Dorothy Wordsworth

'Dorothy Wordsworth's "Address to a Child" depicts a storm to a child from an adult in his life.  Behind all the storm imagery, there is a message being given to the child.  The speaker informs that if you chase after the wind you will find "Nothing but silence and empty space" (line 17).  The wind is also compared to a buzzard and a creature that growls and has claws.  The wind is shown to be a powerful force that "rings a sharp larum" (line 10) and makes a "great rout" (line 22).  However, the speaker is able to keep the powerful wind at bay with a great fire and, until the wind leaves, the speaker and child have "Books...to read" (line 36).  The books and fire convey a sense of knowledge and light, a sharp contrast to the dark and frightening storm that roars outside.  

The poem conveys a message that there is no reason to fear the dark and unknown world if you are armed with knowledge and light.  If you already have knowledge, then you know the methods to acquire more knowledge and the dark and mysterious will not remain dark and mysterious forever.  One of the most important things to take from the poem is that knowledge can give power, but by seeking power is like searching for the wind: it brings "Nothing but silence and empty space" (line 17).  

William Wordsworth

The "Highland Lass" (line 2) in Wordsworth's "The Solitary Reaper" is described in great detail with eloquent language and imagery.  What makes her beautiful is not what she looks like, but rather her entrancing singing voice.  The speaker claims that

"No sweeter voice was ever heard/In the spring-time from the Cuckoo-bird,/Breaking the silence of the seas/Among the farthest Hebrides" (lines 13-16).

 The reader assumes that the speaker does not speak the language the woman sings in, however, because he asks if "no one will tell [him] what she sings" (line 17).  This makes the woman more mysterious and intriguing and adds to her appeal for both the reader and the speaker.  Not one time is the woman ever physically described, but her voice "sings a melancholy strain" (line 6) and "the Vale profound/Is overflowing with the sound" (lines 7-8).  For the speaker, the ability to create beauty is far more important and valuable than being physically beautiful.  Through this, the speaker shows that what is inside of a person is much more important than how beautiful they are.  Though the speaker never actually sees the woman, the music she created "in [his] heart [he] bore,/Long after it was heard no more" (lines 31-32), signifying that while physical beauty may fade, artistic beauty will last long after it has been exposed.

T.S. Eliot

T.S. Eliot's "Journey of the Magi" is not what you typically expect of a poem written about the three Magi that came to visit Jesus at his birth.  Instead of a journey centered around following a star to see God in the form of a baby, the reader gets a sense of despair and that the journey is pointless.  The speaker tells the audience of "cities hostile and towns unfriendly/And the villages dirty and charging high prices" (lines 14-15).  The journey of the Magi to Bethlehem has been glorified in most cases, but Eliot's interpretation shows the Magi, even in the presence of the baby at the end of their long and difficult journey brings images of death and a birth that was "Hard and bitter agony for [them], like Death, our death" (line 39).  

For the speaker, the birth of Christ meant the death of something else, the death of something more important.  The birth of Christ ultimately ended polytheistic worship for many people and at the end of the poem when the speaker is back home, he notices "an alien people clutching their gods" (line 42), so maybe the journey showed the speaker coming to terms with an ending of something he knew and was familiar with and starting another journey full of mysteries and the unknown.  Rather than face this new unknown, though, the speaker would "be glad of another death" (line 44).    

James Joyce

The character of Maria in Joyce's Dubliners, more specifically "Clay", is, to her core, a people pleaser.  All she wants to do is please people, and she is very good at it because "Everyone is fond of Maria" (Joyce 1134).  However, everyone also does not appreciate Maria; she is not married and is often ridiculed for that.  She is also under-appreciated by a man she formerly cared for as he was growing up.  A small purse that Joe had gotten for her five years previously is one of her most cherished possessions, but for all she did for him in his youth, the purse does not seem to fit or reciprocate the love she showed him.  Maria, being a people pleaser, is very dedicated to every job or task she does, so when she is constantly being let go from jobs as a nanny because the family has no need for her anymore, she feels a need to please people even more, like with the incident of the plum cake that she misplaced.  She was so disappointed she lost it because the plum cake was something she could have been appreciated for, but was not.  

