List of Poems (For Reference)
Metaphor
Not Palaces, An Era’s Crown, Stephen Spender
“Eye, gazelle, delicate wanderer,
Drinker of horizon’s fluid line;”
The Seven Ages of Man ,William Shakespeare
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,
His acts being seven ages.
At first the infant, Mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms;
And then the whining schoolboy, with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school.
Fire and Ice ,Robert Frost
Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.
Personification
Mirror, 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.
Paradise Lost (IX. 1002–3),John Milton
Sky lowered, and muttering thunder, some sad drops
Wept at completing of the mortal sin.
Elegiac Stanzas Suggested by a Picture of Peele Castle, in a Storm, Painted by Sir
George Beaumont, William Wordsworth
And this huge Castle, standing here sublime,
I love to see the look with which it braves,
Cased in the unfeeling armor of old time,
The lightning, the fierce wind, and trampling wave.
Aurora Leigh (I. 251–52) ,Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Then, land!—then, England! oh, the frosty cliffs
Looked cold upon me.
Symbol
My Mother at Sixty-six , Kamala Das
Driving from my parent’s home to Cochin last Friday morning,
I saw my mother, beside me,
doze, open mouthed, her face ashen like that
of a corpse and realised with pain
that she was as old as she looked but soon
put that thought away, and looked out at Young Trees sprinting, the merry children spilling
out of their homes
A Light Exists in Spring by Emily Dickinson
A light exists in spring
Not present on the year
At any other period.
When March is scarcely here
To the Moon by Percy Bysshe Shelley
"Art thou pale for weariness
Of climbing heaven and gazing on the earth,
Wandering companionless
Among the stars that have a different birth, —
And ever changing, like a joyless eye
That finds no object worth its constancy?
Allegory
John Bunyan’s Pilgrim Progress
-character of Christian
-meets Mr Worldly Wiseman
-goes to Vanity Fair, slough of despond
Faerie Queen, Edmund Spenser,
- 7 knights stand for 7 different virtues
- Redcross Knight - Holiness
- Sir Artegall - Justice
- Sir Caledor -Courtesy
- Gloriana - “glory”- Queen Elizabeth
T.S.Eliot, “The Wasteland”
Story of the Fisher King
I sat upon the shore
Fishing, with the arid plain behind me
Shall I at least set my lands in order?
Assonance
John Agard, 'Hopaloo Kangaroo'
If you can boogaloo
boogaloo
I can do
the boogaloo too
for I’m the boogiest
hopaloo kangaroo
Edgar Allan Poe, “Annabel Lee”
And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side
Of my darling—my darling—my life and my bride,
Consonance
Emily Dickinson’s poem #214
I taste a liquor never brewed —
From Tankards scooped in Pearl —
Not all the Vats upon the Rhine
Yield such an Alcohol!
Wilfred Owen’s “Arms and the Boy” (1920)
Let the boy try along this bayonet-blade
How cold steel is, and keen with hunger of blood;
Blue with all malice, like a madman’s flash;
And thinly drawn with famishing for flesh.
Euphony
The Raven, Edgar Allan Poe
And the silken, sad, uncertain rustling of each purple curtain
The Eve of St. Agnes, John Keats
And lucent syrops, tinct with cinnamon;
Manna and dates, in argosy transferr'd
From Fez; and spiced dainties, every one,
From silken Samarcand to cedar'd Lebanon.
Cacophony
The Raven, Edgar Allan Poe
Suddenly, a grating sound of Iron hinges grinding
Robert Browning’s “Pied Piper” (1842)
Rats!
They fought the dogs and killed the cats …
Split open the kegs of salted sprats,
Made nests inside men’s Sunday hats[;]
Thomas Hardy’s “In Tenebris I,”
I shall not lose old strength
In the lone frost’s black length.
Strength long since fled!
Imagery
The wind whispered secrets through the rustling leaves
Caressing my face with a gentle touch
And carried the scent of nostalgia in its embrace
The moon, a silvery orb, hung low in the velvety sky,
Casting its ethereal glow upon the midnight sea
In Memoriam, Alfred Lord Tennyson
Unloved, that beech will gather brown,…
And many a rose-carnation feed
With summer spice the humming air….
Fish, D.H.Lawrence
Unhooked his gorping, water-horny mouth,
And seen his horror-tilted eye,
His red-gold, water-precious, mirror-flat bright eye;
And felt him beat in my hand, with his mucous, leaping
life-throb.
Conceit
My Galley Chargèd with Forgetfulness , Sir Thomas Wyatt
Thorough sharp seas in winter nights doth pass
'Tween rock and rock; and eke mine en'my, alas,
That is my lord, steereth with cruelness;
The Flea, John Donne
Mark but this flea, and mark in this,
How little that which thou deniest me is;
It sucked me first, and now sucks thee,
And in this flea our two bloods mingled be;
A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning, John Donne
If they be two, they are two so
As stiff twin compasses are two;
Thy soul, the fixed foot, makes no show
To move, but doth, if the other do.
Hyperbole
I’m Nobody! Who are you?, Emily Dickinson
How public – like a Frog –
To tell one’s name – the livelong June –
To an admiring Bog!
The Charge of the Light Brigade, Alfred Lord Tennyson
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do and die.
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.
Litotes
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, T.S.Eliot
I am no prophet — and here’s no great matter;
Beowulf
“The sword wasn’t useless to the warrior”,
