Because I Could Not Stop For Death

1. Gossamer: a gauzy form of material; Tippet: a scarf or headdress; Tulle: Fine silk; Surmised: to suppose something is true without having evidence to support it. 
2. In line seven, the woman says she has put away her labor and leisure, meaning her work and spare time for this date with death. She is going on a carriage ride with death, and the poem is saying that she has stopped worrying about her former life because she will never be returning to it, so she just enjoys Death's gracious company. It is ironic to use the words "Kindly" and "Civility" because they aren't words one would usually use to speak of Death, but in this case, he is appearing to her as a handsome suitor, therefore her strange choice of words make sense. The situation this woman is in is almost comical in the sense that not only does she say that Death is good and friendly, he is also there as a striking man, which gives the whole concept of passing on a very seductive feel. As I mentioned above, Death is being personified as a handsome suitor taking her away in his carriage. 
3. In the first two lines, the speaker talks about children playing at recess- a strangely normal scene for this poem. The poet might be trying to make a statement about the normalcy of Death, and how it is very similar to life in a way. The children playing are a symbol for life because of how youthful and energetic the poet has made them out to be, and this image gives a striking contrast to the otherwise dark idea. In the second two lines, the female character describes a field of grain and the setting sun. One of these lines has the same purpose of the children. In the same way that kids are a symbol of life, so is grain- it's nourishment and a symbol for fertility, two things that death could never be. The "settling sun", on the other hand, may be something a bit darker because the setting sun is representing the end of a day, and also the end of her life. 
4. The image itself is a harmless one, but given the situation it's in, it becomes very eery. The way it's described, "A Swelling of the Ground"and "The Cornice - in the Ground", makes it seem unnatural in the way that the Earth shouldn't be able to grow a house, and therefore it is unwanted. In my opinion, this is highlighting the idea of living in the ground for all eternity- as in Death. This is one point in the poem where the woman is really coming to the realization that she will never return to her old life.
5. She is saying that, in Death, time ceases to matter. Even though this day was hundreds of years ago, it seems a shorter time than one day. That experience was so lofty, so chalk-full of insight, that it felt like it took years to complete her carriage ride when, in fact, it was only a day. This might be representing the idea that time ceases to exist when you die, but I think she was just reminiscing on how Death was such a powerful experience. 
6. In line 13, it changes how you view the poem. The first read through I didn't catch it, but the whole poem is in motion, always moving forward as it should since it's describing a journey...except this one line. In this line, the poem is suddenly stopping to let the sun end their journey, and then in the next stanza, they pause for the first time at a small, overgrown house. Up until line 13, they were continuously heading to the end of the poem. 
7. Where the words start with the same letters, those lines seem to represent a key factor in the poem. In stanza, three "At Recess - in the Ring -", "Gazing Grain", "Setting Sun"are all images that can be used to further interpret the poem, and the alliterations make them stand out in your mind. One key example was "The Dews drew quivering and chill -" this is the coming of night, and since she only has a thin cover to keep her warm, she is unprepared for the weather. This represents how she was unprepared for Death's journey/Death in general, and this alliteration highlights that. 

