The Afterwake is a poem about the awakening of women in the later part of the twentieth century. On the literal level, the poem is about a nurse who is taking care of a male patient. The nurse has just passed a terrible night of nursing the man who seems to be a patient of the nerves. This has completely exhausted the nurse by the morning.
First Snow in Alsace is one of the formal, metaphysical poems of Wilbur in which he has described the coming of the first snow of the year, and enlarged the meaning of the incident to make it symbolically suggest the transformation of things as a terrible reality of war and hostility envelops them. The eight tercets and a final concluding line mainly describe the coming of snow, but from the very first line the poet uses many conceits and metaphors that are suggestive of the symbolic meaning of the coming of the snow.
The poem Keeping Things Whole deals with two separate things; part and whole. It illustrates the fact that parts are essential to make the unifying nature of whole. The nature has smaller parts which can be divided into the separate elements. The poet has lost himself in the field.
A jellyfish is sometimes easily noticeable and sometimes it is not easily noticed. It moves like waves. It is attractive. Its color is brown yellow mixed with bluish purple. If the arm of an observer comes close to it, it opens and closes its umbrella-like shape. It the observer aims to catch it, he gives up his plan because of its shaking movement.
The poet Paul Muldoon in Milkweed and Monarch is creating a specific landscape. He starts from church and goes to human beings in general. The speaker of the poem was kneeling in front of the grave of his parents, random thoughts and images crept into his consciousness.
The poem Hear I Love You expresses the sadness of separation. The speaker is (here) in this world and his beloved is (there) far away in the world beyond the mortal’s reach. The speaker in this poem loves his departed beloved. He passionately recalls the sweet moments he spent in her company.
The poem Letters and Other Worlds is an examination of the last years that the poet's father lived the turbulent and mind-breaking life of alcoholism and neurosis caused by family strife and addiction. The 'other' world is the world of poetry and letters in which his father lived for the last few years of his life.
The poem Motherhood by May Swenson gives an elaborate and vividly graphic picture of a mother from the first line to the last. The trick that the speaker is adopting is not to tell who this strange ‘mother’ is. We are shocked by the description because the speaker is also adopting the normal point of view of human beings, trying to describe the mother in terms of human attributes.
When the Americans won the war for the first time in history, they assumed that they were the most important people. Their behaviors changed. The leaders and the most important persons began to wear formal clothes. They stopped wearing shirts only. Their wives thought that it was a mark of rude behavior to scratch their bodies in public.
In the poem Medusa the speaker remembers that she had gone into a house in the jungle. She was looking up the sky. Everything was active. The bell was ready to strike and the sun as well as her memory of ancient myths moved fast. Then she saw Medusa’s staring eyes and serpentine hair standing on the forehead. But this scene will never be repeated and nothing will be active.