demystifying poetry

1. Who is the speaker? What kind of

person is the speaker?

The concept of the persona

the mask

the voice

Thy belt of straw and ivy buds,

Thy coral clasps and amber studs,

All these in me no means can move

To come to thee and be thy love.

But could youth last, and love still breed,

Had joys no date, nor age no need,

Then these delights my mind might move

To live with thee and be thy love.

Sylvia Plath (1932-1963)

Mirror

I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.

Whatever I see I swallow immediately.

Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike.

I am not cruel, only truthful--

The eye of a little god, four-cornered.

Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall.

It is pink, with speckles. I have looked at it so long

I think it is a part of my heart. But it flickers.

Faces and darkness separate us over and over.

Now I am lake. A woman bends over me,

Searching my reaches for what she really is.

Then she turns to those liars, the candles or the moon.

I see her back, and reflect it faithfully.

She rewards me with tears and an agitation of hands.

I am important to her. She comes and goes.

Each morning it is her face that replaces the darkness.

In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman

Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.

2. Is there an identifiable audience for the speaker?

John Frederick Nims

Love Poem

My clumsiest dear, whose hands shipwrecked vases,

At whose quick touch all glasses chip and ring,

Whose hands are bulls in china, burrs in linen,

And have no cunning with any soft thing

Except all ill at ease fidgeting people:

The refugee uncertain at the door

You make at home; deftly you steady

The drunk clambering on his undulant floor.

Unpredictable dear, the taxi driver’s terror,

Shrinking from far headlights pale as a dime

Yet leaping before red apoplectic streetcars—

Misfit in any space. And never on time.

A wrench in clocks and the solar system. Only

With words and people and love you move at ease.

In traffic of wit expertly maneuver

And keep us, all devotion, at your knees.

Forgetting your coffee spreading on our flannel,

Your lipstick grinning on our coat,

So gaily in love’s unbearable heaven

Our souls on glory of spilt bourbon float.

Be with me darling early and late. Smash glasses—

I will study wry music for your sake.

For should your hands drop white and empty

All the toys of the world would break.

My Funny Valentine

My Funny Valentine,

Sweet, Comic Valentine,

You make me smile in my heart.

Your looks are laughable

Un-photographable

Yet you’re my favorite work of art.

Jennings, Elizabeth (1926- )

Absence

I visited the place where we last met.

Nothing was changed, the gardens were well-tended,

The fountains sprayed their usual steady jet;

There was no sign that anything had ended

And nothing to instruct me to forget.

The thoughtless birds that shook out of the trees,

Singing an ecstasy I could not share,

Played cunning in my thoughts. Surely in these

Pleasures there could not be a pain to bear

Or any discord shake the level breeze

It was because the place was just the same

That made your absence seem a savage force,

For under all the gentleness there came

An earthquake tremor: fountain, birds and grass

Were shaken by my thinking of your name.

Pagkawala

(hubad sa balak ni Elizabeth Jennings nga “Absence”)

Gibisita nako ang lugar diin kataposan tang nagkita.

Way kausaban, ang mga tanom maayo ra pagkaatiman.

Makanunayon gihapon ang pagpasirit sa mga fountain.

Way sinyales nga dunay natapos aning lugara.

Ug way nagmando nako nga molimot.

Ang mga way hanawng langgam nga nanukad sa mga kahoy,

Nga gahuni’g himaya nga di nako mahimo’ng iambit,

Abtik nga giduwaan akong hunahuna. Sigurado gyud nga ‘ning

Gagmayng kalingawan, way angay’ng antoson nga kasakit

O kaha kagubot nga makapatay-og sa huyohoy.

Tungod kay way maskin unsang nausab ‘ning lugara,

Mas nabati na nuon nako ang gibug-aton sa imong pagkawala.

Kay taliwa sa kalinaw ug kahapsay, miabot

Ang dakong linog: ang fountain, ang mga langgam, ug ang sagbot

Kay gipang-uyog sa akong paghunahuna sa imong ngalan.

Gratian Paul R. Tidor

Iligan City, Philippines

Jan. 30, 2012

Herrick, Robert (1591-1674)

To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time

Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,

Old time is still a-flying;

And this same flower that smiles today

Tomorrow will be dying.

