This poem is from Tanure Ojaide’s Delta Blues and Homesongs, a collection of poems inspired by the plight of the people of the oil-rich Niger Delta of Nigeria. The crisis in the region came to the attention of the world… Read More ›
Literature
Analysis of Kofi Awoonor’s The Weaver Bird
The Weaver Bird is perhaps Kofi Awoonor’s most famous poem. An early work, it initially appeared in Awoonor’s first volume of verse, Rediscovery (1964). What seems on the surface to be a simple complaint about a nest-building bird resonates with… Read More ›
Analysis of Lorna Goodison’s We Are the Women
This poem, which is part of Lorna Goodison’s collection I Am Becoming My Mother, is representative both of the poet’s particular focus on the experience of women and their strength and of her interest in Caribbean history and the heritage… Read More ›
Analysis of Thorkild Bjørnvig’s Water, Rushes and the Moon
Water, Rushes and the Moon (Siv, vand og måne) perfectly illustrates the major themes of Bjørnvig’s mature work: his love and respect for pristine nature, his abhorrence for what he called “the filth in the landscape,” and his belief that… Read More ›
Analysis of Andrey Voznesensky’s War Ballad
War Ballad (alternatively titled Ballad of 1941) was first published in Andrey Voznesensky’s debut collection, Mozaika (Mozaics) (Vladimir 1960), along with I Am Goya. In that book the poem was “dedicated to the partisans of Kerch, a peninsula in the… Read More ›
Analysis of Pablo Neruda’s Walking Around
It so happens I am sick of being a man. And it happens that I walk into tailorshops and movie houses dried up, waterproof, like a swan made of felt steering my way in a water of wombs and ashes…. Read More ›
Analysis of Constantine P. Cavafy’s Waiting for the Barbarians
One of Cavafy’s earlier poems, Waiting for the Barbarians is also one of his best known internationally, second perhaps only to Ithaka. With its diachronic subject of how a society relates to those it designates as the barbaric others, the… Read More ›
Analysis of Cecília Meireles’s Voyage
Viagem (Voyage) is the title of the major collection of poetic works by Cecília Benavides de Carvalho Meireles up to 1939, which includes a poem by the same name. The volume won an award from the Brazilian Academy of Letters… Read More ›
Analysis of Anna Akhmatova’s Voronezh
During Osip Mandelstam’s internal exile in the Soviet city Voronezh, Anna Akhmatova visited her Acmeist colleague, whose 1934 arrest she had witnessed, and wrote this poem in March 1936. The poem first appeared in the journal Leningrad, with the last… Read More ›
Analysis of André Breton’s Vigilance
André Breton published Vigilance in 1932 in the collection Le Revolver à cheveux blancs (The Revolver with White Hair), which consists of texts written between 1915 and 1932. Vigilance is to be found in the third part, containing poems written… Read More ›
Analysis of Wisława Szymborska’s View with a Grain of Sand
We call it a grain of sand, but it calls itself neither grain nor sand. It does just fine without a name, whether general, particular, permanent, passing, incorrect, or apt. Our glance, our touch mean nothing to it. It doesn’t… Read More ›
Analysis of Paolo Volponi’s View on the Parallel Year
It is appropriate that this poem ends Paolo Volponi’s 1986 collection Con testo a fronte (With Parallel Text), a title that signifies that it complements some other text (testo). Vista sull’anno parallelo is thus a fitting conclusion because the “parallel… Read More ›
Analysis of Pablo Neruda’s The United Fruit Company
The United Fruit Company (1950) by Pablo Neruda is part of section five of Canto General, “The Sand Betrayed,” and was inspired by Pablo Neruda’s visit to Colombia in September 1943. At the time, the Colombian government was embroiled in… Read More ›
Analysis of Jorge Guillén’s Twelve O’clock, Noon
Jorge Guillén’s Las doce en el reloj appeared in his first collection of poems, Cántico (1928). Its theme is the completeness reached at a moment in time—noon, the present—by a man, the poet, immersed in a place, the world, which… Read More ›
Analysis of Les Murray’s Toward the Imminent Days
In this poem, an epithalamium 183 lines long, Les Murray urges what can only be called “fullness of being” by tapping into the energetic contours of the Australian theme of “country as mind.” Murray has identified the distinguishing motif of… Read More ›
Analysis of Vladimir Mayakovsky’s To Sergei Yesenin
Vladimir Mayakovsky’s To Sergei Yesenin You have passed, as they say, into worlds elsewhere. Emptiness… Fly, cutting your way into starry dubiety. No advances, no pubs for you there. Sobriety. No, Yessenin, this is not deridingly,- in my throat not… Read More ›
Analysis of Rubén Darío’s To Roosevelt
To Roosevelt by Rubén Darío (1904) It is with the voice of the Bible, or verse of Walt Whitman, that we should reach you, Hunter! Primitive and modern, simple and complicated, with a bit of Washington and a bit of… Read More ›
Analysis of Joyce Mansour’s Torn Apart
Torn Apart (Déchirures), Joyce Mansour’s second volume of poetry, is a collection of 117 numbered poems that together appear to undertake an exploration of what the poet sees beyond the fabric of religious belief when that fabric is subjected to… Read More ›
Analysis of Jacques Prévert’s To Paint the Portrait of a Bird
Jacques Prévert’s To Paint the Portrait of a Bird First paint a cage With an open door Then paint Something pretty Something simple Something beautiful Something useful For the bird Then place the canvas against a tree In a garden… Read More ›
Analysis of Pablo Neruda’s Tonight I Can Write
“Tonight I can write the saddest lines,” Pablo Neruda declares in the opening, and the reader believes him. In simple, incantatory language, the poet’s longing for a lost love suffuses his perceptions of the natural world: “To hear the immense… Read More ›