In this poem, Telephone Conversation, Wole Soyinka is trying to highlight the impact of racial discrimination in the micro-structure of society. The title of the poem clearly reveals that two people are talking on the phone and the theme of racial discrimination is carried out through the dialogue form.
Lost in Translation by James Ingram Merrill was first published on April 6, 1974 which later included in his famous poetic collection Divine Comedies for which he was awarded with the most prestigious award the Pulitzer Prize in 1976. As the epigraph indicates, the exact translation is not possible in the language. When we try to translate, we are lost in it.
The poem Daddy by Sylvia Plath is typically a protest poem whose themes are multiple. On its surface, it is the outpour of a daughter's anger against her dominating father, but the poem's deeper meanings should be more generalized and symbolically interpreted as themes of
The poem makes simple bare statements about the downfall of a certain tyrant called Ozymandias. The speaker in the poem reports to us what a traveler "from an antique land" told him. The traveler conjoins the past with the present. The traveler knew who Ozymandias was and what happened to his power and empire.
Ulysses asked his crew (while returning home from the Trojan War) to be courageous because the land was now in sight. He told his men that the next rising wave would carry them to the seashore in no time. All of them reached the land of the Lotos-Eaters in the afternoon.
"When You Are Old" is a short lyric of twelve lines in three stanzas. The poem is the product of the early period in Yeats's poetic career. It is addressed to Maud Gonne with whom he was in love. It forms a part of the group of poems published in 1893 with the title The Rose. It expresses the poet’s distress at the disastrous onslaught of Time.
The Shield of Achilles is composed by W.H. Auden in 1955 where he represents the Homeric theme in a mock-heroic way making necessary changes. Thetis, the mother of Achilles, in Greek mythology, looks at the shield hung over the shoulder of her son.
The poem Ode on Melancholy embodies one of Keats' greatest insights into the nature of human experience. Here, the two conflicting domains of experience manifest as joy and melancholy. The poem has an abrupt beginning, which reads like a conclusion after a long mental conflict of the speaker. The poem in fact had one stanza before the present first stanza, and so also the present poem begins like a drama of thoughts in medias res; the conflict has brought the speaker to a phase of resolution where he begins by declaring his understanding of the dialectics.
William Wordsworth's poem Three Years She Grew in Sun and Shower, is a lyrical elegy on the untimely demise of Lucy. This poem is also known as 'The Education of Nature', and is considered one of the Lucy poems. Lucy poems are written about an ideal female who is sometimes symbolized as nature, for whom the speaker feels great affection. It was written in the year of 1798 in collaboration with S.T. Coleridge and was published in 1800 in the Lyrical Ballads anthology.
It is most logical to consider The Hollow Men (1925) immediately after 'The Waste Land' because it is the most nearly related to 'The Waste Land'. It is, in some ways, a continuation of the earlier poem and, in others, it marks a departure from its predecessor. Like 'The Waste Land' it should be regarded as a series of poems rather than as one single poem, most of which is made up out of the lines Ezra Pound deleted from The Waste Land.