Recent Posts - page 4
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Analysis of Paul Valéry’s The Young Fate
The Young Fate is a long and obscure but highly evocative poem of over 500 lines in alexandrine verse by French poet Paul Valéry. This poem, frequently cited by critics as his masterpiece, presents the thoughts of a young woman… Read More ›
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Analysis of Enrique González Martínez’s Wring the Swan’s Neck
Enrique González Martínez’s Wring the Swan’s Neck Wring the swan’s neck who with deceiving plumage inscribes his whiteness on the azure stream; he merely vaunts his grace and nothing feels of nature’s voice or of the soul of things. Every… Read More ›
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Analysis of Zehra Çirak’s Women—Portrait I
Published in Zehra Çirak’s third book of poetry, Fremde Flügel auf eigener Schulter (Alien Wings on Your Own Shoulder, 1994), “Frauen—Porträt I” is part of a versatile ekphrastic cycle in which a series of photographs or paintings (or ironically framed… Read More ›
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Analysis of Gabriela Mistral’s A Woman
Found in the last of Gabriela Mistral’s published books of poetry, Una mujer (A Woman) reflects the maturity and skill of its author. Lagar (Wine Press) is the product of an experienced poet, although the volume reflects the issues that… Read More ›
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Analysis of Kim Chi-ha’s With a Burning Thirst
With a Burning Thirst is the title poem of Kim Chi-ha’s second collection of poetry. This collection was published in 1982, after he was released from prison. This volume presents Kim’s criticism of President Park Chung Hee’s and his successor… Read More ›
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Analysis of Paavo Haavikko’s The Winter Palace
Paavo Haavikko’s Talvipalatsi (The Winter Palace) represented the culmination of a decade of innovative work that helped introduce modernism to Finnish-language poetry in the 1950s. A series of nine long poems, it should be seen as one unified text in… Read More ›
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Analysis of Salvatore Quasimodo’s Wind at Tìndari
This poem was first published in the collection of poems Acque e terre (Waters and Lands) in June 1930. Vento a Tindari is composed in unrhymed verse, with each line containing a varying number of syllables. In Italian, the rhythm… Read More ›
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Analysis of Micere Githae Mugo’s Wife of the Husband
A short poem of only 21 lines, Micere Mugo’s Wife of the Husband is a subtle lament about the hard labor and long hours that a woman must spend doing the work necessary to stay in her husband’s and her… Read More ›
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Analysis of Boris Pasternak’s When the Weather Clears
Boris Pasternak When the Weather Clears A dish-like lake, serene and spacious, Converging stormclouds overhead And there, beyond, the alpine glaciers, Lustrous and stark, sublime and dread. The lighting alters and the woods Go through a constant change of color,… Read More ›
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Analysis of Tanure Ojaide’s When Green was the Lingua Franca
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 ›
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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 ›
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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 ›
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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 ›
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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 ›
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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 ›
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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 ›
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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 ›
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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 ›
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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 ›
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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 ›