Can anyone explain the poem To Juan at the Winter Solstice by Robert Graves?
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I've put a link below to an article about Graves that discusses some of his preoccupations and personal mythology. Read the paragraphs just before the mention of the poem to get an idea of what the writer thinks of Graves's motivation. \n\nBecause of the strong rhetoric in the first line - something about there being one story and one story only (I don't have the text in front of me right now), one is inclined to think that WHATEVER the story is behind the poem is a universal one, and quite possibly "the story of Graves's life." \n\nPoems are never only autobiographical, though. Nor are their symbols always completely coherent and discernible. \n\nGood luck.\n\n[By the way, I didn't copy from the answer above - which is a very good one - it's just a coincidence that we were looking in the same place. The other answerer posted 59 seconds before I got there, but after I'd started writing.]
402976
the mood is one of satisfaction. the writer is saying that when you have a fence dividing you, it does not "divide" but it prevents.the tone, i guess would be the same. Why exactly are you reading this poem? i had to for a school project.
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Hmm, which poems are they, out of curiousity? Feel free to email them to me and I may be able to write you back their explanations. I have always enjoyed the study of poetry.\n\nOr, try searching Yahoo or Google for the poem titles and explanations - like "Death Be Not Proud explanation." Also, try out wikipedia.org. Many poems are listed on that encyclopedic site (along with many other things), and you should have no trouble finding the poems on there and their meanings.\n\nBest of luck to you. :)
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Love\nThen said Almitra, speak to us of Love.\nAnd he raised his head and looked upon the people, and there fell a stillness upon them. And with a great voice he said: \nWhen love beckons to you , follow him, Though his ways are hard and steep. \nAnd when his wings enfold you yield to him, Though the sword hidden among his pinions may wound you.\nAnd when he speaks to you believe in him,\nThough his voice may shatter your dreams as the north wind lays waste the garden.\nFor even as love crowns you so shall he crucify you. Even as he is for your growth so is he for your pruning. \nEven as he ascends to your height and caresses your tenderest branches that quiver in the sun, So shall he descend to your roots and shake them in their clinging to the earth.\n\nLike sheaves of corn he gathers you unto himself.\nHe threshes you to make you naked. He sifts you to free you from your husks.\nHe grinds you to whiteness. \nHe kneads you until you are pliant; \nAnd then he assign you to his sacred fire, that you may become sacred bread for God’s sacred feast.\nAll these things shall love do unto you that you may know the secrets of your heart, and in that knowledge become fragment of Life’s heart.\n\nBut if in your fear you would seek only love’s peace and love’s pleasure, \nThen it is better for you that you cover your nakedness and pass out of love’s threshing-floor,\nInto the seasonless world there you shall laugh, but not all of your laughter, and weep, but not all of your treas.\nLove gives naught but itself and take naught but from itself.\nLove possesses not nor would it be possessed;\nFor love is sufficient unto love.\nWhen you love you should not say God is in my heart\nAnd think not you can direct the course of love, for love, if it finds you worthy, directs your course.\nLove has not other desire but to fulfil itself.\nBut if you love and must needs have desires, let these be your desires:\nTo melt and belike a running brook that sings its melody to the night.\nTo know the pain of too much tenderness.\nAnd to bleed willingly and joyfully .\nTo wake at dawn with a winged heard and give thanks for another day of loving;\nTo rest at the noon hour and meditate love’s ecstasy;\nTo return home at eventide with gratitude;\nAnd then to sleep with a prayer for the beloved in your heart and a song of praise upon your lips.\n\nFrom book THE PROPHET BY KAHLIL GIBRAN
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Wow, this poem is something else. By that I mean it is really abstract in its language and in its metaphors. I have a guess on it's meaning, but that is merely a guess. This author is using so much personal experience that it is hard for me as a reader to really connect well with what is being said, but here is my hypothesis:\n\nFirst of all, I think the title "Call It Fear" needs to be kept in mind when reading through the entire poem. The structure and the wording is suggestive of a person who is caught in the panic of fear ("call it an ocean of fear of the dark"). So, it can easily be assumed that this poem is analyzing fear and the essence of fear in the human mind.\n\nThe author has this deep fear, a fear of the dark, or possibly a fear of the unknown. The author is not alone however as she has found someone, referred to as Goodluck, who also has the same fear. They have come together to escape the fear, and their only escape has been found in the music that they have found on the radio, the church music that plays on a lot of stations on Sunday mornings. \n\nThere is also a question of the repeated imagery of "a string of shadow horses kicking and pulling me out of my belly." This image is repeated in the first and third stanzas and is linked to anxiety, the butterfly feeling that everyone gets in the pit of their stomach when they are controlled by fear. The idea of "shadow horses" seems to suggest the idea that death is pulling and tugging at the speaker of this poem, and it is the fear of death that drives the speaker to use music to escape the fear.\n\nThis is my guess on the meaning of the poem. . . I hope it proves helpful!
