Questions tagged [poetry]
Poetry Is a form of literary art in which language is used for its aesthetic and evocative qualities in addition to, or in lieu of, its apparent meaning.
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What did Walt Whitman mean by "a pennant universal"? [migrated]
(Edit: This was closed because it was marked as "opinion based" and I was asked to edit the question so that it could be answered by facts and citations.
@Fumblefingers gave citations, ...
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What does 'haply' mean in Keats's 'Ode to a Nightingale'?
The following line occurs in Keats's poem 'Ode to a Nightingale':
And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne
It seems to me that 'haply' means either, as Merriam-Webster says, 'by chance', or, ...
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What does 'pards' mean in Keats's 'Ode to a Nightingale'?
John Keats's 'Ode to a Nightingale' contains the line "Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,".
Away! away! for I will fly to thee,
Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,
But on the ...
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Where can I find information on the prosody of a poem?
Where can I find out what the meters, feet, and stresses are in a poem? I found a website where you can guess where they are, but the website doesn't provide answers.
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Eighteenth-century pronounciation of "wax"
In "Against Idleness and Mischief"(1715) ("How doth the little busy bee"), Isaac Watts rhymes "wax" and "makes".
Were these two words pronounced the same at the ...
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Do "radiant" and "brilliant" rhyme for the purposes of poetry? Wiktionary says their transcriptions are /ˈɹeɪ.di.ənt/ and /ˈbɹɪljənt/
Is this a dialectal/idiolectal thing, where some merge /i/ and /j/, and others don't? I'm ESL and always thought they're merged until now.
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What is the sentence structure for this verse in John Keats' "The day is gone, and all its sweets are gone!"?
He writes:
When the dusk holiday—or holinight [—][some versions put another em dash here]
Of fragrant-curtain’d love begins to weave
The woof of darkness thick, for hid delight,
Should I read a ...
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Who is being fed in "Did hourly feed him by" from Walden, or, Life in the Woods? [duplicate]
There was a shepherd that did live,
And held his thoughts as high
As were the mounts whereon his flocks
Did hourly feed him by
From Walden, or, Life in the Woods by Henry David Thoreau
I'm confused ...
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Understanding the line from Gunga Din
So, in Kipling's Gunga Din, there's a piece in the second stanza:
The uniform ’e wore
Was nothin’ much before,
An’ rather less than ’arf o’ that be’ind,
For a piece o’ twisty rag
An’ a goatskin water-...
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What is the reason for the absence of articles in in "... with mien of lord or lady, perched above my chamber door" in "The Raven"?
The seventh stanza of Edgar Allan Poe's The Raven reads as follows:
Open here I flung the shutter, when, with many a flirt and flutter,
In there stepped a stately Raven of the saintly days of yore;
...
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What's with the definite article in "It was in the bleak December"?
In his classic poem which pretty much everyone knows by heart, Edgar Allan Poe writes as follows:
Ah, distinctly I remember
It was in the bleak December,
And each separate dying ember
Wrought its ...
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How would one scan the poem in Boromir's dream? [closed]
Tolkien's The Fellowship of the Ring contains this short poem, heard by Boromir in a dream and related to the Council of Elrond:
Seek for the Sword that was broken; In Imladris it
dwells; There ...
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How is death "romanticized"? [closed]
Many times in question papers we can see that there's a question on "how death is romanticized in xxxx poem/ story?"
My question is how do we determine that the writer has romanticized death ...
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Excerpts from a poem: need help understanding poetic English
This is John Keats’s classic Petrarchan sonnet “To the Nile”, which was written two hundred years ago in a style more ancient still:
Son of the old Moon-mountains African!
Chief of the Pyramid and ...
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What is the correct word for referring to the speaker of a song or poem? [duplicate]
Like "narrator", but for something that isn't a narrative. Do we have a word for that?
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What does "brook no challenge" mean?
I am not sure how to understand this expression which showed up in a Walt Whitman poem (Passage to India : 142) - English is not my first language
Brook normally means 'to not tolerate' but that doesn'...
