Travis+Dennis

__ Wiki Poetry Project __ __Annabel Lee by Edgar Allan Poe__ It was many and many a year ago, In a kingdom by the sea, That a maiden there lived whom you may know By the name of ANNABEL LEE; And this maiden she lived with no other thought Than to love and be loved by me.

I was a child and she was a child, In this kingdom by the sea; But we loved with a love that was more than love- I and my Annabel Lee; With a love that the winged seraphs of heaven Coveted her and me.

And this was the reason that, long ago, In this kingdom by the sea, A wind blew out of a cloud, chilling My beautiful Annabel Lee; So that her highborn kinsman came And bore her away from me, To shut her up in a sepulchre In this kingdom by the sea.

The angels, not half so happy in heaven, Went envying her and me- Yes!- that was the reason (as all men know, In this kingdom by the sea) That the wind came out of the cloud by night, Chilling and killing my Annabel Lee.

But our love it was stronger by far than the love Of those who were older than we- Of many far wiser than we- And neither the angels in heaven above, Nor the demons down under the sea, Can ever dissever my soul from the soul Of the beautiful Annabel Lee.

For the moon never beams without bringing me dreams Of the beautiful Annabel Lee; And the stars never rise but I feel the bright eyes Of the beautiful Annabel Lee; And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side Of my darling- my darling- my life and my bride, In the sepulchre there by the sea, In her tomb by the sounding sea.

__Analysis__ Edgar Allen Poe was considered part of the American Romantic movement but his works were different than most of the Romantic writers. A lot of his poetry was inspired by the deaths of women in his life, including Virginia Clemm, his 13 year old cousin who he married. His works also used a lot of gothic imagery making terror the main theme in many of them. Like many of Poe’s poems, “Annabel Lee” explores the theme of the death of a woman. The narrator starts off by describing his love for a woman named Annabel Lee. She lived in an unnamed “kingdom by the sea” where they fell in love at very young ages. They were so in love that they “loved with a love that was more than love”, and because of this, even the angels were jealous. The narrator then describes how his love Annabel Lee became sick and dies from the sickness. He explains that her sickness and death was the result of the angels coveting their love. He blames the angels’ envy of their love for her death, and he does this more than once throughout the poem, showing his excessive feelings of loss. Even though she dies, their love is so stronger, stronger than anyone else’s, that their souls could not be separated from each other’s which shows he believes that they will be together again. There is not one night that he doesn’t dream about her and ever night he sees her eyes in the stars, as he lies down next to her in her tomb. This poem shows how much love he had for a certain women. I believe that the inspiration he had for Annabel Lee came from his wife which would show that Poe was deeply in love with her. The narrator was so in love with this woman, maybe even obsessed that he dreamt about her every night and laid by her grave, and believed that someday their souls would be reunited. One day I hope to be so much in love with a woman that I could feel the same feelings for her as the narrator felt for his love Annabel Lee. __ To My Dear and Loving Husband by Anne Bradstreet __ F ever two were one, then surely we. If ever man were lov'd by wife, then thee. If ever wife was happy in a man, Compare with me, ye women, if you can. I prize thy love more than whole Mines of gold Or all the riches that the East doth hold. My love is such that Rivers cannot quench, Nor ought but love from thee give recompetence. Thy love is such I can no way repay. The heavens reward thee manifold, I pray. Then while we live, in love let's so persever That when we live no more, we may live ever. __Analysis__ Anne Bradstreet was America’s first women poet. She was a very strong and well educated puritan woman and loved her husband very much. This conflicted with her puritan beliefs because women were expected to be reserved, domestic, and obey their husband’s every word. Women were not to show passionate feelings of love towards their husband which Bradstreet did through her poems. Throughout her writings, you can hear two different voices. Some of her works she speaks of her puritan beliefs and lives up to expectations of women, such as her writing “To My Dear Children” in which she speaks about her beliefs and how puritans are supposed to act. In other works she speaks of her resistance to the puritan expectations of women and her passionate love for her husband, such as her poems “To My Dear and Loving Husband”, and “A Letter to Her Husband, Absent upon Public Employment”. In “To My Dear and Loving Husband” Anne Bradstreet professes her love for her husband. Because of her love for him is so strong, believes that they are one and that she is truly happy to have him. In line 5-6 she speaks of gold and riches and how he is worth more than that. Anne doesn’t consider her husband to be a possession and she really cares for him and truly appreciates his love for her. Her love is also everlasting. “[Her] love is such that rivers cannot quench” which shows that her love will never run out and is so strong that nothing could change the way she felt about him. She also describes her husband’s lover for her and how she can’t “repay” him for it so she hopes that the heavens will reward him for loving her so much. At the end of the poem she says that she hopes that they love each other until they die so that when they die they will be together forever. Puritan women were not supposed to express such passion for their husbands but because Bradstreet does so, this shows that she really loves her husband. She is willing to go against her beliefs to express the way she feels about her husband and she continues this in some of her other poems. __ After Apple-Picking by Robert Frost __ My long two-pointed ladder’s sticking through a tree Toward heaven still, And there’s a barrel that I didn’t fill Beside it, and there may be two or three Apples I didn’t pick upon some bough. 5 But I am done with apple-picking now. Essence of winter sleep is on the night, The scent of apples: I am drowsing off. I cannot rub the strangeness from my sight I got from looking through a pane of glass 10 I skimmed this morning from the drinking trough And held against the world of hoary grass. It melted, and I let it fall and break. But I was well Upon my way to sleep before it fell, 15 And I could tell What form my dreaming was about to take. Magnified apples appear and disappear, Stem end and blossom end, And every fleck of russet showing clear. 20 My instep arch not only keeps the ache, It keeps the pressure of a ladder-round. I feel the ladder sway as the boughs bend. And I keep hearing from the cellar bin The rumbling sound 25 Of load on load of apples coming in. For I have had too much Of apple-picking: I am overtired Of the great harvest I myself desired. There were ten thousand thousand fruit to touch, 30 Cherish in hand, lift down, and not let fall. For all That struck the earth, No matter if not bruised or spiked with stubble, Went surely to the cider-apple heap 35 As of no worth. One can see what will trouble This sleep of mine, whatever sleep it is. Were he not gone, The woodchuck could say whether it’s like his 40 Long sleep, as I describe its coming on, Or just some human sleep.

