Thirty years separate the poems “Musée des Beaux Arts” and “Palais des Artes”, and yet one has clearly been influenced by the other. In the “Musée des Beaux Arts”, W. H. Auden starts by describing suffering in relation to painting and introduces his argument that the greatest sufferings are generally gone unnoticed. He specifically uses Breughel’s painting of Icarus as an example for his argument. “Palais des Artes”, on the other hand, does not try to make a general argument, but instead exemplifies Auden’s argument by presenting a garden-like scene where a greater drama is happening between a woman and a man but no one else in the scene notices. Auden argues that the world will keep turning regardless of what great tragedy is taking place, as can be seen in the fall of Icarus which is only a small part of the bigger painting by Breughel. Glück agrees with his theory by creating a poem in which the biggest drama plays a minor role and the main focus is on daily life. These two poems are combined not only by their underlying theories but also through their verb tenses, format and parallel situations.
The speakers in John Keats’ “When I Have Fears that I May Cease to Be,” and Sylvia Plath’s “Lady Lazarus” are both fixated on the prospect of death, yet view it in completely opposite ways. In “When I Have Fears,” death is the spectral absence of a future, whereas life is seen through the imagery of the harvest. The poem’s form—a Shakespearean sonnet—conveys Keats’ belief in the unattainability of potential fame and love. “Lady Lazarus,” on the other hand, utilizes much darker imagery, comparing life to the horrors of a concentration camp, and death to a state of protection and peace. Unlike Keats’ poem, Plath’s is structured in tercets, a form that evokes the chaos and torture depicted in Dante’s Inferno. Both poets describe what they fear as a negative space; for Keats, this negative is death, while for Plath, this negative is life.
Both John Donne’s ‘Elegy 19: To His Mistress Going to Bed’ and Marge Piercy’s ‘The Cast Off’ expose their main subject through a series of uncoverings that cumulate in the final praise of the uncovered female figure to fulfill both poem’s titles: in Donne, the imagined nudity of the “mistress” and in Piercy, the splitting of a cast to reveal the female speaker’s leg. However, while Donne’s gendered comparisons literally take ownership of the woman by progressing from the heavenly to the diminutive and objectified, Piercy’s progression from sexual descriptions of inanimate uncoverings to a finally desexualized description of a revealed woman removes the male hand from this female figure. By structuring her praised images in this way, Piercy allows the woman to reveal herself of her own will.
At first glance, Robert Browning’s “Porphyria’s Lover” and Robert Lowell’s “Skunk Hour” seem to share little in common in terms of style and form. However, Browning and Lowell both use a linguistic shift halfway through the poem to reveal the speaker’s insanity. In line 31 of “Porphyria’s Lover,” Browning shifts the active agent from Porphyria to the speaker, who subsequently commits an act of violence that exposes his insanity. Similarly in “Skunk Hour,” Lowell uses a shift from present tense to the past tense in stanza 4 to indicate a moment of introspection, during which the speaker realizes he is insane. A comparison based on the effect of the shifts reveals that, though the specific style and form of “Porphyria’s Lover” and “Skunk Hour” are distinct, in both poems they serve the function of characterizing the speaker and establishing mood.
