The poem Rhapsody on a Windy Night presents the setting of a moonlight windy night, and the time is twelve o'clock. The street is deserted. The young man, the speaker, walks down a street in which the street lamps eventually dominate his walk so much so as to act as triggers to series of fanciful and disorganized imaginings. The young man is returning to his lodge.
'Morning at the Window' is an imagist poem that presents an image of poverty. The picture is that of a slum where people lead miserable lives. The speaker is at the window. He may be a visitor of a certain house in the area where poor people live. The images that come to his eyes are 'object correlatives' or objects corresponding certain ideas and emotions in the poet's and the reader's mind.
Anecdote of the Jar is an imagist poem in which Stevens explores the question of the superiority between art and nature: Is nature superior to human creations, or does human creativity surpasses nature in some way? This is an age-old and puzzling question. This poem solves the riddle by recognizing the unique differences between art and nature: art may sometimes be more beautiful than nature but it cannot be as creative as the nature.
The poem High Toned Old Christian Woman is a humorous and playful poem. It is mainly a defense of poetry. The speaker is a writer of love poems and he is talking to a devout Christian woman who seems to have repudiated poetry. He argues that poetry is a supreme fiction or art.
The Emperor of Ice-Cream is the most popular poem of Wallace Stevens. Stevens 'plots' this story into two equal stanzas: one for the kitchen where the ice cream is being made, and another for the bedroom where the corpse awaits decent covering. He "plots" it further by structuring the poem as a series of commands from an unknown master of ceremonies, directing, in a diction of extreme oddness, the neighbors in their funeral duties.
One of the many visionary epics, this poem by William Blake seems to embody the optimism for a regenerate England chosen by the true original God, like the excitement of John Milton for such a spiritual leader out of his country. This present piece of poem is a call for a spiritual revolution. The speaker is calling the whole nation England to wake up.
Mercy, Pity, Peace and Love are the essential qualities of God. We pray God to these qualities when we are in distress. Mercy has a kind human heart, pity a human face, love is the human form and peace is the human dress. Where, mercy, pity, peace and love live, God, too, lives there.
The lamb is one of the simplest poems of Blake. The symbolic meaning of it is almost clearly stated in the poem The Lamb which is probably the most important among the poem of innocence. Here the symbols of child, lamb and Christ are assimilated each other. The poem begins with a child like directness and natural world that show none of the signs of grownups.
The poem Leda and the Swan by William Butler Yeats shows how Leda was being raped by Zeus in the form of a wild swan and how this copulation led to the destruction of the city of the Troy. Zeus who is known to be a very wise god, one day infatuated by her beauty after seeing naked body while she was bathing in the river Furatos and raped her.
Lapis Lazuli is a deep blue mineral. Here it refers to the medallion of this Chinaware presented to the poet. The poet has listened to the cries of hysterical women (of the nineteen thirties) who are panicky and scared of the preparations for the Second World War. They are sick of the painter's palette and the musical instrument of the singer and the poet's compositions because all of them are happy and gay.