Questions on Poems

To His Coy Mistress

1. Coy: flirtatious; Humber: an estuary in central, northeastern England; Transpires: is revealed; Slow-Chapped: used to explain that time is quickly eating away at them. 
2. The speaker is trying to get his mistress to make love to him because time is leaving them quickly, and with every passing minute, they are getting closer to death. The mistress is being coy because of her religion and unmarried statues, you can see this in the multiple bible references the man makes in his letters. Some are: "Love you ten years before the flood" where the speaker is referring to antediluvian times, and "Till the conversion of the Jews" an allusion to the conversion From Judaism to Christianity. 
3. If we could wait forever, never having to bow under the weight of time, it would make me the happiest man alive. But with every passing day we are aging, and soon, you will wish you had slept with me while you were still young and beautiful. Therefore, if you just slept with me now, there would be no regrets later and worms wouldn't get all up in your business. To be completely honest, I think he has posed a very logical argument, even though it it obviously tainted with multiple, very strong biases. 
4. "Vegetable Love" refers to the author wanting to let their relationship grow and develop- like an eggplant or a squash- so they don't have to rush things. The simile about "amorous birds of prey" contrasts it most, in my opinion, because it's a much harsher image. While vegetables bring forth visuals of health, fertility, and prosperity, birds of prey are violent killers who devour such things.  "Let us roll all our strength and all Our sweetness up into one ball"contrasts the most with the distance because by using world geography, he is attempting to flatter her by placing her in a beautiful, "ruby-laden" place and him in plain ole' England. Now, he is saying they should become one and give all their love and desires to each other. He is complaining because she has left him in England with this dreary body of water while she flaunts her beauty in india, and he wants to be in "India" with her. 
5. "Time's winged chariot hurrying near;" is an allusion to greek mythology by using Apollo's sun chariot. He is saying the end of their 'day' is drawing near. "Deserts of vast eternity." He is comparing the infinite solitude of death to a sweeping desert. He kind of states this in the line before when he is saying that everything lay before them. "Than languish in his slow-chapped power"in this line, he is saying that time is quickly eating away at them, and the longer they do nothing, the more it will devour until there is nothing left. 
6. In the last two lines, the speaker is saying that even though they can't stop time, enjoying each others company as thoroughly as possible may make it go faster. The sun is a metonymy for Time passing. 
7. If the time poem was about time more so than love, he might be saying that time isn't worth anything at all if you don't love something. Whether that something is a woman, a hobby, a favorite pet, or none of those, time will pass anyway, and it's up to you to make your existence matter. In his opinion, sleeping with the woman he loves is what he needs to do.

A Dream Deferred 

1. While the other five images are sensory ones we can easily perceive, the author uses this violent picture, and an image not many can relate to, as a reality call. Dreams aren't always understandable, and a lot of the time, they can't be capped. This last word gives us images of bombs, fireworks, and other things that can't contain themselves, which is very similar to how dreams work.
2. I think he is referring to the inequality of african americans, and how people telling them to put off their dreams of freedom caused them to explode into rioting. He is talking about how his dream was deferred, a dream that most african american people shared. 

The Chimney Sweeper

1. The narrator seems to be an older boy, maybe someone who once believed the same things that young Tom does now, looking on a younger, more naive version of himself and wishing he could be ignorant again. I think the poet is less agonized than the speaker because the narrator has experienced the things he is talking about. I'd be willing to bet that the same boy who is talking has seen dozens of "Tom's" come to the same realization that he has, and become bitter like him. I don't think that's something anyone would relish seeing. The poet is definitely more detached, speaking from an omniscient point of view, showing someone young versus someone older telling of the same story. "Could scarcely cry "'weep! 'weep! 'weep! 'weep!" This is a particularly interesting line because he seems to telling his childhood story without much emotion, especially in the last line of the first stanza. There he states that all he does is sweep chimneys and sleep in soot, very resigned to his fate, because the next stanza, he goes onto explain a very different, less-hardened boy. The narrator brings the character of Young Tom into play in lines 7-8 with an anecdote about trying to shave the boy's head, and how he cried. While the poet begs you to empathize with the boys life style, the narrator seems to tell it like he's seen it before; maybe the speaker is in a position of more authority than originally assumed? In line 24, this is confirmed by saying they won't be harmed if they just do there work, and even though Tom does it happily, the speaker knows it's because he's been lied too, not because he enjoys it. 
2. I think the coffins of black represent their soot-covered lives, and the angels are freeing them from their fate. I think the narrator wants these boys to free because he was once one of them, and there was nothing he wanted more. The green plains represent life outside of being a chimney-sweep. I can't imagine there is much color or vegetation in a chimney, and he longs to see the outside world. Their lives are grey and black; no life, no color, no love. 

The Telephone Explication

“The Telephone” by Robert Frost is quietly intriguing in its use of tone to create the feel of conversation. The first and third stanzas are metaphors, while the shorter lines tend to be said without emotion, and involve no figurative language. This is a surprisingly strange contrast since there isn't a cut-and-dry line in the whole poem from the other speaker. On one hand, quotes such as, “When leaning with my head against a flower, I heard you talk.” And “You spoke from that flower on the window sill,” have a lot of flow in how you would read them, and seem almost childish and harmless. On the other hand, a line such as, “First tell me what it was you thought you heard.” is far more abrasive. You can tell this by the length of the line, and when read aloud, it is not something you would say to someone you wanted to impress. In contrast with the other lines, which are airy and metaphorical, the shorter ones have neither of those traits. This small change creates an entirely new scene around two, three-dimensional characters.  

