“The Centaur,” by May Swenson is speaking about the imagination and games of a little girl. The poet layered her work with many forms of imagery and language. The forms used give the poem a mysterious and surprising tone and help convey her writing about a girl who is defying the expectations of society. A feeling of mystery and surprise is heavy in her work. The poet’s use of three-line stanzas plays a big role in the nature of the work. Lines 6 and 7 prove this well: “A fresh horse from my stable / which was a willow grove.” In these lines, Swenson has the reader believing that the child is choosing a horse to ride, only to find out that the child is actually carving a play horse because the stable turns out to be a grove from where the
child finds the lumber to make her toy. The poet uses the surprising style later on in the poem when she says, “Dismounting, I smoothed my skirt” (Line 51). Up until line 51 many of the readers assumed the child was a boy because the child used a knife to calve the horse. Once the readers found out the child was in fact a girl, it changed the theme of the poem. Swenson is trying to overcome the stereotypical relations of a woman. By surprising the reader she depicts the thoughts of society. She disagrees with these thoughts and wants to change them. The reader can look at the girl’s comments to her mother: “Where have you been? said my mother / Been riding” (Lines 55–56). She portrays that playing with knives and pretending to be a “rough-rider” is completely normal to the girl, and should be for society. The metaphor that compares the girl to the horse and making her one with the horse is extremely important. Swenson states, “I was the horse and the rider” (Line 38). A horse is a very strong and powerful animal respected throughout time for its strength and ability to work. By making the analogy with the girl, the poet gives the same characteristics to many women, therefore, giving a strong statement about a woman's abilities. In addition to the strength talked about through the horse analogy, is a wish for freedom. The girl describes herself as, “the wind twanged in my mane” (Line 43). These moving images of the wind indicate freedom—her desire to fly far away. However, following that statement is, “My mouth squared to the bit” (Line 44). The concept of the bit gives control of the strong female spirit. One takes in the image of a horse who wants to run wild and free, but is kept by his owner to ride and work as he is told. This feeling is carried out further by the poet at the end of this poem.
The most noticeable aspect of the structure of the entire poem is the lack of capital letters and periods. There is only one part in the entire forty lines, which is at the very end, and this intentional punctuation brings readers to question the speaker’s literacy. In fact, the speaker is very young, and the use of punctuation and hyphens brings to attention the speaker’s innocence, and because of that innocence, the
The poem takes the reader back in time for a moment to a small kitchen and a young boy at bedtime. The dishes have been cleared and placed on the counter or in the sink. The family is seated around the table. The father having a glass of whiskey to relax after a very hard day working in the family owned twenty-five-acre greenhouse complex. He is asked to take his small son to bed. The poem begins, “The whiskey on your breath could make a small boy dizzy” (Roethke line 1) enlists the imagery of what the young boy was smelling as he most likely climbed aboard his fathers’ large work boots for the evening waltz to bed. It is obvious this is an evening ritual, one that is cherished. The boy is aware of his fathers’ waltzing abilities and he concedes that he is up for the challenge. The irony of the statement, “I hung on like death” (Roethke line 3) is a private one, yet deeply describes his yearning for one more waltz with his father who passed away when Theodore was only fifteen years ...
Throughout the book, Steinbeck uses descriptive words to allow the reader to envision a vivid picture in their minds. For astonishing imagery in a book, an author uses all five senses to portray an image so real that one feels that they may be standing right there. Steinbeck guides the reader through the barn as he says, “The resting horses nibbled the remaining wisps of hay, and they stamped their feet and they bit the wood of the mangers and rattled the halter chains” (92). This barn description allows the reader to hear the sound of horses’ stomping feet, to smell the musty combination of wood, metal, and hay, to taste the old barn in the air, to see the restless horses and feel the rusty chains, coarse hay and horses’ mane...
