Poems

IF I SHOULD DIE by Emily Dickinson

IF I should die,

And you should live,

And time should gurgle on,

And morn should beam,

And noon should burn,

As it has usual done;

If birds should build as early,

And bees as bustling go,--

One might depart at option

From enterprise below!

'Tis sweet to know that stocks will stand

When we with daisies lie,

That commerce will continue,

And trades as briskly fly.

It make the parting tranquil

And keeps the soul serene,

That gentlemen so sprightly

Conduct the pleasing scene!

Broken Love by William Blake.

MY Spectre around me night and day 

Like a wild beast guards my way; 

My Emanation far within 

Weeps incessantly for my sin.

‘A fathomless and boundless deep, 

There we wander, there we weep; 

On the hungry craving wind 

My Spectre follows thee behind.

‘He scents thy footsteps in the snow 

Wheresoever thou dost go, 

Thro’ the wintry hail and rain. 

When wilt thou return again?

’Dost thou not in pride and scorn 

Fill with tempests all my morn, 

And with jealousies and fears 

Fill my pleasant nights with tears?

‘Seven of my sweet loves thy 

knife Has bereavèd of their life. 

Their marble tombs I built with tears, 

And with cold and shuddering fears.

‘Seven more loves weep night and day 

Round the tombs where my loves lay, 

And seven more loves attend each night 

Around my couch with torches bright.

‘And seven more loves in my bed 

Crown with wine my mournful head, 

Pitying and forgiving all 

Thy transgressions great and small.

‘When wilt thou return and view 

My loves, and them to life renew? 

When wilt thou return and live? 

When wilt thou pity as I forgive?’

‘O’er my sins thou sit and moan: 

Hast thou no sins of thy own? 

O’er my sins thou sit and weep, 

And lull thy own sins fast asleep.

‘What transgressions I commit 

Are for thy transgressions fit. 

They thy harlots, thou their slave; 

And my bed becomes their grave.

‘Never, never, I return: 

Still for victory I burn. 

Living, thee alone I’ll have; 

And when dead I’ll be thy grave.

‘Thro’ the Heaven and Earth and Hell 

Thou shalt never, quell: 

I will fly and thou pursue: 

Night and morn the flight renew.’

‘Poor, pale, pitiable form 

That I follow in a storm; 

Iron tears and groans of lead 

Bind around my aching head.

‘Till I turn from Female love

And root up the Infernal Grove,

I shall never worthy be

To step into Eternity.

‘And, to end thy cruel mocks, 

Annihilate thee on the rocks, 

And another form create 

To be subservient to my fate.

‘Let us agree to give up love, 

And root up the Infernal Grove; 

Then shall we return and see 

The worlds of happy Eternity.

‘And throughout all

Eternity I forgive you, you forgive me. 

As our dear Redeemer said:

“This the Wine, and this the Bread.”

Remember by Christina Rossetti

Remember me when I am gone away,

Gone far away into the silent land;

When you can no more hold me by the hand,

Nor I half turn to go, yet turning stay.

Remember me when no more day by day

You tell me of our future that you plann’d:

Only remember me; you understand

It will be late to counsel then or pray.

Yet if you should forget me for a while

And afterwards remember, do not grieve:

For if the darkness and corruption leave

A vestige of the thoughts that once I had,

Better by far you should forget and smile

Than that you should remember and be sad.

Mirror By Sylvia Plath

I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.

Whatever I see I swallow immediately

Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike.

I am not cruel, only truthful ‚

The eye of a little god, four-cornered.

Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall.

It is pink, with speckles. I have looked at it so long

I think it is part of my heart. But it flickers.

Faces and darkness separate us over and over.

Now I am a lake. A woman bends over me,

Searching my reaches for what she really is.

Then she turns to those liars, the candles or the moon.

I see her back, and reflect it faithfully.

She rewards me with tears and an agitation of hands.

I am important to her. She comes and goes.

Each morning it is her face that replaces the darkness.

In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman

Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.

How Do I Love Thee? by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways. 

I love thee to the depth and breadth and height 

My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight 

For the ends of Being and ideal Grace. 

I love thee to the level of every day's 

Most quiet need, by sun and candlelight. 

I love thee freely, as men strive for Right; 

I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise. 

I love with a passion put to use 

In my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith. 

