Intro Paragraph for Browning and Lowell

Both “Porphyria’s Lover” by Robert Browning and “Skunk Hour” by Robert Lowell address the topic of maddening loneliness that results from an alienating society. This sense of madness caused by social convention is delivered in a confessional by the speaker, and amplified by the description of the poem’s setting, celebration of the grotesque, and introspective digressions. Lowell and Browning use many of the same literary tools to deliver these experiences, especially in regards to execution of juxtaposition, imagery, and punctuation.

The Uncovering of Paradox: Poetry Comparison Essay

Although composed centuries apart, John Donne’s “Elegy XIX: To His Mistress Going to Bed” and Marge Piercy’s “The Cast Off” share a common theme and method of implementation. Both poems use paradox, expressed through diction, metaphor and imagery, to uncover and praise their central figures—for Donne his female mistress and for Piercy everyday, inanimate objects. However, Donne uses paradoxical language and imagery in his treatment of secular love as sacred love to seduce and coax his object of desire and, in doing so, seeks to gain power and agency over her. In contrast, Piercy uses paradox to praise inanimate objects and, in the final strophe, a female figure as well. Through her chosen diction, she employs them both with power and agency—rendering them the subjects not objects of her poem.

Poetry Comparison, Keats and Plath

John Keats’s When I Have Fears that I May Cease to Be and Sylvia Plath’s Lady Lazarus each deal with the subject of death, specifically the way in which one’s attitude toward death affects the quality of one’s life. The speakers in each poem hold opposing views on death, Keats’s narrator paralyzed by a dread of death and Plath’s spurred on by an attraction to it. In both poems, the form and language work to mirror these conceptions of death and to instill them viscerally in the experience of the reader.

-Leena

Comparative Essay - Intro Paragraph

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.

Musee des Beaux Arts/Palais des Artes

The imagery of the pond gives both poems a sense of timelessness and circularity, which strengthens the main idea of both poems that life goes on for the rest of the world no matter what is happening in the subject's personal world. In both "Museé des Beaux Arts" and "Palais des Artes", the formal diction, controlled imagery, and calm tones create an atmosphere of passionate restraint reinforced by the narrative arcs of Bruegel's Icarus and the lovers by the pond.

-Stacy

The Long, Dark Night: The Language of Hope and Despair in Milton and Hopkins.

          John Milton's Sonnet XIX and Gerard Manley Hopkins' "I Wake and Feel the Fell of Dark Not Day" both address depression and darkness, both literally and metaphorically, in Petrarchan sonnets. Although both deal with despair and question God's role in suffering while using ostensibly identical forms, the language and punctuation couple with the content to lead the reader to very different conclusions. I shall examine the similarities and differences between the two texts, paying particular attention to the way that they utilize word choice, punctuation, and the Petrarchan form.


--K.S. Anthony

Draft thesis

Housman and Larkin both utilize trees as symbols of the passage of time and general mortality in order to impart a larger virtue of life. However, although they partake in the same subtly didactic goal, their respective methods in portraying that share some disparities. From the pristine imagery and optimistic tone of Housman's "Loveliest of Trees, the Cherry Now", to the more somber and connotative diction of Larkin's "The Trees", two differing thematic life messages are presented to the reader from unique, different approaches. Housman advocates a carpe diem outlook on life while Larkin relays one of perseverance.