our father’s hut
we sleep, are never hungry.
Why do I not forget?
My father bars the door, bars harm
from this house, and it is years.

No one remembers. Even you, my brother,
summer afternoons you look at me as though
you meant to leave,
as though it never happened.
But I killed for you. I see armed �rs,
the spires of that gleaming kiln—

Nights I turn to you to hold me
but you are not there.
Am I alone? Spies
hiss in the stillness, Hansel
we are there still, and it is real, real,
that black forest, and the �re in earnest.

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502 Chapter 16 • Voice

The speaker in this poem comments on
her life after her encounter with the witch
in the forest. Speaking to her brother,
Gretel observes that they now live in the
world they wanted: they live with their
father in his hut, and the witch and the
wicked stepmother are dead. Even so,
the memory of the events in the forest
haunts Gretel and makes it impossible
for her to live “happily ever after.”

By assuming the persona of Gretel,
the poet is able to convey some inter-
esting and complex ideas. On one level,
Gretel represents any person who has
lived through a traumatic experience.
Memories of the event keep breaking
through into the present, frustrating her
attempts to reestablish her belief in the
goodness of the world. The voice we hear

is sad, alone, and frightened: “Nights I turn to you to hold me,” she says, “but
you are not there.” Although the murder Gretel committed for her brother was
justi�ed, it seems to haunt her. “No one remembers,” laments Gretel, not even
her brother. At some level, she realizes that by killing the witch she has killed a
part of herself, perhaps the part of women that men fear and consequently trans-
form into witches and wicked stepmothers. The world that is left after the killing
is her father’s and her brother’s, not her own, and she is now alone haunted by
the memories of the black forest. In this sense, Gretel—“Now, far from women’s
arms / And memory of women”—may be the voice of all victimized women
who, because of men, act against their own best interests—and regret it.

As “Gretel in Darkness” illustrates, a title can identify a poem’s speaker,
but the speaker’s words can provide even more information. In the next
poem, the �rst line of each stanza establishes the identity of the speaker—
and de�nes his perspective.

LANGSTON HUGHES (1902–1967)

Negro (1926)
I am a Negro:

Black as the night is black,
Black like the depths of my Africa.

I’ve been a slave:
Caesar told me to keep his door-steps clean.
I brushed the boots of Washington.

Illustration of “Hansel and Gretel” (1930)
AP Images

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Browning: My Last Duchess 503

I’ve been a worker:
Under my hand the pyramids arose.
I made mortar for the Woolworth Building.

I’ve been a singer:
All the way from Africa to Georgia
I carried my sorrow songs.
I made ragtime.

I’ve been a victim:
The Belgians cut off my hands in the Congo.
They lynch me still in Mississippi.

I am a Negro:
Black as the night is black,
Black like the depths of my Africa.

Here the speaker, identifying himself as “a Negro,” assumes each of the roles
African Americans have historically played in Western society—slave,
worker, singer, and victim. By so doing, he gives voice to his ancestors who,
by being forced to serve others, were deprived of their identities. By pre-
senting not only their suffering but also their accomplishments, the speaker
asserts his pride in being black. The speaker also implies that the suffering of
black people has been caused by economic exploitation: Romans, Egyptians,
Belgians, and Americans all used black labor to help build their societies. In
this context, the speaker’s implied warning is clear: except for the United
States, all the societies that have exploited blacks have declined, and long
after the fall of those empires, black people still endure.

In each of the preceding poems, the speaker is alone. The following
poem, a dramatic monologue, presents a more complex situation in which
the poet creates a complete dramatic scene. The speaker is developed as a
character whose distinctive personality is revealed through his words as he
addresses a silent listener.

ROBERT BROWNING (1812–1889)

My Last Duchess (1842)
Ferrara

That’s my last Duchess painted on the wall,
Looking as if she were alive. I call
That piece a wonder, now: Frà Pandolf’s1 hands
Worked busily a day, and there she stands.
Will’t please you sit and look at her? I said

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1Frà Pandolf: “Brother” Pandolf, a fictive painter.Frà Pandolf: “Brother” Pandolf, a fictive painter.Frà Pandolf:

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504 Chapter 16 • Voice

“Frà Pandolf” by design, for never read
Strangers like you that pictured countenance,
The depth and passion of its earnest glance,
But to myself they turned (since none puts by
The curtain I have drawn for you, but I)
And seemed as they would ask me, if they durst,
How such a glance came there; so, not the �rst
Are you to turn and ask thus. Sir, ’twas not
Her husband’s presence only, called that spot
Of joy into the Duchess’ cheek: perhaps
Frà Pandolf chanced to say “Her mantle laps
Over my lady’s wrist too much,” or “Paint
Must never hope to reproduce the faint
Half-�ush that dies along her throat”: such stuff
Was courtesy, she thought, and cause enough
For calling up that spot of joy. She had
A heart—how shall I say?—too soon made glad,
Too easily impressed; she liked whate’er
She looked on, and her looks went everywhere.
Sir, ’twas all one! My favor at her breast,
The dropping of the daylight in the West,
The bough of cherries some of�cious fool
Broke in the orchard for her, the white mule
She rode with round the terrace—all and each
Would draw from her alike the approving speech,
Or blush, at least. She thanked men—good! but thanked
Somehow—I know not how—as if she ranked
My gift of a nine-hundred-years-old name
With anybody’s gift. Who’d stoop to blame
This sort of tri�ing? Even had you skill
In speech—(which I have not)—to make your will
Quite clear to such an one, and say, “Just this
Or that in you disgusts me; here you miss,
Or there exceed the mark”—and if she let
Herself be lessoned so, nor plainly set
Her wits to yours, forsooth, and made excuse
—E’en then would be some stooping; and I choose
Never to stoop. Oh sir, she smiled, no doubt,
Whene’er I passed her; but who passed without
Much the same smile? This grew; I gave commands;
Then all smiles stopped together. There she stands
As if alive. Will’t please you rise? We’ll meet
The company below, then. I repeat,

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Browning: My Last Duchess 505

The Count your master’s known muni�cence
Is ample warrant that no just pretense
Of mine for dowry will be disallowed;
Though his fair daughter’s self, as I avowed
At starting, is my object. Nay, we’ll go
Together down, sir. Notice Neptune,2 though,
Taming a sea horse, thought a rarity,
Which Claus of Innsbruck3 cast in bronze for me!

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2Neptune: In Roman mythology, the god of the sea.Neptune: In Roman mythology, the god of the sea.Neptune:
3Claus of Innsbruck: A fictive—or unidentified—sculptor. The count of Tyrol’s capital was at Innsbrück, Claus of Innsbruck: A fictive—or unidentified—sculptor. The count of Tyrol’s capital was at Innsbrück, Claus of Innsbruck:
Austria.

Art gallery similar to setting of “My Last Duchess”
The King’s Closet, Windsor Castle, from ‘Royal Residences’, engraved by William James Bennett
(1769–1844), published by William Henry Pyne (1769–1843), 1816, Wild, Charles (1781–1835)
(after) / Private Collection / The Stapleton Collection / Bridgeman Images

The speaker in “My Last Duchess” is most likely Alfonso II, duke of Ferrara,
Italy, whose young wife, Lucrezia, died in 1561 after only three years of mar-
riage. Shortly after her death, the duke began negotiations to marry again.
When the poem opens, the duke is showing a portrait of his late wife to an
emissary of an unnamed count who is there to arrange a marriage between
the duke and the count’s daughter. The duke remarks that the artist, Frà
Pandolf, has caught a certain look on the duchess’s face. This look aroused
the jealousy of the duke, who thought that it should have been for him alone.
Eventually, the duke could tolerate the situation no longer; he “gave com-
mands,” and “all smiles stopped together.”

