The Unique Language Used in Poems - Essay Example

Sylvia Plath In Sylvia Plath’s poem “Tulips”, which first appeared in Ariel, the describes her metaphysical journey experienced during a stay at a hospital. Written in 1961 when Plath was admitted to the hospital for an appendectomy, the speaker of the poem is the hospital patient as she undergoes the surgical process. She is speaking more to herself than anyone, describing her experience as she first accepts the descent into oblivion and then awakens again to life. Consisting of nine stanzas, each with seven lines, this poem represents a unique structure in that the first half is an acceptance of nothingness, the central stanza balances on the edge and the second half returns to awareness. The language used moves in a melodious iambic meter, both lulling us to drift with the speaker and awakening us to the paces of life. The first stanza uses repetition and alliteration to help soothe us into the quiet world of the hospital ward even as the tulips are seen to be a rude interruption into this world. Repeated whispers keep the tone quiet: “how white … how quiet, how snowed-in” (2) and the soothing sound of the ‘th’ letter combination continue in “this bed, these hands” (4). The speaker is “learning” and “lying” (3), the “light lies” on “white walls” (Dickie, 1979), giving us a pattern of movement that is rocking on rhythm. As she wakes up, though, focus on the bright red of the tulips forces a quickening pace that is also reflected in the language. Things are “coming and going” (51), “the air snags and eddies” (54) and the tulips “concentrate my attention” (55). The tulips are filling the air “like a loud noise” (52). It is mostly due to this quickening pace toward life leading into the end of the poem that we are led to believe the poem is an affirmation of life, even though the tone remains as emotionless and detached as it first began. Elizabeth Bishop In “The Fish,” Elizabeth Bishop describes the perfect catch of a venerable old fish as she observes him hanging from her line. The fish hasn’t fought at all to prevent being reeled in and his skin hangs in strips “like ancient wallpaper” (11), the pattern reminding her of “full-blown roses / stained and lost through age” (14-15). These images conjure up thoughts of the family home, old and empty now that the children are grown and gone, maintenance no longer a priority in this advanced age. The fish is coated with barnacles, lime and sea-lice, with strings of seaweed attached to his underside. Through this imagery, Bishop is not only telling us about the ancient nature of the fish she caught, but also about the nature of the outer life, in which an individual can sit around gathering all this coating about them, yet still remain nothing more than a fish. In describing the various parts of the fish, Bishop indicates just how average he is, containing “coarse white flesh” (27), “big bones and the little bones” (29), “shiny entrails” (31) and a “pink swim-bladder” (32). This fish is not an individual, he is a sum of his parts and nothing more. However, this fish has a surprise for her in the five strands of fishing line seen dangling from its jaw. The five hooks embedded in his jaw immediately transforms the fish from just a regular fish to a symbol of pain and suffering. She must confront not only the fact that this fish has undergone a great deal of pain in his life, but also that she, as a fisherman, may have been responsible for some of it. At the same time, though, the speaker, as an artist, is able to see past the pain to the beauty it represents. The hooks become a “five-haired beard of wisdom” as well as inspiration for the imagination. Robert Hayden Robert Hayden captures the sense of care and sacrifice provided by a loving parent regardless of the level of appreciation or recognition provided by the children in his poem “Those Winter Sundays.” The idea of the father’s long, hard days is expressed throughout the poem in explicit imagery that also evokes a sense of loneliness and protectiveness. This same imagery also serves to illustrate the carelessness of the children who benefit from this care. Hayden starts the poem with the words “Sundays too my father got up early” (1), in which it is suggested that this was his one and only day to sleep in extra hours. He gets up on Sundays too, the other nights of the week he is busy getting up early as well. He gets up in the “blueblack cold” (2), highlighting the early hour as well as the depth of the cold experienced in the morning hours. This depth of cold is also emphasized by the “cracked hands that ached from labor in the weekday weather” (3-4). This cold was so bitter that the child speaker remembers the cold “splintering, breaking” just before rising as the house began to warm to the fire the father had made. By contrast, the children are seen to be oblivious to the father’s cares. The child speaker wakes to hear the cold already breaking, but never thinks to thank the father. The child remains in bed until the father calls, thinking only of the “chronic angers of that house, Speaking indifferently to him, who had driven out the cold and polished my good shoes as well” (9-12). Within the text of the poem, the father is seen as operating in an isolated and ostracized environment, feared and unappreciated yet continuing to do what was necessary to care for the children of the home the best he could. Dylan Thomas Dylan Thomas is another