i. Great rats, small rats, lean rats, brawny rats, And at evening evermore In a chapel by the shore, When the chaunters, sad and saintly, Yellow tapers burning faintly Doleful masses chaunt for thee, Miserere, Domine! Hark! the cadence dies away On the quiet moonlight sea; The boatmen rest their oars and say, Browning Coleridge j. Wailing, wailing, wailing, the wind over land and sea, And Willy's voice in the wind, "Oh mother, come out to me!” k. So we'll go no more a-roving So late into the night, Though the heart be still as loving Tennyson Byron 7. Apply this same test, reading aloud, to the following contemporary poems: 1. The Highwayman, The Barrel-Organ, by Alfred Noyes 2. The City of Falling Leaves, Patterns, by Amy Lowell 3. The Horse Thief, by William Rose Benét 4. Tewksbury Road, Reynard the Fox, by John Masefield 5. The Congo, The Santa Fé Trail, The Chinese Nightingale, by Vachel Lindsay 6. Tartary, by Walter de la Mare 7. Boots, by Rudyard Kipling 8. The Wild Ride, Irish Peasant Song, by Louise Imogen Guiney 9. Da Leetla Boy, Mia Carlotta, Between Two Loves, by T. A. Daly 10. The Turning of the Babies in the Bed, A Coquette Conquered, Discovered, by Paul Laurence Dunbar 11. Grey Rocks and Greyer Sea, by Charles G. D. Roberts 12. Daisies, by Bliss Carman 13. "Grandmither, Think not that I Forget," by Willa Cather Exercise 9 Here are examples of onomatopoeia. Read each aloud to see what the poet is attempting to suggest. Is the onomatopoeia in each passage imitative or merely suggestive? Is it secured by meter or by sound regardless of meter? What letters and sounds in each passage are most suggestive? d. e. f. I bubble into eddying bays, I babble on the pebbles. And all around I heard you pass Tennyson Stevenson From the church came a murmur of folk at their prayers. Arnold g. h. Down, down, down; Down to the depths of the sea! Arnold Arnold When down swung the sound of a far-off bell. i. While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping, As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door. What are the symbols and images here? What comparisons do they suggest? What ideas do they suggest? a. Exercise 11 Music, when soft voices die, Odors, when sweet violets sicken, Rose leaves, when the rose is dead, And so thy thoughts, when thou art gone, Shelley By means of images this poem suggests the value of all beautiful things. Each image suggests a special kind of appeal to one's sense of the beautiful-beauty of sound, of odor, of touch, of sight, of thought. What are the images here? What truth do they suggest? b. Over the shoulders and slopes of the dune I saw the white daisies go down to the sea, The bobolinks rallied them up from the dell, And all of their dancing was, "Life, thou art good!" 1 Do the pictures here suggest a mood or an idea or both? If both, are the two separate or essential each to each? Has the sound anything to do with the mood or the idea? Would it have been possible to express the same idea as well by different pictures or different moods? Is the poem, as a philosophy of life, the result of a special mood felt on a special occasion, or could it be always true? Compare and contrast it with Louis Untermeyer's poem Mockery. Exercise 12 Find the symbols and images in the following poems, and in a similar way discuss their value and their significance: 1 1. Emerson: The Rhodora 2. Holmes: The Chambered Nautilus 3. Joaquin Miller: Crossing the Plains 4. Christina Rossetti: Consider 5. Thackeray: The End of the Play 6. Keats: On First Looking into Chapman's Homer 7. Bryant: To a Waterfowl Daisies, by Bliss Carman; reprinted by permission of and by arrangement with Small, Maynard and Company. 8. Herrick: To Daffodils 9. Joyce Kilmer: Trees 10. Charles Kingsley: Clear and Cool 11. Edith Thomas: Frost To-night 12. Edwin Markham: Lincoln, the Man of the People; The Man with the Hoe 13. John Masefield: Cargoes 14. John Drinkwater: Symbols 15. Rupert Brooke: The Great Lover 16. Richard Burton: Black Sheep 17. Robert Frost: Mending Wall, Birches, The Onset 18. Carl Sandburg: Cool Tombs, Clean Curtains, Grass 19. Sara Teasdale: The Long Hill, Water Lilies 20. Emily Dickinson: Suspense, Indian Summer, A Cemetery 21. William Rose Benét: The Falconer of God 22. Willa Cather: The Palatine 23. Walter de la Mare: The Listeners 24. Thomas Hardy: She Hears the Storm 25. Amy Lowell: Patterns 26. William Vaughn Moody: Gloucester Moors 27. Charles G. D. Roberts: Grey Rocks and Greyer Sea, The Recessional 28. Bliss Carman: A Vagabond Song 29. Theodosia Garrison: Stains 30. Sarah P. M. Greene: De Massa ob de Sheepfol' 31. Katherine Tynan: Sheep and Lambs 32. Robert C. Rogers: The Rosary 33. Anna Hempstead Branch: Songs for my Mother 34. George Sylvester Viereck: The Buried City Exercise 13 THE SOLITARY REAPER Behold her, single in the field, |