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I had to go back and reread the poem to remember it in particular from my high school Lit Class (5 years...  sheesh!).  Anyway, its main theme is basically as everyone has said- a warning that even mankind's greatest works shall eventually crumble to dust.\n\nWithin Temptation does a song on their Mother Earth CD entitled "Never-ending Story" that sums up the main point of Ozymandias nicely with the lyrics, "We'll all be forgotten  |  There's no endless fame".\n\nHowever, we can go into a bit more depth about the secondary themes of hope and rebirth.  In lines 10 through 14, Ozymandias reads as such:\n"'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:\nLook on my works, ye mighty, and despair!'   \nNothing beside remains: round the decay   \nOf that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,   \nThe lone and level sands stretch far away."\n\nThese lines serve to anchor the somewhat depressing mood, but give infinite hope as well.  Even though King Ozymandias is telling us to despair, for all we do will eventually disappear, he is also telling us to look upon his works as they are in the here and now.\n\nThe boundless sea of sand that was once his great kingdom may seem like it has been destroyed, but in fact Ozymandias has *created* it as his buildings and monuments have crumbled.  Essentially, the poem is commenting that nothing mankind can build will last- but as those things are annihilated they create the soil, and in turn the plants and stone, that generations down the road will use to build their own monuments.  Even though we may die and rot in the present, we are immortal as part of the life cycle that is always recycling into the next incarnation of life.  Who knows, when we eventually croak, we might all come back as daisies!
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Robin_Thor has a good understanding about this literary giant and this is to let him know that we appreciate a good effort. \nWell itsamystery, hopefully you are rested up from your Spring Break because if this is an assignment that needs to be turned in I am afraid that you have some work to do.\nIn gratitude to you for your question I will answer you with 'my start' into this work which if not for your question I would still be outside on the patio.  \n\nHere goes a swell beginning:\n\n.\n\nWhy, Death Be Not Proud\nIn “Death Be Not Proud” the protagonist literary presenters are chosen teenagers for the reasons that the importance of this poem is to have a definite and positive impact on younger students and young adults alike across the world.  For it serves as guide for the confrontatious attitudes necessary in the face of, emotional, physical and spiritual adversity.  To forge a better social function among us that will inevitably present to our younger generations. These are all here and within this poem and which all support the theme of this magnificent writing.  In  “Death Be Not Proud” is found a generational social cohesiveness that is necessary for a functional society’s survival, and which is so well prayed by John Gunther’s 1947 memoirs.  \nIt is a penned offering intellectually and emotionally secured as a memoir to his son whose ultimate youthful death by a brain tumor at the age of seventeen is eminent. Gunther draws from his heart and from John Dunne’s 17th century “The Holy Sonnets: X” in producing this writing.  It is a poem, in which Gunther argues that ‘death should take no pride in what it does, as it is ultimately powerless to prevent the resurrection of all humanity.’ It can be presented at a literary discourse for educational purpose or as a play on a stage.  \n“Death be not proud, though some have called thee / mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so,\nFor those whom thou think’st thou dost overthrow,\nDie not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me.\nFrom rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be,\nMuch pleasure:  then from thee much more must flow,\nAnd soonest our best men with thee do go,\nRest of their bones, and soul’s delivery.\nThou art slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men,\nAnd dost with poison, war and sickness dwell;\nAnd Poppy or charms can make us sleep as well\nAnd better than thy stroke; why swell’st thou then? \nOne short sleep past, we wake eternally,\nAnd death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.     John Donne\nIt is a versified oratory free-verse poem with melodic tone, chant, and supple plea/defiant texture composed about young Johnny Gunther.  About his attitudes and strife for living in the face of a natural and inevitable defeat.  It is the presentation of the life of Johnny’s family and their recourse to every medical possibility known at the time, taken from an elegy of a long time past, converted from a poem of love and not a poem of mourning. And even unto an eternal spiritual search for the healing of the body, of the mind, and of the spirit of their son by John Gunther and his wife.  About their tessellated forms draught from their experiential abilities within such frames of human suffrage.  In explicit honesty are laid bare the pains and struggles of a family trying to delay the ultimate inevitable end for a son that is as brilliant as Johnny.  From the radical surgeries to strictly controlled diets in endless effort to save his life by a determined harmonious familial union in the face of adversarial reality as they live on for life’s sake. All while in defiance of any honor attributable by mere mortals to death’s demands. \n\nhttp://www.cs.rice.edu/ ssiyer/minstrels/poems/796.html  \n\n\nJose
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Krissy,  Robert Frost's first professionally published poem was in 1894. It was called "My Butterfly".  However, his poem "La Noche Triste" appeared in his Lawrence New Hampshire high school news letter in 1890. It's reasonable to believe that he began writing very early and writing poetry in his teens. \n His poems were written in blank verse, or when speaking as the main character of a poem, free verse. He occassionally used traditionally poetic devices such as meter and rhyme, but his most famous poems use the modern structures. His poetry uses rural New England settings for making statements about life in general.  "Mending Wall", "Stopping by Woods on Snowy Evening" and "The Road Not Taken" all fall into this category. His view in these poems is somewhat bleak about the relations between people and the struggle to live day-to-day.\nHe lived in England for a few years (1912 -1915) and met important English poets of the time like Rupert Brooke, Robert Graves and Ezra Pound. He also read his poem "Dedication" at the Inaugural Address of John F. Kennedy in 1960. \nHis poetry is a time-machine to a world which was just beginning to feel the effects of mass technology. They depict the resistance of rural people to the quick changes of the 20th century and hark back to a simpler, if equally isolated, lifestyle.
