A sudden blow: the great wings beating still
    Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed
    By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,
    He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.

    How can those terrified vague fingers push
    The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?
    And how can body, laid in that white rush,
    But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?

    A shudder in the loins engenders there
    The broken wall, the burning roof and tower[20]
    And Agamemnon dead.

                        Being so caught up,

    So mastered by the brute blood of the air,
    Did she put on his knowledge with his power
    Before the indifferent beak could let her drop? 

Leda and the Swan 
by William Butler Yeats

Page 176

 Zeus(Chief  God) transforms himself into a swan to rape Leda. 

• She became mother of 2 girls from this rape
• Poem is a 14 line sonnet not the same as Shakespeare wrote

• Shows how gods ruled humans
• Planets named for roman gods
• Aphrodite/ aphrodisiac 
• Uses the swans because of its beautiful curves, maybe the most beautiful of the birds

The sea is calm tonight, 
The tide is full, the moon lies fair 
Upon the straits; on the French coast the light 
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand, 
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay. 
Come to the window, sweet is the night air!

Only, from the long line of spray 
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land, 
Listen! you hear the grating roar 
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling, 
At their return, up the high strand, 
Begin, and cease, and then again begin, 
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring 
The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago 
Heard it on the Agean, and it brought 
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow 
Of human misery; we 
Find also in the sound a thought, 
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

The Sea of Faith 
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore 
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled. 
But now I only hear 
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar, 
Retreating, to the breath 
Of the night wind, down the vast edges drear 
And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true 
To one another! for the world, which seems 
To lie before us like a land of dreams, 
So various, so beautiful, so new, 
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, 
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain; 
And we are here as on a darkling plain 
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, 
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

Dover Beach 

by Matthew Arnold

Page 157

 Speaker Unknown, most likely the poet
• Poem on the dawn of the modern world
• Poem about moving into the dark age
• How the world has gone crazy and what to do about it
• Find one person to love and hang on a soltion to the world going crazy, its the best that you can do
• Poets project onto nature their own feelings
• Nothing sad about waves example, but poets give them feelings. Example; sadness of a storm, vicious hurricane
• The waves hitting the shore are messengers of sadness, true in the poetic sense but not in literal
• People believe the tragedy is the most important thing we need to know

• Like a cloth spread over everything there used to be faith, but no faith is going out like a tide
• Life is like a night battle, no light, is this, what our future is for us?
• Bleak poem, first important poem of the modern world?

So there stood Matthew Arnold and this girl
With the cliffs of England crumbling away behind them,
And he said to her, 'Try to be true to me,
And I'll do the same for you, for things are bad
All over, etc., etc.'
Well now, I knew this girl. It's true she had read
Sophocles in a fairly good translation
And caught that bitter allusion to the sea,
But all the time he was talking she had in mind
The notion of what his whiskers would feel like
On the back of her neck. She told me later on
That after a while she got to looking out
At the lights across the channel, and really felt sad,
Thinking of all the wine and enormous beds
And blandishments in French and the perfumes.
And then she got really angry. To have been brought
All the way down from London, and then be addressed
As a sort of mournful cosmic last resort
Is really tough on a girl, and she was pretty.
Anyway, she watched him pace the room
And finger his watch-chain and seem to sweat a bit,
And then she said one or two unprintable things.
But you mustn't judge her by that. What I mean to say is, 
She's really all right. I still see her once in a while
And she always treats me right. We have a drink
And I give her a good time, and perhaps it's a year
Before I see her again, but there she is, 
Running to fat, but dependable as they come.
And sometimes I bring her a bottle of Nuit d' Amour.

Dover bitch

By: Anthony Hecht

 Parody on Dover beach
• Wonders what the woman was thinking? The good time girl
• The joke=she’s not the love of his life
• The lights in France mean good wine and fancy stuff to the lady
• Good title for a bottle of perfume, but not for a bottle of wine
• Arnold had a serious purpose but hecht creates the woman as an entirely different character Arnold is in love with; cynical

The whiskey on your breath
Could make a small boy dizzy;
But I hung on like death:
Such waltzing was not easy.

We romped until the pans
Slid from the kitchen shelf;
My mother's countenance
Could not unfrown itself.

The hand that held my wrist
Was battered on one knuckle;
At every step you missed
My right ear scraped a buckle.

You beat time on my head
With a palm caked hard by dirt,
Then waltzed me off to bed
Still clinging to your shirt.

My Papas Waltz

by Theodore Roethke

page 238

• Between father and son

• Suggests the father is a working man rather than a store owner
• Comes across as a man who does labor during the week
• Comes home from a day’s work and is drunk
• Written in 1948
• Blue collar job
• Is this a poem about child abuse or love?
• Father is not an articulate man
• This is how he relates

Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I'd wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he'd call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,

Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love's austere and lonely offices?

