Recent Posts - page 6
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Analysis of Tanikawa Shuntaro’s Sonnet 41
While Tanikawa is not the first Japanese poet to use the sonnet form, he has made unique contributions to the sonnet genre through his 62 Sonnets (62 no sonetto), in which the poet seems to have used the form of… Read More ›
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Analysis of Okot p’Bitek’s Song of Lawino: An African Lament
First composed in 1956 in Acoli, a Ugandan language, Okot p’Bitek converted this book-length poem into English, and it was published a decade later. The author’s note informs readers that the English-language version “clipped a bit of the eagle’s wings… Read More ›
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Analysis of Fadwa Tuqan’s Song of Becoming
Fadwa Tuqan wrote Song of Becoming in the aftermath of the 1967 Arab-Israeli War that resulted in the defeat of the tripartite Arab coalition (Egypt, Syria, and Jordan) by Israel. The defeat also meant that the Palestinian struggle against dispossession,… Read More ›
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Analysis of Jorge Luis Borges’s A Soldier of Urbina
“A Soldier of Urbina,” from El otro, el mismo (The Self and the Other, 1946), is typical of Borges’s mature poetry. Classical in structure and containing both historical and literary allusions, it is also an outstanding example of Borgesian metaphysics…. Read More ›
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Analysis of Mahmud Darwish’s A Soldier Dreams of White Tulips
This popular poem by Mahmud Darwish has had more than one translation in English. It is a striking poem and rare in its subject matter. It humanizes the enemy and, more specifically, the soldier enemy who invades one’s country. In… Read More ›
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Analysis of Tarjei Vesaas’s Snow and Spruce Forest
Tarjei Vesaas’s Snow and Spruce Forest Talk about what home is — snow and spruce forest is home. From the very start it is ours. Before anyone has told us that it is snow and spruce forest, it has its place in… Read More ›
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Analysis of Nicolás Guillén’s Small Ode to a Black Cuban Boxer
This poem from the collection Sóngoro consongo (1931) is an outstanding example of Nicolás Guillén’s poetry, reflecting both his Afrocentrism and his nationalist response to U.S. imperialism. The poem was inspired by and written for featherweight champion Eligio Sardiñas Montalvo…. Read More ›
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Analysis of David Dabydeen’s Slave Song
David Dabydeen wrote the 14 poems that Slave Song comprises while an undergraduate at Cambridge University. The set of poems won Cambridge University’s Quiller-Couch Prize and the Commonwealth Poetry Prize in 1978. Several individual poems were published before their collective… Read More ›
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Analysis of Niyi Osundare’s Siren
Siren, from Songs of the Marketplace, Niyi Osundare’s first collection, has eight stanzas. It describes the visit of typical Nigerian politicians to rural dwellers. The poem takes its title from the police car siren whose blaring traditionally announces the presence… Read More ›
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Analysis of Han Yongun’s The Silence of Love
Han Yongun’s The Silence of Love Love is gone, gone is my love. Tearing himself away from me he has gone on a little path that stretches in the splendor of a green hill into the autumn-tinted forest. Our last… Read More ›
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Analysis of Giuseppe Ungaretti’s Shout No More
Giuseppe Ungaretti’s Shout No More Stop killing the dead, don’t shout anymore, don’t shout if you still want to hear them, if you hope not to pass on. They have the imperceivable murmur, they make no more noise than the… Read More ›
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Analysis of Gabriele d’Annunzio’s The Shepherds of Abruzzo
This is the first of seven poems grouped under the heading Sogni di terre lontane (Dreams of Distant Places), which are part of d’Annunzio’s poetic masterpiece Alcyone (Halcyon). If the entire work is a passionate celebration of the summer and… Read More ›
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Analysis of Pablo Neruda’s Sexual Water
Among many cultures, the powers of seduction and destruction are sides of the same coin. In Sexual Water, from the second volume of Residencia en la Tierra (Residence on Earth), Pablo Neruda imbues the force of water with an erotic,… Read More ›
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Self-Portrait is a poem published in Yun Dong-ju’s only collection of poetry, The Sky, the Wind, the Stars and Poetry. This collection, published after his death in 1948, includes 12 poems found posthumously as well as 19 poems he had… Read More ›
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Analysis of Carlos Germán Belli’s Segregation
An early poem, Segregation represents Peruvian Carlos Germán Belli’s role as a nexus among the Latin American avant-gardes, the poetry of social concerns, and his own later, formally complex neoclassical verse. Belli uses short arte menor verses (fewer than eight… Read More ›
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Analysis of Stefan George’s Secret Germany
This poem forms the central piece of George’s last volume, Das neue Reich (The Kingdom Come, 1928), and combines the poet’s central themes: autobiographical recollection, a fierce critique of modern society, the invocation of poetic ancestors and heroes, allusions to… Read More ›
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Analysis of Aleksandr Blok’s The Scythians
The Scythians is Aleksandr Blok’s last significant poem, composed from and for a particular moment in history. It forms part of the “January Trilogy” of 1918, together with The Twelve and the essay The Intelligentsia and the Revolution. Revolutionary Russia… Read More ›
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Analysis of Joyce Mansour’s Screams
Joyce Mansour’s first volume of verse, Cris (inarticulate expressions of pain, rage, or surprise; but also, cris de bataille, battle cries), brought her to the immediate attention of France’s literati—in particular to the attention of male surrealists who found in… Read More ›
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Analysis of Tomas Tranströmer’s Schubertiana
Published in 1978, Schubertiana, a poem from Tomas Tranströmer’s eighth volume of poems, Sanningsbarriären (Truth Barriers), explores the ways in which music functions as an antidote to the fragmentation that often defines contemporary life. As typically happens in Tranströmer’s work,… Read More ›
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Analysis of Derek Walcott’s The Schooner Flight
This quest poem fuses Derek Walcott’s highly metaphoric style with distinctly Caribbean Creole speech patterns. The narrator, a poet/sailor named Shabine, speaks English Creole, declaring, “Well, when I write / this poem, each phrase go be soaked in salt.” This… Read More ›