Traveling Though the Dark

1. The speaker's dilemma is that there is a dead deer laying on the side of the road, and he is debating whether or not he should push it into the river. On one hand, having the deer on the road is dangerous for oncoming traffic, on the other, the deer is ripe with a baby. He is the kind of person who would stand on a dark, cold street, taking the time to decide whether or not to push a dead deer into the river, and this shows compassion and selflessness. He calls his hesitation "my only swerving" because he doesn't want to be the bringer of death. In line four, he comments that the dead might cause trouble for other drivers and so he felt the need to remove it. These two lines connect because both are alluding too a possible death- one being a fellow driver, the other the mother deer. 
2. "She had stiffened already, almost cold" and "...her side was warm; her fawn lay waiting" both come within two lines of each other, but they signify very different things. They are both talking about the same deer, but one gives an image of a baby doe, something cute and warm, while the other describes the emaciated body of its mother it seemed to have crawled out of. Another contrasting statement is in one line "...alive, still, never to be born". At first glance, you think the baby might be dead because two of the describing words are reminiscent of a still-born, and 'alive' doesn't really stand out within this line of dead words. The third example is the description of the car that comes directly before the pushing of the deer into the ravine. The car is described with lines like "under the hood purred the engine" and "The car aimed ahead its lowered parking lights", words like 'purred' and 'aimed' give the car a human effect using personification, which is strange because no other living things in this poem are described similarly. Even the living seem already dead. 
3. The author, in this circumstance, is using slant rhyming. Every end word in the second and fourth line in each stanza was loosely rhymed. Like 'deer' and 'dead' or 'waiting' and 'hesitated". The line that has no connection is "It is usually best to roll them into the canyon:" because canyon doesn't rhyme with anything in the first stanza. 

The Flea and The Man He Killed Questions

The Man He Killed

1.     “Half-a-crown” is a money piece, in this line, he’s saying he would lend it to the man he killed if they’d met on better terms.

2.     He uses the word ‘because’ twice in one stanza when he is trying to justify his actions to the reader, when in reality, he doesn’t understand any better than the reader does. Since the word ‘although’ comes at the end of a stanza, your voice has a half pause, and the use of enjambment gives this word extra weight. It’s like he’s having a conversation with you, and then suddenly realizes his argument might be flawed, and rethinks his words. I think the words ‘old’ and ‘ancient’ may be referring to the speaker’s past. He might be using this metaphorical hyperbole as a symbol for his life before the war, as in, if they had met somewhere he would’ve been before he began killing, maybe they would’ve been friends.

3.     I don’t think this is necessarily true, not in all circumstances. Hardy’s poem is about an experience that causes turmoil for the everyday man who found himself in a bad situation. “The Man He Killed” isn’t a classic, or elevated, poem, it’s a man telling the audience about someone he killed in cold blood- someone who he may have been friends with! Poetry is the telling of experience, regardless of the amount of sophisticated language.

The Flea

1.       Preceding the first line, the woman in this situation is denying a man what he wants (sex), and he is asking why she won’t since she gives him everything else. Between the first and second stanza’s, he is making his argument that their blood is already in the flea together, when she threatens to kill the flea (Though use make you apt to kill me) he says that by doing it, she would be killing both of them as well since they now live inside the flea. Between the second and third stanza, she kills the flea (Cruel and sudden, hast thou since…). During the third stanza, the male character tells her that by sleeping with him, she would loose the same amount of innocence as she did by killing the flea, which is none.

2.     The speaker and the woman seem to be unmarried (probably a sin at the time) but dating anyway. Even though they’ve been together and love each other, she is still denying him what he wants most: sex, and that’s what they are arguing about here. She kills him in the third stanza by murdering the flea that their blood is mingling in, meaning that he isn’t actually dead, but she regrets giving into his pleas.