Donne, John (1573-1631)

Sonnet 14, from The Holy Sonnet

Batter my heart, three-personed God; for You

As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;

That I may rise and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend

Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.

Donne, John (1573-1631)

Sonnet 10, from The Holy Sonnets

Death, be not proud, though some have called thee

Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so;

For those whom thou think’st thou dost overthrow

Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me.

3. What is the occasion?

Hopkins, Gerald Manly (1844-1889)

Spring and Fall: To a young Child

Margaret, are you grieving

Over Goldengrove unleaving?

Leaves, like the things of man, you

With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?

Ah, as the heart grows older

It will come to such colder

By and by, nor spare a sigh

Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;

And yet you will weep and know why.

Now no matter, child, the name:

Sorrow’s springs are the same.

Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed

What heart heard of, ghost guessed:

It is the blight man was born for,

It is Margaret you mourn for.

Frost, Robert (1875-1963)

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

Whose woods these are I think I know.

His house is in the village though;

He will not see me stopping here

To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer

To stop without a farmhouse near

Between the woods and frozen lake

The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake

To ask if there is some mistake.

The only other sound’s the sweep

Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,

But I have promises to keep,

And miles to go before I sleep,

And miles to go before I sleep.

4. What is the setting in time (hour, season, century, and so on)?

HARDY, THOMAS (1840-1928)

The Darkling Thrush

I leant upon a coppice gate

When Frost was specter- gray,

And Winter’s dregs made desolate

The weakening eye of day.

The tangled bine- stems scored the sky

Like strings of broken lyres.

And all mankind that hunted nigh

Had sought their household fires.

The land’s sharp features seemed to be

The century’s corpse outleant,

His crypt the cloudy canopy,

The wind his death- lament.

The ancient pulse of germ and birth

Was shrunken hard and dry,

And every spirit upon earth

Seemed fervorless as I.

At once a voice arose among

The black twigs overhead

In a full- hearted evensong

Of joy illimited;

An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,

In blast-beruffled plume,

Had chosen thus to fling his soul

Upon the growing gloom.

So little cause for carolings

Of such ecstatic sound

Was written on terrestrial things

Afar or nigh around,

That I could think there trembled through

His happy goodnight air

Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew

And I was unaware.

December 31, 1900

Yeats, William Butler (1865-1939)

The Wild Swans at Coole

The trees are in their autumn beauty,

The woodland paths are dry,

Under the October twilight the water

Mirrors a still sky;

Upon the brimming water among the stones

Are nine-and-fifty swans.

5. What is the setting in place (indoors or out, city or country, land or sea, region, country, hemisphere)?

Nims, John Frederick

Love Poem

A wrench in clocks and the solar system. Only

With words and people and love you move at ease.

In traffic of wit expertly maneuver

And keep us, all devotion, at your knees.

Forgetting your coffee spreading on our flannel,

Your lipstick grinning on our coat,

So gaily in love’s unbearable heaven

Our souls on glory of spilt bourbon float.

Be with me darling early and late. Smash glasses—

I will study wry music for your sake.

For should your hands drop white and empty

All the toys of the world would break.

Kumin, Maxine (1925-- )

After Love

Afterwards, the compromise.

Bodies resume their boundaries.

These legs, for instance, mine.

Your arms take you back in.

Spoons of our fingers, lips

admit their ownership.

The bedding yawns, a door

blows aimlessly ajar

and overhead, a plane

singsongs coming down.

Nothing is changed, except

there was a moment when

the wolf, the mongering wolf

who stands outside the self

lay lightly down, and slept.


Mirror

I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.

Whatever I see I swallow immediately.

Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike.

I am not cruel, only truthful--

The eye of a little god, four-cornered.

Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall.

It is pink, with speckles. I have looked at it so long

I think it is a part of my heart. But it flickers.

Faces and darkness separate us over and over.

Richard Wilbur (1921--)

A Late Aubade

…Think what a lot

Of time, by woman’s reckoning,

You’ve saved, and so may spend on this,

You who had rather lie in bed and kiss

Than anything.

It’s almost noon, you say? If so,

Time flies, and I need not rehearse

The rosebuds theme of centuries of verse.