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506 Chapter 16 • Voice

Though silent, the listener plays a subtle but important role in the poem:
his presence establishes the dramatic situation that allows the character of
the duke to be revealed. The duke tells his story to communicate to the emissary
exactly what he expects from his prospective bride and from her father. As
he speaks, the duke provides only the information that he wants the emissary
to take back to his master, the count. Although the duke appears vain and
super�cial, he is actually extraordinarily shrewd. Throughout the poem, he
turns the conversation to his own ends and gains the advantage through
�attery and false modesty. The success of the poem lies in the poet’s ability to
develop the voice of this complex character, who embodies both super�cial
elegance and shocking cruelty.

FURTHER READING: The Speaker in the Poem

LESLIE MARMON SILKO (1948– )

Where Mountain Lion Lay
Down with Deer (1973)
I climb the black rock mountain

stepping from day to day
silently.

I smell the wind for my ancestors
pale blue leaves
crushed wild mountain smell.

Returning
up the gray stone cliff
where I descended

a thousand years ago.
Returning to faded black stone.

where mountain lion lay down with deer.
It is better to stay up here

watching wind’s re�ection
in tall yellow �owers.

The old ones who remember me are gone
the old songs are all forgotten

and the story of my birth.
How I danced in snow-frost moonlight

distant stars to the end of the Earth,
How I swam away

in freezing mountain water
narrow mossy canyon tumbling down

out of the mountain

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Mirikitani: Suicide Note 507

out of the deep canyon stone
down

the memory
spilling out
into the world.

Reading and Reacting
1. Who is speaking in line 4? in line 9? Can you explain this shift?
2. From where is the speaker returning? What is she trying to recover?

3. JOURNAL ENTRY Is it important to know that the poet is Native American? NTRY Is it important to know that the poet is Native American? NTRY
How does this information affect your interpretation of the poem?

4. CRITICAL PERSPECTIVE In her 1983 essay “Answering the Deer,” poet and
critic Paula Gunn Allen observes that the possibility of cultural extinc-
tion is a reality Native Americans must face. Native American women
writers, says Allen, face this fact directly but with a kind of hope:

The sense of hope . . . comes about when one has faced ultimate disaster time
and time again over the ages and has emerged . . . stronger and more certain
of the endurance of the people, the spirits, and the land from which they
both arise and which informs both with life. Transformation, or more directly,
metamorphosis, is the oldest tribal ceremonial theme. . . . And it comes once
again into use within American Indian poetry of extinction and regeneration
that is ultimately the only poetry any contemporary Indian woman can write.

Does Silko’s poem address the issue of cultural extinction and the pos-
sibility of regeneration or metamorphosis? How?

Related Works: “This Is What It Means to Say Phoenix, Arizona” (p. 205),
“Two Kinds” (p. 471), “We Wear the Mask” (p. 550)

JANICE MIRIKITANI (1942– )

Suicide Note (1987)
. . . An Asian American college student was
reported to have jumped to her death from her dor-
mitory window. Her body was found two days later
under a deep cover of snow. Her suicide note con-
tained an apology to her parents for having received
less than a perfect four point grade average. . . .

How many notes written . . .
ink smeared like birdprints in snow.

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508 Chapter 16 • Voice

not good enough not pretty enough not smart enough
dear mother and father.
I apologize
for disappointing you.
I’ve worked very hard,

not good enough
harder, perhaps to please you.
If only I were a son, shoulders broad
as the sunset threading through pine,
I would see the light in my mother’s
eyes, or the golden pride re�ected
in my father’s dream
of my wide, male hands worthy of work
and comfort.
I would swagger through life
muscled and bold and assured,
drawing praises to me
like currents in the bed of wind, virile
with con�dence.

not good enough not strong enough not good enough

I apologize.
Tasks do not come easily.
Each failure, a glacier.
Each disapproval, a bootprint.
Each disappointment,
ice above my river.
So I have worked hard.

not good enough
My sacri�ce I will drop
bone by bone, perched
on the ledge of my womanhood,
fragile as wings.

not strong enough
It is snowing steadily
surely not good weather
for �ying—this sparrow
sillied and dizzied by the wind
on the edge.

not smart enough
I make this ledge my altar
to offer penance.
This air will not hold me,
the snow burdens my crippled wings,

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Mirikitani: Suicide Note 509

my tears drop like bitter cloth
softly into the gutter below.

not good enough not strong enough not smart enough
Choices thin as shaved
ice. Notes shredded
drift like snow

on my broken body,
cover me like whispers
of sorries
sorries.
Perhaps when they �nd me
they will bury
my bird bones beneath
a sturdy pine
and scatter my feathers like
unspoken song
over this white and cold and silent
breast of earth.

Reading and Reacting
1. This poem is a suicide note that contains an apology. Why does the

speaker feel she must apologize? Do you agree that she needs to apologize?
2. What attitude does the speaker convey toward her parents?

3. JOURNAL ENTRY Is the college student who speaks in this poem a stranger NTRY Is the college student who speaks in this poem a stranger NTRY
to you, or is her voice in any way like that of students you know?

4. CRITICAL PERSPECTIVE In her essay “Reading Asian American Poetry,”
Juliana Chang discusses the reasons why Asian American prose, both
�ction and non�ction, has received more critical attention than Asian
American poetry. In particular, she points to “the critical perception
that poetry is to prose precisely as the private and individual are to the
public and the social, and that the poetic therefore has less social rel-
evance.” Chang continues, “Anecdotally, I have heard consistently that
poetry is considered ‘dif�cult,’ that readers often experience an anxiety
over being equipped with the right ‘key’ to decipher a complex of images
and patterns in order to gain access to a ‘hidden,’ and therefore private,
meaning.”

Do you feel that “Suicide Note” has social relevance? Does the poem
seem accessible or dif�cult? Does its meaning seem “hidden” in any way?

Related Works: “The Rocking-Horse Winner” (p. 409), “The Value of
Education” (p. 549), “Dreams of Suicide” (p. 684), “Death Be Not Proud”
(p. 757), The Cuban Swimmer (p. 1166)

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The tone of a poem conveys the speaker’s attitude toward his or her subject
or audience. In speech, this attitude can be conveyed easily: stressing a
word in a sentence can modify or color a statement. For example, the state-
ment “Of course, you would want to go to that restaurant” is quite straight-
forward, but changing the emphasis to “Of course you would want to go
to that restaurant” transforms a neutral statement into a sarcastic one. For
poets, however, conveying a particular tone to readers poses a challenge
because readers rarely hear poets’ spoken voices. Instead, poets indicate
tone by using rhyme, meter, word choice, sentence structure, �gures of
speech, and imagery.

The range of possible tones is wide. For example, a poem’s speaker may
be joyful, sad, playful, serious, comic, intimate, formal, relaxed, condescend-
ing, or ironic. In the following poem, notice the speaker’s detached, almost
irreverent attitude toward his subject.

ROBERT FROST (1874–1963)

Fire and Ice (1923)
Some say the world will end in �re,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor �re.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suf�ce.

Here the speaker uses word choice, rhyme, and especially understatement to
comment on the human condition. The conciseness as well as the simple,
regular meter and rhyme suggest an epigram—a short poem that makes a
pointed comment in an unusually clear, and often witty, manner. This point-
edness is consistent with the speaker’s glib, unemotional tone, as is the last
line’s wry understatement that ice “would suf�ce.” The contrast between the
poem’s serious message—that hatred and indifference are equally destruc-
tive—and its informal style and offhand tone complement the speaker’s
detached, almost smug, posture.

Sometimes shifts in tone reveal changes in the speaker’s attitude. In the
next poem, subtle shifts in tone reveal a change in the speaker’s attitude
toward war.

The Tone of the Poem

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Hardy: The Man He Killed 511

THOMAS HARDY (1840–1928)

The Man He Killed (1902)
“Had he and I but met
By some old ancient inn,

We should have sat us down to wet
Right many a nipperkin!1

“But ranged as infantry,
And staring face to face,

I shot at him as he at me,
And killed him in his place.

“I shot him dead because—
Because he was my foe,

Just so: my foe of course he was;
That’s clear enough; although
“He thought he’d ’list,2 perhaps,
Off-hand-like—just as I—

Was out of work—had sold his traps—
No other reason why.