3.     MARK but this flea, and mark in this, Look at this flea, How little that which thou deniest me is, You deny me so little, why this? It suck'd me first, and now sucks thee, The flea takes blood from both of us. And in this flea our two bloods mingled be And I want our blood too mix like it is inside the flea. Thou know'st that this cannot be said What the flea does isn’t shameful, A sin, nor shame, nor loss of maidenhead So why is shameful for us to do the same thing? Yet this enjoys before it woo, It enjoys the benefits of you before marriage, And pamper'd swells with one blood made of two; And helped itself to me without consent. And this, alas ! is more than we would do But even that is more than we would do. The male character is comparing sex to the feeding of a flea off both of them. 4.     I think he is using the line “parents grudge, and you” to paint a picture of the inside of the flee; a dark, romantic place where the two lovers can go without the wrath of their parents finding them. 5.     The living walls of jet represent the inside of the flea. If the woman kills the flea, she will kill her boyfriend, herself, and insult the institution of marriage. 6.     She thinks she is victorious when she crushes the flea, but the boyfriend thinks differently. Changing his story, he now says that since she killed the flea and suffered no harm, it must mean that having sex with him wouldn’t be as shameful as she thought in the first place. 7.     I think she will keep denying him, and he may leave her because she won’t listen to his “logic”. 8.     The Flea is a man persuading his girlfriend to sleep with him using skewed logic and comparing their relationship to the feeding of a blood-sucking insect. The Apparition, on the other hand, is a man attempting to scare his girlfriend into having sex with him by telling her he will come back and haunt her after death if she doesn’t give in now. The Flea is far more cordial in the sense that that boyfriend wants his girlfriend to want to sleep with him, not force her, and the other boyfriend is threatening her until she submits.

"My Last Duchess" by Robert Browning

“My Last Duchess” by Robert Browning is about not only a man with a high stature in his world of politics, but the Duke of Ferrara no less. Coming from his point of view, he is a man who could (and should) have everything he wants, regardless of what it is. In this case, a wife who devotes every smile, blush, and quite frankly, her entire life, to him. A theme throughout this dramatic monologue is how the Duke treats his wife: with entitlement and complete disregard for her general well being.

The Duke eludes to these feelings first in the lines, “I call that piece a wonder, now: Frà Pandolf’s hands worked busily a day, and there she stands.” In the bolded portion, he refers not only to the painting, but also to his wife as she was in life: a mere object. Also, the comma before ‘now’ indicates he regards his wife with wonder in the painting, but in reality, appreciated her much less. In the italicized portion, a mysteriously placed page break separates two statements, which gives the line a new meaning that compliments his egotistical nature. Even though it isn’t apparent here, after ‘hands’ the poem carries on to a different line, which means that the remainder of the quote was meant to be about the wife; that she worked a busy life, and now smiles at only him. This last portion is again hinted at during the lines, “But to myself they turned (since none puts by the curtain I have drawn for you, but I)”

            

The Road Not Taken Blog Entry

I think the "The Road Not Taken" by Robert Frost is an allegory a life-altering decision the author is deciding to make. Also, I believe both of his choices are equally tantalizing. Robert Frost hints at this in two lines: “Oh, I kept the first for another day!” and “In leaves no step had trodden black.” I took the latter to mean no one had had the chance to sully the trail before he got there. One troubling line is in the last stanza, “I shall be telling this with a sigh,” Does this mean the author regrets the decision he made? Or that he is nostalgically curious toward the trail he did not take in the first place? This poem is about life being full of choices, and the leap of faith you take when you make one. His choice of path probably led him toward a new job opportunity, or someone he wished to marry, but either way, he chose it, and now, he has to deal with the outcome.

1.     I don’t necessarily think he regrets his decision, but that he wonders what would’ve happened if he had taken the other road. The same way that a student may think they should’ve taken just Pre-Calculus instead of fast track, or a small business owner wondering whether they really should’ve started their own firm.
2.     It’s like The Butterfly Effect, little things can cause big changes. Even though he may have been deciding between two different career paths, maybe the love of his life worked at Walmart, he chooses Fred Meyer, and now they’ve never met. Or say he chooses Walmart, they meet, she gets pregnant, and now he’s stuck at a dead-end cashier job with another mouth to feed. Either way, he’s lost something but also gained from his experiences.