poet who uses imagery well to develop his ideas. In his poem “In My Craft or Sullen Art”, he writes about the reasons he continues to write poetry. With ideas developed in “the still night when only the moon rages and the lover lie abed” (2-4), Thomas indicates that his work is developed when the rest of the world is asleep and there are no distractions or inspirations. Yet, he works by “singing light”, indicating that he continues to hear a voice or be inspired by some muse that insists he continues to write. Because of this, he indicates that there must be some reason for him to continue working night after night to develop his poems and undertakes, in the rest of the poem, to discover what his purpose might be. As he considers this driving force, this “singing light”, he lists several possibilities that might drive a person to write, but rejects all of them. He writes, “not for ambition or bread or the strut and trade of charms on the ivory stages” (7-9). In these few lines, Thomas manages to convey a sense of disgust for the base idea of writing only for money and fame with the use of hard consonants in words such as ‘ambition’ and ‘bread’ while he also conveys a sense of conceited charlatanism by employing words like ‘strut’ and the phrase ‘trade of charms on the ivory stages.’ By ivory stages, of course, he intends the paper upon which he is working. Thus, the ‘trade of charms’ can be nothing but the poetry he writes, a phrase that immediately reduces it to mere wordplay and trickery for profit rather than for the deeper sentiments and altruistic meanings intended. In the end, he determines that his writing is intended not for the ‘proud man’ or the ‘towering dead’, but instead is meant for the lovers, as the only people who might understand these deeper meanings, but “who pay no praise or wages nor heed my craft or art” (19-20). This, then, explains the meaning behind the title. Either he is reduced to writing for the pompous man, to writing for basic support needs or he writes to the lovers, who do not read or understand what has been written and thus pay nothing for the effort. As a result, his craft and art must remain ‘sullen.’ Gwendolyn Brooks Writing during a time of tremendous social upheaval, during her time Brooks witnessed the rise of the black man from the highly oppressed state of post-Civil War class distinctions through the dawn of the Civil Rights Movement and the rise of black culture into the present age. At the time she wrote her poem “We Real Cool”, jazz was in full swing in the urban north and black people were finding their own voices in an increasingly receptive modern public. The brevity of language associated with the modern literary movement as well as the jazzy rhythms of the Chicago city scene can be found within her lines. In this poem, Brooks is talking about the teenagers that she saw running wild through the mid-1900s Chicago streets. They would get together in gangs and do nothing with their lives but hang out on street corners causing trouble and getting involved in crime. The way in which Brooks separates the stanzas allows for a progression of thought through the very simple statements presented. “We real cool. We left school” (1-2) talks about the way in which the boys would leave the time-wasting efforts of school in the city in order to hang out and display their ‘cool’ on the streets corners. This, of course, leads to them participating in small crimes, beginning with lurking late and then learning to ‘strike straight.’ This same three word sentence structure continues through the remaining two stanzas of the poem to indicate how the boys then begin to associate sin with their inner selves, drinking and partying until they die an early death as a result of their actions. Brooks employs a poetic tool known as enjambment in order to incorporate the rhythms of the street into her poem. Each line with the sole exception of the final line ends with the first word of the next sentence – always the word ‘we.’ This serves to keep the energy pulling from one line to the next, leaving a pause in the center of each line in imitation of the syncopated rhythms of jazz. At the same time, there continues to be an emphasis on the single word ‘we’, indicating that there are multiples of people involved in this activity, which is compounded by the greater ‘we’ of the public reading the poem who condones this type of behavior either through neglect, intention or ignorance. Howard Nemerov Howard Nemerov is introduced as a poet who was always laughing at himself. According to the editors, Nemerov “was committed to wit – to seeing relationships among disparate phenomena and creating metaphor (Ramazani et al, 2003: 179). His approach to poetry was to discover the connections between elements of the world, to find the inner relationships that existed between them and the importance of them. One example of this tendency of his can be found in his short yet sweet poem “Snowflakes.” This poem consists of no more than four lines total, but manages to convey a much greater depth of meaning than a mere four lines might be thought capable of holding. The first line relates the snowflake to an artistic form through analogy. “Not slowly wrought, nor treasured for their form” (1), forces the reader to consider what else might be slowly wrought or appreciated for its form. The most immediate solution to this question is the creation of a sculpture, particularly one made of