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Poetry
Step one in understanding "Cat!" is to find out what "atter" means! According to Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary available at Dictionary.com, the word "atter" refers to poison or venom...
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Poetry
While there are certainly a number of differences between the two poems, both seem to depict a woman who is very aware of the loss of her youth. In "Mirror," a physical mirror narrates, describing...
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Poetry
Critiquing another person's poem can be a daunting task, especially under circumstances in which you know the author personally. Authors frequently divulge their personal thoughts and feelings in...
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Poetry
Answer an exam question about a poem by addressing a series of topics. First, you should identify the author and approximate date of the poem. Next, you might discuss whether the poem belongs to or...
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Poetry
Both Emily Dickinson and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote poetry that fits into the Transcendentalist tradition, which means their poems share certain traits common to Transcendentalism. While...
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Poetry
In terms of its structure, the poem can be divided into three sections. The first section of the poem describes the time when the West Indies was a colony of the British Empire. The speaker...
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Poetry
"Night of the Scorpion" is a poem written in 1965. The poem's speaker uses first person to relate a memory of his mother being bitten on the toe by a scorpion on a rainy night in India. In the...
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Poetry
“Inukshuk” by Canadian poet, playwright, essayist, and teacher Daniel David Moses anticipates the northern expansion of Europeans into Canadian lands and the movement's destructive effects on...
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Poetry
One literary device that is used in the first two lines of the poem is enjambment. Enjambment occurs when a line of poetry flows over into the next line of the poem without using some kind of...
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Poetry
A critical appreciation or a critical analysis of a poem should address content and form. In discussing content, the critic should describe what the poem is about, possibly noting an author's...
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Poetry
Sappho's Fragment 31 is a love poem, which describes the poet's emotions as she sees a man talking and laughing with her beloved. The poem's content is very passionate, though its form is...
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Poetry
This is a very interesting question. If you are to write an introduction on sound devices in poetry, I would suggest you start by explaining how a poet usually wants to convey a message through...
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Poetry
Pheng offers an ironic and somewhat critical take on her country, Singapore, and her people, many of them immigrants. She tries, in this poem, to understand what her homeland means to her. Her...
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Poetry
When the speaker of the poem says, "Being present means I accept its isness," I think this means that she accepts the reality of the present moment, its existence and significance, as valuable....
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Poetry
"Prayer to Masks" is a poem by Leopold Sedhar Senghor. Senghor is from Sengal, Africa and was his country's president for 20 years. Senghor begins by addressing black, red, and white masks of...
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Poetry
Lenrie Peters's poem "Homecoming" is about nostalgia and the inevitability of change. In the opening stanza of the poem, the speaker says that "The present reigned supreme / Like the shallow floods...
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Poetry
The poem "We Old Dudes" by Joan Murray is a humorous look at old American men who have retired and moved to Florida. If readers take the broader meaning of the word "dude" to mean "person" instead...
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Poetry
Rupert Loydell and Zulfikar Ghose in their poems write on the same subject---- a jobless, homeless, person, in one case a tramp and in the other a street beggar, both struck by poverty, pain and...
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Poetry
Although the two poems are identical in structure and rhyme scheme, "We Old Dudes" is not a parody of "We Real Cool" because Joan Murray isn't imitating Gwendolyn Brooks's style in an exaggerated...
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Poetry
In the poem "Blue Horses Rush In," the speaker certainly indicates that Chamisa, the baby, is born into an ongoing familial legacy. Indeed, Chamisa is born in a place from where her "grandmothers...
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Poetry
I will get you started This poem paints a vivid and brutal picture of what is involved in killing a tree, but I think there can be a deeper meaning as well. The poet uses strong images to show that...
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Poetry
The author uses several poetic devices in the poem "Then and Now." The first stanza includes the use of onomatopoeia in the phrase "grinding tram and hissing train," which helps the reader add...
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Poetry
“The Black Man’s Burden” is a poem written by H. T. Johnson, an African American reverend. It was published in 1899 in response to and as a criticizm of Kipling’s famous poem “The White Man’s...
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Poetry
The speaker of this poem is a college-aged girl who has taken a trip home one weekend. Her college is located in the North, her home is in the South. As she sits with her grandmother, she feels...
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Poetry
Anne Spencer is a Harlem Renaissance poet born in 1882 in Virginia. She was the daughter of former slaves, and her activism rang through many of her poems. These three poems in particular: "Lady,...