“Yes; quaint and curious war is!
You shoot a fellow down

You’d treat if met where any bar is,
Or help to half-a crown.”3

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1nipperkin: A small container of liquor.nipperkin: A small container of liquor.nipperkin:
2‘list: Enlist.‘list: Enlist.‘list:
3crown: A unit of British currency.crown: A unit of British currency.crown:

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512 Chapter 16 • Voice

The speaker in this poem is a soldier relating a wartime experience. Quota-
tion marks indicate that he is engaged in conversation—perhaps in a pub—
and his dialect indicates that he is a member of the English working class.
For him, at least at �rst, the object of war is simple: kill or be killed. To
Hardy, this speaker represents all men who are thrust into a war without
understanding its underlying social, economic, or ideological causes. In this
sense, the speaker and his enemy are both victims of forces beyond their
comprehension or control.

The tone of “The Man He Killed” changes as the speaker tells his story.
In the �rst two stanzas, sentences are smooth and unbroken, establishing
the speaker’s matter-of-fact tone and re�ecting his con�dence that he has
done what he had to do. In the third and fourth stanzas, broken syntax
re�ects the narrator’s increasingly disturbed state of mind as he tells about
the man he killed. The poem’s singsong meter and regular rhyme scheme
(met/wet, inn/nipperkin) suggest that the speaker is struggling to maintain his
composure; the smooth sentence structure of the last stanza and the use of a
cliché (“Yes; quaint and curious war is!”) indicate that the speaker is trying
to trivialize an incident that has seriously traumatized him.

Sometimes a poem’s tone can establish an ironic contrast between the
speaker and his or her subject. The speaker’s abrupt change of tone at the end
of the next poem establishes such a contrast.

AMY LOWELL (1874–1925)

Patterns (1915)
I walk down the garden-paths,
And all the daffodils
Are blowing, and the bright blue squills.
I walk down the patterned garden-paths
In my stiff, brocaded gown.
With my powdered hair and jewelled fan,
I too am a rare
Pattern. As I wander down
The garden-paths.

My dress is richly �gured,
And the train
Makes a pink and silver stain
On the gravel, and the thrift
Of the borders.
Just a plate of current fashion
Tripping by in high-heeled, ribboned shoes.

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Lowell: Patterns 513

Not a softness anywhere about me,
Only whalebone1 and brocade.
And I sink on a seat in the shade
Of a lime tree. For my passion
Wars against the stiff brocade.
The daffodils and squills
Flutter in the breeze
As they please.
And I weep;
For the lime-tree is in blossom
And one small �ower has dropped upon my bosom.

And the plashing of waterdrops
In the marble fountain
Comes down the garden-paths.
The dripping never stops.
Underneath my stiffened gown
Is the softness of a woman bathing in a marble basin,
A basin in the midst of hedges grown
So thick, she cannot see her lover hiding,
But she guesses he is near,
And the sliding of the water
Seems the stroking of a dear
Hand upon her.
What is Summer in a �ne brocaded gown!
I should like to see it lying in a heap upon the ground.
All the pink and silver crumpled up on the ground.

I would be the pink and silver as I ran along the paths,
And he would stumble after,
Bewildered by my laughter.
I should see the sun �ashing from his sword-hilt and buckles

on his shoes.
I would choose
To lead him in a maze along the patterned paths,
A bright and laughing maze for my heavy-booted lover.
Till he caught me in the shade,
And the buttons of his waistcoat bruised my body as

he clasped me,
Aching, melting, unafraid.
With the shadows of the leaves and the sundrops,

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1whalebone: The type of bone used to stiffen corsets.whalebone: The type of bone used to stiffen corsets.whalebone:

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514 Chapter 16 • Voice

And the plopping of the waterdrops,
All about us in the open afternoon—
I am very like to swoon
With the weight of this brocade,
For the sun sifts through the shade.

Underneath the fallen blossom
In my bosom,
Is a letter I have hid.
It was brought to me this morning by a rider from the Duke.
Madam, we regret to inform you that Lord Hartwell
Died in action Thursday se’nnight.2

As I read it in the white, morning sunlight,
The letters squirmed like snakes.
“Any answer, Madam,” said my footman.
“No,” I told him.
“See that the messenger takes some refreshment.
No, no answer.”
And I walked into the garden,
Up and down the patterned paths,
In my stiff, correct brocade.
The blue and yellow �owers stood up proudly in the sun,
Each one.
I stood upright too,
Held rigid to the pattern
By the stiffness of my gown.
Up and down I walked.
Up and down.
In a month he would have been my husband.
In a month, here, underneath this lime,
We would have broken the pattern;
He for me, and I for him,
He as Colonel, I as Lady,
On this shady seat.
He had a whim
That sunlight carried blessing.
And I answered, “It shall be as you have said.”
Now he is dead.

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2se’nnight: “Seven night,” or a week ago Thursday.se’nnight: “Seven night,” or a week ago Thursday.se’nnight:

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Lowell: Patterns 515

In Summer and in Winter I shall walk
Up and down
The patterned garden-paths
In my stiff, brocaded gown.
The squills and daffodils
Will give place to pillared roses, and to asters, and to snow.
I shall go
Up and down,
In my gown.
Gorgeously arrayed,
Boned and stayed.
And the softness of my body will be guarded from embrace
By each button, hook, and lace.
For the man who should loose me is dead,
Fighting with the Duke in Flanders,3

In a pattern called a war.
Christ! What are patterns for?

The speaker begins by describing herself walking down garden paths. She
wears a stiff brocaded gown, has powdered hair, and carries a jeweled fan.
By her own admission, she is “a plate of current fashion.” Although her
tone is controlled, she is preoccupied by sensual thoughts. Beneath her
“stiffened gown / Is the softness of a woman bathing in a marble basin,” and
the “sliding of the water” in a fountain reminds the speaker of the stroking
of her lover’s hand. She imagines herself shedding her brocaded gown and
running with her lover along the maze of “patterned paths.” The sensuality
of the speaker’s thoughts stands in ironic contrast to the images of stiff-
ness and control that dominate the poem: her passion “Wars against the
stiff brocade.” She is also full of repressed rage. She knows that her lover
has been killed, and she realizes the meaninglessness of the patterns of her
life, patterns to which she has conformed, just as her lover conformed by
going to war. Throughout the poem, the speaker’s tone re�ects her barely
contained anger and frustration. In the last line, when she �nally lets out
her rage, the poem’s point about the senselessness of conformity and war
becomes apparent.

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3Flanders: A region in northwestern Europe, including part of northern France and western Belgium. Flanders: A region in northwestern Europe, including part of northern France and western Belgium. Flanders:
Flanders was a site of prolonged fighting during World War I.

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516 Chapter 16 • Voice

FURTHER READING: Imagery

F. J. BERGMANN (1954– )

An Apology (2003)
Forgive me
for backing over
and smashing
your red wheelbarrow.

It was raining
and the rear wiper
does not work on
my new plum-colored SUV.

I am also sorry
about the white
chickens.

Reading and Reacting
1. A parody is a literary work that imitates the style of another work for

comic effect or ridicule. Bergmann’s “An Apology” is a parody of Wil-
liam Carlos Williams’s “Red Wheelbarrow” (p. 563). Why do you think
Bergmann chose this poem to parody?

2. What aspects of “Red Wheelbarrow” does Bergmann parody? Do you
think these elements deserve to be parodied, or do you think Bergmann’s
parody is unjusti�ed or unfair?

3. Do you think Bergmann’s purpose is to ridicule “Red Wheelbarrow” or
just to amuse his readers? Explain.

4. JOURNAL ENTRY Write a parody of another poem in this book. Make
sure you decide in advance what elements of the poem you want to
parody.

