Yusef Komunyakaa's “Facing It” and John Keats’ “Ode to a Grecian Urn” are two abstract poems that, while different in subject, share a deep connection of the individual person through the use of figurative language and structured verse. Komunyakaa’s piece confronts the ghost of war, implying a free-verse form that mirrors memory. At the same time, Keat’s ode bonds to a consistent iambic pentameter, a rhythmic pattern of ten syllables in each line consisting of alternating stressed and unstressed syllables, capturing the timeless narrative engraved in the ancient art of the urn. Both poets exploit figurative language: Komunyakkaa through the reflective granite of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and Keats through the silent yet loud features on …show more content…
“Facing It” by Yusef Komunyakaa is a poignant and powerful poem that dives into the complex emotions of a Vietnam War veteran as the author confronts the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. His poem navigates through themes of memory, trauma, and the intersection of personal and collective grief. Komunyakaa, pulling from his own experience in the war, uses vivid imagery and careful control of tone to bring the audience into a reflective space where the granite stone wall changes into a mirror for the internal turmoil of the speaker. The speaker's description of the memorial as a mirror represents the grief he still carries with him and the feeling of sinking back into the memories of the war. A quote from the text that shows excellent uses of figurative language to express the author’s emotions and personal conflict is, “My clouded reflection eyes me like a bird of prey, the profile of night” (Komunyakaa, lines …show more content…
John Keats’ “Ode to a Grecian Urn” is an enduring work of beauty that masterfully intertwines the permanence of art with the transient nature of human experience. In the fourth stanza of the text, Keats mentions nature and humans as well, “What little town by river or sea sore,/ Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel,/ Is emptied of this folk, this pious morn?” (Keats, lines 35-37). Keats describes the sense of abandonment in a once vibrant place. In this poem, Keats employs an abundant veil of figurative language to explore the stories captured on the surface of the urn, which themselves are a powerful depiction of reality and the emotions that come with life. The poem is structured into five stanzas, each consisting of ten lines of iambic pentameter, with a complex rhyme scheme. Keats uses metaphor and personification to bring life into the art, allowing it to express truth through storytelling. The images depicted on the urn—a lover’s chase, a sacrifice, and a ghost town—cite the relationship between art and
An Analysis of Facing It Yusef Komanuyakaa's poem "Facing It" is a brutal examination of the affects that war leaves upon men. The reader can assume that Komanuyakaa drew upon his own experiences in Vietnam, thereby making the poem a personal statement. However, the poem is also a universal and real description of the pain that comes about for a soldier when remembering the horror of war. He creates the poem's persona by using flashbacks to the war, thereby informing the reader as to why the speaker is behaving and feeling the way he is. The thirty-one lines that make up "Facing It" journey back and forth between present and past to tell the story of one man's life.
In Yusef Komunyakaa’s poem “Facing It,” he discusses his experience during the Vietnam War. Komunyakaa was in Louisiana during the civil War. During the Vietnam War, he joined the army as a correspondent (Poets). Later, he began writing newspapers for the military called The Southern Cross. The poem begins with the reflection of Komunyakaa’s face fading as he views the stone. Those lines read, “My black face fades, / hiding inside the black granite” (1-2). The black granite does not allow his skin tone to show. He emphases his ethnicity when he uses ‘black’ twice. Furthermore, Komunyakaa acknowledged himself as an African American and created a connection between himself and the memorial. Here I believe he realized he should be on the memorial. He is remembering an incident during the Vietnam War that should have taken his life. His fading face makes me assume that he realizes that there were no separate races in that war. They were all Americans. In the next line, Komunyakaa can not control his emotions. He rejects his emotions when he says, “I said I wouldn't, / dammit: No tears” (3-4). When Komunyakaa views the wall his past emotions rush back to him. As he struggles with the emotions his perception of himself and his surroundings change. At the beginning, his face was distant, but appeared as discussed the memorial and its meaning. He could now describe h...
Yusef Komunyakaa, the poet of war, vividly describes his vacillating emotions about the Vietnam War and his relation to it as an African-American veteran in the poem, “Facing It.” Komunyakaa, the protagonist of his narrative, reflective poem, contemplates his past experiences as he promenades around the Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial, struggling to conceal his ardent emotions and remain hard and cold as “stone.” He writes one stanza in a dark mood, and by using metaphors and visual imagery, he paints a picture with his words for all to see.
John Keats’s illness caused him to write about his unfulfillment as a writer. In an analysis of Keats’s works, Cody Brotter states that Keats’s poems are “conscious of itself as the poem[s] of a poet.” The poems are written in the context of Keats tragically short and painful life. In his ...
The diction Kenyon employs for her description of the poem’s physical and psychological setting serves as Kenyon’s primary means for presenting her argument regarding the nature of the mourning process and its failure to help those who have lost loved ones. The poem’s first stanza begins as follows, “Like primitives we buried the cat with his bowl. Bare-handed we scraped sand and gravel back into the hole(1-4).” The first two words, “like primitives,” give the reader immediate insight into Kenyon’s opinion regarding the nature of the burial itself. She sees it as a means of coming to grips with death that is less evolved than the mental state of those that it attempts to help. When the first stanza is interpreted as a whole, the reader is...
