Wallace Steven's poem “The Man Whose Pharynx was Bad” was written as a part of a book of poetry Harmonium. The poem concerns a poet's inability to express himself because of a bad pharynx. The title is a crucial part of the poem because it sets up the theme of the poem. The pharynx is a part of the body behind the mouth and the nose that connects to the throat. A bad pharynx would prevent the ability to speak and therefore express oneself. This poem is not only about the inability to artistically express one's self, but also the boredom the speaker faces with summer, while also seeking inspiration in a change of season.
The seasons are very common topics for poetry, so much so that they have almost become cliché. The first three lines of the first stanza, “The time of year has grown indifferent. / Mildew of summer and the deepening snow / Are both alike in the routine I know:” depict a scene where the seasons themselves have become indistinguishable to the speaker (lines 1-3). Summer and winter are often thought of as opposites because one is hot and dry while the other is cold and wet. Being unable to differentiate even the seasons shows an inability of the poet to express himself through even the most basic poetic means. The final line in the stanza, “I am too dumbly in my being pent.” uses the archaic meaning of the word “dumbly” to suggest that the poet, by being pent or contained artistically, has lost his ability to express himself (4). This idea of being artistically stunted leads into the second stanza were the poet is unable to find inspiration.
The second stanza depicts a scene of a poet asleep in the city as a wind passes him by that carries with it poetic inspiration. The accompanying wind in the second stanza...
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...ine grow from beneath the layers of winter. While Stevens' gives hope to the speaker in this last stanza by using words associated with life such as “sprouting”, the final line in the stanza, “One might. One might. But time will not relent” brings the speaker back to reality through the realization the winter is not coming, and that he is stuck with summer and his malady (20).
In the end, this poem is the speaker's idle dream of the approaching winter replacing the uninspired summer. Stevens' uses the unconventional and humous title to hint at the message of the poem which he explores further with his use of imagery and diction. Stevens' displays his modernist and imagist influences in this poem to show part of his poetic vision that merges thought and feeling while investigating the boringness of the quotidian and a need for change to bring inspiration.
“Winter Evening” by Archibald Lampman, and “Stories of Snow” by P.K Page are two poems describing the human experience of winter. Winter is seen, by some, to be blissful, magical and serene. Winter could also be described as pure and heavenly, with the white snow resembling clouds. However, others have a contrasting viewpoint; they paint winter in harsher light, giving the impression that winter is bitter and ruthless. Others still, have a mixed viewpoint and may recognize both the positives and negatives to the season.
Edna St. Vincent Millay says that “the summer sang in me” meaning that she was once as bright and lively as the warm summer months. In the winter everyone wants to bundle up and be lazy, but when summer comes along the sunshine tends to take away the limits that the cold once had on us. She uses the metaphor of summer to express the freedom she once felt in her youth, and the winter in contrast to the dull meaningless life she has now. There are many poets that feel a connection with the changing seasons. In “Odes to the West Wind” Percy Bysshe Shelley describes his hopes and expectations for the seasons to inspire the world.
For each seasonal section, there is a progression from beginning to end within the season. Each season is compiled in a progressive nature with poetry describing the beginning of a season coming before poetry for the end of the season. This is clear for spring, which starts with, “fallen snow [that] lingers on” and concludes with a poet lamenting that “spring should take its leave” (McCullough 14, 39). The imagery progresses from the end of winter, with snow still lingering around to when the signs of spring are disappearing. Although each poem alone does not show much in terms of the time of the year, when put into the context of other poems a timeline emerges from one season to the next. Each poem is linked to another poem when it comes to the entire anthology. By having each poem put into the context of another, a sense of organization emerges within each section. Every poem contributes to the meaning of a group of poems. The images used are meant to evoke a specific point in each season from the snow to the blossoms to the falling of the blossoms. Since each poem stands alone and has no true plot they lack the significance than if they were put into th...
... the end of the poem until “the rose tree’s thread of scent draws thin and snaps upon the air”, terminating life and dictating the start of another season.
