The Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T.S. Eliot

            In “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”, I feel that T.S. Eliot makes the reader feel distant from the speaker by not stating Prufrock’s first name in the title. By opening the poem up with lines from Dante’s Inferno, the reader gets the sense that this poem is not going to be a “lovey-dovey” poem, but more of a pessimistic attitude for a poem that has the words “Love Song” in the title.

            T.S. Eliot used plenty of personification and similes in this poem.

·      Personification- the attribution of a personal nature or character to inanimate objects or abstract notions, especially as a rhetorical figure.

·      Simile- a figure in speech in which two unlike things are explicitly compared using “like” or “as”.

In the first stanza, T.S. Eliot describes the setting by saying, “When the evening is spread out against the sky / Like a patient etherised upon a table;” (2-3). This is comparing the speaker’s night to a passed out body, which gives the reader the feeling of a very dead night. To show an example of personification, T.S. Eliot says, “The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes, / The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes,” (15-16). This is giving the fog human-like, or rather cat-like, qualities. From lines fifteen through twenty-two, Eliot uses great personification by giving the fog human or cat-like qualities.

Journey of the Magi by T.S. Eliot

            I feel like the speaker in the “Journey of the Magi” is one of the three wise men that travelled to Bethlehem for the birth of Jesus. In the first stanza, I imagined the wise men were having an awful time traveling.

                        And the night-fires going out, and the lack of shelters,

                        And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly

                        And the villages dirty and charging high prices:

                        A hard time we had of it. (13-16)

            It seemed as though Eliot was describing their journey as backbreaking and full of hardships. They were obviously not treated as royalty and did not travel with great luxury.

            In the second stanza, T.S. Eliot describes their arrival in Bethlehem by saying, “Finding the place; it was (you may say) satisfactory.” (31). I believe that this expresses a kind of relief the gentlemen felt once they reached their destination after a long, excruciating journey.

            The third and final stanza made me believe that the first two stanzas were a memory of the past of one of the three wise men. The first line of this stanza, “All this was a long time ago, I remember,” gave the hint that the speaker was recalling the past (32).

Anne Donne By Sylvia Townsend Warner

Anne Donne was the name of John Donne’s beloved wife. The marriage was greatly looked down upon by Anne’s uncle and father. Since Anne’s father was the Lieutenant of the Tower, he had John thrown in Fleet Prison for marrying his daughter. It took about eight years for Donne to reconcile with Anne’s father.

            I believe that the speaker of the poem is Anne Donne herself. “I lay in in London;/ And round my bed my live children were crying,” (Lines 1-2). These lines reinsure the fact that it might be Anne Donne speaking because she did have many children in her life. I also feel like the poem could be taken as a letter from one woman to a friend, the woman being the main speaker. The poem gives the sense of a woman having a miscarriage and how her world feels as though it is falling apart. “Carrying my dead child, so lost, so light a burden,” (Line 18).

            “As my blood left me it set the clapper swinging:/ Tolling, jarring, jowling, all the bells of London” (Lines 4-5). This line really gives the reader the loud and slow ringing of a big bell in London by using the words such as, “tolling”, ”jowling”, and “jarring”.

            “Ill-done, well-done, all-done.” (Line 8). In this line, Sylvia Townsend Warner used an anaphora by repeating the word “done” throughout the line. I interpreted this line as the speaker, Anne Donne or another woman, going through stages of sadness, denial, and acceptance after a miscarriage.   

            The end of the poem ends with the lines, “And showed him my ill news. That done,/ Went back, lived on in London” (Lines 20-21). This truly shows how the speaker has fully accepted a lost child and has moved on with her life.

Piano by D.H. Lawrence

Piano by D.H. Lawrence immediately made me think of a memory that he might have had when he was a child. The long lines make the reader feel like they are drifting in to nostalgia or some type of sweet dream that someone may have.

            Softly in the dusk, a woman singing to me;

            Taking me back down the vista of years, till I see

            A child sitting under the piano, in the boom of the tingling strings

            And pressing the small, poised feet of a mother who smiles as she sings.

The first line of the poem, it gives the feeling that D.H. is going back into time and recalls some kind of memory of his mother singing. He gives the image of his mother being a happy woman that “smiles as she sings” and how he would be under the piano, listening and enjoying her company. D.H. ends the poem with the line: “Down in the flood of remembrance, I weep like a child for the past” (Line 12). I think this poem is done in memory of his mother and the time that he would spend with her; He longs for the feeling of the unconditional love of his mother and wishes that she were back in his life. (His mother died 8 years before this poem was written)

Oread by H.D.

Today I am presenting the imagist poet H.D. in class. She is a very interesting woman that influenced the imagism in poetry. Her poems are very different than the Victorian period poems. She feels that few words are needed to actually make poems; this is shown in her very early work such as Oread and The Pool.

In the poem Oread, I read it as the sea being a powerful force that is controlled by a nymph in the mountains. The shortness of the lines in the poem gives the reader the sense of that power. H.D. uses the word “whirl” at the beginning of the first two lines, which is an anaphora (the repetition of a word/phrase at the beginning of two or more lines). The word “pines” is repeated at the end of the second and third lines; this repetition is an epizeuscis (the repetition of a word/phrase at the end of two or more lines). The words “whirl”, “splash”, and “hurl” also give the impression of great force coming from the sea.

In a Station of the Metro by Erza Pound

When I first read this poem, I was so confused by its length! I could have sworn that the page that contained the rest of the poem had fallen out of my book, but this is only a two-line poem. After reading the back-story of the poem, it made so much sense to me. Pound is talking about a time he was at a train station and all the beautiful people mesmerized him. He uses the word “apparition” I think, to describe how he gets a quick image of all the people busily passing by him and how it’s not a very clear image. I can see why he used the word “apparition” because it really makes the reader feel that kind of hustle-and-bustle of a busy train station. He then describes the people as “Petals on a wet, black bough” because of how the people bring colorfulness to the train station.

Dulce et Decorum Est by Wilfred Owen

I am not one to be interested in war poems but this poem really caught my attention. It described the looks of the worn-down soldiers with such clear imagery. “Bent double, like old beggars under sacks/ Knock-kneed, coughing like hags…” (Lines 1-2). The first stanza really gives the reader a feeling of fatigue the soldiers were feeling from the war by using very long sentences and great imagery. “Men marched asleep” and “Drunk with fatigue” (Lines 4 and 7). Owen really provides a great insight of the hardships that soldiers would face in war.

“Gas! Gas! Quick, boys! – an ecstasy of fumbling” (Line 9). This first line of the second stanza really shifts the mood of the poem from fatigue to quick and alert. Owen then describes the horrifying death of a fellow soldier that is “drowning” in the poisonous gas. The last for lines shows that Owen is repulsed at the thought of young men, who haven’t lived a full life, die wars.