5. CRITICAL PERSPECTIVE Blogger and critic Kerry Michael Wood observes
that some readers think that critics have read too much into “The Red
Wheelbarrow.” According to him, however, “The Red Wheelbarrow”

NOTE

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575

CHAPTER 19

FIGURES OF SPEECH

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE (1564–1616)

Shall I compare thee to a
summer’s day? (1609)
Shall I compare thee to a summer’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.S

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Nancy Mercado
Ricardo Muniz

Sylvia Plath
Cleveland State University Library / Everett Collection

Marge Piercy
AP Photo/Ben Barnhart

Sylvia Plath Marge Piercy

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576 Chapter 19 • Figures of Speech

Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimmed;
And every fair from fair sometimes declines,
By chance, or nature’s changing course, untrimmed.
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st;1

Nor shall death brag thou wand’rest in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st.

So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

Although writers experiment with language in all kinds of literary works,
poets in particular recognize the power of a �gure of speech to take readers
beyond the literal meaning of a word. For this reason, �gures of speech—
expressions that use words to achieve effects beyond the power of ordinary
language—are more prominent in poetry than in other kinds of writing. For
example, the sonnet above compares a loved one to a summer’s day in order
to make the point that, unlike the �eeting summer, the loved one will—
within the poem—remain forever young. But this sonnet goes beyond the
obvious equation (loved one = summer’s day): the speaker’s assertion that
his loved one will live forever in his poem actually says more about his con-
�dence in his own talent and reputation (and about the power of language)
than about the loved one’s beauty.

When William Wordsworth opens a poem with “I wandered lonely as a
cloud” (p. 712), he conveys a good deal more than he would if he simply
began, “I wandered, lonely.” By comparing himself in his loneliness to a
cloud, the speaker suggests that like the cloud he is a part of nature and that
he too is drifting, passive, blown by winds, and lacking will or substance.
Thus, by using a �gure of speech, the poet can suggest a wide variety of feel-
ings and associations in very few words.

The phrase “I wandered lonely as a cloud” is a simile, a comparison
between two unlike items that uses like or as. When an imaginative compari-
son between two unlike items does not use like or as—that is, when it says “a
is b” rather than “a is like b”—it is a metaphor.

Accordingly, when the speaker in Adrienne Rich’s “Living in Sin” (p. 538)
speaks of “daylight coming / like a relentless milkman up the stairs,” she is
using a strikingly original simile to suggest that daylight brings not the conven-
tional associations of promise and awakening but rather a stale, never-ending

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Hughes: Harlem 577

routine that is greeted without enthusiasm. This idea is consistent with the
rest of the poem, an account of an unful�lling relationship. However, when
the speaker in the Audre Lorde poem on page 579 says, “Rooming houses are
old women,” she uses a metaphor, equating two elements to stress their com-
mon associations with emptiness, transience, and hopelessness. At the same
time, by identifying rooming houses as old women, Lorde is using personi�ca-
tion, a special kind of comparison, closely related to metaphor, that gives life
or human characteristics to inanimate objects or abstract ideas.

Sometimes, as in Wordsworth’s “I wandered lonely as a cloud,” a single
brief simile or metaphor can be appreciated for what it communicates on its
own. At other times, however, a simile or metaphor may be one of several
related �gures of speech that work together to convey a poem’s meaning. The
following poem, for example, presents a series of related similes. Together,
they suggest the depth of the problem the poem explores in a manner that
each individual simile could not do on its own.

LANGSTON HUGHES (1902–1967)

Harlem (1951)
What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore—
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over—
like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

The dream to which Hughes alludes in this poem is the dream of racial equal-
ity. It is also the American Dream—and, by extension, any important unreal-
ized dream. His speaker offers six tentative answers to the question asked in
the poem’s �rst line, and �ve of the six are presented as similes. As the poem
unfolds, the speaker considers different alternatives: the dream can shrivel
up and die, fester, decay, crust over—or sag under the weight of the burden
those who hold the dream must carry. In each case, the speaker transforms
an abstract entity—a dream—into a concrete item—a raisin in the sun, a
sore, rotten meat, syrupy candy, a heavy load. The �nal line, italicized for
emphasis, gains power less from what it says than from what it leaves unsaid.
Unlike the other alternatives explored in the poem, “Or does it explode?” is

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AP Images/Robert Kradin

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578 Chapter 19 • Figures of Speech

not presented as a simile. Nevertheless, because of the pattern of �gurative
language the poem has established, readers can supply the other, unspoken
half of the comparison: “. . . like a bomb.”

Sometimes a single extended simile or extended metaphor is developed
throughout a poem. The following poem develops an extended simile, com-
paring a poet to an acrobat.

LAWRENCE FERLINGHETTI (1919– )

Constantly Risking Absurdity (1958)
Constantly risking absurdity

and death
whenever he performs

above the heads
of his audience

the poet like an acrobat
climbs on rime

to a high wire of his own making
and balancing on eyebeams

above a sea of faces
paces his way

to the other side of day
performing entrechats

and sleight-of-foot tricks
and other high theatrics

and all without mistaking
any thing

for what it may not be

For he’s the super realist
who must perforce perceive

taut truth
before the taking of each stance or step

in his supposed advance
toward that still higher perch

where Beauty stands and waits
with gravity

to start her death-defying leap

And he
a little charleychaplin man

who may or may not catch
her fair eternal form

spreadeagled in the empty air
of existence

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Lorde: Rooming houses are old women 579

In his extended comparison of a poet and an acrobat, Ferlinghetti char-
acterizes the poet as a circus performer, at once swinging recklessly on a
trapeze and balancing carefully on a tightrope.

What the poem suggests is that the poet, like an acrobat, works hard
at his craft but manages to make it all look easy. Something of an exhi-
bitionist, the poet is innovative and creative, taking impossible chances
yet also building on traditional skills in his quest for truth and beauty.
Moreover, like an acrobat, the poet is balanced “on eyebeams / above a
sea of faces,” for he too depends on audience reaction to help him keep
his performance focused. The poet may be “the super realist,” but he also
has plenty of playful tricks up his sleeve: “entrechats / and sleight-of-
foot tricks / and other high theatrics,” including puns (“above the heads
/ of his audience”), unexpected rhyme (“climbs on rime”), alliteration
(“taut truth”), coinages (“a little charleychaplin man”), and all the other
linguistic acrobatics available to poets. (Even the arrangement of the
poem’s lines on the page suggests the acrobatics it describes.) Like these
tricks, the poem’s central simile is a whimsical one, perhaps suggesting
that Ferlinghetti is poking fun at poets who take their craft too seriously.
In any case, the simile helps him to illustrate the acrobatic possibilities
of language in a fresh and original manner.

The following poem develops an extended metaphor, personifying
rooming houses as old women.

AUDRE LORDE (1934–1992)

Rooming houses are old women (1968)
Rooming houses are old women
rocking dark windows into their whens
waiting incomplete circles
rocking
rent of�ce to stoop to
community bathrooms to gas rings and
under-bed boxes of once useful garbage
city issued with a twice monthly check
and the young men next door
with their loud midnight parties
and �shy rings left in the bathtub
no longer arouse them
from midnight to mealtime no stops inbetween
light breaking to pass through jumbled up windows
and who was it who married the widow that Buzzie’s

son messed with?

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580 Chapter 19 • Figures of Speech

To Welfare and insult form the slow shuf�e
from dayswork to shopping bags
heavy with leftovers
Rooming houses
are old women waiting
searching
through darkening windows
the end or beginning of agony
old women seen through half-ajar doors
hoping
they are not waiting
but being
the entrance to somewhere
unknown and desired
but not new.

So closely does Lorde equate rooming houses and old women in this poem
that at times it is dif�cult to tell which of the two is actually the poem’s
subject. Despite the poem’s assertion, rooming houses are not old women;
however, they are comparable to the old women who live there because their
walls enclose a lifetime of disappointments as well as the physical detritus of
life. Like the old women, rooming houses are in decline, rocking away their
remaining years. And, like the houses they inhabit, these women’s boundaries
are �xed—“rent of�ce to stoop to / community bathrooms to gas rings”—and
their hopes and expectations are few. They are surrounded by other people’s
loud parties, but their own lives have been reduced to a “slow shuf�e” to
nowhere, a hopeless, frightened—and perhaps pointless—“waiting / search-
ing.” Over time, the women and the places in which they live have become
one. By using an unexpected comparison between two seemingly unrelated
entities, the poem illuminates both the essence of the rooming houses and
the essence of their elderly occupants.

