The Lifeguard by James Dickey is a poem that explores the burden of responsibility that every man carries within his mind. On a literal level of the poem, we find a life-guard (a man who is there to save people from drowning in swimming pools) who has failed to rescue a child, even after attempting the whole day long, and are now thinking of his failure with a sense of guilt and tragedy of his failure.
Elizabeth Bishop's poem 'The Armadillo' takes a common subject that is a kind of street carnival in the Brazilian city. The poem is marked by ambivalence, because the poet first aestheticizes the carnival; flying of the fire balloons and then she became critical to the act of flying fire balloons which might create massive destruction in jungle life.
The poem 'in Just-spring' by Cummings is about the spring as seen from the viewpoint of the child. The very title is said with an excitement of remembering childhood, and the power to enjoy the spring. Two boys Eddie and Bill come running from their marble and pirate games.
The sonnet God's Grandeur by Gerard Manley Hopkins stresses the immanence of God. The whole universe is an expression of God’s greatness, but man fails to recognize it. Though the soil is bare and smeared with man’s toil, there is a constant renewal or natural beauty because God continues to 'brood' over the world.
The poem September Song by Geoffrey Hill is an elegy on a ten-year-old Jew child killed in the Nazi concentration camps. The poem is extremely ironical about man's inhumanity to human beings. In a sense, the poem is a mock-elegy; it is written in the form of conversation with the child that has been killed in a tone that sounds as if the speaker is one of the detached and apathetic observers of the horrible execution of the Jews.
The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer is a series of different kinds of stories told by a group of imaginary pilgrims going to Canterbury: the Cathedral, a place of assassination of Saint Thomas a Becket. One of the pilgrims, Chaucer’s persona or narrator, who is a civil servant, retells us the stories.
Mid-August at Sourdough Mountain Lookout by Gary Snyder is a quiet meditative type of poem in which the persona meditates upon a landscape that he describes. The poem begins like a descriptive poem, but is a serious meditation upon an American rural landscape, and upon the people who have literally and metaphorically left it behind when they went after the lure of the city civilization.
First Song is a typical Kinnell poem in which he tells the story (one incident) of a small boy who finds solace in the music of the frogs croaking in the evening at the city’s edge after a day’s straining labor. The frogs cacophonous croaking, which can be irritating to common people, here becomes a thing that brings the boy to an understanding of his own pathetic plight in the society that oppresses him, to the awareness of initiation into the adult world, to his energies and need for transcending the bondage of his life.
The poem Farewell presents the condition of the poet who is approaching death or who must be an old person. Farewell is an expression which we use when we leave someone or when we are left by someone. However, the farewell here in the poem is the final leave of the world. Death is regarded to be the final and the most unpleasant of farewells.
The poem After Great Pain, a Formal Feeling comes from Emily Dickinson is acclaimed as the greatest piece on pain and death, and which marks the highest measure of excellence in its artistic achievement. While it underlines the broad theme of pain and misery as the inevitable part of human existence, lie compares implicitly "the after effects of pain to the slow numbing process of freezing to death".