I love thee with a love I seemed to lose 

With my lost saints, -- I love thee with the breath, 

Smiles, tears, of all my life! -- and, if God choose, 

I shall but love thee better after death.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806–1861) biography :

Born in 1806 at Coxhoe Hall, Durham, England, Elizabeth Barrett Browning was an English poet of the Romantic Movement. The oldest of twelve children, Elizabeth was the first in her family born in England in over two hundred years. For centuries, the Barrett family, who were part Creole, had lived in Jamaica, where they owned sugar plantations and relied on slave labor. Elizabeth's father, Edward Barrett Moulton Barrett, chose to raise his family in England, while his fortune grew in Jamaica. Educated at home, Elizabeth apparently had read passages from Paradise Lost and a number of Shakespearean plays, among other great works, before the age of ten. By her twelfth year, she had written her first "epic" poem, which consisted of four books of rhyming couplets. Two years later, Elizabeth developed a lung ailment that plagued her for the rest of her life. Doctors began treating her with morphine, which she would take until her death. While saddling a pony when she was fifteen, Elizabeth also suffered a spinal injury. Despite her ailments, her education continued to flourish. Throughout her teenage years, Elizabeth taught herself Hebrew so that she could read the Old Testament; her interests later turned to Greek studies. Accompanying her appetite for the classics was a passionate enthusiasm for her Christian faith. She became active in the Bible and Missionary Societies of her church.

In 1826, Elizabeth anonymously published her collection An Essay on Mind and Other Poems. Two years later, her mother passed away. The slow abolition of slavery in England and mismanagement of the plantations depleted the Barretts's income, and in 1832, Elizabeth's father sold his rural estate at a public auction. He moved his family to a coastal town and rented cottages for the next three years, before settling permanently in London. While living on the sea coast, Elizabeth published her translation of Prometheus Bound (1833), by the Greek dramatist Aeschylus.

Gaining attention for her work in the 1830s, Elizabeth continued to live in her father's London house under his tyrannical rule. He began sending Elizabeth's younger siblings to Jamaica to help with the family's estates. Elizabeth bitterly opposed slavery and did not want her siblings sent away. During this time, she wrote The Seraphim and Other Poems (1838), expressing Christian sentiments in the form of classical Greek tragedy. Due to her weakening disposition, she was forced to spend a year at the sea of Torquay accompanied by her brother Edward, whom she referred to as "Bro." He drowned later that year while sailing at Torquay, and Browning returned home emotionally broken, becoming an invalid and a recluse. She spent the next five years in her bedroom at her father's home. She continued writing, however, and in 1844 produced a collection entitled simply Poems. This volume gained the attention of poet Robert Browning, whose work Elizabeth had praised in one of her poems, and he wrote her a letter.

Elizabeth and Robert, who was six years her junior, exchanged 574 letters over the next twenty months. Immortalized in 1930 in the play The Barretts of Wimpole Street, by Rudolf Besier (1878-1942), their romance was bitterly opposed by her father, who did not want any of his children to marry. In 1846, the couple eloped and settled in Florence, Italy, where Elizabeth's health improved and she bore a son, Robert Wideman Browning. Her father never spoke to her again. Elizabeth's Sonnets from the Portuguese, dedicated to her husband and written in secret before her marriage, was published in 1850. Critics generally consider the Sonnets—one of the most widely known collections of love lyrics in English—to be her best work. Admirers have compared her imagery to Shakespeare and her use of the Italian form to Petrarch.

Political and social themes embody Elizabeth's later work. She expressed her intense sympathy for the struggle for the unification of Italy in Casa Guidi Windows (1848-1851) and Poems Before Congress (1860). In 1857 Browning published her verse novel Aurora Leigh, which portrays male domination of a woman. In her poetry she also addressed the oppression of the Italians by the Austrians, the child labor mines and mills of England, and slavery, among other social injustices. Although this decreased her popularity, Elizabeth was heard and recognized around Europe.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning died in Florence on June 29, 1861.

Death, be not proud By John Donne

Death, be not proud, though some have called thee 

Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so; 

For those whom thou think'st thou dost overthrow 

Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me. 

From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be, 

Much pleasure; then from thee much more must flow, 

And soonest our best men with thee do go, 

Rest of their bones, and soul's delivery. 

Thou art slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men, 

And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell, 

And poppy or charms can make us sleep as well 

And better than thy stroke; why swell'st thou then? 

One short sleep past, we wake eternally 

And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.

The River-Merchant's Wife: A Letter by Ezra Pound

After Li Po

While my hair was still cut straight

across my forehead

I played at the front gate, pulling

flowers.

You came by on bamboo stilts, playing

horse,

You walked about my seat, playing with

blue plums.

And we went on living in the village of

Chokan:

Two small people, without dislike or

suspicion.

