Themes and Devices in Poetry

• These notes cover themes, structure, and literary devices in various poems.

If

• Explores themes of masculinity, ambition, hope, power, and determination.
• Conditional clause creates a tone of uncertainty.
• The incomplete nature of the first line suggests difficulty.
• Direct address creates intimacy.
• "Make your dreams your master" uses consonance to emphasize power.
• Personification is used to convey power.
• The alternating rhyme scheme suggests expectation, contrasting with the doubt in the poem's title.
• Syllable count alternates between 11 and 10, establishing a structure that contrasts with the title’s uncertainty.
• The use of iambic pentameter mimics a heartbeat or life, which is disrupted by "if," suggesting life's susceptibility to challenges.

Prayer Before Birth

• Focuses on the themes of desperation, power, fear, religion, anger, and rebellion.
• Syllable use creates a cyclic structure.
• Graphology represents either an ECG or heartbeat, becoming increasingly urgent as it approaches life, showing fear of humanity or sin.
• Biblical imagery, such as "tall walls wall me," supports the original sin theory.
• Demonstrates how hardships foster individualism.
• Line, "let them not make me a stone," and "them" causes division and line breaks structure through syllables, which expresses rebellion and original sin.
• The phrase "otherwise kill me" displays support for the sin of murder, despite fearing sin, thus revealing the inevitability of sin and original sin.
• Caesura in the initial lines builds suspense leading up to birth and reliance on God even before birth.
• "Desert" has biblical allusions, alluding to the devil's temptation, which instigated original sin.
• First-person perspective creates intimacy, while plosives convey power and a bitter tone.

Blessing

• Centers on themes of religion, twisted perspective, desperation, vulnerability, and longing.
• Highlights poverty.
• Poem structure mirrors water flow.
• Short initial paragraphs indicate shortage, while longer paragraphs signify abundance.
• Longing for the future is evident.
• Negative imagery establishes perspective.
• Lives are centered around the sun ("liquid sun"), indicating heliocentrism, with weather determining water availability.
• Hardships foster a sense of community.
• Zoomorphism adds emphasis.
• Irony and the questioning of God "voice of a kindly god" underscores the sacredness of water.

Search for My Tongue

• Deals with themes of identity, uncertainty, introspection, immigration, and loss.
• Imagery of death in the first stanza emphasizes fear of losing one's mother tongue.
• The middle stanza is the longest, representing the core of identity.
• The third stanza employs floral imagery, contrasting death imagery with themes of hope, new life, and acceptance.

Half-past Two

• Explores themes of memory, time, the past, confusion, and isolation.
• Utilizes structure to represent incomplete understanding of time, with 11 stanzas instead of 12, and tercets create set structure.
• Third-person perspective creates detachment.
• Anatomical semantic field and personification of time gives it power.
• Abstract nouns show childish perception of time.
• Absent spaces represent the blur of time for the subject.

Piano

• Revolves around themes of nostalgia, loss, memory, grief, and music.
• The word "clamor" contrasts soft music, illustrating the contrast between past and present.
• Inconsistent meter reflects incomplete memories.
• Inclusive pronouns express longing for togetherness.
• Plosives convey power, contrasting the calmness of the mother.
• "Appassionato" represents an emotional crescendo.
• The poem shifts from passive to active voice to show regaining control over emotions.

Hide and Seek

• Focuses on: fear, isolation, society, loneliness, and despair.
• Inconsistent meter mimics a heartbeat, indicating anxiety.
• Second-person perspective creates disconnect.
• Personification of inanimate objects emphasizes finding support in other things due to a lack of human presence.
• Internal dialogue displays self-pity.
• Ending on a rhetorical question establishes the tone of mystery and unsolvability.
• "Nothing stirs" suggests no one is waiting for the speaker.
• The continuous stanza reflects a continuous experience.

Sonnet 116

• Explores love, time, defiance, integrity, conflict, change, and power.
• Nautical semantic field illustrates how love and life are journeys that share the same destination.
• There is a conflict between time and love.
• Inconsistent iambic pentameter reveals love's inconsistency.
• Uses stars to symbolize guidance and hope.
• Shakespearean sonnet form indicates the unchanging nature of love.
• Proper nouns of Time and Love creates power dynamic but love is still presented as stronger.
• Volta occurs with the line, "if this be an error and upon me proved."
• Features a heroic rhyming couplet.
• Compares time to death, illustrating how time kills love and outlives death.