If you must go,

Wait for a while, then slip downstairs

And bring us up some chilled white wine,

And some blue cheese, and crackers, and some fine

Ruddy-skinned pears.

6. What is the central purpose of the poem?

Marlowe, Christopher (1564-1593)

The Passionate Shepherd to His love


Mirror


Love Poem


The Darkling Thrush



State the central idea or theme of the poem in a sentence.

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

Marlowe, Christopher (1564-1593)

The Passionate Shepherd to His love


Mirror


Love Poem


The Darkling Thrush



8. What is the tone of the poem? How is it achieved?

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

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

Some of the adjectives used to describe tone

are: playful, solemn, mocking, reverent,

calm, excited, affectionate, hostile, earnest,

flippant and sarcastic.

The tone of actual speech is easy to

determine because of the inflections used by

the speaker, but it is not always so on a

printed page. Without the speaker speaking

to us, how do we determine what the

attitude of the speaker and/or the author is

toward the subject?

X. J. Kennedy, in his An Introduction to Poetry, has a brilliant answer:

Strictly speaking, tone isn't attitude; it is whatever in the poem makes an attitude clear to us: the choice of certain words instead of others, the picking out of certain details. In Housman's "Loveliest of Trees," for example, the poet communicates his admiration for a cherry tree's beauty by singling out for attention its white blossoms; had he wanted to show his dislike for the tree, he might have concentrated on its broken branches, birdlime, or snail.

Perrine adds that:

Almost all the elements of poetry help to indicate its tone: connotation, imagery, and metaphor; irony and understatement; rhythm, sentence construction, and formal pattern….It is an end product of all the elements in a poem.

9. a. Outline the poem so as to show its structure and development, or

b. Summarize the events of the poem.

Shakespeare, William (1564-1616)

Sonnet 29

When, in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes,

I all alone beweep my outcast state,

And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,

And look upon myself, and curse my fate,

Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,

Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,

Desiring this man's art and that man's scope,

With what I most enjoy contented least;

Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,

Haply I think on thee--and then my state,

Like to the lark at break of day arising

From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven's gate;

For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings

That then I scorn to change my state with kings.

Not all Shakespeare’s sonnets (154 of them)

were written as Shakespearean or English

sonnet. Sonnet 29 in particular is written as a

Petrarchan or Italian sonnet. Notice that

according to the structure of the Petrarchan

sonnet, it is divided into two groups: the first

eight lines are called the octet/octave, and the

last six lines are called the sestet.

But Sonnet 73 is Shakespearean. Its structure is

made up of three quatrains (one quatrain has

four lines) and a concluding rhyming couplet.


Sonnet 73

That time of year thou mayst in me behold

When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang

Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,

Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.

In me thou see'st the twilight of such day

As after sunset fadeth in the west;

Which by and by black night doth take away,

Death's second self, that seals up all in rest.

In me thou see'st the glowing of such fire,

That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,

As the deathbed whereon it must expire,

Consumed with that which it was nourished by.

This thou perceiv'st which makes thy love more strong,

To love that well which thou must leave ere long.

Because these two sonnets are pure lyric

poems, nothing external really happens. The

discourse is unadulterated mental

cogitations, pure thoughts and feelings. It

does not tell you whether it is indoors or

outdoors, what time of day, what year or

season, whether the speaker is in the garden

or in his room, etc.

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

10. Paraphrase the poem.

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

11. Discuss the diction of the poem. Point out words that are particularly well chosen and explain why.

Edmund Spenser (1552?-1599)

Sonnet 75, from Amoretti

One day I wrote her name upon the strand,

But came the waves and washed it away.

Agayne I wrote it with a second hand,

But came the tyde, and made my paynes his pray.

"Vayne man," sayd she, "that doest in vaine assay,

A mortall thing so to immortalize,

For I my selve shall lyke to this decay,

And eek my name bee wiped out likewise."

"Not so," quod I, "let baser things devize

To dy in dust, but you shall live by fame:

My verse your virtues rare shall eternize,

And in the heavens wryte your glorious name.

Where whenas death shall all the world subdew,

Our love shall live, and later life renew."