FURTHER READING: Simile, Metaphor,
and Personification

ROBERT BURNS (1759–1796)

Oh, my love is like a red, red rose (1796)
Oh, my love is like a red, red rose

That’s newly sprung in June;
My love is like the melody

That’s sweetly played in tune.

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Momaday: Simile 581

So fair art thou, my bonny lass,
So deep in love am I;

And I will love thee still, my dear,
Till a’ the seas gang1 dry.

Till a’ the seas gang dry, my dear,
And the rocks melt wi’ the sun;

And I will love thee still, my dear,
While the sands o’ life shall run.

And fare thee weel, my only love!
And fare thee weel awhile!

And I will come again, my love
Though it were ten thousand mile.

Reading and Reacting
1. Why does the speaker compare his love to a rose? What other simile is

used in the poem? For what purpose is it used?
2. Why do you suppose Burns begins his poem with similes? Would moving

them to the end change the poem’s impact?
3. Where does the speaker seem to exaggerate the extent of his love? Why

does he exaggerate? Do you think this exaggeration weakens the poem?
Explain.

4. JOURNAL ENTRY Create ten original similes that begin with, “My love is NTRY Create ten original similes that begin with, “My love is NTRY
like _________.”

Related Works: “Araby” (p. 288), “Baca Grande” (p. 545), “My mistress’ eyes
are nothing like the sun” (p. 572), “To His Coy Mistress” (p. 594), “How Do
I Love Thee?” (p. 719), The Brute (p. 814)

N. SCOTT MOMADAY (1934– )

Simile (1974)
What did we say to each other
that now we are as the deer
who walk in single �le
with heads high
with ears forward

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582 Chapter 19 • Figures of Speech

with eyes watchful
with hooves always placed on �rm ground
in whose limbs there is latent �ight

Reading and Reacting
1. In what sense are the speaker and the person he is speaking to like the

deer he describes in this extended simile? In what sense are their limbs in
“latent �ight” (line 8)?

2. Without using similes or metaphors, paraphrase this poem.
3. This entire poem consists of a single sentence, but it has no punctuation.

Do you see this as a problem? What punctuation marks, if any, would you
add? Why?

4. JOURNAL ENTRY What do you suppose the speaker and the person he adNTRY What do you suppose the speaker and the person he adNTRY –
dresses might have said to each other to inspire the feelings described in
this poem?

Related Work: “Let me not to the marriage of true minds” (p. 785)

SYLVIA PLATH (1932–1963)

Metaphors (1960)
I’m a riddle in nine syllables,
An elephant, a ponderous house,
A melon strolling on two tendrils.
O red fruit, ivory, �ne timbers!
This loaf’s big with its yeasty rising.
Money’s new-minted in this fat purse.
I’m a means, a stage, a cow in calf.
I’ve eaten a bag of green apples,
Boarded the train there’s no getting off.

Reading and Reacting
1. The speaker in this poem is a pregnant woman. Do all the metaphors she

uses to characterize herself seem appropriate? For instance, in what sense
is the speaker “a means, a stage” (line 7)?

2. If you were going to expand this poem, what other metaphors (or similes)
would you add?

3. What are the “nine syllables” to which the speaker refers in the poem’s
�rst line? What signi�cance does the number nine have in terms of the
poem’s subject? in terms of its form?

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Jarrell: The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner 583

4. JOURNAL EOURNAL EOURNAL NTRY Would you say the speaker has a positive, negative, or neutral NTRY Would you say the speaker has a positive, negative, or neutral NTRY
attitude toward her pregnancy? Which metaphors give you this impression?

Related Work: “I Stand Here Ironing” (p. 217)

RANDALL JARRELL (1914–1965)

The Death of the Ball
Turret Gunner1 (1945)
From my mother’s sleep I fell into the State
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,
I woke to black �ak and the nightmare �ghters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose. 5

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1Ball turret gunner: World War II machine gunner positioned upside-down in a plexiglass sphere in the Ball turret gunner: World War II machine gunner positioned upside-down in a plexiglass sphere in the Ball turret gunner:
belly of a bomber.

Gunner in ball turret
Source: ©Cape Canaveral Hangar, United States Air Force

Reading and Reacting
1. Who is the speaker? To what does he compare himself in the poem’s �rst

two lines? What words establish this comparison?
2. Contrast the speaker’s actual identity with the one he creates for himself

in lines 1–2. What elements of his actual situation do you think lead him
to characterize himself as he does in these lines?

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584 Chapter 19 • Figures of Speech

3. JOURNAL ENTRY Both this poem and “Dulce et Decorum Est” (p. 723) use NTRY Both this poem and “Dulce et Decorum Est” (p. 723) use NTRY
�gures of speech to describe the horrors of war. Which poem has a greater
impact on you? How does the poem’s �gurative language contribute to
this impact?

4. CRITICAL PERSPECTIVE In a 1974 article, Frances Ferguson criticizes “The
Death of the Ball Turret Gunner,” arguing that the poem “thoroughly
manifests the lack of a middle between the gunner’s birth and his
death. . . . Because the poem presents a man who seems to have lived in
order to die, we forget the �ction that he must have lived.” However, in
a 1978 explication, Patrick J. Horner writes that the “manipulation of
time reveals the stunning brevity of the gunner’s waking life and the
State’s total disregard for that phenomenon. . . . Because of the telescop-
ing of time, [the poem] resonates with powerful feeling.”

With which critic do you agree? Do you see the “lack of a middle” as
a positive or negative quality of this poem?

Related Works: “The Things They Carried” (p. 310), “The Soldier”
(p. 725), from In Time of War (p. 727), “Terza Rima” (p. 729)

MARGE PIERCY (1936– )

The Secretary Chant (1973)
My hips are a desk.
From my ears hang
chains of paper clips.
Rubber bands form my hair.
My breasts are wells of mimeograph ink.
My feet bear casters.
Buzz. Click.
My head is a badly organized �le.
My head is a switchboard
where crossed lines crackle.
Press my �ngers
and in my eyes appear
credit and debit.
Zing. Tinkle.
My navel is a reject button.
From my mouth issue canceled reams.
Swollen, heavy, rectangular
I am about to be delivered
of a baby

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Piercy: The Secretary Chant 585

Xerox machine.
File me under W
because I wonce
was
a woman.

Reading and Reacting
1. Examine each of the poem’s �gures of speech. Do they all make reason-

able comparisons, or are some far-fetched or hard to visualize? Explain
the relationship between the secretary and each item with which she is
compared.

2. JOURNAL ENTRY Using as many metaphors and similes as you can, write a NTRY Using as many metaphors and similes as you can, write a NTRY
“chant” about a job you have held.

3. CRITICAL PERSPECTIVE In a review of a recent collection of Piercy’s poetry,
critic Sandra Gilbert notes instances of “a kind of bombast” (pompous
language) and remarks, “As most poets realize, political verse is almost
the hardest kind to write.”

In what sense can “The Secretary Chant” be seen as “political verse”?
Do you think Piercy successfully achieves her political purpose, or does
she undercut it with “bombast”?

Related Works: “A&P” (p. 160), “The Carpet Factory” (p. 643), Applicant
(p. 840)

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586 Chapter 19 • Figures of Speech

JOHN DONNE (1572–1631)

A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning (1611)
As virtuous men pass mildly away,

And whisper to their souls to go,
Whilst some of their sad friends do say

The breath goes now, and some say no:

So let us melt, and make no noise,
No tear-�oods, nor sigh-tempests move;

’Twere profanation of our joys
To tell the laity1 our love.

Moving of th’ earth brings harms and fears;
Men reckon what it did and meant;

But trepidation of the spheres,
Though greater far, is innocent.

