Modernist poems analysis

Modernist poems analysis

1.) ‘The Embankment‘ - T. E. Hulme

Once, in finesse of fiddles found I ecstasy,

In a flash of gold heels on the hard pavement.

Now see I

That warmth’s the very stuff of poesy.

Oh, God, make small

The old star-eaten blanket of the sky,

That I may fold it round me and in comfort lie.

Probably the most striking trait of the poem is the very intense use of alliterations: fantasia, fallen, finesse of fiddles, found, the flashes… In other words, that musical quality (the melopoeia, in Pound’s terms) that results from the softness of the sound of ‘f’. The soft rhythm redirects our attention to the poem: the music of the ‘f’ not only resembles the music of fiddles, it also highlights them reinforcing the image. The effect of softness is very similar to Joyce’s “the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling” in the final paragraph of The Dead.

2.) "Darkness" - Joseph Campbell

Darkness

I stop to watch a star shine

in the boghole A

star no longer, but a silverative

ribbon of light.

I look at it and pass on.

darkness title shows some negative thoughts and mood of poet. star shine shows some hope and positiveness for life.poems show is the emergence of a distinctly modern style of poetry that rejects the gushing excesses of the worst Victorian verse.

3.) 'Image'-  Edward Storer

Forsaken lovers,

Burning to a chaste white moon

Upon strange Pyres of loneliness and

drought.

here poet may be interpret the  he shows one couple and with the use of word burning shows hateness for love.

4.) "In a station of the Metro"- Ezra Pound

The apparition of these faces in the

Crowd;

Petals on a wet, black bough

In this quick poem, Pound describes watching faces appear in a metro station. It is unclear whether he is writing from the vantage point of a passenger on the train itself or on the platform. The setting is Paris, France, and as he describes these faces as a "crowd," meaning the station is quite busy. He compares these faces to "petals on a wet, black bough," suggesting that on the dark subway platform, the people look like flower petals stuck on a tree branch after a rainy night.

Though short, this poem is very sensory in nature; it allows the reader to imagine a scene while reading the lines. Through Pound's economical description of these faces as "petals on a wet, black bough," he is able to invoke a transient tone.

This poem is also a clear example of the Imagist style. Victorian poets would frequently use an abundance of flowery adjectives and lengthy descriptions in their poems. Yet Pound employs a Modernist approach to "In a Station of the Metro," using only a few descriptive words (and no verbs among them) to successfully get his point across.

5.) 'The Pool' - Hilda Doolittle

Are you alive?

I touch you

You quiver trembling like a seafish

I cover you with my net

What are you banded one?

In the poem, The Pool,"  Doolittle speaks intimately about an issue that she faced through her life:  her bi-sexuality.  One of her mentors, Sigmund Freud,  worked with Doolittle concerning her sexuality, which led to her standing as an icon for both the gay movement and feminine rights.

6.) "Insouciance" – Richard Aldington

In and out of the dreary trenches

Trudging cheerily under the stars

I make for myself little poems

Delicate as a flock of doves

They fly away like whitewinged

Doves.

In this poem, poet compares his poems with dove. Here the words like 'Trudging' and 'cheerily' gives contrasting meaning. These words give the image of life where we are doing many things unwillingly. Poems can not fly but here poet says he has made poems that can fly away like white winged doves. It looks he want to be free.

7.) Morning at the Window- T. S. Eliot

They are rattling breakfast plates in basement kitchens,

And along the trampled edges of the street

I am aware of the damp souls of housemaid

Sprouting despondently at area gates.

The brown waves of fog toss up to me

Twisted faces from the bottom of the street,

And tear from a passerby with muddy skirts

An aimless smile that hovers in the air

And vanishes along the level of the roofs.

