The first stanza of the poem Break, Break, Break, by Alfred Lord Tennyson presents the picture of the poet sitting near his friend's grave on the sea-beach as he says “Break Break, Break, On thy cold gray stones, O Sea! And I would that my tongue could utter The thoughts that arise in me”.
The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe is a narrative of a young man who is bereaved by the death of the woman he loved. He compulsorily constructs self-destructive meaning around a raven’s repetition of the word 'Nevermore', until he finally despairs of being reunited with his beloved Lenore in another world. Just because of the nightmarish effect, the poem cannot be called an elegy. In fact, 'The Raven' is a ballad of eighteen six-line stanzas with decidedly emphatic meter and rhymes.
Elizabeth Bishop's poem The Fish displays her ecological awareness that leads her to accept a relationship of coexistence between human beings and nonhuman beings. This ecological awareness in the poem is reflected when she leaves the fish free. It is one of her typical and representative poems.
This poem Piano is about a fully grown adult recalling about the past. In this poem 'piano' serves as a metaphor of nostalgia. The poet may be trying to say that the function of music is to release us from the tyranny of conscious thought. Every man whether he is old or young- wants to listen to music reminds him of his happy memories of the past and makes him free from the trouble of the present.
In the poem The Grandmother, the American-Indian poet, Ray Young Bear, draws a picture of his grandmother, all-loving, all-inspiring. His grandmother would wear a purple scarf round her head for warmth and she would go to market with a plastic shopping bag in her hand. Her shape was also quite remarkable.
The poplars are cut down and we don’t get here any shade and the sound of the wind. They used to grow along River Ouse and we could see their reflection in the water, but now there is nothing to see. The poet once used to sit under the trees. Now he sits on them. The trees are no longer standing. They are lying on the grass.
The Snow Storm is one of the most noted poems of Emerson because it implicitly states his philosophy of the transcendental spirit in the nature. This poem describes very succinctly how the nature’s creative force leaves an amazing architectural landscape in just a night’s playful work. The snowstorm constructs wonderful structures that civilizations of human endeavor have not been able to achieve.
Ode to Evening is one of the finest poems of Collins in his collection 'Odes on Several Descriptive and Allegorical Subjects'. It is composed in a single stanza of fifty two lines with unrhyming pattern. This beautiful poem is addressed to the evening who is regarded as the goddess, nymph or maid. The personified evening is chaste, reserved and meek opposite to the characteristics of the bright sun.
The Cloud by Shelley is perhaps the most important one in Shelley's poetry in terms of imagery and symbols. It symbolizes the force and harbinger of revolution. It is the agent of change that inspires one to move from apathy to spiritual vitality. It is dynamic and creative. In this poem, it is even personified, angelic, immortal, and mythical. The Cloud is here treated as a kind of essential element which binds and sustains all other things. It supplies the soil with rain so that regenerate.
Sunday Morning is a meditative poem in which Stevens presents a woman who is frightened by the thought of death when she hears the church bells. The poet initially appreciates the woman's rational thoughts as she refuses to accept the romantic fancies of the Christian afterlife and wants to make her life on this earth itself meaningful.