Review of Feast (Part 2)

Review of Feast

The poem “Feast” written by Edna St. Vincent Millay, belongs to the Modern Poetry of English Literature. Experience of poverty was a hall mark in the life of Edna. So Millay’s poem “Feast” is a good example for her blending of poverty.

 America is a country, rich with an overabundance of food and drink. There are times when tons and tons of wheat flour are dumped in the sea merely to maintain high prices in the world market while the poor in both America and elsewhere starve. Edna St. Vincent Millay’s poem ‘Feast’ is her protest against such meaningless waste, while people starve all over the world.

Feast is an event where food and drinks are distributing in a large scale. The poem narrates a story of hunger and thirst. Poet is so familiar with the process of producing wine. Wine is a major drink in a feast.  Millay highlighting wine in many ways. Although the working class produced wine, they are deprived of the outcome of their work. But upper class feast on the production of lower class. The another thing Millay highlight is the best wine is thirst. When we don’t have something we feel it valuable.  Likewise, the poem brings out different ideas.

The themes discussed through the poem are,

·         The social disparity between the upper class and the working class

·    The ironic situation that working class is deprived of their production

·      In equal distribution of resources between the rich and the poor

·       Social inequality

·      Sarcastically criticising how the rich people feast on the production of the poor while poor are starving

·        Lack of something which gives value to it 

The techniques used in the poem are,

·         Lyrical form

·         First person point of view

·         Use of food imageries such as wine, grapes, beans

·         Use of symbolism

-          Grapes and beans symbolising production

-          Vintner and monger symbolising the commercial class

·         Tone of irony and sarcasm

·         Use of regular rhyming scheme

My Dreams, My Works, Must Wait, Till After Hell (part 1)

My Dreams, My Works, Must Wait, Till After Hell

I hold my honey and I store my bread

In little jars and cabinets of my will.

I label clearly and each latch and lid

I bid, be firm till I return from hell,

I am very hungry. I am incomplete.

And none can tell when I may dine again.

No man can give me any word but wait,

The puny light. I keep eyes pointed in;

Hoping that, when the devil days of my hurt

Drag out to their last dregs and I resume

On such legs as are left me, in such heart

As I can manage, remember to go home,

My taste will not have turned insensitive

To honey and bread old purity could love.

Gwendolyn Brooks (1917-2000)

Gwendolyn Brooks

Gwendolyn Brooks 

Gwendolyn Brooks was born on June 7,1917. Brooks is an American poet. In the last twenty-five years’ African American women poets have become a major force and they have been given the acclaim so long denied to their predecessors. Pulitzer Prizes have been awarded to some of them as a recognition of their work. Gwendolyn Brooks was the first African American woman to receive it. The major theme of their works is their liberation both as a women and as African American poets.

Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath was born on 27, 1932, in Boston, Massachusetts. Plath belongs to the 20^th century of poetry known as confessional poetry. She was known as a poet and a novelist. Her interest of writing started at an early age. She won a scholarship to Smith College in 1950 because of publishing large number of her works. Sylvia Plath at the end committed suicide after two previous attempts. At the third attempt she succeeded in killing herself. At the first two attempts she really did not want to die. She wanted also to live.

In the poem “Lady Lazarus” she mentioned “I have done it again” which means her previous attempts to die. She was caught between her attractions to life as well as to death.

Sylvia Plath married Ted Hughes who was also a poet in 1956. It was a stormy relationship. In 1960, Plath published her first collection of poetry, “The Colossus” at England. And in the same year she gave a birth to their first child, a daughter and after two years later she had a son as the second child. But she was unfortunate to failing her marriage apart.

After Ted Hughes left her for another woman, she was in a deep depression. Struggling with her mental illnesses she wrote “The Bell Jar”, her only novel.  It is based on her life and deals with one young woman’s mental disorder. Plath was the first person to win a posthumous Pulitzer prize in 1982.

On February 11, 1963 Sylvia Plath died  by committing suicide.