Agayne, tyde, paynes, vayne, sayd, doest, vaine, assay, mortall, selve, lyke, eek, quod I, devize, dy, wryte, whenas, subdew—these words are either archaic words, or words with archaic spelling. The poem was written in the 16th

century, 500 years ago, at the time of Queen Elizabeth I, when the spelling of English words has not yet been standardized.

Compare the diction with that of Richard Wilbur’s poem “A Late Aubade.” See how very contemporary the words are, how easily we recognize them, how colloquial in tone.

Emily Dickinson’s “A Narrow Fellow in the Grass” uses a diction that is particularly well-chosen when she describes the feeling of a sudden encounter with a snake.

Several of nature’s people

I know, and they know me;

I feel for them a transport

Of cordiality;

But never met this fellow,

Attended or alone,

Without a tighter breathing,

And zero at the bone.

No poet has described the feeling of fear as well as Dickinson has in the last two lines of this poem. “…a tighter breathing,/And zero at the bone.”

Richard Wilbur (1921--)

A Late Aubade

It’s almost noon, you say? If so,

Time flies, and I need not rehearse

The rosebuds theme of centuries of verse.

If you must go,

Wait for a while, then slip downstairs

And bring us up some chilled white wine,

And some blue cheese, and crackers, and some fine

Ruddy-skinned pears.

12. Discuss the imagery of the poem.

What kinds of imagery are used? Is there

a structure of imagery?

Let’s go back to Thomas Hardy’s “The

Darkling Thrush.”


The Darkling Thrush

I leant upon a coppice gate

When Frost was specter- gray,

And Winter’s dregs made desolate

The weakening eye of day.

The tangled bine- stems scored the sky


And all mankind that hunted nigh

Had sought their household fires.

The land’s sharp features seemed to be

The century’s corpse outleant,

His crypt the cloudy canopy,

The wind his death- lament.

The ancient pulse of germ and birth

Was shrunken hard and dry,

And every spirit upon earth

Seemed fervorless as I.

At once a voice arose among

The black twigs overhead

In a full- hearted evensong

Of joy illimited;

An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,

In blast-beruffled plume,

Had chosen thus to fling his soul

Upon the growing gloom.

So little cause for carolings

Of such ecstatic sound

Was written on terrestrial things

Afar or nigh around,

That I could think there trembled through

His happy goodnight air

Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew

And I was unaware.

December 31, 1900

Imagery--is any object in the poem that can

be apprehended by the senses. Thus, there

are usually five types:

a. visual imagery--objects that can be

apprehended by the sense of sight

b. auditory imagery--those that can be

apprehended by the sense of hearing

c. olfactory imagery--those that can be

apprehended by the sense of smell

d. tactile imagery--those that can be

apprehended by the sense of touch

e. gustatory imagery--those that can be

apprehended by the sense of taste

Other types may include organic imagery,

internal sensations such as hunger, thirst,

fatigue, or nausea; and kinesthetic imagery like

"the movement or tension in the muscles or

joints." A special kind of imagery is called

synesthetic, that image which combines two or

more imagery in one phrase such as "loud red" or

"screaming red," where the visual and the

auditory senses are combined.

Probably the most memorable haiku ever

written is the one by Basho, and the imagery

seizes the imagination and stays there forever:

Into the old pond

A frog suddenly plunges.

The sound of water.

In Anglo-American poetry, Ezra Pound, who

was influenced by Chinese and Japanese

poetry, and was the founder of a poetic

movement called Imagism, wrote a haiku-like

couplet:

The apparition of these faces in a crowd,

Petals on a wet, black bough.

My favorite example of imagery comes from the concluding stanza of Wallace Stevens’s“Sunday Morning:”

Deer walk upon our mountains, and the quailWhistle about us their spontaneous cries;Sweet berries ripen in the wilderness;And, in the isolation of the sky,At evening, casual flocks of pigeons makeAmbiguous undulations as they sink,Downward to darkness, on extended wings.

But these lines may have been influenced by another poem, some hundred years earlier in John Keats’s “To Autumn:”

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?

Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,--

While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,

And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue:

Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn

Among the river-sallows, borne aloft

Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;

And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;

Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft

The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;

And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

13. Point out examples of metaphor,

simile, personification, and metonymy,

and explain their appropriateness.

A. The tangled bine- stems scored the sky


B. Which by and by black night doth take

away,

Death's second self, that seals up all in

rest.


