Recent Posts - page 5
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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 ›
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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 ›
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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 ›
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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 ›
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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 ›
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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 ›
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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 ›
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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 ›
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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 ›
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Analysis of Umberto Saba’s To My Wife
You are like a creamy pullet, my white hen, whose plumes the wind disturbs when she stoops to drink or peck at the ground, yet proceeding over the grass with measured step just like a queen: full-bosomed and superb and… Read More ›
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Analysis of Shu Ting’s To an Oak
Shu Ting’s To an Oak If I love you – I’ll never be a clinging campsis flower Resplendent in borrowed glory on your high boughs; If I love you — I’ll never mimic the silly infatuated birds Repeating the same… Read More ›
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Analysis of Fernando Pessoa’s This
Published in the modernist literary magazine Presença in 1933, this poem points to Fernando Pessoa’s obsession with the contrast between feelings and thoughts. It illustrates the main theme of the poetry signed with his own name (which Pessoa himself called… Read More ›
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Analysis of Jorge de Lima’s That Black Girl Fulô
One of the major aspirations of Brazilian modernist and regionalistic writers during the 1920s was to affirm Brazilian identity through focusing on the Brazilian northeast and its culture and history. Jorge de Lima was one of the main exponents of… Read More ›
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Analysis of Rolf Jacobsen’s Suddenly. In December
Rolf Jacobsen’s Suddenly. In December Suddenly. In December. I stand knee-deep in snow Talk to you and get no answer. You’re keep quiet. My love, now it’s happened after all. Our whole life, the smiles, the tears and the courage…. Read More ›
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Analysis of Breyten Breytenbach’s The Struggle for the Taal
Written in prison, this poem (Taalstryd) fits squarely into the Afrikaner tradition of dissident writing associated with the Sestigers. At the same time, however, it marks a certain departure for the poet, as it directly challenges Afrikaans as the language… Read More ›
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Analysis of Lars Gustafsson’s The Stillness of the World Before Bach
This poem (Världens tystnad före Bach) appeared in Swedish in Lars Gustafsson’s poetry collection of the same title in 1982, at the mid-point of the poet’s literary career to date. Over the past 50 years, Gustafsson has experimented with many… Read More ›
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Analysis of Osip Mandelstam’s The Stalin Epigram
This precisely executed image of Stalin and his reign of terror led to Osip Mandelstam’s arrest and exile and ultimately to his death in the gulag. After sharing this poem (“My zhivem, pod soboiu ne chuia strany”) with a small… Read More ›
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Analysis of Hagiwara Sakutarō’s Spring Night
Although it is not one of Sakutarō’s more harrowing compositions and does not contain the nightmarish imagery of so much of his poetry, Spring Night nevertheless creates a hauntingly melancholic mood by employing visual imagery to evoke the mystery of… Read More ›
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Analysis of Cesare Pavese’s South Seas
This was Pavese’s first successful poetic composition. In South Seas (I mari del Sud) are three qualities evident in many of his later poems: Pavese’s effort to create a “poem-story” (poesia-racconto); the poet’s choice of conventionally “unpoetic” subject matter (lower-class… Read More ›
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Analysis of Rainer Maria Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus
Rainer Maria Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus (Die Sonnette an Orpheus) comprises 55 sonnets in two series. The first series (Erster Teil) contains 26 poems; the second (Zweiter Teil), 29. Poet and translator Willis Barnstone provides a breezy but comprehensive 97-page… Read More ›