Love
The clod and the pebble
The clod makes the best of the situation
love is selfless
it sacrifices itself
The pebble thinks love is selfish
love is cruel
song
talking about a man who is very bad to her
lists various bad things about him
he will leave you when it turns rough
he is happy when your sad
he values stupidity
he does nothing but want more
if you please him he will leave you
then she says these are the good parts of him
they call him love instead of his name
she basically calls him a baby
he never keeps to his word
he lies constantly
he promises loads but never delivers
he'll flatter you to trick you and take pleasure in it
passion
she's tormented until she hears the sky speaking to her
rhyme scheme: triplet
the language abandoned her fingers
like the ghosts of Homer's Odyssey
mystical love, connected to religion and spirits
she has an epiphany
she talks about the apocalypse, judgement day and heaven and hell
Last sonnet
literary terms
personification of star
metaphor, eternal lids apart
aliteration, mountain and moors
shows his desire to be like a star
the tone is melancholic
he wants to live a life that never moves forwards and always stays the same
he knows the star is sleepless, he thinks this is positive
he knows the life of a star is lonely
he would like to either live like a star forever or die
Theme
personifies a star as a human watching from above
the connotation is of a bright star, a good thing
oxymoron - contrasting images
Love (III)
Herbert is describing his love for God
Herbert was born in wales, educated in London and he was a clergyman
he considered himself dirty, with dust and sin
here, dust means humans, "ashes to ashes, dust to dust"
sin could be original sin
metaphysical poem
Lover's infinetness
Metaphysical poetry
like a monolougue
the poem is gentle but jealous
starts with a paradox
he treats love like a business deal
The paradox of love that in giving your heat to another, it is transfigured; and compare. Mathew 16,25
strong realism
startling opening - energy and movement
there are puns
there's a fusion of emotion and intellect
the iteration of all, all, all, infinitives
Donne combines sacred and profane metaphors
he thought that he had all her love, but there must be some for others
She was a phantom of delight
constant AA rhyme scheme
3 stanzas, 10 lines
iambic tretameter
he thinks she's just an image and doesn't know her
apparition: denotation is just a vision or a spirit
a phantom is not really there
Wordsworth is associated with the romantic movement
he calls poetry "a spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings"
Tiger in the menagerie
19 lines long
repetition of too makes it unrealistic this is anaphora
the tiger was very stealthy and sly
the tiger is a predator, it might suggest violence, even human violence
might be a reflection of William Blake's Tiger
"like a painting of a tiger" is similie
Connotation of a menagerie is wild animals kept in cages, unnatural
"rock shut" like rocking a baby
violence during the day is in the cage but at night it comes out
"Indian main" is the Indian ocean
to "shed" is more like shedding skin
lots of merging, the eye and the sun and the bars and the stripes
the other animals are helpless
lots of diverse interperetations
Lion heart
about singapore
"You" is about a murlion but the murlion refers to the people of Singapore
fricative alliteration, fist full of fish
"your gills snapped shut" about the evolution of the murlion but also her city
"conquering the shore" is much like an attack
the sand on it's back shows that it was originally a sea creature
"swaddled" is what a baby is wrapped in
reciprocation, you embrace the land and the land embraces you
the surface of the water reflects the surface of the sky scrapers
for my grandmother knitting
about an old woman who has no purpose in life
written in 2nd person
how she gets abandoned by her children - they refuse her knitted clothes
she begins to feel useless
knitting makes her feel young again
the poem tries to close the divide between old and young
she had to work very hard to raise her children, she has worked so hard all her life that she can't stop working
the poet uses normal language and idioms to show a grandmother knitting
she hit her children when she needed to
enjambment is used to draw atention to certain words and phrases
the word refrain is repeated to show that the woman feels useless
her personality is her work
the needles are personified
the word "but" is used in every stanza to show the opposite opinion
grasp has 2 meanings, her hand and her mind
coming home
no longer his home
about growing old
gender differences in his home mother cooks, father labours
repitition
contrasts between old and young
the formal word mother shows their disconnection
stabat mater
autobiographoical
universal appeal beyond it's subjectivity
it has a very peculiar structure
there is a philosophical over tone
references to christian mythology
his mother was embarrassed by her husband being older than her father
walk away symbolises journey and growing up