DDCPoetry

Poem found here:  "from Anactoria" by Algernon Charles Swinburne Anactoria Based on the wikipedia article, this is just a portion of the longer poem which talks about Sappho's love and inspiration -- Anactoria.  But this is not the adoration love poem.  The first line of the rhymed couplet poem starts out with, "Yes, thou shalt be forgotten like spilt wine".  The Dionysian introduction brings a sense of push and pull in this relationship as the pull is, "Except these kisses of my lips on thine / Brand them with immortality;"  -- What the speaker thinks will happen versus the present.  There's definitely a play of lust here. "but me -- / Men shall not see bright fire nor hear the sea,"  Note the idolization is to "Anactoria" and not to the speaker himself.  By downplaying himself there's a weird thing.  Yes, the love is being cast above him, but he is making himself memorable by stating he won't be memorable, "Nor mi...

Original poem reprinted online here: "A Ballad of Dreamland" by Algernon Charles Swinburne Originally read: July 14, 2013 More information about the Poet: Algernon Charles Swinburne Ballad . So what appears to be octaves are actually two quatrains with a "abab" rhyme scheme pushed together.  And even though the meter may be a bit loose, the rhyme scheme alternates between soft sounds (-es, -red) to harsh sounds (-art).  Also what the octave form brings is immediate juxtaposition that ties in together rather than separate individual stanzas. In the first stanza the focus is with the speaker, "I hid my heart in a nest of roses" and past me wrote "flowery metaphor" as more of a pun.  But this is the direction the poem goes in the beginning -- the comparison to the self  to metaphor on a slight hyperbolic scale.    The image is nice, but lines like, "Under the roses I hid my heart" invite a symbolic interpretation that leads to the same -- ...

Original poem reprinted online here: "April" by Algernon Charles Swinburne Originally read: April 6, 2013 More information about the Poet: Algernon Charles Swinburne This is an easy and not so easy poem to decipher.  On the surface there's an alternating rhyme scheme sort of (ababcdeded) but that "c" line changes the dynamics of the poems intent, and trajectory.  Is the "c" line a volta, not all the time, but sometimes. Also the poem has a simple subject, right, speaker loves a woman like the divine and (possibly) vice versa, or maybe not.  Yeah it gets confusing really quick for me because the tone changes on the subject (both the woman and the divine).  I've been stuck on how to analyze this poem, so I'm just going to do it one stanza at a time. In stanza one the main focus is on nature and the comparison between, "The songs of the birds begin" (which has a positive connotation), and "I sing with sighing between" -- happy ...