Maria's character also seems to accept her fate as if it is set in stone.  When playing the game, she picks the clay first, which symbolizes death, and secondly she picks the prayer book, informing her that she will enter a convent in the next year.  Because she is considered a spinster, she has come to accept that she will never be properly appreciated and she will never be married.  Maria's fate is a tragic one, but not because she is elderly, under-appreciated, and unmarried, but because she is so set on making others happy that she fails to give herself the same kind of happiness.

Wyndham Lewis

The art magazine, Blast, included the Vorticist Manifesto in its first issue.  The Vorticist Manifesto calls for a complete makeover of literature and art with very strong language including a call to "Blast First (from politeness) England" (Lewis 1083) and to "Blast France" (Lewis 1085)  Wyndham Lewis used Blast to cry out against England's authors and artists, whom he believed to be stuck in the nineteenth century.  His idea of Vorticism celebrates breaking free from what other people think, especially the idea of the individual.

In looking into Lewis' personal life, it is easy to see that he appreciated the idea of the individual more than the masses.  He did not write what people of his time wanted to hear.  He attacked the modern society of the time and wrote pro-fascist literature as well.  Though his work was never appreciated during his lifetime, Lewis and especially Blast "were remarkably important in clearing the way for the new art of modernism" (Damrosch 1082).

William Butler Yeats

Two of William Butler Yeats' poems are written about his muse Maud Gonne, and use references to the Trojan War.  His "No Second Troy" celebrates her beauty and at the same time shows how her beauty has "taught to ignorant men the most violent of ways" (line 3).  The other poem "Leda and the Swan" depicts the rape of Leda by Zeus which gave birth to Helen in Greek mythology.  Both poems use eloquent imagery, the first poem uses it to show the beauty of Helen and the horrors her beauty causes; the second poem uses the rape of her mother to foreshadow the destruction Helen's birth and beauty would eventually cause.  

Yeats' relationship with Maud Gonne was not what Yeats yearned for it to be.  Though he proposed to her several times, he was always turned down.  Gonne is the inspiration of most, if not all, of Yeats' poems that describe a woman of beauty.  Yeats' poem "No Second Troy" could also refer to the war he constantly fought with himself over Gonne and his everlasting, unrequited love for her.  The speaker in the poem struggles with not blaming the woman for the war being fought; it is not her fault she is so beautiful, yet the question at the end, "Was there another Troy for her to burn?" (line 12) indicates that maybe the first war she caused, the first city she caused to be burned is not enough for her.

Thomas Hardy

"The Convergence of the Twain" is almost like a eulogy for the Titanic.  The unsinkable ship lies, in the poem, on the bottom of the ocean where "The sea-worm crawls" (line 9) and "Dim moon-eyed fishes near" (line 13).  The poem takes a sinister turn near the end as the "Immanent Will" (line 18) grows a "sinister mate" (line 19) for the ship, "And as the smart ship grew/In stature, grace, and hue,/In shadowy silent distance grew the Iceberg too" (lines 22-24).  

Hardy's interpretation of the tragedy of the Titanic is different from many as he does not focus on the loss of many lives, but on the loss of the ship itself.  Instead of recreating the death of a passenger, Hardy grieves "Over the mirrors meant/To glass the opulent" (lines 7-8) and "Jewels in joy designed/To ravish the sensuous mind/Lie lightless, all their sparkles bleared and black and blind" (lines 10-12)  Hardy may focus on the material losses of the Titanic because the Titanic was designed to be for the extremely wealthy who might not have cared about those less fortunate, so their deaths were not as tragic.  

However, Hardy's inclusion of the Immanent Will may indicate that the entire event was inescapable and inevitable as soon as the ship grew more and more extravagant; the Immanent Will wants to shift our focus from material things to the things in our lives that are not lost in shipwrecks.