Mirror (Part 1)

Mirror

I am silver and extract. I have no preconception,

Whatever I see, I swallow immediately.

Just as it is, unlisted by love or dislike

I am not cruel, only truthful

The eye of a little god, four cornered.

Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall.

It is pink, with speckles. I have looked at it so long

I think it is a part of my heart. But it flickers.

Faces and darkness separate us over and over.

Now I am a lake. A woman bends over me.

Searching my reaches for what she really is

Then she turns to those liars, the candle or the moon.

I see her back, and reflect it faithfully.

She rewards me with tears and an agitation of hands.

I am important to her. she comes and goes.

Each morning it is her face the replaces the darkness.

In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me and old woman

Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.

Sylvia Plath (1932-1963)

Review Of Preludes (part 2)

Review Of Preludes

The poem ‘preludes’ written by T.S Eliot belongs to Modern poetry of English literature. Eliot writes the poem as an introduction to the modern metropolitan. The versification of the poem is done depending on the various times of the day.

Through the poem Eliot brings out the realities related to a metropolitan social context.

·         Pollution

·         Loneliness or isolation

      -even morning is associated with unpleasant imagery.

·         Individuality

-Lack of family concept

·         Pretension

·         Destruction of nature

·         Monotony

·         Physical and psychological impurity

·         Reversal nature

·         Alienation

·         Sufferings

·         Corruption

·         Lack of diversity

Eliot highlighting the inability of changing these issues and emphasising the need for adaptation.  The above mentioned realities can be taken as the themes of the poem.

Techniques      

·         Figurative language

·        Critical and sarcastic tone

·        Gradually makes the poem personal

·        Images

·        Negative images

Preludes (Part 1)

Preludes 

I

The Winter evening settles down

With smell of steaks in passageways

Six o’ clock.

The burnt out ends of smoky days.

And now a gusty shower wraps

The grimy scraps

Of withered leaves about your feet

And newspapers from vacant lots;

The showers beat

On broken blinds and chimney-pots,

And at the corner of the street

A lonely cab-horse steams and stamps.

And then the lighting of the lamps.

II

The morning comes to consciousness

Of faint stale smells of beer

From the sawdust-tramples street

With all its muddy feet that press

To early coffee-stands.

With the other masquerades

That time resumes,

One thinks of all the hands

That are raising dingy shades

In a thousand furnished rooms.

III

You tossed a blanket from the bed,

You lay upon your back, and waited;

You dozed, and watched the night revealing

The thousand sordid images

Of which your soul was constituted;

They flickered against the ceiling.

And when all the world came back

And the light crept up between the shutters

And you heard the sparrows in the gutters,

You had such a vision of the street

As the street hardly understands;

Sitting along the bed’s where

You curled the papers from your hair,

Or clasped the yellow soles of feet

In the palms of both soiled hands.

IV

His soul stretched tight across the skies

That fade behind a city

Or tramples by insistent feet

At four and five and six o’ clock;

And short square fingers stuffing pipes,

And evening newspapers, and eyes

Assured of certain certainties,

The conscience of a blackened street

Impatient to assume the world.

I am moved by the fancies that are curled

Around these images, and cling;

The notion of some infinitely gently

Infinitely suffering thing.

Wipe your hands across your mouth, and laugh;

The worlds revolve like ancient women

Gathering fuel in vacant lots.

T.S Eliot (1888-1965)

T.S Eliot

T.S Eliot

The full name of Eliot is Thomas Stearns Eliot. He was born in September 26, 1888, St. Louis, Missouri, in the United States, to a prominent Boston Brahmin family. He moved to England in 1914 at the age of 25, settling, working and marrying there. He was considered as an essayist, publisher, playwright, literary and social critic.

He is considered as one of the major poet in twentieth century. T. S Eliot is considered as the father of Modern Poetry. Breaking away from the Victorian tradition Eliot introduced a new subject in a new style. Eliot brought all things both beautiful as well as ugly into poetry.

Eliot died in January 4, 1965, Kensington, London, United Kingdom.