Those Winter Sundays

by Robert Hayden

Pg 243

 Son to father
• tending the fire was Always the dad’s job
• Even done on Sunday’s
• There’s never a day off to heat the house
• This was an act of love by father for the father
• Poet feels he owes his act of love in return
• This poem is his act of love

Daddy

by Sylvia Plath
 

 p. 306
• Poem about severe hate for her father
• German ancestry 
• Metaphor to Nazis (symbolized the ultimate evil)
• Not sure where he came from
• Sees him as the devil with cleft feet
• Refers to her husband as black meaning evil
• Depressive personality
• Gave her medication “stuck her together with glue”
• “Rack and screw” torture instruments
• “villagers” reference to classic horror movies

Nuns Fret Not at Their Convents Narrow Room

by:William Wordsworth

Page 104

Octave and Sestet
• Line 8 has no punctuation which carries over into line 9
• Characterized by confinement
• In that one place willingly
• Confinement by pleasant confinement 
• Hermit, willingly doesn’t want to live with the rest
• Maids at the wheel; spinning wheel to make cloth
• Bees; fox glove bells
• 14 lines, 10 syllables, written 200 years after Shakespeare 
• Opposite to a free verse
• Requires 2 sounds in 8 lines

"Terence, this is stupid stuff:
 You eat your victuals fast enough;
 There can't be much amiss, 'tis clear,
 To see the rate you drink your beer.
 But oh, good Lord, the verse you make,
 It gives a chap the belly-ache.
 The cow, the old cow, she is dead;
 It sleeps well, the horned head:
 We poor lads, 'tis our turn now
 To hear such tunes as killed the cow.
 Pretty friendship 'tis to rhyme
 Your friends to death before their time
 Moping melancholy mad:
 Come, pipe a tune to dance to, lad."

  Why, if 'tis dancing you would be
 There's brisker pipes than poetry.
 Say, for what were hop-yards meant,
 Or why was Burton built on Trent?
 Oh, many a peer of England brews
 Livelier liquor than the Muse,
 And malt does more than Milton can
 To justify God's ways to man.
 Ale, man, ale's the stuff to drink
 For fellows whom it hurts to think:
 Look into the pewter pot
 To see the world as the world's not.
 And faith, 'tis pleasant till 'tis past:
 The mischief is that 'twill not last.
 Oh I have been to Ludlow fair
 And left my necktie god knows where,
 And carried half-way home, or near,
 Pints and quarts of Ludlow beer:
 Then the world seemed none so bad,
 And I myself a sterling lad;
 And down in lovely muck I've lain,
 Happy till I woke again.
 Then I saw the morning sky:
 Heigho, the tale was all a lie;
 The world, it was the old world yet,
 I was I, my things were wet,
 And nothing now remained to do
 But begin the game anew.

  Therefore, since the world has still
 Much good, but much less good than ill,
 And while the sun and moon endure
 Luck's a chance, but trouble's sure,
 I'd face it as a wise man would,
 And train for ill and not for good.
 'Tis true, the stuff I bring for sale
 Is not so brisk a brew as ale:
 Out of a stem that scored the hand
 I wrung it in a weary land.
 But take it: if the smack is sour,
 The better for the embittered hour;
 It should do good to heart and head
 When your soul is in my soul's stead;
 And I will friend you, if I may,
 In the dark and cloudy day.

  There was a king reigned in the East:
 There, when kings will sit to feast,
 They get their fill before they think
 With poisoned meat and poisoned drink.
 He gathered all that springs to birth
 From the many-venomed earth;
 First a little, thence to more,
 He sampled all her killing store;
 And easy, smiling, seasoned sound,
 Sate the king when healths went round.
 They put arsenic in his meat
 And stared aghast to watch him eat;
 They poured strychnine in his cup
 And shook to see him drink it up:
 They shook, they stared as white's their shirt:
 Them it was their poison hurt
        - I tell the tale that I heard told.
 Mithridates, he died old.

Terence, this is stupid stuff...

by A.E Housman

Page 173

Poet makes up 2 characters, terrance and the other guy talking to terrance
• So happy so why write such sad poetry
• Driving everyone crazy with his sad poems
• Muse=poetry; spirit speaks to poets on how to speak poetry
• Allusion to John Milton (Paradise Lost); story of Adam and Eve; justifies God’s punishments to Adam and Eve
• Philosophy that the world is a bad place
• How do you train for ill? To withstand life’s blows
• There are really no answers, but to maybe have no expectations
• We need to face that there is trouble in the world

The miller's wife had waited long,
 The tea was cold, the fire was dead;
 And there might yet be nothing wrong
 In how he went and what he said:
 "There are no millers any more,"
 Was all that she heard him say;
 And he had lingered at the door
 So long it seemed like yesterday.

 Sick with a fear that had no form
 She knew that she was there at last;
 And in the mill there was a warm
 And mealy fragrance of the past.
 What else there was would only seem
 To say again what he had meant;
 And what was hanging from a beam
 Would not have heeded where she went.

 And if she thought it followed her,
 She may have reasoned in the dark
 That one way of the few there were
 Would hide her and would leave no mark:
 Black water, smooth above the weir
 Like starry velvet in the night,
 Though ruffled once, would soon appear
 The same as ever to the sight.