Dull sublunary lovers’ love
(Whose soul is sense) cannot admit

Absence, because it doth remove
Those things which elemented it.

But we, by a love so much re�ned
That ourselves know not what it is,

Inter-assurèd of the mind,
Care less, eyes, lips, and hands to miss.

Our two souls, therefore, which are one,
Though I must go, endure not yet

A breach, but an expansion,
Like gold to airy thinness beat.

If they be two, they are two so
As stiff twin compasses2 are two:

Thy soul, the �xed foot, makes no show
To move, but doth, if th’ other do.

And though it in the center sit,
Yet when the other far doth roam,

It leans and harkens after it,
And grows erect as that comes home.

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1laity: Here, “common people.”laity: Here, “common people.”laity:
2compasses: V-shaped instruments used for drawing circles.compasses: V-shaped instruments used for drawing circles.compasses:

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Donne: A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning 587

Such wilt thou be to me, who must,
Like th’ other foot, obliquely run;

Thy �rmness makes my circle just,3

And makes me end where I begun.
35

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3just:3just:3 Perfect.just: Perfect.just:

Reading and Reacting
1. Beginning with line 25, the poem develops an extended metaphor that

compares the speaker and his loved one to “twin compasses” (line 26),
attached yet separate. Why is the compass (pictured above) an especially
apt metaphor? What physical characteristics of the compass does the poet
emphasize?

2. The poem uses other �gures of speech to characterize both the lovers’
union and their separation. To what other events does the speaker com-
pare his separation from his loved one? To what other elements does he
compare their attachment? Do you think these comparisons make sense?

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588 Chapter 19 • Figures of Speech

3. JOURNAL ENTRY To what other object could Donne have compared his NTRY To what other object could Donne have compared his NTRY
loved one and himself? Explain the logic of the extended metaphor
you suggest.

4. CRITICAL PERSPECTIVE In John Donne and the Metaphysical Poets (1970),
Judah Stampfer writes of this poem’s “thin, dry texture, its stanzas of
pinched music,” noting that its form “has too clipped a brevity to qualify
as a song” and that its “music wobbles on a dry, measured beat.” Yet, he
argues, “the poem comes choked with emotional power” because “the
speaker reads as a naturally reticent man, leaving his beloved in uncer-
tainty and deep trouble.” Stampfer concludes, “Easy self-expression here
would be self-indulgent, if not reprehensible. . . . For all his careful dignity,
we feel a heart is breaking here.”

Do you �nd such emotional power in this highly intellectual poem?

Related Works: “To My Dear and Loving Husband” (p. 593), “How Do I
Love Thee?” (p. 719), A Doll House (p. 881) Post-its (p. 955)

Two additional kinds of �gurative language, hyperbole and understatement,
also give poets opportunities to suggest meaning beyond the literal level of
language.

Hyperbole is intentional exaggeration—saying more than is actually
meant. In the poem “Oh, my love is like a red, red rose” (p. 580), when the
speaker says that he will love his lady until all the seas go dry, he is using
hyperbole.

Understatement is the opposite—saying less than is meant. When the
speaker in the poem “Fire and Ice” (p. 510), weighing two equally grim
alternatives for the end of the world, says that “for destruction ice / Is also
great / And would suf�ce,” he is using understatement. In both cases, the
poets expect their readers to understand that their words are not to be
taken literally.

By using hyperbole and understatement, poets enhance the impact of
their poems. For example, poets can use hyperbole to convey exaggerated
anger or graphic images of horror—and to ridicule and satirize as well as to
in�ame and shock. With understatement, poets can convey the same kind of
powerful emotions subtly, without arti�ce or embellishment, thereby leading
readers to read more closely than they might otherwise.

The emotionally charged poem that follows uses hyperbole to convey
anger and bitterness that seem almost beyond the power of words.

Hyperbole and Understatement

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Plath: Daddy 589

SYLVIA PLATH (1932–1963)

Daddy (1965)
You do not do, you do not do
Any more, black shoe
In which I have lived like a foot
For thirty years, poor and white,
Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.

Daddy, I have had to kill you.
You died before I had time—
Marble-heavy, a bag full of God,
Ghastly statue with one grey toe
Big as a Frisco seal

And a head in the freakish Atlantic
Where it pours bean green over blue
In the waters off beautiful Nauset.
I used to pray to recover you.
Ach, du.1

In the German tongue, in the Polish town2

Scraped �at by the roller
Of wars, wars, wars.
But the name of the town is common.
My Polack friend

Says there are a dozen or two.
So I never could tell where you
Put your foot, your root,
I never could talk to you.
The tongue stuck in my jaw.

It stuck in a barb wire snare.
Ich, ich, ich, ich,3

I could hardly speak.
I thought every German was you.
And the language obscene

An engine, an engine
Chuf�ng me off like a Jew.

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1Ach, du: “Ah, you” (German).Ach, du: “Ah, you” (German).Ach, du:
2Polish town: Grabôw, where Plath’s father was born.Polish town: Grabôw, where Plath’s father was born.Polish town:
3ich: “I” (German).ich: “I” (German).ich:

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590 Chapter 19 • Figures of Speech

A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen.4

I began to talk like a Jew.
I think I may well be a Jew.

The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna
Are not very pure or true.
With my gypsy ancestress and my weird luck
And my Taroc pack and my Taroc pack
I may be a bit of a Jew.

I have always been scared of you,
With your Luftwaffe,5 your gobbledygoo.
And your neat moustache
And your Aryan eye, bright blue.
Panzer6-man, panzer-man, O You—

Not God but a swastika
So black no sky could squeak through.
Every woman adores a Fascist,
The boot in the face, the brute
Brute heart of a brute like you.

You stand at the blackboard, daddy,
In the picture I have of you,
A cleft in your chin instead of your foot
But no less a devil for that, no not
Any less the black man who

Bit my pretty red heart in two.
I was ten when they buried you.
At twenty I tried to die
And get back, back, back to you.
I thought even the bones would do.

But they pulled me out of the sack,
And they stuck me together with glue.
And then I knew what to do.
I made a model of you,
A man in black with a Meinkampf 7 look

And a love of the rack and the screw.
And I said I do, I do.

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4Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen: Nazi concentration camps.Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen: Nazi concentration camps.Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen:
5Luftwaffe: The German air force.Luftwaffe: The German air force.Luftwaffe:
6Panzer: Protected by armor. The Panzer division was the German armored division.Panzer: Protected by armor. The Panzer division was the German armored division.Panzer:
7Meinkampf: Mein Kampf (My Struggle) is Adolf Hitler’s autobiography.Meinkampf: Mein Kampf (My Struggle) is Adolf Hitler’s autobiography.Meinkampf: Mein Kampf

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Plath: Daddy 591

So daddy, I’m �nally through.
The black telephone’s off at the root,
The voices just can’t worm through.

If I’ve killed one man, I’ve killed two—
The vampire who said he was you
And drank my blood for a year,
Seven years, if you want to know.
Daddy, you can lie back now.

There’s a stake in your fat black heart
And the villagers never liked you.
They are dancing and stamping on you.
They always knew it was you.
Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through.

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75
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Nazi poster, 1941
Hulton Archive/Archive Photos/Getty Images

In her anger and frustration, the speaker sees herself as a helpless victim—a
foot entrapped in a shoe, a Jew in a concentration camp—of her father’s
(and, later, her husband’s) absolute tyranny. Thus, her hated father is
characterized as a “black shoe,” “a bag full of God,” a “Ghastly statue,” and,
eventually, a Nazi, a torturer, the devil, a vampire. The poem “Daddy” is

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592 Chapter 19 • Figures of Speech

widely accepted by scholars as autobiographical, and the fact that Plath’s
own father was actually neither a Nazi nor a sadist (nor, obviously, the devil
or a vampire) makes it clear that the �gures of speech in the poem are wildly
exaggerated. Even so, they may convey the poet’s true feelings toward her
father—and, perhaps, toward the patriarchal society in which she lived.

