Analyse: Gedichte von Pope, Donne, Keats & Heaney
Epigram
This poem is an epigram by Alexander Pope, and it was written in 1738, in the 18th century. This poem is a couplet in iambic pentameter. The I voice is an unnamed speaker who is presumed to be the poet, and he is talking to the readers. He wrote it as a taunt of classes. The title introduces you to the meaning of the poem. It is interesting because it is as long as the poem itself and it has the same importance as the poem itself. The summary would be that the poem starts with a title in which we know that ''I'' refers to the poet. In the poem ''I'' refers to the poet as well and ''you'' refers to the reader. The collar of a dog or the dog itself is given to His Highness, which can have different meanings. At the end the poet asks ''whose dog are you?'', saying that we all belong to someone, whether we believe it or not.
As far as imagery and linguistic and rhetorical features are concerned, this poem is characterized by a metaphor: ''Kew'' refers to a palace with beautiful gardens in London, and ''His Highness'' is a metaphor for Frederick, Prince of Wales. The rhyming pattern is ''AA'' because it is simply a couplet.
The setting of this poem is in London, in a neighbourhood of Richmond called Kew. It is famous because of its gardens, an area declared a World Heritage Site.
Intertextualität im Epigram
I would like to conclude the analysis of this poem by pointing out how intertextuality works. When in the epigram we talk about ''Kew'' and ''His Highness'', we know they are actually metaphors for a palace in London and Frederick, Prince of Wales. These are the references taken to create this poem.
Break of Day
This metaphysical poem was written by John Donne in the Renaissance period. ''Break of Day'' is structured with a quatrain and a final couplet in iambic tetrameter. The I voice is a lover, who is addressing a beloved with an anxious and desperate tone.
The subject is that the poem is about human love (real but at the same time insecure) and ''carpe diem'', because time goes by fast and he does not want the beloved to leave. In the first quatrain the lover wants his beloved to stay with him so that he does not break his heart with their separation. In the final couplet the poet keeps a selfish position; he wants the beloved near him in a possessive way. Here the tone changes to a frustrated approach.
As far as imagery and linguistic and rhetorical features are concerned, this poem is characterized by a hyperbole ''my joys will die'' and a euphemism ''and perish in their infancy'', the use of a soft word for something as hard as death. In addition, there is an imperative of the word ''stay'' at the beginning of the poem. The rhyming pattern is the quatrain that rhymes in couplets, and the final couplet does as well: ''AABBCC''.
Intertextualität in Break of Day
I would like to conclude the analysis of this poem by pointing out how intertextuality works in ''Break of Day''. This poem holds a relation with John Donne's other poem ''The Flea'', which is again connected to Andrew Marvell's ''To His Coy Mistress''. Even though this poem does not talk about sex, it is about the persuasion coming from the lover towards the beloved. He is convincing her of something.
Hard Times
This fragment belongs to the novel ''Hard Times'', written in the Victorian Age by novelist Charles Dickens. Hard Times is a satirical novel, because it uses exaggeration to criticize the school system and a dictatorial system, in this case.
In this excerpt of Dickens' Hard Times, the speaker emphasizes to the schoolmaster and another adult how boys and girls should be taught nothing but facts. This is shown in the way language works; the emphasis is placed on facts. The word is repeated five times in the opening paragraph. This suggests a lack of importance to the idea of the imagination (imaginative ideas are discouraged).
The setting is a school filled with children and mastered by a schoolmaster. However, the text does not give us many clues to know what the setting is exactly.
There are three characters in this text: the speaker, the schoolmaster and another adult. There is a third-person narrator, an omniscient narrator. He knows everything and is in total control. The speaker is inflexible and rigid; his mouth is wide, thin and hard set, which probably indicates that his views are equally hard set. His head gives the impression of scarcely having ''ware-house room for the hard facts stored inside''. Everything gives the impression of squareness.
Intertextualität in Hard Times
As far as intertextuality is concerned, it is worth establishing the similarities between this text and Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist. The speaker of Hard Times can be associated with the master of the workhouse, because both are inflexible and rigid and reflect authority. Both texts show how people from the middle and upper classes have imposed their rules and systems on the lower classes.