At fourteen I married My Lord you.

I never laughed, being bashful.

Lowering my head, I looked at the wall.

Called to, a thousand times, I never

looked back.

At fifteen I stopped scowling,

I desired my dust to be mingled with

yours

Forever and forever and forever.

Why should I climb the lookout?

At sixteen you departed,

You went into far Ku-to-en, by the river

of swirling eddies,

And you have been gone five months.

The monkeys make sorrowful noise

overhead.

You dragged your feet when you went

out,

By the gate now, the moss is grown,

the different mosses,

Too deep to clear them away!

The leaves fall early this autumn, in

wind.

The paired butterflies are already

yellow with August

Over the grass in the West garden;

They hurt me. I grow older.

If you are coming down through the

narrows of the river Kiang,

Please let me know beforehand,

And I will come out to meet you

As far as Cho-fu-sa.

She is Far from the Land by Thomas Moore

She is far from the land, where her young hero sleeps, 

And lovers are round her, sighing; 

But coldly she turns from their gaze, and weeps, 

For her heart in his grave is lying!

She sings the wild song of her dear native plains, 

Every note which he lov'd awaking

Ah! little they think, who delight in her strains, 

How the heart of the Minstrel is breaking! 

He had lov'd for his love, for his country he died, 

They were all that to life had entwin'd him,

Nor soon shall the tears of his country be dried, 

Nor long will his love stay behind him.

Oh! make her a grave, where the sun-beams rest, 

When they promise a glorious morrow; 

They'll shine o'er her sleep, like a smile from the West, 

From her own lov'd Island of sorrow!

Top of Form

Remember by Christina Rossetti(1830 - 1894)

Remember me when I am gone away,

Gone far away into the silent land;

When you can no more hold me by the hand,

Nor I half turn to go yet turning stay.

Remember me when no more day by day

You tell me of our future that you planned:

Only remember me; you understand

It will be late to counsel then or pray.

Yet if you should forget me for a while

And afterwards remember, do not grieve:

For if the darkness and corruption leave

A vestige of the thoughts that once I had,

Better by far you should forget and smile

Than that you should remember and be sad.

Figures of Speech

Figures of Speech (Stylistic Devices)

In literature and writing, a figure of speech (also called stylistic device or rhetorical device) is the use of any of a variety of techniques to give an auxiliary meaning, idea, or feeling.Sometimes a word diverges from its normal meaning, or a phrase has a specialized meaning not based on the literal meaning of the words in it. Examples are metaphor, simile, or personification.
Stylistic devices often provide emphasis, freshness of expression, or clarity.

Here is a list of some of the most important figures of speech:

Adjunction:
Is a figure of speech in which a word, phrase or clause is placed at the beginning or the end of a sentence.

Examples:

Fades physical beauty with disease or age.

Either with disease or age.

Alliteration:
Is the repetition of initial sounds in neighboring words.Alliteration draws attention to the phrase and is often used for emphasis.The initial consonant sound is usually repeated in two neighboring words although sometimes the repetition occurs also in words that are not neighbors.

Examples:

sweet smell of success,a dime a dozen.

Allusion

The act of alluding is to make indirect reference. It is a literary device, a figure of speech that quickly stimulates different ideas and associations using only a couple of words.

Allusion relies on the reader being able to understand the allusion and being familiar with the meaning hidden behind the words.

Example:

Describing someone as a "Romeo" makes an allusion to the famous young lover in Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare.
In an allusion the reference may be to a place, event, literary work, myth, or work of art, either directly or by implication.

Examples of allusion:

David was being such a scrooge!. (Scrooge" is the allusion, and it refers to Charles Dicken's novel, A Christmas Carol. Scrooge was very greedy and unkind, which David was being compared to.)
The software included a Trojan Horse. (allusion on the Trojan horse from Greek mythology) to wash one’s hands of it. (allusion on Pontius Pilatus, who sentenced Jesus to death, but washed his hands afterwards to demonstrate that he was not to blame for it.)

There are many advantages when you use an allusion:

You don't need to explain or clarify a problem in a lengthy way.
You make the reader become active by reflecting on the analogy.
You make your message memorable.

Examples of Symbolism in Literature

Symbolism is a technique used in literature when some things are not to be taken literally. The symbolism can be an object, person, situation, events or actions that have a deeper meaning in context.
This technique can enhance writing and give insight to the reader.

Symbolism in Poems

In Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven”, the black bird stands for death and loss.