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Poetry
What an interesting but heartbreaking poem for the narrator! “Nighttime Fires” by Regina Barrera uses the first person unnamed narrator to recall a part of her life that as an adult she tries to...
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Poetry
Stevie Smith leaves out much of the background of the incident alluded to in this poem. Perhaps the most crucial element of what we, as readers, have to fill in is the relation of the speaker to...
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Poetry
In Arun Kolatkar's poem, "An Old Woman," the main theme is about keeping what is important in perspective—in this case, an old woman and her heritage—the land from which she comes. Someone may be...
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Poetry
"These Are Wintering Words" is a poem written by Marilyn Dumont and first published in a collection of poetry entitled "The Pemmican Eaters." The poem celebrates mixed race heritage, and serves as...
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Poetry
This poem is a celebration of the history and cultural diversity of the British people. The speaker, as if describing the steps in a recipe, describes the different cultural and ethnic groups which...
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Poetry
When tackling a question like this, sometimes the good old list-making method is your best friend! So, with that in mind, let's think about it this way: Similarities 1. Both poems use a style...
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Poetry
Richard Garcia's "Why I Left the Church" is a poem in which the speaker reflects on the ways he felt incompatible with the Catholic Church as a child. This could connect with current attitudes...
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Poetry
“It Ain’t What You Do, It’s What It Does To You” is a poem written by Simon Armitage. In his poem, which is written in the first person, the poet reflects back on his life. He looks at the various...
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Poetry
The Weaver Bird is a poem written by Kofi Awoonor, a poet from Ghana. It is dealing with the theme of occupation and colonization from the perspective of the native people. Whilst the poem never...
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Poetry
To work out the meter of a poem, first count the number of syllables in a line. If this varies greatly from line to line, the poem may have no regular meter, but if each line has a set number of...
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Poetry
"The Farmhand" contrasts a young farmhand's awkwardness and unease at a dance with his skill and confidence at his job. The poem consists of five quatrains (stanzas of four lines) written using...
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Poetry
"Bilingual/Bilingüe" is a poem by Rhina P. Espaillat that deals with the tensions inherent in living a life in two languages simultaneously. The poet expresses the difficulties experienced by...
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Poetry
There's a bit of controversy on this one, especially because many critics claim that Gonzales was just an angry Chicano mixing his own political preferences in a somewhat poetic way. Yet, the...
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Poetry
An analytic thesis should be a statement that you can argue for and defend. First, let’s analyze the poem and see what perspectives are apparent. “Bent to the Earth” is a free verse memoir poem. It...
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Poetry
“Meeting at an Airport” is a free verse poem. It has 6 stanzas, each of which are different lengths. It does not use a discernible meter. It is a memoir and tells a story in which the speaker is an...
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Poetry
An Abecedarian poem is a poem that uses each letter of the alphabet in order, from A to Z, as the beginning letter of each line. When such a poem is a "couplet" poem, then each pair of lines also...
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Poetry
Sir J. C. Squire's short poem "The Discovery" describes the moment in 1492 when a Taino Indian sees Christopher Columbus's ships arriving at the island now known as San Salvador. I'll address the...
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Poetry
Hilary Corke's "After I Wake Up" is written in free verse. The difference between free verse and blank verse is that, while neither relies upon rhyme to lend cohesion to a poem, blank verse will...
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Poetry
On its face, “The Rabbit” appears to be a simple poem. However, a deeper analysis reveals Alan Brownjohn’s futuristic poem to be a frightening portent of an ecological disaster brought upon the...
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Poetry
Haiku are short and sweet, and have strong images of nature. The senses are usually visual, but they can appeal to hearing and touch as well. The reader gets a picture when reading them.
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Poetry
The speaker of the poem is a child, who finds a picture of her father, and tries to understand him. (We’re not told if this speaker is a girl or a boy, but for the purposes of this answer, I’ll...
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Poetry
To analyze this poem, let’s look at a couple of different aspects. First, the visual form of this poem is the first thing that the reader notices. The poem is written in lowercase letters, except...
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Poetry
This poem is about an old man who suffered through a famine The old man is the speaker’s grandfather. The speaker starts out reading the grandfather’s diary, for he says: The yellowed diary’s...
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Poetry
U.A. Fanthorpe’s “First Flight” is a free verse poem in fourteen stanzas, ranging in length from one to four lines. There are two speakers, but they do not interact, so the poem is either two...
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Poetry
The irony in this particular poem certainly produces a comic effect for the reader and allows us to understand that we are not supposed to identify with the "snob[bish]" speaker. In calling the...