La Belle Dame sans Merci

• Explores themes of gender, power, and conflict.
• 12 stanzas represent the 12 months, representing cyclical nature.
• French title creates irony.
• Ballad form emphasizes love.
• Iambic tetrameter mimics a heartbeat.
• Religious semantic field in stanza 7 creates connotations of the supernatural.
• Lily alludes to death and foreshadows death.
• Exclamatives emphasize panic and passion.
• Volta occurs when the speaker turns active instead of passive.

Poem at Thirty-Nine

• Centers on themes of nostalgia, loss, and introspection.
• Free verse creates a personal, autobiographical tone.
• End stop enacts the coming to an end of everything.
• Enjambment slows the pace.
• Caesura breaks up sentences, representing fragmented memories.
• The father bridges the past and future.
• Repetition of the first line highlights cyclical nature of grief and inescapability.
• Internal rhyme suggests similarities.
• Asyndetic list represents being overwhelmed by memories.
• Fire symbolizes hope and unpredictability.
• Changes in tense shows the impact her father had on her life.

War Photographer

• Deals with themes of conflict, society, control, trauma, memory, grief, resentment, obligation, and perspective.
• Inconsistent iambic pentameter mirrors life's inconsistencies.
• Biblical allusions to the devil represent evil.
• The set structure enacts governments controlling suffering.
• Civil wars represent internal conflict and moral dilemmas.
• Caesura mimics gunshots, showing how they end lives.
• The word "ghost" indicates haunting memories.
• Domestic imagery contrasts the safety of home with the dangers of war.
• Ending on a couplet emphasizes that war requires two parties.
• "He has a job to do" uses monosyllabic language to create a matter-of-fact, unemotional tone.

The Tyger

• Investigates themes of evil, religion, power, fear, vulnerability, creation, predation, and nature.
• The 6 stanzas represents the 6 days of creation, or the Genesis story.
• Plosives express power and danger.
• "Symmetry" disrupts the trochaic tetrameter and rhyme scheme to show imperfections and the problem of evil.
• Anatomical semantic field humanizes God.
• Allusions to Greek myths such as Icarus, Prometheus, which reference previous defiance's against God.
• Smithing semantic field implies deliberate creation, with connotations of weapons implying danger and violence.
• The oxymoron of chaos and beauty is parallel to the lamb and the tiger.
• The poem is cyclical.

My Last Duchess

• Explores themes of love, hate, anger, and control.
• Highlights betrayal.
• Consistent use of iambic pentameter mirrors a heartbeat and signifies control.
• A bitter tone contrasts joy, representing an abnormal relationship.
• End stop signals death.
• Objectifies the Duchess.

Half-Caste

• Focuses on themes of identity, pride, individualism, defiance, and race.
• Free verse creates a narrative tone.
• Lack of end stop signifies an unfinished discourse and unstructured form.
• Enjambment creates a rant-like tone and pace, violating societal norms.
• Phonetic words establish authenticity and shows being viewed as incomplete.
• Direct address engages the reader.
• Natural imagery suggests all ethnicities are natural.
• Lowercase "picasso" suggests human equality.
• Allusions to Martin Luther King Jr.

Do not go gentle into that good night

• Centers on themes of obsession, grief, death, parenthood, and loss.
• Villanelle form shows obsession and fixation.
• Semantic field of religion invokes desperation.
• The last line disrupts iambic pentameter, which is supposed to show heartbeat stopping .
• Imperatives reverse traditional power dynamics.
• Asyndetic list expresses feeling overwhelmed.
• "Gay" breaks the meter, and introduces happiness but is not in line with the theme of death.
• "Dying of the light" represents the death of hope and life.

Remember

• Deals with themes of memory, loss, remembrance, desire, nostalgia, life, death, acceptance, grief, and relationships.
• First-person perspective creates intimacy of death.
• Imperatives establishes a power dynamic.
• "Silent land" and "darkness and corruption" represents the dual nature of grief, comprising sadness and the necessity to love someone to grieve.
• Enjambment exemplifies continuation of memories and life continuing after someone has passed.
• Absence of rhyming couplets at the end signifies incompletion.
• Petrarchan sonnet form is used.
• Iambic pentameter mimics a heartbeat/life.
• Uses a single stanza to represent the merging of feelings.

This lesson explores themes, structure, and literary devices in poems such as 'If' and 'Prayer Before Birth'. It covers topics such as masculinity, ambition, hope, fear, and religion. Analysis includes conditional clauses, direct address, personification, and rhyme scheme.