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Is "what" or "whom" correct in this example?
I'm writing a poem and the last line will be either:
A [sailor] is not what I wish to be
or
A [sailor] is not whom I wish to be.
(Sailor is bracketed because the actual noun is different but ...
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"Some may be from showing up" meaning in the Rose Tattoo by Dropkick Murphys
I am trying to get the meaning of the song. As far as I can tell, the man is describing his tattoos, or, rather, recalls circumstances where he's got them. I think I understand most of the verses, ...
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Which literary device is "the only place to put the pieces were the bags under my eyes"?
I am writing a few paragraphs about Rupi Kaur's poetry. I've been trying to think about which literary device is used in this example.
In milk and honey, written by Rupi Kaur, she states:
"the ...
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When quoting poetry, is it appropriate to place [sic] after a lowercase 'I'?
I am quoting one of Rupi Kaur's poems. Kaur purposely writes using all-lowercase letters for the pleasing aesthetic of her poetry. However, this may make it a bit difficult to quote. In one of her ...
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Request for Grammatical Explanation of Shakespeare's Line [closed]
I am particularly looking for the grammatical explanation of the "hath ending" in the last line of the following stanza, why it's not "the world is ending"? Or if I say it means ...
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Talking "saloon"
I recollect vaguely a line found in some piece of poetry by Dylan Thomas, and it suggests a question in many ways puzzling that I could hardly answer. I have not been able to find the poem and I ...
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Can I contract "you is" to "you's"? [duplicate]
Not in the sense of "you are", but rather, I'm writing a poem for my girlfriend and I wrote this line: "Loving you's no hassle." I don't want to use anything incorrect, but I also ...
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I am looking for a word (a noun preferably but an adjective would suffice) that denotes a person that knowingly allows another to use them regularly
This is for a poetic endeavor.
The person allowing this is a people pleaser and lacking in self-esteem (obviously). They feel they are in love with the “user” and although aware that the “relationship”...
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Meaning of "you are sharing my share of with"
There's a poem that used this phrase and the line approximately sounds like that:
I think of [...] the heart you are sharing my share of with the American air.
I fail to understand the point of the ...
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Did the English place name "Frome" used to be pronounced as it is spelled?
The English town Frome is famously pronounced as "froom". The following is two stanzas from the dedication of G.K. Chesterton's poem Ballad of the White Horse, from 1911.
Up through an ...
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What does Tennyson mean by "Ye think ... the murmur of the world"?
I am finding the following lines from Tennyson's Idylls of the King rather perplexing (full text here):
A thousand pips eat up your sparrow-hawk!
Tits, wrens, and all wing'd nothings peck him dead!
...
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Poetic metre of 'Three Little Birds'
I'm trying to understand how poetic feet and meter apply in different contexts, particularly lyrics. When considering this, the majority of the texts which I read seem to assume that meter is fairly ...
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Is there a term for quoted language in a poem?
In Wyatt's Whoso List to Hount, there is a (fictional) piece of writing quoted. Here are the three lines that display this:
There is written, her fair neck round about:/
'Noli me tangere for Caesar'...
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How was the è in past-tense verbs pronounced?
How would Shakespeare have pronounced damnèd for example?
How about the end of Nurse's Song by Blake:
The little ones leapèd, and shoutèd, and laugh'd
And all the hills echoèd
How would he have ...
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If a written line of poetry ends ᴡɪᴛʜᴏᴜᴛ a punctuation mark and the next line starts with “and”, is this considered an enjambment?
In the poem “Planetarium” by Adrienne Rich,
there are the following lines:
of a woman trying to translate pulsations
into images for the relief of the body
and the reconstruction of the mind.
The ...
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"Sought for" at the end of a sentence
Does anyone know if "sought for" can be used at the end of a clause, phrase, or sentence, even if "for" might be redundant? I'm not speaking of "sought for [something]", ...
