George Dickinson's Modern Love Poem Analysis

I wasn 't wholly convinced by Vendler 's analysis either. For one thing I feel she labours the structural aspect of the poem a little too much for my liking, as in this: "Although the poem was cast, in all of Dickinson 's fair copies, into six stanzas, its rhyme shapes it into three parts, rhyming (except for lines one and two) aabccb".

If the first two lines don 't fit the aabccb rhyme scheme then you can 't claim that the whole poem is written in that rhyme scheme. No-one, I think, would claim of a sixteen-line poem that "except for lines one and two it is a sonnet". (Having said that, I have seen George Meredith 's Modern Love sequence described as a sequence of sixteen-line sonnets, which is a non sequitur if ever I 've heard one.)

Whenever I read ED poems in any quantity I feel as if I 'm listening to a jazz improvisation where someone is riffing with endless invention on a simple form like the blues. She left some of her poems incomplete, too, or in several versions, making it difficult for later editors to decide which version to choose, or even if a poem was completed. Her use of various rhyme approximations, a loose approach to metre, and a relaxed attitude towards form were part of her restless imagination (and of its time in America, of course, as with Whitman) so I don 't think the complex interlocking structure that Vendler claims for her was deliberate, at least not

At least ED doesn 't tell the child in such stark terms that it 's going to die eventually I 've never experienced the extremes of New England weather but Boston and Harvard get the same weather as Amherst don 't they, regardless of whether they 're urban or rural? I expect that Boston-born and Harvard professor Helen Vendler also weeps with joy at the end of winter as much as her rural cousins. It 's something alien to us, of course, where the seasons transition from our dreary, wet winters into dreary, wet summers, via a dreary, wet spring and into -- you 've guessed it -- a dreary, wet autumn. Today, however, is actually quite warm and sunny, but we 've become quite fatalistic at so many false meteorological dawns, and the word on the street (or at least at the bus stop this morning) is that it ain 't gonna last. Oh, fraud that cannot cheat the bus stop