“In this poem, the night represents his destination — the poet’s own inner life, possibly self-knowledge. The poet, then, feels at least partially alienated from himself in much the same way that the night promotes a feeling of alienation from other people” (Kidd 2). Therefore, the reader can assume this rest of the poem is going to be about the narrator getting to know his place in this world while he is on a night stroll. The second line of stanza one states “I have walked out in rain –and back in rain” (Frost 157). His repetition of going in the rain twice emphasizes his miserable condition on this dark, rainy night. Nonetheless, he embraces nature and continues on with his walk past “the furthest city light” which tells the reader that he is now in complete darkness. Stanza two focuses primarily on his relationship with society. The narrator is casually walking in the city at night and sees the “saddest city lane” and
In the first quatrain of the poem the speaker compares himself to autumn. The speaker says, “That time of year thou mayst in me behold” (1). He is seeing himself as the fall season of the year. A time of the year when nights arrive quicker and the temperature becomes cooler. When relating this season to life, it is when a person is experiencing stages of decline in their life making them closer to death. He creates an image of a tree, with leaves that have been falling with the change of season into winter. “When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang.” (2) When using the image of leaves falling from a tree and leaving it bare,
The consistent pattern of metrical stresses in this stanza, along with the orderly rhyme scheme, and standard verse structure, reflect the mood of serenity, of humankind in harmony with Nature. It is a fine, hot day, `clear as fire', when the speaker comes to drink at the creek. Birdsong punctuates the still air, like the tinkling of broken glass. However, the term `frail' also suggests vulnerability in the presence of danger, and there are other intimations in this stanza of the drama that is about to unfold. Slithery sibilants, as in the words `glass', `grass' and `moss', hint at the existence of a Serpent in the Garden of Eden. As in a Greek tragedy, the intensity of expression in the poem invokes a proleptic tenseness, as yet unexplained.
In both, out of some onomatopoeic words for a bird song and realistic sceneries of nature, the true beauty and ugliness is doubted. While we all suppose spring to be the most beautiful fantastic global fete, the poet shows us a mocking unpleasing view out of that. Or on the other hand he shows us a delicate heartsome scene in the lifeless vapid "Winter."
The first stanza is crowded with sensual and concrete images of nature and its ripeness during the first stages of Autumn. Autumn is characterized as a “season of…mellow fruitfulness” (1). It is a season that “bend[s] with apples the mossed cottage-trees” (5), “fill[s] all fruit with ripeness to the core” (6), “swell[s] the gourd, and plump[s] the hazel shells” (7), and “set[s] budding more” (8). The verbs that Keats uses represent the bustling activity of Autumn and also reflect the profusion of growth. Autumn also acts as the subject of all the verbs, indicating its dynamic behavior. Furthermore, the multitude of these images depicting the ripening of nature contributes to the sense of abundance that characterizes the first stanza. The stanza also contains many short phrases, again calling up images of abundance. Keats, through his use of sensual imagery, draws readers into the real world where there will ultimately be decay and death. The sound devices in this stanza further develop the sensual imagery and...
In the opening stanza, Frost describes coming to a point during a walk along a rural road that diverges into two separate, yet similar paths. The narrator finds that he ...
Frost’s sentence structure is long and complicated. Many meanings of his poems are not revealed to the reader through first glance, but only after close introspection of the poem. The true meanings contained in Frost’s poems, are usually lessons on life. Frost uses symbolism of nature and incorporates that symbolism into everyday life situations. The speaker in the poems vary, in the poem “The Pasture”, Frost seems to be directly involved in the poem, where as in the poem “While in the Rose Pogonias”, he is a detached observer, viewing and talking about the world’s beauty. Subsequently, the author transfers that beauty over to the beauty of experiences that are achieved through everyday life.
Stevens’ message reveals itself as the poem unravels: there is never one true understanding of a reality outside of one’s interpretation. The author suggests that one can’t help but transfer their own beliefs and ideas onto what they see; in this case, the “listener” is projecting an impression of misery onto the scenery that lies before him. For example, the first two stanzas are filled with decorative language that serves to describe the visual image of a winter landscape. Using phrases such as “crusted with snow” (3) instead of “covered” with snow provides an evocative illustration of the snow’s roughness. Other phrases such as “shagged with ice” (5) and “rough in the distant glitter/Of the January sun” (6-7) force the reader to experience the miserable portrayal of winter. These are not the descriptions of an observer who “beholds nothing that is not there” (14-15), but rather the objective, poetic appreciation for the snowy
In line 12 he addresses Autumn's rhetorical question. It is clear that Autumn is the time for harvesting, gathering and preparing for the Winter that lies ahead. The stanza ends appropriately in that it literally describes the process of the last apples being pressed for cider, but more importantly it describes the last breaths of life being squeezed out of Autumn.
Frost uses nature as a reflection of human experiences; just like humanity it can have seasons and life cycles. He uses different scenes to depict a certain mood for readers to step into the psychological happening of a man. The idea of how seasons change, Frost compares it through the life cycles that humans encounter. Contrary to popular opinion, I believe that nature is not Frost’s central theme in his poetry; it is about the relationship that man has with nature in which can be seen from “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”, “The Road Not Taken”, and “An Old Man’s Winter Night.”
Both poets present readers with characters questioning the apparent transience of nature. Whitman's young girl weeps to see the black "burial-clouds that lower victorious soon to devour all," (line 12) just as Stevens' young woman is saddened "when the birds are gone, and their warm fields/Return no more" (lines 49-50). These characters, unable to grasp the entirely of the cycle of mortality, are dismayed by earthly loss they continually observe.