Poem

Time is a common theme in poems. Its immutable presence is able to at once bring one poem to lament lost time while another poem to beatify it because of the love they had for another person. The three poems this essay will discuss are A.E. Houseman’s To An Athlete...

A. E. Housman's “To an Athlete Dying Young” is what may be called a “consistent” poem. It has a message to convey, the message is directed to the athlete of the title, and the poem is itself a variation on congratulations to any athlete who performs well. This element is...

Gary Soto’s Saturday at the Canal and How Things Work each feature a different perspective on a surprisingly related theme. Similarly, the tones of the poems are similar, while their syntactic structures are very different. The former poem features a pessimistic and wishful point of view, one in which dreams...

Louise Erdrich’s Indian Boarding School: The Runaways is a poem that describes certain aspects of freedom and a wish to escape, as experienced by young girls attempting to leave a boarding school. Not only does the poem appear to describe a present desire for freedom, but it also contains meditations...

Richard Calmit Adams was a historian and poet from Delaware who researched the topic of Indian life. It is believed that he also worked in the court in Washington D.C. but devoted a huge part of his life to literature and built a writing career. His poem “A Delaware Indian...

In Henry Miller’s play The Crucible, the small Massachusetts community of Salem falls into ruin as it hunts and kills suspected witches. The spark that lit the fire and set the villagers against one another is mass accusations and cover-ups all in an effort to protect reputations. In the opening...

The title of Jane Miller’s poem “Sonnet Against Nuclear Weapons” gives the reader a clear impression as to what the content of the piece will address: the reader anticipates a polemic against the usage of nuclear arsenals in poetic form. However, when encountering the text itself, there appears to be...

Billy Collins, “the poet laureate of the United States, who lives in an antique farmhouse in Somers” (Foderaro, 2003) has been dubbed “the most popular poet in America” by the New York Times (Poetry Foundation, 2013). Of his many, many poems, perhaps one of the poems that resonates the most...

Speculating upon Sexton’s poem Words, it should be viewed as evoking a multitude of responses in readers; an American poet here puts a lot of effort into narrowing her attention on to a single focus – duality. In other words, the poem embodies itself as an excursus into why simple...