Auden used simplistic and descriptive languages as imagery, for example on line 4 In Auden’s poem, “While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;” he layered multiple occurrences on top of another, creating portraits of everyday life. The “Old Masters” that he had eluded in the second line of the poem is the “Old Masters” of the art world. The rest of the poem is in reference to Pieter Brueghel’s painting “The landscape with the fall of Icarus”. Its allusion comforts and gives a specific image to the readers. This poem was written in free verse with no metrical pattern. The reference to “Old Masters” and museums and old paintings creates a tension with the simple language and mundane qualities of Auden's form. The disparity between the two is an intentional move, one intended to demonstrate how even simple subjects and language can be pa...
Keats’ poetry explores many issues and themes, accompanied by language and technique that clearly demonstrates the romantic era. His poems ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ and ‘Bright Star’ examine themes such as mortality and idealism of love. Mortality were common themes that were presented in these poems as Keats’ has used his imagination in order to touch each of the five senses. He also explores the idea that the nightingale’s song allows Keats to travel in a world of beauty. Keats draws from mythology and christianity to further develop these ideas. Keats’ wrote ‘Ode To A Nightingale’ as an immortal bird’s song that enabled him to escape reality and live only to admire the beauty of nature around him. ‘Bright Star’ also discusses the immortal as Keats shows a sense of yearning to be like a star in it’s steadfast abilities. The visual representation reveal these ideas as each image reflects Keats’ obsession with nature and how through this mindset he was able
Facing it reflects the author's personal experience and dread from the Vietnam War. African American poet Yusef Komunyakaa was born and raised in Bogalusa, Louisiana, which at the author’s prime time was the center for the Ku Klux Klan and then later became a key destination for the civil rights movement, these situations later on heavily influenced Komunyakaa’s writing. In 1969, he joined the army and was stationed in Vietnam, there Komunyakaa served as a war correspondent. Witnessing the bloody battles also influenced his poetry. After coming back from the war, Komunyakaa began writing poetry and then attended the University of Colorado Springs to receive a BA. Furthermore, he then earned his MA and MFA in creative writing from Colorado State University and the University of California, Irvine, respectively. Komunyakaa is known to tackle difficult subjects and hits reality and history pretty hard.
The language used in ‘Ode on Melancholy’ is highly appropriate – the clouds are “weeping”. Much of the effectiveness of this poem derives from the concrete imagery. Throughout the poem, Keats yokes elements, which are ordinarily regarded as incompatible or as opposites. These ... ... middle of paper ... ...
The second and third stanzas of Funeral Rites are highly descriptive, as Heaney describes ‘their puffed knuckles’. This close, sensory description of the body is present in many of his bog poems, but specifically in The Grauballe Man, as, similar to Funeral Rites, Heaney dedicates multiple stanzas to the direct, det...
This allows for a smooth transition in his description of the ritual that marks a soldier’s death. To draw attention to the tears “in their eyes”, which could be in the eyes of the dead soldier or of their brothers at war, they are connected to the “glimmer of good-byes”, to represent the quick mourning for the soldiers (10-11). The connection here is furthered with the use of enjambment at the end of the tenth line; with no grammatical separation, the thought smoothly transitions from one line to the other. On the other hand, Keats uses the exact Shakespearean rhyme In the sonnets “When I Have Fears that I May Cease to Be”, by John Keats, and “Anthem for Doomed Youth”, by Wilfred Owen, the poets’ use of formal elements create distinctions to mark the speakers’ thoughts and build upon the situation.
Throughout Keats’s work, there are clear connections between the effect of the senses on emotion. Keats tends to apply synesthetic to his analogies with the interactions with man and the world to create different views and understandings. By doing this, Keats can arouse different emotions to the work by which he intends for the reader to determine on their own, based on how they perceive it. This is most notable in Keats’s Ode to a Nightingale, for example, “Tasting of Flora, and Country Green” (827). Keats accentuates emotion also through his relationship with poetry, and death.
In Keats “Ode to a Nightingale” we see the sense embodied through a variety of different literary techniques and in particular his use of synaesthesia imagery. The dejected downhearted nature of the poem promotes emotion in the reader even before noting poetic devices at work. The structure of the meter is regular and adds to the depth of this poe...
This opposition shows Keats highlighting the delicate correspondence between happiness, death and melancholy having humanistic traits. In order to experience true sorrow, one must feel true joy to see the beauty of melancholy. However, Keats’s poem is not all dark imagery, for interwoven into this poem is an emerging possibility of resurrection and the chance at a new life. The speaker in this poem starts by strongly advising against the actions and as the poem continues urges a person to take different actions.
‘An Arundel Tomb’, by Philip Larkin, is written to preserve the image portrayed by a sculpture located on a tomb in Arundel. The poet uses this poem to convey the feelings, which the sight of this tomb induces for him. The whole poem itself is describing how an idea or identity in history is preserved through this sculpture.