Poems + useful stuff to know about them Flashcards
(14 cards)
Whoso list to hunt - Thomas Wyatt
- Petrachan sonnet (typically talking about love and death)
- Reversed structure
> Thought to be about Anne Boleyn.
Sonnet 116 - William Shakespeare
- Shakespearean sonnet (made from 3 quatrains and a couplet). Typically about love and death.
- Follows iambic petrameter (steady meter)
> was thought to be about a man? (not really relevant i just find this interesting). Challenges gender norms and conveys the love of a friend. (Love was used as a loser term then we use it now).
The Flea - John Donne
- Metaphysical poem.
- Meter alternates between iambic petrameter and tetrameter. Regular iambic feet represent a heartbeat, as well as the persistence of an arguement.
- Goes inbetween femanine rhyme (mASter + disASter) versus masculine rhyme (blow + flow).
> The metaphysical movement (a group of people who share the same ideology on metaphysics and try to relate spiritual phenomena to reality).
Memento Mori + Carpe Diem attitude
17th centuary poets (different ways of viewing form, structure, and languages. Explored passionate feelings with intellectual arguements. Intellectual thought).
Fleas were very common issue, relates to everyone.
To His Coy Mistress
- A blazon poem (a poem that describes and celebrates something or someone, normally a woman, by naming all the beautiful features of it. Compares the body to jewels, stars, roses etc).
- Regular rhyme pattern.
- Syllogism (a poem which has two parts of an arguement).
> Written during the restoration 1660 (when the king charles the II was reinstated after the rule of oliver cromwell).
The Scrutiny
- One sided arguement + lack of female speaker.
- Lyrical poem (expresses emotions and feelings)
- Dramatic monolouge.
- ABABB rhyme scheme
- Traditional structure reflects his light-hearted approach or a preplanned arguement.
> Views on sex (sex was seen as more taboo and a very ‘chivilicric’ thing to brag about).
The poem (This poem would’ve been plolitical as well as personal during the civil war. Pursuit of pleasure and sex was calivier and anti-puritain).
Cavalier poets (Supported the monarchy in the civil war, poetry was about living life the the fullest - carpe diem).
Richard Lovelace (17th centuary poet, was a soldier, lover and courtier).
A Song (Absent from thee) - John Wilmot
- Iambic tetrameter
- Regular rhyme (it’s typical to have a regular rhyme pattern during the time of it’s release).
- 4 stanza’s
> Written during the restoration (after the puritains). Carpe diem.
Charles reopened theatres and brung a more jovial way of living.
Wilmot (Lots of his writing had been sensored, died at 33 from syphilis.
The Garden of Love - William Blake
- ABCB structure
- Anapestic trimeter + tetrameter
- Internal rhyme
- First person (personal)
- Past tense
- Repetition of ‘and’ = polysendeton, emphasis showing anger.
> Blake (a romantic poet. Believed in radical political and spiritual ideas. Speaking against the church)
Blake’s collections (songs of innocence and songs of experiance. Experience showed the negative side of the church, modern life, and views the modern condition as dangerous. The garden of love is central to this as it marks the transition from youth to adulthood.
Reference to the garden of Eden.
Song (Ae Fond Kiss) - Robert Burns
- Trochaic tetrameter
- Paralellism is central within the poem
- Rhyme structure AABBCCDD
- Rhyming couplets
- Cyclical lyric (refrain). Repetition helps to convey a lack of closure, he is contantly loving her.
- Stressed first syllable and unstressed last syllable (feminine endings which gives the poem a sad falling rhythm).
> Rhyming couplets are often used in poems about love.
Impactful in scotland (has scottish dialect which appeals to the lower classes).
Burns (had a secret love affair with Agnes McLehose, he was married with twins but left his wife to live with her)
B + A <3 (They used nicknames when writing to eachother, however she then left for Jamacia which left him heartbroken).
She Walks in Beauty - Lord Byron
- Typical lyric poem (an expressive freestyle, often about love or greif)
- Iambic tetrameter (reflects a steady pae and a balanced beauty of the woman).
- ABABAB rhyme scheme (symbolizes the balence between light and dark)
- 3 sesets
- Present tense = her beauty is eternal
- Enjambment and structure of the poem mirrors two things coming together to create something whole.
> Byron (he was a romantic poet, he was inspired to write this about the wife of his cousin Anne Beatrix Wilmot who looked beautiful in a dress at a party of one of his friends).
‘Starry skies’ reffers to the dress she was wearing.
Remember - Christina Rossetti
- Petrachan sonnet
- Iambic pentrameter (similar to a heartbeat)
- Strict meter = strained feel of restraint
- ABBA ABBA CDD ECE rhyme scheme
- Palindromic nature of ABBAABBA rhme refelcts feelings of hesitancy. It becomes less assertive.
> Rossetti (she was surrounded by death and illness from a young age as her father died. There was typically high morality rates in england. She had strong catholic beleifs, she saw death as a means of escape).
The Ruined Maid - Thomas Hardy
- Warm tone created from the dialect + colloquialism.
- Quatrains
- AABB rhyme scheme
- Anaphora ‘said she’
- Traditional ballad form
- Diolouge and refrains
- IIambic trimeter (nursery rhyme + patronizing tone.
> Due to industrialization, there was more people moving to the city.
Beleifs that marriage benefits family ratyhet yhen love
Prostitution was taboo
‘The Fallen Woman’
Used as a cautionary tone.
At An Inn - Thomas Hardy
- Cyclical structure
- ABABCDCD rhyme scheme.
- Half of the lines are written in iambic trimeter (three sets of two beats) the other half conforms to iambic dimeter (two sets of two beats per line).
> Victorian England saw very strict rules where it was uncommon for man and woman to casually go out together.
More scientific breakthroughs led to questioning of the existence of god.
Victorian poetry often looked at loss and isolation and featured the everyday person with a moral lesson.
Victorian poetry was idealistic in their perception of love.
Hardy (disliked victorian rules and was a ‘realist’ poet, criticizes god and society by highlighting the pressures put on everyday people, he is agnostic).
La Belle Dame sans Merci - John Keats
- The tone of the poem follows a medevil like sound, however it was not written in the medevil times. Conveys the story as ‘idealized storybook type?’
- English ballad
- Keats uses balladic stanza to root his poem in tradition and tie the form to mythic content.
- Traditional ABCB rhyme scheme.
> Keats (during the year he wrote the poem his brother died of tuberculosis and his relationship with a girl called Fanny Brawne reached it’s climax. The poem can be seen as a development of Keats’ own theory of ‘negative capability’).
Sensuous imagery is typical of Keats’ writing.
Simple language appeals to wider audience’s of all status’.
Non Sum Qualis Eram Bonae sub Regno Cynarae - Erwin Dowson
- Alexandrine poetry (twelve syllable lines in iambic hexameter, sugessts a constanty of desolation + love).
- Rhyme scheme draws attention to the middle line of each tercet.
- Exclimaition mark after ‘Cyrana! puts emphasis on her (also it’s a use of refrain which places important on her as well).
> Cynara is a figure in greek mythology. She suduced Zeus but she became tired of her role as mistress to hera so returned home where Zeus was enraged at having been abandoned.
The poem is part of the decedant movement (a movements where poets would engage in sexual promiscuity influenced by the romantic and gothic writers. They built traditions of drugs and alcohol but weren’t liked by wider society.)
Title translates to ‘I’m not the man I was when I was under the influence of Cynara’
The title was taken for Horace’s poem, in which the speaker talks about wanting to let Cyanara go, despite loving her.