This shows the reader the creativeness in how she put together her chapbook. She did not stay in the conventional mode and snuck a subtle final poem into her piece of art. There were many times as I read through her words that I would utter to myself sounds of astonishment as I was taken aback by the brashness
The main way the poem gets its point across is with imagery. Swinburne starts his poem with imagery saying, “I saw my soul at rest upon a day / As a bird sleeping in the nest of night,” (Lines 1-2). Right away he uses Imagery and a simile to paint a
The poem itself in structured into thirteen stanzas with each stanza containing eight lines. Patterson uses imagery as one of the main techniques to capture the audience’s imagination, with lines like “a stripling on a small and weedy beast” and “where mountain ash and Kurrajong grew wide” giving a description of the character in the first instance and the landscape in the second. The poem is set to a rhythm that is fast pace and builds anticipation throughout using metaphors like “And he raced him down the mountain like a torrent down its bed” and personification such as “the stock whips woke their echoes and they fiercely answered
One of the central characters in the poem is that of Alison, a woman who is married to an older man called John the carpenter, “this carpenter hadde wedded newe a wyf”. Alison's attractions are suggested primarily by animal similes and she is described as radiant “ful brighter was the shining of hir hewe”. Alison’s beauty cannot be separated from her animation and vitality. This, with a hint of naivety, is suggested by the comparisons to "kide or calf" and (twice) to a colt. Alison is soft as a “wether's wolle” and her voice is like the swallow's. A supple, sinuous quality of her figure is suggested in the sim...
The poem starts off with a young girl “awake at dawn” who is dreaming by silk curtains. The young girl has fragrance “spilling” out of her hair “half sandalwood, half aloes” this sets the mood for the poem. If they did not explain the fragrance spilling out of the girl's hair and her waking up by silk curtains they wouldn't have set the calm mood for the poem. Most girls don't pay attention to there hair and the way they wake
Centaurs are incredibly interesting figures in Greek mythology. They are creatures with dual natures: half man, half beast. They have the torso of a man and the body of a horse. They are often portrayed in paintings and sculptures with weapons. Typically, they are portrayed as primitive, brave, courageous, vengeful, arrogant, wild, impulsive, savage, rowdy, prone to drunkenness and violence.
As an unrhymed poem, the rhythm created uses devices such as, consonance, repetition, and alliteration. The inconsistency rhyme schemes in both poems seem to reflect the speaker’s turmoil and feelings they harbor for their fathers. The poetic meter Plath uses gives a slow, almost childlike melody. Throughout the poem, a soothing sound with the continuous use of the “-oo” sound anchors Plath to a childlike tone. Words like “do,” “shoe,” “Achoo,” and “you” gain recognition with the continuation of the poem. Meanwhile, “Those Winter Sundays” provides fourteen-lines, but its meter distinguishes. Some examples of rhymes and near-rhymes are shown but no rhyme scheme. The first line is presented as a trochaic pentameter rather than the standard iambic pentameter. In order to capture the harshness of his father’s life, Hayden uses grating consonance sounds in the words “cold,” “cracked,” and “ached” (Line 2 and 3). Gradually, the “k” sounds become replaced with “o” sounds, like in the words “good,” “shoes,” “know” etc. these sounds evoke associations with love and
I think that the poem has a specific meaning that symbolizes the life of a girl who compares her life to grass. This
These eight simple lines of the poem can mean so much more than what they say. It may provoke some deeper emotions from curiosity to complete understanding with little to go on. By breaking down the play into two sections one can understand
In the 4th, 5th, and 6th line of this poem the poet portrays a major simile stating “the truth’s superb surprise, as lightening to the children eased with explanation kind.” In the first part of the simile saying “the truths superb
Unlike her brother, Dorothy seems to be less solitary in her experiences, her accounts of what happened and who was with her are less personal than William’s. Dorothy tends to include everyone who surrounded her at that point and time – ‘We [Dorothy and her brother William] were in the woods beyond Gowbarrow park’ – whereas William makes it a companionless experience, he forgets everyone that may have been sharing the moment with him – ‘I wandered lonely as a Cloud’ . This, in conjunction with the use of imagery, similes and personification, not only makes William’s poems more accessible to a wide range of readers but it also adds character and personality, whereas Dorothy’s journal tends to be more reserved and closed to interpretation. Although both use semantic field of nature, William’s use is more affective as it conveys emotion, passion and attachment to his work.
Lyric poetry has always expressed both personal and emotional feelings. In the poem “Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers” we find a woman who is caught in the customs and culture of her time, an abused wife who knows that there is no way out of her situation. Rich uses the symbolism of the colorful tigers in the tapestry as the antithesis of who Aunt Jennifer is: they are strong, confident, and self assured; things she might dream of but will never be. In the second stanza we see Aunt Jennifer struggling to pull an ivory needle through the fabric as she works on the tapestry. The pull of the needle symbolizes the oppression Aunt Jennifer feels in her daily life as she is weighed down by / “The massive weight of Uncle's wedding band / Sits heavily upon Aunt Jennifer's hand.” Even in death, Aunt Jennifer cannot be free of the subjugation she has faced during her life time. However, her unspoken hopes and dreams will live on in the tapestry she has created / “The tigers in the panel that she made / Will go on prancing, proud and unafraid.