Byzantium is a description of the city bearing that name, but it is also a symbol of paradise as well as Purgatory. Byzantium usually discussed as a companion piece to Sailing to Byzantium written four years later, takes up the actual process by which the artist creates his images and, in a bold stroke by Yeats compares the creative process to the soul’s journey after death.
This short poem of three stanzas is a dialogue between an old woman and a church dignity – a bishop. It enunciates philosophy in a light-hearted vein. Yeats had seen such a woman in Dublin who had always puzzled him as to what in life she should symbolize. She was vulgar in her tongue and amoral in her life; but she was down to earth and candid. She knew no pretense that many call civilization.
Aunt Jennifer is portrayed as a nervous and fearful housewife lacking inner conviction unlike the tigers she creates. Jennifer is domesticated and mastered by her husband. Her husband owns her.
Rich in her poem Aunt Jennifer's Tigers uses innovative forms and the techniques that are supportive to her theme. This poem is a formal and structured in a lyrical pattern. Most of the words she uses are short and simple of everyday life.
In the poem Aunt Jennifer's Tigers a woman expresses her suppressed feelings through her art. Aunt Jennifer is the victim of the male-dominated society. She has no one to tell her mental and physical pain. She makes a picture of a graceful and powerful tiger to convey her deep feelings.
Highly allusive Rich's A Valediction Forbidding Mourning is a poem in which allusion serves a number of functions. The most obvious allusion, of course is the allusion to Donne established by the title 'Valediction'.
The poem is full of incomplete sentences and phrases which mean obstructed mind and articulation. Rich has frequently used periods mark and dramatic pause so as to convey her failure of expression of pain and anxiety.
The Prelude begun in 1799 and was completed in 1805, but was published a year after the poet’s death in 1850. In this work the poet describes his experiences of growing up as a man and a poet with fullness, closeness and laborious anxiety that is unique in English literature. The Prelude is the finest work of Wordsworth’s great creative period. Wordsworth conceived the idea of writing a history of the growth of his own mind, and the various texts of the poem cover a very long period in the poet’s life during which his style and opinion both changed considerably.
A Valediction Forbidding Mourning by Adrienne Rich is a poem that expresses how the male-made language does not allow the female to fully express her feelings.
This poem is apparently and mainly about the loss of the intuitive powers of perceptions and joyful existence in childhood, but it turns out to be more important about growing up and developing the poetic, moral and philosophical faculties in the process of losing the primal powers of the child.