The Mill

By:Edwin Arlington Robinson

Page 179

 The miller is an old profession; takes farmers grain and grounds into meal etc.
• Old and ancient profession
• Last name miller are seen in families where families were millers
• Poem about change; about how millers have no longer become necessary 
• How human beings have found other ways of doing mill work; technology
• Humans are becoming obsolete
• The man hanged himself in the mill, she then committed suicide by drowning herself
• She didn’t want to be seen gruesomely dead like she found her husband which is why she drowned herself in a pond
• “change” in society; this change was bad for this couple
• How can a human being become obsolete?
• Society made him feel he wasn’t a part of society anymore
• Possibly wonders why this has happened to him?
• Early modern poet

Whenever Richard Cory went downtown, 

    We people on the pavement looked at him: 

He was a gentleman from sole to crown, 

    Clean favored, and imperially slim.

And he was always quietly arrayed, 
    And he was always human when he talked; 
But still he fluttered pulses when he said, 
    “Good morning,” and he glittered when he walked.

And he was rich -- yes, richer than a king, 
    And admirably schooled in every grace: 
In fine, we thought that he was everything 
    To make us wish that we were in his place.

So on we worked, and waited for the light, 
    And went without the meat, and cursed the bread, 
And Richard Cory, one calm summer night, 
    Went home and put a bullet through his head.

Richard Cory

By Edwin Arlington Robinson

Page 181

Another suicide poem
• How many words suggest royalty? (crown, empirical, king, glittered when he walked, arrayed, grace, fluttered pulses (so handsome that women’s pulses beat faster))
• One idea of this poem is that money doesn’t buy happiness, because he had money but was so unhappy
• Another idea; we don’t know each other in the modern world, because of the lifestyle we lead
• We don’t share each other about our lives

The trees in the garden rained flowers

By Stephen Crane

 How might this poem relate to economics?
• The more money the more fit we are?
• Capitalism? Based on your ability you can make as much money without restrictions, nothing taken away from government. Using perseverance, luck etc; however taxes are still there
• Poem interpreted as a capitalistic poem (stronger, bolder, shrewder) not necessarily nicer or hint of sharing

A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.
And the camels galled, sore-footed, refractory,
Lying down in the melting snow.
There were times when we regretted
The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,
And the silken girls bringing sherbet.
Then the camel men cursing and grumbling
And running away, and wanting their liquor and women,
And the night-fires going out, and the lack of shelters,
And the cities dirty and the towns unfriendly
And the villages dirty and charging high prices:
A hard time we had of it.
At the end we preferred to travel all night,
Sleeping in snatches,
With the voices singing in our ears, saying
That this was all folly.

Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley,
Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation;
With a running stream and a water mill beating the darkness,
And three trees on the low sky,
And an old white horse galloped away in the meadow.
Then we came to a tavern with vine-leaves over the lintel,
Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver,
And feet kicking the empty wineskins.
But there was no information, and so we continued
And arrived at evening, not a moment too soon
Finding the place; it was (you may say) satisfactory.

All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.

Journey of the Magi

by T.s eliot

Magi from the 3 wise man
• Dramatic monologue
• Invents a personality to one of the wise men
• Dramatic because it reveals about the reader
• Theme usually about despair
• Similar to the story of what we hear at Christmas time
• Talks about the difficult journey
• No historical basis for Christ’s birth in December
• Folly- why follow this star?
• “white horse” mentioned in the bible 
• Roman soldiers dice for his robe
• Empty wine skins referring to drunkenness
• Something about this birth that has stayed in this mind
• The birth haunted him?
• All this way for birth or death?
• Implication with the birth of Jesus there would be a new religion that would overcome new religions
• Had no significance this was the birth of Jesus, the son of God

. The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

By T.s. eliot

 Dramatic monologue 
• This character is an uptight repressed personality
• Idea to give the aristocratic uptight business man who is very lonely
• Revealing his deepest thoughts to us as the readers
• His name doesn’t even have a romantic feel to it
• *”read the divine comedy of dante’s inferno for English paper” starts bad but ends good
• Meets people who knew who were once were alive
• Meets them in hell
• Asked everyone why they were sent to hell
• No one ever leaves so they can speak of why they were sent to hell
• Deep inner most thoughts of a deep and lonely person, he is his own worst enemy
• Those who hear these thoughts are his friend or us the reader?
• Sawdust restaurants…people threw the shells on the floor
• Tedious agreement (one person want to hurt another person)
• Not positive images, but that of negative
• Tells of a question he wants to ask a girl, but can’t tell us what he meant
• Talks about the fog…metaphor for a cat…
• This parties have a lot of vicious gossip, they make verbal back and forth attacks, visions then revisions, controlled hostility 
• He can’t disturb the universe with any of his non-sense
• Rather Is his tie ok…etc
• Modern man is confused and frustrated and doesn’t know what is important
• How can I break through and have an honest moment?