Sonnet 116

Let me not to the marriage of true minds

Admit impediments: love is not love

Which alters when it alteration finds,

Or bends with the remover to remove.

O, no! it is an ever-fixéd mark

That looks on tempests and is never shaken;

It is the star to every wondering bark,

Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.

Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks

Within his bending sickle's compass come;

Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,

But bears it out even to the edge of doom:

If this be error and upon me proved,

I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

In this famous sonnet by Shakespeare, we

have figures of speech galore. Love is

metaphorized as “an ever-fixéd mark that

looks on tempests and is never shaken,” and

as a “star to every wandering bark.” Time is

personified as a man with a sickle, but Love

lies outside its compass though lovers, aptly

represented by the synechdoche of “rosy lips

and cheeks,” are the fools of time.

14. Point out and explain any symbols. If

the poem is allegorical, explain the

allegory.

Symbol is something that stands for

something else, like the flag is a piece of

cloth with a certain design but it stands for a

country. In Dylan Thomas's poem "Do Not Go

Gentle into That Good Night," the term "good

night" is a symbol of death.

Dylan Thomas (1914-1953)

Do Not Go Gentle into That Goodnight (1952)

Do not go gentle into that good night.

Old age should burn and rave at close of day;

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,

Because their words had forked no lighting they

Do not go gentle into that good night,

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright

Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,


Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,

And learn, too late, they grieved it in its way,

Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see its blinding sight

Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,


And you, my father, there on the sad height,

Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray,

Do not go gentle into that good night,


Archibald MacLeish demonstrates the use of

symbol in "Ars Poetica" in the following lines:

For all the history of grief

An empty doorway and a maple leaf.

For love

The leaning grasses and two lights above the

sea.

Laurence Perrine makes a distinction between image, metaphor and symbol. Here is what he says:

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

15. Point out and explain examples of paradox, overstatement, understatement, and irony. What is their function?

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

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

My vegetable love should grow

Vaster than empires, and more slow;

An hundred years should go to praise

Thine eyes, and on thy forehead gaze;

Two hundred to adore each breast,

But thirty thousand to the rest;

Understatement is saying less than what you

mean. Somebody referred to the Atlantic

Ocean as "the drink," or the Deluge as "the

pond," or the Sahara Desert as being "made

of fine sand." Describing a loaded dinner

plate as "a nice snack" is also an

understatement. When Rizal was asked if he

spoke Spanish, he said "a little." That seems

like an understatement from someone who

lived and studied in Spain and who wrote his

novels in Spanish.

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

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

Textbook writers like Perrine always give

three kinds of irony: verbal irony, dramatic

irony and irony of situation. Dramatic irony

occurs when there is a discrepancy between

appearance and reality; irony of situation

when the discrepancy is between what is

expected and what actually happens. As a

more limited term though, dramatic irony is

the discrepancy not between what the

speaker says and what the speaker means

but between what the speaker says and what

the author means. The speaker's words may

be perfectly straightforward, but the author,

by putting those words in a particular

speaker's mouth, may be indicating to the

reader ideas or attitudes quite opposed to

those the speaker is voicing.

This kind of irony is best illustrated in

dramatic monologues such as Robert

Browning's "My Last Duchess."

Still a more specific use of this term is in

Greek drama where the audience seems to

know more than the characters. For

example, we know who killed Laois but

Oedipus does not know until much later in

the play.

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

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)

Ozymandias

I met a traveler from an antique lam, on the sand,

Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert…Near them, on the sand,

Half-sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:

And on the pedestal these words appear:

“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:

Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretched far away.

Edwin Arlington Robinson (1896-1935)

Richard Cory (1897)

Whenever Richard Cory went down town,

We people on the pavement looked at him:

He was a gentleman from sole to crown,

Clean favored, and imperially slim.

And he was always quietly arrayed,

And he was always human when he talked;

But still he fluttered pulses when he said,

“Good morning,” and he glittered when he walked.

And he was rich- yes richer than a king,

And admirably schooled in every grace:

In fine, we thought that he was everything

To make us wish that we were in his place.

So on we worked, and waited for the light,

And went without the meat, and cursed the bread:

And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,

Went home and put a bullet through his head.

demystifying poetry

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