marble thanks to the shared qualities of being white and reflecting light. This association is made even more manifest as the image of a snowman springs to mind and the careful smoothing and shaping that takes place in conscientious young people striving for the perfect form. However, enjambment forces the reader to continue to the second line, which indicates that the snowflake is not treasured for its form in heaven. This qualification leads one to consider where the snowflake might be treasured, realizing that it isn’t treasured on earth either, as it either melts or becomes part of a much larger snowfall and indistinguishable from the rest. Nemerov provides the solution as being “the blind self of the storm” appreciating the beauty of each single snowflake in its creation. His final two lines, referring to “each driven individual Perfected in the moment of his fall” (3-4), thanks to its reference to ‘driven’ and ‘perfected’, tends to force images of the Creator and the human being, leaving the reader with the suggestion that the beauty of life is in the simple experiencing of it rather than in some final, shaped form. Amy Clampitt Amy Clampitt also makes a bid for metaphysical associations in her poem “Beach Glass.” On the surface, it tells a simple story of a woman walking along the beach with a friend or a lover, picking up fragments of glass she finds there while the friend considers much weightier issues. This is suggested in her first few lines, “While you walk the water’s edge, turning over concepts I can’t envision” (1-3). The beach glass she collects is a combination of broken beer and wine bottles as well as more exotic glass that can’t be so easily identified. All of it, though, has been tempered by the waves and sand into something less harmful than the sharpened edges commonly associated with broken bottles. The combination of the various types of glass found on the beach as well as the state in which it is found leads the speaker of the poem into the same kinds of thoughts she suggests the ‘you’ character is having, brilliantly illustrated through her actions. Throughout the first and second stanzas, Clampitt discusses the various ways in which the natural world around her continues to remind her that everything might change in a moment, but nothing is so unimportant as to mean nothing. “It [the ocean] behaves toward the permutations of novelty … with random impartiality, playing catch or tag or touch-last like a terrier, turning the same thing over and over … For the ocean, nothing is beneath consideration” (14-15, 18-23). Having thus established the significance of the glass, Clampitt then moves on to discuss the types of glass she finds, removing the sharp edges by speaking of the “amber of Budweiser, chrysoprase of Almaden and Gallo, lapis by way of … Phillips’ Milk of Magnesia” (29-33). These brown, apple-green and blue shards of glass are no longer shards per se, instead they are blends of color that are joined with others – a “translucent turquoise or blurred amethyst” (34) that cannot be identified. In observing the similar states of these pieces of glass, and the possible origins of the more exotic colors, Clampitt comes to the conclusion that regardless of their origins or use, they all end up the same kind of gravelly, blunted substance from which they came. A. R. Ammons Like Nemerov, Ammons chooses to express himself with the same kind of brevity, allowing the reader to make the necessary connections between the words contained in his poetry and the greater ramifications of its message in the outer world. In poems such as “Small Song,” he presents four lines, separated by a space between the second and third, that points to the interconnectedness of the universe by using little more than the relationship between two elements. These are the physical presence of a bunch of reeds and the natural element of the wind. The poem reads, “The reeds give way to the wind and give the wind away” (1-4). The repeat of the word ‘wind’ forces the reader to look at the poem more than once to be sure they have understood the basic meaning of the poem. In blowing, the wind forces the reeds to move; however, in moving, the reeds create more wind and allow it to pass. This simple interaction demonstrates how the universe is a constant action and reaction, always moving and always with each element dependent on the other. Ammons helps aid understanding of his poem, though, by inserting the space between the second and third lines. This space comes just before the first ‘wind’ is introduced, thus forcing a pause in the reading. For the space of a fraction of a second, the reader is faced with the possibility of filling in the blank of what the reeds are going to give way to. This pause is filled with the empty sound of the reader’s breath, invoking the presence of the wind even in the telling of the poem. Because of the natural reaction of a reader to take a breath at this pause, by the time they are reading the words “give the wind away,” they are exhaling again, again reinforcing the concept contained within the poem itself. Anne Sexton Anne Sexton’s poem “The Starry Night” is as much a description of the painting by Vincent van Gogh as it is an exploration of what it might have felt like to the painter, contemplating his own possible end. The excerpt from a letter written in 1888 quoted at the beginning of the poem indicates the importance of the stars to the painter who must