Poetry (2)

Created by

Varun Aditya

Cards (11)

The City Planners
Margaret Atwood (written 1964)
Main idea: humans destroying nature, order vs disorder, history vs modernity, urban vs rural
She was a passionate activist and environmentalist
She wrote a lot of dystopian literature
Key quotes:
“when the houses, capsize, will slide/ obliquely”
“the planted/ sanitary trees”
Free verse
Juxtapositions throughout
Oxymoronic ending
The Planners
Boey Kim Cheng (written 1992)
Witnessed the urbanification and change in Singapore
Main idea: humans destroy nature
Extended metaphor of dentistry
Key quotes:
“to stain the blueprints of our pasts tomorrow”
“all gaps are plugged/with gleaming gold”
No rhyme scheme (free verse)
No fixed line length
Oxymoronic ending
Night Sweats
Robert Lowell (written 1964)
Main ideas: self-doubt, creative anxiety, writer’s block, bipolarity
Wife seems to be the only thing that can calm and organise him
Its is almost a love letter to his wife
Key quotes:
“my life’s fever”
“always inside me is the child who died”
“washed with light”
Iambic pentameter
Has some sonnet features
Structure mirrors theme (disorganised)
The Man with the Night Sweats
Thom Gunn (written 1992)
Main theme: solitude, illness/death, feeling lost
5 friends had died of AIDS (this could be an elegy to commemorate them) –
explores the horrors of the AIDS epidemic and the feeling of having no
control over your body
Key quotes:
“the given shield was cracked”
“hugging my body to me”
Eight stanzas
ABAB CC rhyme scheme
Couplets and quatrains
Rain
Edward Thomas (written 1916)
Main themes: solitude, sympathy, death, war and pain
Written in the trenches (based on his own life – died 1 year after
writing this poem)
Key quotes:
“none whom once I loved”
Helpless among the living or the dead”
Iambic pentameter
Blank verse
18 lines
From Long Distance 
Tony Harrison (written 1978) – many of his poems/plays were
controversial
Main ideas: grief, after-life, loss, texture
Key quotes:
“slippers warming by the gas”
“the disconnected number I still call”
Couples separated by distance
Cyclical ending
Funeral Blues
W. H. Auden (written 1938)
Main ideas: death, grief (how we grieve differently)
Satirises politicians and politics (originally written for a play where they
were mourning a politician)
Key Quotes:
“The stars are not wanted now”
“Cut off the telephone”
Many imperatives used
4 stanzas (each is a quatrain)
Hyperbolic metaphors used
A lot of auditory imagery used
The Telephone Call 
Fleur Adcock (written 1986)
Often put a dark twist on mundane experiences
Focused on ordinary home life
Main ideas: fraud, luck, human ignorance, human emotions, hope,
disappointment
Key Quote:
“the top of my head/ has floated off”
Six octets
No rhyme scheme
On Finding a Small Fly Crushed in a Book
Charles Tennyson Turner (written 1873) – his brother was much more
successful
Turner became a victor
Important ideas: Religion, the inevitability of death, the value of life
Key Quotes:
“pure relics of a blameless life”
“The book will close upon us”
Sonnet form and rhyme scheme (but about death)
Iambic pentameter
A Consumer's Report 
Peter Porter (1970) – two daughters and wife killed herself after 2
years of marriage
Makes many allusions to myths
Main ideas: consumerism, human greed, disappointment, value of
life, dullness vs excitement, stability vs. excitment
Key quotes:
“So finally, I’d buy it”
“I’d have liked to be more excited”
First person (two stanzas)
Free verse
Ozymandias 
Percy Shelley (written 1817)
Main themes: power, arrogance, history, the power of art, the
inevitability of being forgotten
Based on the remains of a statue in Egypt (Ramesses II – an
arrogant pharaoh of Egypt)
Key Quotes
“a sheer of cold command”
“the hand that mocked them”
Sonnet (9th line is the volta)
Rhyme scheme does not fit perfectly (love is disappearing?)