Every poem in the Anthology offers students a different reading experience. We glimpse into worlds that have their own individual power and message. And the medium for these meditations on human experience is language, specifically the written word that poets use to express their own encounters with their subject matter. Therefore it is essential that for each poem in the Anthology, that students make a note of their own interpretation. This personal view enables students to write creatively and productively about their examination poem or poems.
Consequently, I have endeavoured to place myself in the same situation as students and to write a concise interpretation of each poem. So, I repeatedly asked myself the follow question and made notes on my responses: What is this poem attempting to communicate to the reader and with what results?
Sonnet 43.
An ecstatic yet clear-sighted celebration of the poet’s private passion for her eventual husband, and fellow poet Robert Browning. The sonnet form is traditionally associated with expressions of romantic love but in this passionate and devotional sonnet the absence of volta on lines 8-9 reveals the lack of counter-argument conventionally represented in a sonnet. Hence we recognise the undiminished faith of the poet in the unsullied purity of her affection for her lover.
London
An angry exploration of the universal suffering of the powerless poor within a nightmarish urban landscape, where exploitation and corruption thrives. Such corruption is represented within the monarchy, church and business. Only the wandering poet and flowing Thames seem to have any freedom of movement at all and even the river is contaminated by business. This social and political commentary by the Romantic poet, Blake, is a savage inditement of human greed and of any power that is exploitative of the vulnerable
She walks in Beauty.
The Romantic poet Byron, notoriously famous as ‘ mad, bad and dangerous to know’ describes a beautiful, elusive, exotic woman using synecdoches such as ‘brow’ , ‘cheek’ and ‘raven tress’ which heighten her enigmatic status because the ‘she’ is never seen completely. Interestingly, we never hear her voice despite the ‘eloquent’ brow. Perhaps the poet enjoys her voicelessness which keeps her forever untainted and ‘innocent’.
Living Space.
What are the minimum requirements for happiness?
In this poem the poet gives admiring representation to a fragile , precarious world where the very structures of home are under constant threat of collapse. Despite this fragility, the fascinated, awestruck poet is aware of the resilience and defiant hope of the inhabitants of these slum houses where happiness is still snatched despite the abject poverty of the environment.
As Imperceptibly as Grief.
‘Tell the truth, but tell it slant.’
The poet attempts to give representation to the intensely personal experiences of grief and depression. The unconventional, often oxymoronic combinations of words, highlight the obscurity and compelling power of the private life. Human experience is expressed in an highly individual and even elliptical style that defies conventional representation. Interpretation is intuitive and is only possible in glimpses . Even untranslatable or ineffable. Fragmentation of meaning linguistically mirrors the poet’s state of mind perhaps.
Cozy Apologia.
How can contentment create a poem without seeming complacent or smug?
The title interestingly communicates a serious apology for the cosy, intimate world of the ordinary. The poem explores the very personal experience of happiness at a time of nature’s extraordinary turmoil encapsulated in the hurricane whose tough-guy name precipitates witty remembrances of inadequate previous romances. Humour is prevalent. All these remembrances serve to heighten the admiration for the poem’s addressee. The outer world of the storm itself fails to threaten the inner world of the poet’s blissful sanctuary with her beloved.
Valentine.
A cynical or realistic debunking of the cloying stereotypes of Valentine’s Day using an onion as a bathetic and witty poetic conceit. The conceit provides a dramatic and thoughtful exploration of the romantic experience. Disappointment reigns over such an experience which Duffy argues is inevitable because passionate, enduring love is transient. Definition of love represented through negatives or what it is not. The skeletal structure of the poem mimics the unwrapping of the onion’s ‘truth. ‘
Death of a Naturalist.
Explores the metaphorical ‘death’ of one era of the poet’s life. The poem is autobiographical and gives sensuous representation to the young poet’s vitality and innocent enthusiasm for nature which changes into disgust once adolescent, sexual understanding arrives, ironically giving ‘birth’ to the poet! The Poet’s Catholic upbringing is reflected in the shift from naivety to guilt through the ‘sin’ of sexuality, so that the poem seems to explore a form of bereavement in an evocative language that is loaded with sensitivity even to the point of synaesthesia.
Hawk Roosting.
A human hawk contemplates his world through the use of the dramatic monologue. His apparently ruthless and egotistical I/ eye is unapologetically complacent about his role in life’s drama. The hawk’s contentment with his own identity, which requires no evolutionary change, is in sharp contrast to other Anthology poems where change is essential and ongoing. The form of the poem reflects the static state of the speaker. Yet is the real Hawk voiceless because his experience and inner life have been created by the poet?
To Autumn.
A Romantic meditation on the inevitability of change, reflected through the Poet’s evocation of the natural transformation in the seasons, bringing about the inevitability of different forms of loss and death. Rampant fertility is exhausted and yields to a calm acceptance of hibernation and mortality. The poem employs gorgeous sensuous imagery to illustrate the inevitability of change which indirectly gives representation to Keats’ own awareness of his impending mortality from tuberculosis. Keats was aware that he was living out the ‘Autumn’ of his tragically short life.
Afternoons.
A detached male poet observes the disappointment of romantic love through the evocation of the domestic rituals of 1960’s young mothers whose hopes have faded with the inevitable march of time. The poem feels distant rather than loomingly intimate, reflecting the way women, in particular, may feel marginalized within their own lives. Gives representation to a rather dismal yet realistic awareness that human beings are infinitely replaceable in their own lives and that human agency is an illusion. Life’s bleakness evoked through carefully selected specific details that silence hope, particularly at this time for women whose lives were subjugated to maternity and the bringing up of children.
Ozymandias.
Intricately narrated through a ‘Russian Doll’ encounter with a hubristic dictator whose fall is literally and metaphorically evoked through the device of his ruined statue. Human beings are often fatally consumed by their own self-importance and try to achieve immortality through delusional attempts to imprint themselves upon the world. The sonnet form is thus ironically used to suggest Ozymandias fateful and fatal self-love. The poems universal exploration of hamartia reveals that perhaps the only possible immortality achievable for mortal human beings is through Art itself. The poet renders the fallen dictator immortal through the very act of poetic creation. The poet is no gone and the same can be said of millions of readers yet the poem itself remains to testify to the ephemeral.
Excerpt from The Prelude.
The Romantic poet Wordsworth, captures a moment in time from the innocence of childhood which endures in memory. Home is a safe place that is abandoned for the exhilarating experience of skating on ice which we suspect has become a metaphor for life’s incidents as the poet matured. Such a pleasurable, childhood remembrance is evoked through a series of sensory impressions that testify to the rituals of tentative independence on the ice. The poem feels uncomplicated in its exploration of this happy past moment until the end when the recollection encounters a slight hint of inevitable change and the inexorable march of time towards mortality. The poem has the immediacy of intensely realised autobiography and expresses the passionate potential of the young poet’s early experience.