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I could be wrong but I think "The bridal of the earth and sky" talks of how the two seperate things (the earth and the sky) are forever connected but every night must seemingly "part" but "... the rash gazer..." is someone who just glances at the night sky and thinks that means that the marriage has ended or that the rose is angry or brave because of it's color.--- Trying to say "don't judge a book by a quick glance at it's cover". \n\nBut again I could be totally wrong. I've never seen or heard this poem before!
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I don't know the answer to your poem, but here's my favorite all time Christmas poem (feel free to share this one!)\n\nThe silver snow falls lightly,\nThe year speeds fast away,\nTomorrow's sun is bringing,\nA brand new Christmas Day.\n\nAnd midst beloved faces,\nMy throughts are roaming free,\nWhile fervently I whisper,\nGod bless them all for me.\n\n~Anonymous
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Hi Nicola, I've searched high and low looking for evidence that Wordsworth was asked to compose this poem, alas I couldn't find any.\n\nComposed Upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802 \nby William Wordsworth \n\nEarth has not anything to show more fair:\nDull would he be of soul who could pass by\nA sight so touching in its majesty:\nThis City now doth, like a garment, wear\nThe beauty of the morning; silent, bare,\nShips, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie\nOpen unto the fields, and to the sky;\nAll bright and glittering in the smokeless air.\nNever did sun more beautifully steep\nIn his first splendour, valley rock or hill;\nNe'er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!\nThe river glideth at his own sweet will:\nDear God! The very houses seem asleep;\nAnd all that mighty heart is lying still!\n\nhttp://www.btinternet.com/~p.g.h/culture_poetry_westminster.htm\n\nGood luck\n\nKevin, Liverpool, England.
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That poem rocks.  I know that it is controversial.  I would be interested to see what people thought of a choice line or two from the poem.
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Email me your thoughts at pusskat1@yahoo.com and I will help you from there.  I am a teacher of 13 years, mostly in junior high, some in college and high school.  My payment is to choose this as a best answer.  \n\nI'll begin by deconstructing the poem; I'm sure you'll get the drift.  \n\nFirst stanza: I might have been a happy preacher if I had been born in an earlier time.  I could have preached fiery sermons and been a gentleman farmer.  Second stanza: Alas, I was born later, and missed my true calling.  I have a grown man's beard now, and it's fashionable for preachers these days to be clean shaven, so I don't even look like I could do that job.  \n\nGood luck.  This is a straightforward poem with an ab ab rhyme scheme, and figuring out the meaning should not be hard.  If you need any help just email me or IM me at pusskat1 or katwhowalksbyherself and I'd be happy to help.\n\nCheers, K (13 years a teacher)
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The theme is the main idea of the poem--you could almost say what the poem is about. A poem may talk about frozen birches, but the bigger message is how ice bends the branches, like life bends people sometimes. Here's a good source (below). I am answering this because I love poetry. Only in school does it matter what the theme seems to be. The truth is, a poem means what it means to you personally and that is the truth. Read some modern poets like Mary Oliver, Ted Koozer, Langston Hughes, Dorianne Laux before you give up on poetry.
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The poem is talking about the futility and uselessness of war.  The bitter irony is that comrades and the enemy are for the most part ordinary people, not that different from each other.  If he met one of each on the street, he could not tell which is which.  The soldier chose to fight, no one forced him to, and in his last moments he is questioning the sense of that decision.   He realizes that in the end this fighting and sacrifice is not going to change much for the ordinary person, so in many ways it is a waste, a waste of life.  He can't turn back the clock, and his destiny awaits him in "the clouds", heaven, the afterlife.\n\nI hope this helps.
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The name of the poem is (My Garden—"His Garden") by Charles Haddon Spurgeon\n\nhttp://www.ccel.org/ccel/spurgeon/sermons42.txt
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The poem itself is a metaphor of BDSM games and contains quite a few implied metaphors, almost one in every line:\n\n- Exquisite is the torment of my soul.\n Torture of a body is real, torture of a soul is metaphor\n\n- Always she brings me to the brink of insanity\n To the brink of a cliff is real\n\n- Yet at the last moment, she pulls me back.\n She pulls \n\n- My darkest fantasies fulfilled through her.\n Darkest fantasies\n\n- The searing pain cauterized by her dark passion.\n Searing pain cauterized\n Dark passion\n\n- Chains and whips her means to my end\n Means to my end\n \n- For like a succubus she is insatiable,\n Metaphor, but not implied\n\n- My bondage is her release.\n Release\n\n- My pain, her pleasure.\n Nothing here\n\n- We are the outlet for each others pain\n Outlet for pain\n\n- Two lost souls intertwining and screaming out in a unified voice\n  Lost souls, souls screaming\n\n- In each other’s darkness, we find peace.\n  Darkness\n\nWho is the author?