__Analysis__ Robert Frost was born in San Francisco. At a young age his parents separated because of his father’s alcoholism and soon after his father died. When he began to write, he was rejected many times. So he moved to England where he was first published. Then he moved back to American where he bought a farm and enjoyed his life with his family. His wife then died from heart failure in 1938. Soon after, his daughter became mentally ill and his son took his own life. Frost ended up burying four of his children. Despite all of this he continued to write of nature’s beauty. Frost died in 1983 of Pneumonia. “After Apple-Picking” is about Frost doing what he loved-working on his farm. All day he had been picking apples. For a long time he had waited for the harvest and he greatly desired it. But now he has become tired and drowsy, and he has been drowsy since the morning. It seems that he is so tired that he starts to imagine things. Despite him being very tired, he is very happy because he enjoyed picking apples and as he falls asleep he wonders if the sleep is a normal sleep or something different. Many of Frost’s works are about nature and the work he did on the farm. This is because he was happiest when he was with his family at his farm. His poems speak of the love he had for nature and the work that he did. Because of the love he had for nature, he was able to stay a happy man after the unfortunate things that happened in his life. __ Poetry by Marianne Moore __ I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle. Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers in it after all, a place for the genuine. Hands that can grasp, eyes that can dilate, hair that can rise if it must, these things are important not because a

high-sounding interpretation can be put upon them but because they are useful. When they become so derivative as to become unintelligible, the same thing may be said for all of us, that we do not admire what we cannot understand: the bat holding on upside down or in quest of something to

eat, elephants pushing, a wild horse taking a roll, a tireless wolf under a tree, the immovable critic twitching his skin like a horse that feels a flea, the base- ball fan, the statistician-- nor is it valid to discriminate against 'business documents and

school-books'; all these phenomena are important. One must make a distinction however: when dragged into prominence by half poets, the result is not poetry, nor till the poets among us can be 'literalists of the imagination'--above insolence and triviality and can present

for inspection, 'imaginary gardens with real toads in them', shall we have it. In the meantime, if you demand on the one hand, the raw material of poetry in all its rawness and that which is on the other hand genuine, you are interested in poetry.

__Analysis__ Born in Kirkwood, Missouri in 1887, Marianne Moor was a very inventive modernist writer. In her childhood her family was abandoned by her father so her mother worked as a teacher to support them. She attended Bryn Mawr College where she began to write poetry and graduated in 1909. She then traveled with her mother to France and England but then returned to the U.S. to teach. Her poetry was first published in small magazines in 1915. She never married and continued writing poetry through her life. She also became a critic and wrote numerous essays on many works. In “Poetry” Moore speaks of reading creating and understanding poetry. She believes that to create good poetry you must enjoy reading it. But not only must you enjoy reading it but take writing poetry seriously because “when dragged into prominence by half poets, the result is not poetry”. A reason why people may not like poetry is because they do not understand it and because of this, poetry may not seem very important. These poems don’t take “a high-sounding interpretation” to understand them, but an open mind to what they are saying and a willingness to enjoy reading them. At the end she says that you can only be interest in poetry if you truly demand everything that poetry has to offer. To me poetry has always been a mystery. I have never been able to understand and interpret the simplest of poems. To Moore this may be because I do not enjoy reading it and I am not open to what poetry has to offer. But when I open my mind to poetry and not reject it because I don’t like it, then I may understand it and enjoy it. Then poetry can be important and useful.