have been considering his own mortality, having already encountered his insanity and still struggling to survive. He would only have two more years to live before he put a bullet in his own stomach, dying a slow and painful death. It is perhaps in response to this knowledge that Sexton takes her inspiration. The first stanza of the poem describes the scene depicted in the painting, a sky absent of human presence with the sole exception of a black tree, dark in the nighttime, reaching out “like a drowned woman into the hot sky” (3). The town itself is seen as so still and silent as to not exist in the presence of the eleven stars she can find in the painting, yet, even here, they are described in terms of action rather than static placement as the night “boils with eleven stars” (4). Like a boiling pot, the image invoked is one of constant movement, constant bumping against each other and intense pressure. This concept of motion is then carried over into the second stanza, where the stars are seen to move. “They are all alive. Even the moon bulges in its orange irons” (6-7). Within this concept of motion, Sexton introduces the unseen, unpainted element, what she refers to as the “old unseen serpent” (10) who swallows up the night sky and the stars themselves in an unspoken, unknown process. It is this relatively peaceful, unheralded, unknown oblivion that Sexton ultimately desires as death in the third stanza, perhaps what she feels van Gogh himself was thinking when he looked up and began painting the stars. A.K. Ramanujan A.K. Ramanujan is a poet known for his multi-cultural approach to life from his earliest childhood throughout his adult life. Although he wrote primarily in English, it remains a fact that his life was always shaped by a mixture of his South Indian Brahman roots and the reactions to that he found in America. In exploring his unique approach to the world, he was able to fathom how his present was inextricably fused to his past and the pasts of his forebears. This is evident in poems such as “Self-Portrait.” In this poem, Ramanujan uses the simple imagery of a reflection to explore his own inner self as it exists in relation to how he envisions his self to be. The first line seems to connect him to the rest of the world, “I resemble everyone.” Enjambment forces the break so that this statement must be dealt with on its own, but also encourages the reader to quickly continue on to the next line, which emphatically emphasizes that while he resembles everyone, he does not resemble his own conception of who he is. This is illustrated through the reflection he “sometimes” sees in the store windows. The image reflected to him is not the image he has of himself but is instead “the portrait of a stranger, date unknown, often signed in a corner, by my father” (6-9). In this image, he has changed the simple reflection into a more static painting, depicting the image someone else had for him. In the final line of the poem, this someone else is identified not as the nameless, faceless crowd of society one might expect, but is instead his own father. In making this connection, Ramanujan highlights the connection of familial history as being something stronger than the forces of society as well as the individual goals of the person. While we are each ourselves, we are also what our parents have made of us. Works Cited Ammons, A.R. “Small Song.” The Norton Anthology of Contemporary Poetry. 3rd Ed. Jahan Ramazani, Richard Ellmann & Robert O’Clair (eds.). New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2003: 295. Bishop, Elizabeth. “The Fish.” The Norton Anthology of Contemporary Poetry. 3rd Ed. Jahan Ramazani, Richard Ellmann & Robert O’Clair (eds.). New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2003: 21. Brooks, Gwendolyn. “We Real Cool.” The Norton Anthology of Contemporary Poetry. 3rd Ed. Jahan Ramazani, Richard Ellmann & Robert O’Clair (eds.). New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2003: 145. Clampitt, Amy. “Beach Glass.” The Norton Anthology of Contemporary Poetry. 3rd Ed. Jahan Ramazani, Richard Ellmann & Robert O’Clair (eds.). New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2003: 184. Hayden, Robert. “Those Winter Sundays.” The Norton Anthology of Contemporary Poetry. 3rd Ed. Jahan Ramazani, Richard Ellmann & Robert O’Clair (eds.). New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2003: 62. Nemerov, Howard. “Snowflakes.” The Norton Anthology of Contemporary Poetry. 3rd Ed. Jahan Ramazani, Richard Ellmann & Robert O’Clair (eds.). New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2003: 180. Plath, Sylvia. “Tulips.” The Norton Anthology of Contemporary Poetry. 3rd Ed. Jahan Ramazani, Richard Ellmann & Robert O’Clair (eds.). New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2003: 600. Ramanujan, A.K. “Self-Portrait.” The Norton Anthology of Contemporary Poetry. 3rd Ed. Jahan Ramazani, Richard Ellmann & Robert O’Clair (eds.). New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2003: 439. Sexton, Anne. “The Starry Night.” The Norton Anthology of Contemporary Poetry. 3rd Ed. Jahan Ramazani, Richard Ellmann & Robert O’Clair (eds.). New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2003: 435. Thomas, Dylan. “In My Craft or Sullen Art.” The Norton Anthology of Contemporary Poetry. 3rd Ed. Jahan Ramazani, Richard Ellmann & Robert O’Clair (eds.). New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2003: 110. Read More