War
This poem features a "rough beast" "with lion body and the head of a man, / A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun" that "Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born."
William Butler Yeats presents the idea that the death of a Greek hero--“A shudder in the loins engenders there / The broken wall, the burning roof and tower / And Agamemnon dead”—is caused by Zeus’s rape of a mortal in this poem.
What is “Leda and the Swan”?
Here, “And I have known the arms already, known them all— /Arms that are braceleted and white and bare / (But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!) / Is it perfume from a dress / That makes me so digress? / Arms that lie along a table, or wrap about a shawl. / And should I then presume? / And how should I begin?” the introverted speaker of this poem imagines potential lovers.
What is “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”?
This poet depicts a man who "was much further out than you thought / And not waving but drowning."
This speaker in Carol Ann Duffy's poem of the same name "breathed / his stench; my bridegroom in his rotting shroud, / moist and dishevelled from the grave's slack chew, / croaking his cuckold name, disinherited, out of his time" when her husband was brought back to life.
This poet imagines a funeral scene in which a young athlete dies and becomes a "Townsman of a stiller town."
Here, “And I have known the arms already, known them all— /Arms that are braceleted and white and bare / (But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!) / Is it perfume from a dress / That makes me so digress? / Arms that lie along a table, or wrap about a shawl. / And should I then presume? / And how should I begin?” the introverted speaker of this poem imagines potential lovers.
What is “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”?
"Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,/ As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.Dim, /through the misty panes and thick green light, /As under a green sea, I saw him drowning." In Owens's poem, the soldier drowns in this, not water.
This poet wrote of trench warfare: "Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots / But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind; / Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots / Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind."
James Joyce wrote this novel from 1918 to 1920, loosely based on the hero of Homer's The Odyssey.
What is Ulysses?
This poet describes the death of a fellow soldier, showing the reader "the blood / Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs, / Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud / Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues."
This poem veers wildly off course: “May she be granted beauty and yet not /Beauty to make a stranger's eye distraught, /Or hers before a looking-glass, for such, /Being made beautiful overmuch, /Consider beauty a sufficient end, /Lose natural kindness and maybe /The heart-revealing intimacy /That chooses right, and never find a friend,” becoming a bitter tirade against an ex-lover.
"I will arise and go now, for always night and day / I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore; / While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey, / I hear it in the deep heart’s core." This poem seeks refuge from the city in an Irish aquatic setting.
Asking, "Are you terrified? / Be terrified. / It’s you I love, / perfect man, Greek God, my own; / but I know you’ll go, betray me, stray / from home. / So better by for me if you were stone," this Gorgon gets her own dramatic monologue in Duffy's poem by the same name.
In an alternate universe in which Shakespeare had a sister, this author images that, "she found herself with child by that gentleman and so—who shall measure the heat and violence of the poet’s heart when caught and tangled in a woman’s body?—killed herself one winter’s night and lies buried at some cross-roads where the omnibuses now stop outside the Elephant and Castle."
This character in Joyce's novel reminisces about an earlier time in which, "I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes."
In writing, "I do not think that they will sing to me. / I have seen them riding seaward on the waves / Combing the white hair of the waves blown back / When the wind blows the water white and black. / We have lingered in the chambers of the sea /By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown / Till human voices wake us, and we drown," this poet imagines the protagonist being rejected by mermaids.
Writing after the end of World War I, this poet foresaw more conflict ahead, noting that, "The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity."
This traditional hero of Greek mythology is greeted, "And here you come / with a shield for a heart / and a sword for a tongue / and your girls, your girls. / Wasn’t I beautiful / Wasn’t I fragrant and young? / Look at me now" by his snake-haired victim in Duffy's poem.
The speaker of this poem corrects those who have deduced that, "It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way" by saying, "Oh, no no no, it was too cold always / (Still the dead one lay moaning) / I was much too far out all my life."
This Shakespearean character is evoked in Eliot’s poem: “No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;/Am an attendant lord, one that will do/To swell a progress, start a scene or two,/Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,/Deferential, glad to be of use,/Politic, cautious, and meticulous;/Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;/At times, indeed, almost ridiculous—/Almost, at times, the Fool.”
Realizing that, "That is no country for old men. The young / In one another's arms, birds in the trees, /—Those dying generations—at their song, /The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas, /Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long/ Whatever is begotten, born, and dies," the speaker of this poem wants to get on a boat.