La Belle Dame Sans Merci
This poem is a ballad by John Keats, written in the Romantic period. A ballad is a medieval genre revived by the Romantic poets. The genre is indicated in the title of the poem. This ballad is made up of 12 stanzas, and each stanza is a quatrain. It is written in iambic tetrameter.
The speakers in this case are four different people: an unnamed speaker, the knight, the lady, and the princes and warriors. Each of these speakers has different addressees: the unnamed speaker talks to the knight, the knight talks to the lady, the lady talks to the knight, and the princes and warriors talk to the knight. Thus the poem explores the theme of unrequited love but also impossible love (she is a fairy and he is a mortal). The tone is sombre and sorrowful.
The summary of the poem is that a speaker asks a knight what happened to him. The knight answers that he met a beautiful lady who seemed to love him. When he set her on his horse, she led him to her cave. There she sang him to sleep. In his sleep he had nightmares. Pale kings, princes and warriors told him he had been enslaved by a beautiful but cruel lady. When he awoke, the lady was gone and he was lying on a cold hillside.
Moreover, the setting of the poem is late autumn, in England during the age of chivalry. We know it is autumn because of words like ''withering sedge'', ''the cold'' and ''the absence of birdsong''.
As far as imagery and linguistic and rhetorical features are concerned, this poem is characterized by a metaphor comparing the colour of his cheeks with the colour of a rose (line 11). Alliteration (4th stanza): ''Her hair was long, her foot was light, and her eyes were wild''. The language is related to nature: ''lake'', ''birds'', ''lily'', ''rose'', ''garland'', ''hill''. The Romantics enjoyed associating human emotions with states of nature. The rhyming pattern is ''abcb aded'' in each stanza, giving a sense of completeness in itself.
Intertextualität in La Belle Dame Sans Merci
I would like to conclude the analysis of this poem by pointing out how intertextuality works in ''La Belle Dame Sans Merci''. Keats based the title of his lyrical ballad on the title of a long French poem written in 1428 by Alain Chartier. He based the form on the folk ballad. The poem belongs to the tradition of courtly love. When it comes to historical and cultural context, the poem blends two preoccupations of Romanticism: the chivalric world of the romance period in the Middle Ages, and the tendency to melancholy as a result of love (the pain of love could be as thrilling as its satisfaction).
Mid-Term Break
This poem is an elegy by Seamus Heaney, written in the Eighteenth Century period. ''Mid-Term Break'' has a structure of eight stanzas in iambic pentameter. The I voice is an unnamed speaker, presumed to be a young person, who is telling others what happened when he found out that his brother was dead. Thus, the speaker is sad and melancholic.
The subject is that the unnamed speaker laments the death of someone close to him. The first tercet focuses on the speaker's isolation (''I sat all morning / our neighbours''). The word knell introduces what the poem is going to be about: death. The second tercet shows the speaker's father's sadness. Although he had experienced death like this before, it had not been the same. The third tercet introduces a new character, a baby who doesn't even know what is happening and is laughing. The speaker is embarrassed because he doesn't know how to behave in this context. The fourth tercet deals with strangers giving condolences while the mother comforts him. The fifth tercet is less personal. It starts with the mother, as if she could cry more, and then introduces the ambulance with a corpse. In the sixth tercet the speaker finally sees the dead person surrounded by candles; he hasn't seen him in six weeks. In the seventh tercet, the dead boy is in his coffin. He died in a car accident, but he didn't have a scar. The final stanza is a very touching sentence. It emphasizes the death of a child.
As far as imagery and linguistic and rhetorical features are concerned, this elegy is characterized by onomatopoeia ''knelling'' (line 2). Alliteration: ''A four foot box, a foot for every year'' (line 22). Simile: ''He lay in the four foot box as in his cot'' (line 20). Metaphor: ''wearing a poppy bruise'' (line 19). Enjambment: ''Away at school, as my mother held my hand / In hers and coughed out angry tears'' (lines 12 and 13). The rhyming pattern is offset by a series of assonant effects, so there is no formal rhyme scheme. It is in the final two lines that the poet uses the only full rhyme in the elegy. This gives the ending a sense of finality, emphasizing the theme of death.
Intertextualität in Mid-Term Break
I would like to conclude the analysis by pointing out how intertextuality works in ''Mid-Term Break''. This elegy is related to ''Funeral Blues'' by W. H. Auden, because both talk about the themes of death, sadness, melancholy and mourning.