In William Blake’s “Ah Sunflower”, the sunflower represents people and the sun represents life:

Ah Sunflower, weary of time,
Who countest the steps of the sun;
Seeking after that sweet golden clime
Where the traveler’s journey is done;

In William Wordsworth’s “She Dwelt Amoung Untrodden Ways” innocence and beauty are shown with these phrases:

"A violet by a mossy stone" and "Fair as a star, when only one is shining in the sky."

In Sara Teasdale’s “Wild Asters”, ‘spring’ and ‘daisies’ are symbols of youth and ‘bitter autumn’ is a symbol of death:

In the spring, I asked the daisies
If his words were true,
And the clever, clear-eyed daisies
Always knew.
Now the fields are brown and barren,
Bitter autumn blows,
And of all the stupid asters
Not one knows.

In Samuel Taylor Coleridge's
“The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”, the albatross can be seen as standing for a burden you must bear:

Ah ! well a-day ! what evil looks
Had I from old and young !
Instead of the cross, the Albatross
About my neck was hung.

Symbolism in Books, Plays & Screenplays

In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, the letter 'A' symbolized adultery.

In Shakespeare’s As you Like It, ‘stage’ symbolizes the world and ‘players’ symbolize men and women:

All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
they have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,

In Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, ‘Wuthering’ represents the wild nature of the inhabitants:

My love for Linton is like the foliage in the woods.
Time will change it; I’m well aware, as winter changes the trees.
My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath a source of little visible delight, but necessary.

In Elie Wiesel’s novel Night, night is used throughout the book to represent death, darkness, and loss of faith.

In the movie The Wizard of Oz, the storm symbolizes high emotions and occurred when those emotions were present.

In the movie trilogy Star Wars, Luke was dressed in light colors and Darth Vader was dressed in black, showing good vs evilIn Lorraine Hansberry’s play
A Raisin in the Sun, a plant on the windowsill symbolizes needs and hope, like a plant needs the sun to grow, we have needs.

In Dr. Seuss’s How the Grinch Stole Christmas!, the Grinch steals the symbols of Christmas, like trees, presents and food, to find out in the end Christmas was more than those things.

In Hansel and Gretel, bread symbolizes comfort and bread crumbs symbolize the way home.

In Elizabeth Barret Browning’s Aurora Leigh, women’s work is symbolized as being undervalued:
The works of women are symbolical.

We sew, sew, prick our fingers, dull our sight,Producing what?
A pair of slippers, sir,
To put on when you're weary.

In the Lone Ranger, silver bullets represent justice by law:
A symbol which means justice by law.
I want to become known to all who see the silver bullets that I live and fight to see the eventual defeat and proper punishment by law of every criminal in the West.

Anaphora:

Anaphora is a literary and rhetorical device in which a word or group of words is repeated at the beginning of two or more successive clauses or sentences. This technique adds emphasis and unity to the clauses.
Anaphora, possibly the oldest literary device, has its roots in Biblical Psalms used to emphasize certain words or phrases. Gradually, Elizabethan and Romantic writers brought this device into practice.

example:

“Every day, every night, in every way, I am getting better and better”.

Postmodern/Postmodernity

-Suspicion and rejection of Master Narratives; local narratives, ironic deconstruction of master narratives: counter-myths of origin.

-Rejection of totalizing theories; pursuit of localizing and contingent theories.

-Social and cultural pluralism, disunity, unclear bases for social/national/ethnic unity.

-Skepticism of progress, anti-technology reactions, neo-Luddism; new age religions

-Sense of fragmentation and decentered self;
multiple, conflicting identities

-Alternative family units, alternatives to middle-class marriage model, multiple identities for couplings and childraising.

-Subverted order, loss of centralized control, fragmentation.

-Trust and investment in micropolitics, identity politics, local politics, institutional power struggles.

-Rhizome/surface tropes.
Attention to play of surfaces, images, signifiers without concern for "Depth"

-Hyper-reality, image saturation, simulacra seem more powerful than the "real"; images and texts with no prior "original".
"As seen on TV" and "as seen on MTV" are more powerful than unmediated experience.

-Disruption of the dominance of high culture by popular culture;
mixing of popular and high cultures, new valuation of pop culture, hybrid cultural forms cancel "high"/"low" categories

-Demassified culture; niche products and marketing, smaller group identities

-Art as process, performance, production, intertextuality.
Art as recycling of culture authenticated by audience and validated in subcultures sharing identity with the artist.