Plath uses hyperbole to communicate these emotions to readers who she
knows cannot possibly feel the way she does. Her purpose, therefore, is not
only to shock but also to enlighten, to persuade, and perhaps even to empower
her readers. Throughout the poem, the in�ammatory language is set in ironic
opposition to the childish, affectionate term “Daddy”—most strikingly in the
last line’s choked out “Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through.” The result of
the exaggerated rhetoric is a poem that is vivid and shocking. And, although
some might believe that Plath’s almost wild exaggeration undermines the
poem’s impact, others would argue that the powerful language is necessary to
convey the extent of the speaker’s rage.

Like “Daddy,” the following poem describes a situation whose emotional
impact is devastating. In this case, however, the poet does not use highly
charged language; instead, she uses understatement, presenting her imagined
scenario without embellishment.

EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY (1892–1950)

If I should learn, in some
quite casual way (1931)
If I should learn, in some quite casual way,
That you were gone, not to return again—
Read from the back-page of a paper, say,
Held by a neighbor in a subway train,
How at a corner of this avenue
And such a street (so are the papers �lled)
A hurrying man—who happened to be you—
At noon today had happened to be killed,
I should not cry aloud—could not cry
Aloud, or wring my hands in such a place—
I should but watch the station lights rush by
With a more careful interest on my face,
Or raise my eyes and read with greater care
Where to store furs and how to treat the hair.

Although this poem’s speaker imagines a tragic scenario—receiving the news
of her lover’s death—her language is restrained. In the poem’s �rst eight lines,
words and expressions like “quite casual” (1), “say” (3), “this avenue / And

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Bradstreet: To My Dear and Loving Husband 593

such a street” (5–6), and “happened to be” (7, 8) convey a sense of random-
ness. The speaker’s voice is detached and passive. In the remaining six lines,
which describe her reaction to the news, she calmly explains her unwilling-
ness to make a scene, telling what she will not do—“cry / Aloud, or wring
my hands . . .” (9–10)—and expressing her determination to adopt an air of
studied interest in the subway car’s trivial advertisements. The poem’s lan-
guage and tone are consistently �at and unemotional, conveying a sense of
detachment and resignation.

FURTHER READING: Hyperbole
and Understatement

ANNE BRADSTREET (1612–1672)

To My Dear and Loving
Husband (1678)
If ever two were one, then surely we.
If ever man were lov’d by wife, then thee;
If ever wife was happy in a man,
Compare with me ye women if you can.
I prize thy love more than whole Mines of gold,
Or all the riches that the East doth hold.
My love is such that Rivers cannot quench,
Nor ought but love from thee, give recompense.
Thy love is such I can no way repay,
The heavens reward thee manifold I pray.
Then while we live, in love let’s so persever,
That when we live no more, we may live ever.

Reading and Reacting
1. Review the claims the poem’s speaker makes about her love in lines 5–8.

Are such exaggerated declarations of love necessary, or would the rest
of the poem be suf�cient to convey the extent of her devotion to her
husband?

2. JOURNAL ENTRY Compare this poem’s declarations of love to those of
John Donne’s speaker in “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning” (p. 586).
Which speaker do you �nd more convincing? Why?

Related Works: “A Rose for Emily” (p. 143), “How Do I Love Thee?”
(p. 719), “Let me not to the marriage of true minds” (p. 785)

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594 Chapter 19 • Figures of Speech

ANDREW MARVELL (1621–1678)

To His Coy Mistress (1681)
Had we but world enough and time,
This coyness, lady, were no crime.
We would sit down and think which way
To walk, and pass our long love’s day.
Thou by the Indian Ganges’ side
Should’st rubies �nd; I by the tide
Of Humber1 would complain. I would
Love you ten years before the Flood,
And you should, if you please, refuse
Till the conversion of the Jews.
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.
An age at least to every part,
And the last age should show your heart.
For, lady, you deserve this state,
Nor would I love at lower rate.

But at my back I always hear
Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near,
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity.
Thy beauty shall no more be found,
Nor in thy marble vault shall sound
My echoing song; then worms shall try
That long preserved virginity,
And your quaint honor turn to dust,
And into ashes all my lust.
The grave’s a �ne and private place,
But none, I think, do there embrace.

Now therefore, while the youthful hue
Sits on thy skin like morning glew2

And while thy willing soul transpires
At every pore with instant �res,

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1Humber: An estuary on the east coast of England.Humber: An estuary on the east coast of England.Humber:
2glew: Dew.glew: Dew.glew:

Winged horses pulling chariot
Helene Rogers /Art Directors & TRIP / Alamy

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Marvell: To His Coy Mistress 595

Now let us sport us while we may;
And now, like amorous birds of prey,
Rather at once our time devour
Than languish in his slow-chapped3 power.
Let us roll all our strength and all
Our sweetness up into one ball
And tear our pleasures with rough strife
Thorough the iron gates of life.
Thus, though we cannot make our sun
Stand still, yet we will make him run.

Reading and Reacting
1. In this poem, Marvell’s speaker sets out to convince a reluctant woman

to become his lover. In order to make his case more persuasive, he uses
hyperbole, exaggerating time periods, sizes, spaces, and the possible fate
of the woman if she refuses him. Identify as many examples of hyperbole
as you can.

2. The tone of “To His Coy Mistress” is more whimsical than serious. Given
this tone, what do you see as the purpose of Marvell’s use of hyperbole?

3. JOURNAL ENTRY Using contemporary prose, paraphrase the �rst four lines NTRY Using contemporary prose, paraphrase the �rst four lines NTRY
of the poem. Then, beginning with the word However, compose a few new
sentences of prose, continuing the argument Marvell’s speaker makes.

4. CRITICAL PERSPECTIVE In her essay “Andrew Marvell’s ‘To His Coy Mistress’:
A Feminist Reading,” critic Margaret Wald presents the following analy-
sis of the poem:

Andrew Marvell’s speaker in “To His Coy Mistress” invokes Petrarchan con-
vention, a poetic mode originating in the fourteenth century in which a male
lover uses exaggerated metaphors to appeal to his female beloved. Yet Mar-
vell alludes to such excessive—and disempowering—pining only to defy this
tradition of unrequited love. Instead of respectful adulation, he offers lustful
invitation; rather than anticipating rejection, he assumes sexual dominion
over the eponymous “mistress.” The poem is as much a celebration of his
rhetorical mastery as it is of his physical conquest.

In what sense is the speaker in this poem celebrating his beloved? In what
sense is he celebrating himself? Is his portrayal of his loved one entirely
positive? Which elements, if any, are negative?

Related Works: “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” (p. 453),
“To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time” (p. 518), “The Passionate Shepherd
to His Love” (p. 777), The Brute (p. 814)

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596 Chapter 19 • Figures of Speech

ROBERT FROST (1874–1963)

“Out, Out—” (1916)
The buzz saw snarled and rattled in the yard
And made dust and dropped stove-length sticks of wood,
Sweet-scented stuff when the breeze drew across it.
And from there those that lifted eyes could count
Five mountain ranges one behind the other
Under the sunset far into Vermont.
And the saw snarled and rattled, snarled and rattled,
As it ran light, or had to bear a load.
And nothing happened: day was all but done.
Call it a day, I wish they might have said
To please the boy by giving him the half hour
That a boy counts so much when saved from work.
His sister stood beside them in her apron
To tell them “Supper.” At the word, the saw,
As if to prove saws knew what supper meant,
Leaped out at the boy’s hand, or seemed to leap—
He must have given the hand. However it was,
Neither refused the meeting. But the hand!
The boy’s �rst outcry was a rueful laugh,
As he swung toward them holding up the hand
Half in appeal, but half as if to keep
The life from spilling. Then the boy saw all—
Since he was old enough to know, big boy
Doing a man’s work, though a child at heart—
He saw all spoiled. “Don’t let him cut my hand off—
The doctor, when he comes. Don’t let him, sister!”
So. But the hand was gone already.
The doctor put him in the dark of ether.
He lay and puffed his lips out with his breath.
And then—the watcher at his pulse took fright.
No one believed. They listened at his heart.
Little—less—nothing!—and that ended it.
No more to build on there. And they, since they
Were not the one dead, turned to their affairs.