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Prepostition 'as to' in poetry
So I ran accross this line in a poem of Alexander Pope:
Vice is a monster of so frightful mien As to be hated needs but to be
seen; Yet seen too oft, familiar with her face, We first endure, then
...
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In English, are trains female?
In the poem Night Mail by W. H. Auden, the eponymous train is always referred to as being female:
This is the night mail crossing the Border,
Bringing the cheque and the postal order,
Letters for the ...
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How to understand Trisyllables in poetry?
I can understand usually when a foot in poetry is iambic or trochaic, however I am a bit confused when a foot is comprised of 3 syllables. Is there poetry written with this? And how do you tell where ...
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What is the mouse shape of "The Mouse's Tale" in Alice? [closed]
"The Mouse's Tale" is a shaped poem by Lewis Carroll which appears in his 1865 novel Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.
I read in Mouse Tale (Fall 91):
Traditional tail-rhymes have a shorter ...
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Why 'd' in 'Aeneid'?
The Latin poem Aeneis is Aeneid in English. How did the last d come about?
A few suspects by quick search:
/ð/ → /d/ shift in English, but there must be a shift /s/ → /ð/.
It seems romance languages ...
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"...The merry children spilling out of their homes..." What is the figure of speech here? [duplicate]
What is the poetic device in the line 'the merry children spilling out of their homes'?
This is taken from the poem "My Mother at Sixty-six" written by Kamala Das, an Indian poet (the poem ...
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Despite a break of traditional rules, my sonnet still be called a sonnet?
I am having to do a sonnet for a class poetry slam, and in reviewing what I have at the moment, realize this as one of my lines:
.../so briefly, in the multivalent chagrin, the gray of conformity, ...
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iambic pentameter, stress, and monosyllables
I am studying poetry structure and I am focusing on iambic pentameter at the moment.
From what I have read, there are 10 syllables per line and 5 stressed and 5 unstressed syllables.
It goes ...
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"Hook it home" meaning
I stumbled upon the idiom "hooking it home" in some of Bukowski's lines. Namely,
the whores are there for young boys and old men;
to the young boys they say,
"don't be frightened, ...
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Help with some Bukowski syntax [closed]
I'm working to translate some Bukowski and got confused with the syntax of "Advice For Some Young Man In The Year 2064" (https://www.pinterest.com/pin/751678994049154743/) to the point that ...
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Is there any literary name attributed to 12 verse length stanza?
Not a 12 line poem, but a 12 verse stanza.
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Where would the question marks fall within this poem?
Can someone help me punctuate this line? It is poetry, which may not always follow the common rules of punctuation...
I asked myself is there such a place in the deepest part of the soul
where noone ...
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A meaning without suitable words
I wanted to add a poem to my book but I can't manage to convey my meaning in the right words. The first sentence was about bells that indicate _____. That was where my sentence end. The meaning that I ...
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What is the rhythm of the following poem?
When we grab you by the ankles,
Where our mark is to be made,
You'll soon be doing noble work,
Although you won't be paid.
When we drive away in secret,
You'll be a volunteer,
So don't scream when we ...
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What is it called when a poetry stanza alternates between iambic tetrameter and triameter?
What is it called when a poetry stanza alternates between iambic tetrameter and triameter?
If I shall wander into hell
And die upon its coals
So we have one line of iambic tetrameter and one line ...
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Meaning of these verses from a poem by Keats [closed]
What does these words mean :
And in the midst of this wide quietness
A rosy sanctuary will I dress
With the wreath’d trellis of a working brain,
I'm not a literature student, these verses were ...
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1
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What's the meaning of "steal" in There Is A Pleasure In The Pathless Woods? [closed]
There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
There is society, where none intrudes,
By the deep sea, and music in its roar:
I love not man the less, but Nature ...
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What is the figure of speech used in these lines? [closed]
Jacob's Ladder
Hearken! Trim that swagger a trifle, you wretched lump of earth!
Stamp those feet neither, nor act so haughty
Hearken! You are but a tiny figure on the grand scroll
A statistic, a ...
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