-Navigation, information management, just-in-time knowledge.
The Web

-Interactive, client-server, distributed, many-
to-many media (the Net and Web)

-Dispersal, dissemination,
networked, distributed knowledge

-Indeterminancy, contingency

-Play, irony, challenge to official seriousness, subversion of earnestness

-Hybridity, promiscuous genres, recombinant culture, intertextuality, pastiche

-Design and architecture of LA and Las Vegas

-cyborgian mixing of organic and inorganic, human and machine and electronic

-androgyny, queer sexual identities, polymorphous sexuality, mass marketing of pornography

-hypermedia as transcendence of physical limits of print media;
the Web or Net as information system

Modernism/Modernity

-Master Narratives and Metanarratives of history, culture and national identity; myths of cultural and ethnic orgin.

-Faith in "Grand Theory" (totalizing explantions in history, science and culture) to represent all knowledge and explain everything.

-Faith in, and myths of, social and cultural unity, hierarchies of social-class and ethnic/national values, seemingly clear bases for unity.

-Master narrative of progress through science and technology.

-Sense of unified, centered self;
"individualism," unified identity

-Idea of "the family" as central unit of social order: model of the middle-class, nuclear family

-Hierarchy, order, centralized control.

-Faith and personal investment in big politics (Nation-State, party)

-Root/Depth tropes.
Faith in "Depth" (meaning, value, content, the signified) over "Surface" (appearances, the superficial, the signifier)

-Faith in the "real" beyond media and representations; authenticity of "originals"

-Dichotomy of high and low culture (official vs. popular culture);
imposed consensus that high or official culture is normative and authoritative

-Mass culture, mass consumption, mass marketing

-Art as unique object and finished work authenticated by artist and validated by agreed upon standards.

-Knowledge mastery, attempts to embrace a totality.
The encyclopedia

-Broadcast media, centralized one-
to-many communications.

-Centering/centeredness,
centralized knowledge.

-Determinancy

-Seriousness of intention and purpose, middle-class earnestness.

-Sense of clear generic boundaries and wholeness (art, music, and literature)

-Design and architecture of New York and Boston.

-Clear dichotomy between organic and inorganic, human and machine

-Phallic ordering of sexual difference, unified sexualities, exclusion/bracketing of pornography

-the book as sufficient bearer of the word;
the library as system for printed knowledge

Broken Love by William Blake.

Broken Love by William Blake.

MY Spectre around me night and day 

Like a wild beast guards my way; 

My Emanation far within 

Weeps incessantly for my sin.

‘A fathomless and boundless deep, 

There we wander, there we weep; 

On the hungry craving wind 

My Spectre follows thee behind.

‘He scents thy footsteps in the snow 

Wheresoever thou dost go, 

Thro’ the wintry hail and rain. 

When wilt thou return again?

’Dost thou not in pride and scorn 

Fill with tempests all my morn, 

And with jealousies and fears 

Fill my pleasant nights with tears?

‘Seven of my sweet loves thy 

knife Has bereavèd of their life. 

Their marble tombs I built with tears, 

And with cold and shuddering fears.

‘Seven more loves weep night and day 

Round the tombs where my loves lay, 

And seven more loves attend each night 

Around my couch with torches bright.

‘And seven more loves in my bed 

Crown with wine my mournful head, 

Pitying and forgiving all 

Thy transgressions great and small.

‘When wilt thou return and view 

My loves, and them to life renew? 

When wilt thou return and live? 

When wilt thou pity as I forgive?’

‘O’er my sins thou sit and moan: 

Hast thou no sins of thy own? 

O’er my sins thou sit and weep, 

And lull thy own sins fast asleep.

‘What transgressions I commit 

Are for thy transgressions fit. 

They thy harlots, thou their slave; 

And my bed becomes their grave.

‘Never, never, I return: 

Still for victory I burn. 

Living, thee alone I’ll have; 

And when dead I’ll be thy grave.

‘Thro’ the Heaven and Earth and Hell 

Thou shalt never, quell: 

I will fly and thou pursue: 

Night and morn the flight renew.’

‘Poor, pale, pitiable form 

That I follow in a storm; 

Iron tears and groans of lead 

Bind around my aching head.

‘Till I turn from Female love

And root up the Infernal Grove,

I shall never worthy be

To step into Eternity.

‘And, to end thy cruel mocks, 

Annihilate thee on the rocks, 

And another form create 

To be subservient to my fate.

‘Let us agree to give up love, 

And root up the Infernal Grove; 

Then shall we return and see 

The worlds of happy Eternity.

‘And throughout all

Eternity I forgive you, you forgive me. 

As our dear Redeemer said:

“This the Wine, and this the Bread.”