This poem Lady Lazarus by Sylvia Plath like many other protest poems should be analyzed from a psychological point of view, as an outpour of a neurotic energy through the channel of creative art, or poetry. It is in a sense a kind of therapy.
When Sylvia Plath wrote this unconventional poem of hers on February 1961, she had given birth to her daughter Frieda. The mother love is strangely absent in the beginning of the poem. But the mother does move from a strange alienation to a kind of instinctive sweeping emotion, when she lives with the child for some time and when the child happens to breathe and cry; this probably happens after the intense labor pain is over, so that the mother could feel the love.
Adonais is a pastoral elegy which Shelley wrote on the death of his contemporary poet John Keats. Like Milton's 'Lycidas', it is an English adaptation of the classical form of elegy perfected by poets as early as the classical Greek times of Homer and Virgil. 'Adonais' is written mainly in the classical pattern, though Shelley has adapted and added some of the elements.
West Running Brook is the poem by Robert Frost in dialogue form between a spouse, which also hints and develops a thematic tension about a subject that is philosophically significant. Many allegorical interpretations have been made about the basic idea about the only one brook running west when all the others flow towards the east.
The Death of a Hired Man is a typical poem by Frost in which an ordinary man and his wife turn into a philosophically significant debate. The wife represents love and sympathy, emotion and imagination, and evaluates 'human beings' not in terms of reason but emotion. The husband is a 'practical' modern man who regards and respects people in terms of their work, worth, contribution and so on. In other words, the husband represents reason, intellect, utilitarianism, practicality, rationality, and the like.
The speaker is probably a farmer returning home from far away. He is riding his horse. It is getting rather late. He has come to a place where there is very beautiful scenery. He stops the horse and looks around, enjoying. There is a lake on one side and a small forest on the other side he snow is falling like soft cotton (downy).
This short lyric 'Neither Out Far nor In Deep' is a subtle satire on the human nature of neglecting or escaping from the concrete reality before them and obsessively seeking to find the unreal, the unknowable and the inaccessible. This poem is also based on a commonplace situation; a few people are watching at noting far to the sea that symbolizes the abstract and the theoretical aspects of life like the supernatural and the abstract philosophical, turning their backs towards the land that symbolizes reality, the concrete and the inevitable.
The poem 'Metaphors' by Sylvia Plath is a lyric poem where she uses the metaphors to create a riddle as she states in line one. The poem successfully describes the condition of a pregnant woman, her picture is beautifully made with the help of clear metaphors. The nine syllables, nine lines, and nine letters of title 'Metaphors' suggest the nine months of gestation.
Ariel is probably Plath's finest single construction because of the precision and depth of its images. In its account of the ritual journey to the center of life and death, Plath perfects her method of leaping from image to image in order to represent mental process.
Eliot's The Waste Land is an important landmark in the history of English poetry and one of the most talked about poem of the 20th century. It is long poem of more than four hundred lines in 5 parts entitled: 1) The burial of the Dead; 2) A Game of Chess; 3) The fire Sermon; 4) Death by Water; 5) What the Thunder Said.