Reading and Reacting
1. The poem’s title is an allusion to a passage in Shakespeare’s Macbeth

(5.5.23–28) that addresses the brevity and meaninglessness of life in very
emotional terms:

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Cullen: Incident 597

Out, out brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

What idea do you think Frost wants to convey through the title “Out,
Out—”?

2. Explain why each of the following quali�es as understatement:
• “Neither refused the meeting.” (line 18)
• “He saw all spoiled.” (line 25)
• “—and that ended it.” (line 32)
• “No more to build on there.” (line 33)

Can you identify any other examples of understatement in the poem?

3. JOURNAL ENTRY Do you think the poem’s impact is strengthened or weakNTRY Do you think the poem’s impact is strengthened or weakNTRY –
ened by its understated tone?

4. CRITICAL PERSPECTIVE In an essay on Frost in his book Af�rming Limits,
poet and critic Robert Pack focuses on the single word “So” in line 27 of
“Out, Out—”:

For a moment, his narration is reduced to the impotent word “So,” and in
that minimal word all his restrained grief is held…. That “So” is the narrator’s
cry of bearing witness to a story that must be what it is in a scene he cannot
enter. He cannot rescue or protect the boy…. In the poem’s sense of human
helplessness in an indifferent universe, we are all “watchers,” and what we see
is death without redemption, “signifying nothing.” So. So? So! How shall we
read that enigmatic word?

How do you read this “enigmatic word”? Why?

Related Works: “The Lottery” (p. 335), “The Death of the Ball Turret
Gunner” (p. 583), “Terza Rima” (p. 729)

COUNTEE CULLEN (1903–1946)

Incident (1925)
Once riding in old Baltimore,
Heart-�lled, head-�lled with glee;
I saw a Baltimorean
Keep looking straight at me.

Now I was eight and very small,
And he was no whit bigger,

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598 Chapter 19 • Figures of Speech

And so I smiled, but he poked out
His tongue, and called me, “Nigger.”

I saw the whole of Baltimore
From May until December;
Of all the things that happened there
That’s all that I remember.

Reading and Reacting
1. This poem’s last two lines are extremely understated. What words or lines

in the poem are not understated? Does this use of both direct and under-
stated language make sense? Explain.

2. What do you think the speaker might be referring to by “all the things
that happened” in Baltimore (11)? Why?

3. JOURNAL ENTRY Retell the events of this poem in a paragraph, paraphrasNTRY Retell the events of this poem in a paragraph, paraphrasNTRY –
ing lines 1–10 but quoting the last two lines exactly. Include a few sen-
tences that reveal the speaker’s emotions.

4. CRITICAL PERSPECTIVE According to critic Jervis Anderson, Countee
Cullen, although one of the most prominent African American poets
of his time, placed relatively little emphasis in his work on race and
racial politics:

Cullen did not, could not, avoid entirely the question of race. But his view
of himself as a poet did not permit him to make that question his main
subject. . . . Usually, Cullen engaged the race problem obliquely—at times
with deft jabs and glancing blows. . . at times with understated amusement,
as in “Incident.”

Do you agree with Anderson that in “Incident,” Cullen deals with race
with “understated amusement.” What evidence for or against this inter-
pretation do you see in the poem?

Related Works: “Big Black Good Man” (p. 236), “Negro” (p. 502), “Ethel’s
Sestina” (p. 649), “Yet Do I Marvel” (p. 690), “If We Must Die” (p. 778)

MARGARET ATWOOD (1939– )

You �t into me (1971)
you �t into me
like a hook into an eye

a �sh hook
an open eye

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9781337509633, PORTABLE Literature: Reading, Reacting, Writing, Ninth edition, Kirszner – © Cengage Learning. All rights reserved. No distribution allowed without express authorization.
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Lovelace: To Lucasta Going to the Wars 599

Reading and Reacting
1. What positive connotations does Atwood expect readers to associate

with the phrase “you �t into me”? What does the speaker seem at �rst to
mean by “like a hook into an eye” in line 2?

2. The speaker’s shift to the brutal suggestions of lines 3 and 4 is calculated
to shock readers. Does the use of hyperbole here have another purpose in
the context of the poem? Explain.

3. JOURNAL ENTRY Do you �nd this poem unsettling? Do you think it is
serious or just a joke?

Related Works: “Hills Like White Elephants” (p. 74), “Love and Other
Catastrophes: A Mix Tape” (p. 84), “Daddy” (p. 589), A Doll House
(p. 881)

Metonymy and synecdoche are two related �gures of speech. Metonymy is
the substitution of the name of one thing for the name of another thing
that most readers associate with the �rst—for example, using hired gun to
mean “paid assassin” or suits to mean “business executives.” A speci�c kind of
metonymy, called synecdoche, is the substitution of a part for the whole (for
example, using wheels to refer to an automobile or bread—as in “Give us this
day our daily bread”—to mean “food”) or the whole for a part (for example,
using the law to refer to a police of�cer).

With metonymy and synecdoche, instead of describing something by say-
ing it is like something else (as in simile) or by equating it with something
else (as in metaphor), writers can characterize an object or concept by using
a term that evokes it. The following poem illustrates the use of synecdoche.

RICHARD LOVELACE (1618–1658)

To Lucasta Going to the Wars (1649)
Tell me not, Sweet, I am unkind

That from the nunnery
Of thy chaste breast and quiet mind,
To war and arms I �y.

True, a new mistress now I chase,
The �rst foe in the �eld;

And with a stronger faith embrace
A sword, a horse, a shield.

Metonymy and Synecdoche

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600 Chapter 19 • Figures of Speech

Yet this inconstancy is such
As you too shall adore;

I could not love thee, Dear, so much,
Loved I not Honor more.

Prince Rupert’s cavalry charging at Edgehill, 1642
The Print Collector / HIP / The Image Works

Here, Lovelace’s use of synecdoche allows him to condense a number of
complex ideas into a very few words. In line 3, when the speaker says that
he is �ying from his loved one’s “chaste breast and quiet mind,” he is using
“breast” and “mind” to stand for all his loved one’s physical and intellectual
attributes. In line 8, when he says that he is embracing “A sword, a horse, a
shield,” he is using these three items to represent the trappings of war—and,
thus, to represent war itself.

With apostrophe, a poem’s speaker addresses an absent person or thing—for
example, a historical or literary �gure or even an inanimate object or an
abstract concept.

In the following poem, the speaker addresses the Twin Towers of the
World Trade Center, destroyed in the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

Apostrophe

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Mercado: Going to Work 601

NANCY MERCADO (1959– )

Going to Work (2001)
On their daily trips
Commuters shed tears now
Use American �ags
Like veiled women
To hide their sorrows
Rush to buy throwaway cameras
To capture your twin ghosts

Frantically I too
Purchase your memory
On postcards & coffee mugs
In New York City souvenir shops
Afraid I’ll forget your facade
Forget my hallowed Sunday
Morning PATH Train rides
My subway travels through
The center of your belly
Day after day

Afraid I’ll forget your powers
To transform helicopters
Into ladybugs gliding in the air
To turn New York City
Into a breathing map
To display the curvature
Of our world

In “Going to Work,” the poem’s speaker describes her reactions in the after-
math of the September 11th attacks and remembers how, before the towers
were destroyed, she traveled to work on the PATH (Port Authority Trans-
Hudson) train that ran beneath them. Now, she says, commuters “Rush
to buy throwaway cameras / To capture your twin ghosts.” She continues,
“Frantically I too / Purchase your memory” in the form of souvenirs. In the
speaker’s mind, the towers loom large; despite her fears, there is little danger
of her forgetting them. In their remembered size and power, they still “display
the curvature / Of our world.”

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602 Chapter 19 • Figures of Speech

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