The people rattling breakfast plates early in the morning suggest the poverty of the people who have to go to work early. They are also living in the basements of houses for they cannot afford to live in better apartments. The very roads in those streets are trampled or torn. The speaker feels that the housemaids are down heated and miserable. But for the city dwellers, the poor girls sprout out of nowhere at the gates of the city. The speaker then notices a set of several other images of poverty and dejection. He sees twisted faces of people who certainly have pain and distress. He sees a girl with tears in her eyes and a muddy skirt on her. Then someone passes by with an aimless smile. All these images are objective correlatives of poverty, which is the main theme of the poem.

8.) The Red Wheelbarrow- William Carlos Williams

so much depends

upon

a red wheel

barrow

glazed with rain

water

beside the white

chicken.

 another way to interpret the meaning of ‘The Red Wheelbarrow’ is to affirm that Williams literally means that much depends upon a red wheelbarrow and the white chickens: that these symbols of farming and agriculture are central to the maintaining of life as we know it. Of course, one may ask here why it’s important the wheelbarrow is red; would a green wheelbarrow be viewed as less important in the agrarian history of the world? But this interpretation is tenable, nevertheless.

Yet although ‘The Red Wheelbarrow’ is rhymed, the subtle interplay between the sounds of the words that end each line creates a melodious pattern that reminds us of rhyme: ‘chickens’ very faintly picks up on ‘depends’ from the beginning of the poem, while it is possible to detect a faint alliterative relationship between ‘water’ and ‘white’. In the last analysis, William Carlos Williams clearly set out to write a poem that offers concreteness of expression as its main feature. And, of course, that red wheelbarrow.

9.) Anecdote of the Jar- Wallace Stevens

I placed a jar in Tennessee,

And round it was, upon a hill.

It made the slovenly wilderness

Surround that hill.

The wilderness rose up to it,

And sprawled around, no longer wild.

The jar was round upon the ground

And tall and of a port in air.

It took dominion everywhere.

The jar was gray and bare.

It did not give of bird or bush,

Like nothing else in Tennessee.

Anecdote of the Jar is an imagist poem in which Stevens explores the question of the superiority between art and nature: Is nature superior to human creations, or does human creativity surpasses nature in some way? This is an age-old and puzzling question. This poem solves the riddle by recognizing the unique differences between art and nature: art may sometimes be more beautiful than nature but it cannot be as creative as the nature. The jar, as a symbol of the imagination, is not fertile, and it cannot recycle itself or reproduce, though it may, in imagination, be richer than the nature. Both have their uniqueness, and yet we feel that the poet is more or less on the side of the nature's diverse, creative and limitless powers of creation. The confident persona, who seems to have egoistically placed a jar to challenge the nature, realizes at last that his art is not capable of what the nature is.

10.) ‘l (a‘E. E. Cummings

l(a... (a leaf falls on loneliness)

l(a

le

af

fa

ll

s)

one

l

iness

Cummings’s use of typography affects the way we read. Pause, gravity and emphasis are heightened by the devices he employs; the sense and significance of individual letters, words or lines are underscored. But, most importantly of all, meanings are created as the reader’s thoughts are slowed in their progress through the poem. We are forced to go back and forth, thereby becoming aware of the meanings in what Norman Friedman calls an immediate moment of perception.

If Cummings had simply written, “a leaf falls, loneliness,” his publishers would probably have laughed at him. But he didn’t: he put the first ‘l’ on its own, outside the parentheses to reinforce a sense of solitude (because it is not in capitals, it looks like a number one); he put the ‘a’ on its own between the first parenthesis and the line break, and again this indefinite article suggests loneliness; this is seen also in the next line, ‘le’, the French definite article, perhaps again implying isolation; line seven contains simply the word ‘one’, and line eight is comprised only of the letter ‘l’, having a similar effect; and finally, the poem actually looks somewhat like a letter one, not to mention the image of the words, like a leaf, literally falling down the page. Cummings develops this simple poetic symbol for loneliness into something far more potent.

for more reading about this all 10 poems read in this site:-

 https://interestingliterature.com/2016/03/03/10-very-short-modernist-poems-everyone-should-read/