University Poetry Analysis Assignment: Little Patuxent Review Poems

This assignment provides a detailed analysis of five poems from the Little Patuxent Review: "Pony Credo," "Fairy Tale for Two Sad Men," "Broken Heart Syndrome is a Real Thing," "After Going Down, From the Bottom Up," and "October." The analysis covers the central themes of each poem, the significance of literary devices such as punctuation and metaphors, and the insights into the speaker's experiences and perspectives. It explores the poem's structure, the speaker's identity, and the foreshadowing of events. The analysis also delves into the real-life medical conditions mentioned in the poems and the speaker's emotional states. The document thoroughly answers the questions posed in the assignment brief, offering a comprehensive understanding of each poem and its literary significance.

Running head: ENGLISH LITERATURE
ENGLISH LITERATURE
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author note

1ENGLISH LITERATURE
1. What is Pony Credo about? Does looking up the definition of "credo" help with your
understanding? Note where the periods are placed in this poem. What role do these
periods serve? (In other words, why did the poet choose to end-stop these lines where
she did?).
Pony Credo is a poem of longing, of a lost pastoral of bygone times. On another fold,
it is also reflective of how the human master looks at his or her animal slave. The life of the
pony which belongs to the free world of nature is easily transformed into a mere commodity
in the human market. The periods are strategically placed to demarcate the multitude of
images used in the poem. Each period brings an image to its conclusion, and the poet moves
on to another image seamlessly. In the final lines however, the poetic self moves inward to
reflect on the pony's death. In order to understand the precision of the periods in shaping the
crescendo of the poem, one has to look at the metaphor condensed in the form of this pithy
line: "Resurrection is clover." Clover is a fodder fed to the pony and also a rotational crop,
and in the cycle of life and death it becomes a striking symbol of resurrection. In the last two
lines which are exceptional in their use of periods, one image is broken into two parts for
further emphasis.
2. In Fairy Tale for Two Sad Men, what do we learn about the speaker? What about his
father? Why do you think the poet chose to end the poem, otherwise arranged into
stanzas, with one line? Explain the significance of this.
As suggested by the title, the poem is about grief that emanates from loss. We learn
about the speaker that he is narrating the phase of a family which has lost a significant female
member. However the most impactful aspect of the poem comes from the fact that the female
member is a mother and a wife, highlighting that the support system of two primary
characters of the poem, the son and his father, is lost.

2ENGLISH LITERATURE
The last line of the poem is left singly instead of following the stanza oriented pattern
of the rest of the poem to impact the reader. As the line goes “the flame breathing all night
with him”, it signifies a metaphorical relation between the living and the dead and an
inanimate object. Here life is signified as the flame and the flickering of the flame of a candle
is pictorial illustration of the heaving of the chest when a person breathes.
3. What real-life medical issue does the poet compare to a broken heart in Broken Heart
Syndrome is a Real Thing? List three of the things that the speaker identifies as causing
her "broken heart syndrome."
In this poem, Lisa Poff is talks about ‘Takotsubu cardiomyopathy’ which is a medical
condition, which makes the left ventricle resemble the Japanese octopus trap and the author
compares this to the ‘broken heart syndrome’.
The poem talks about the multiple reasons through which one can suffer from a
broken heart. The first reason she talks about is betrayal from a loved one, such as if the
husband leaves to be with a girl at the workplace with pink tinged pigtails and black converse
shoes. The second reason being the loss of a beloved pet, such as if a coyote jumps over a
eight feet fence to kill the family dog. The third reason stated here would be if one gets fired
from a job that they have worked at for a decade.
4. What are some of the hints early on in the poem that foreshadow the ending in After
Going Down, From the Bottom Up?
In this poem by Elaine Wilburt, the poet gives the readers hints about what might
meet them at the end of the text. In the first stanza, the author speaks about a note which is
neatly folded amongst other physical descriptions of an individual which seems a little out of
place. In the second stanza, the descriptions become more and more clear about the end of the

3ENGLISH LITERATURE
poem and with that, the end of the individual. From the first stanza we could suspect that the
man spoken about in the poem has committed suicide based on the neatly folded note found
with the body.
5. Who do you think "you" is in October? Why does the speaker recognize that casting
for fish is a feeble cause?
The significance of ‘you’ in the poem can be attributed to a few personified individuals.
‘You’, can either be a parent, or a friend, a lover or a brother or even just any random person
who has probably played a crucial intimate role in the life of the speaker. The speaker
highlights in the line “the fish don’t bite schooled up like that” that it was a lesson taught to
the speaker by the person identified with ‘you’. Casting for fish is therefore indicated as a
feeble cause as a fish won’t catch the bait while grouped together. The inner meaning,
however of this line signifies the grief and the pain that the speaker is undergoing because of
the loss of that individual, which makes the speaker sit in a futile attempt to catch fish, only
to remember the experience with that person identified by ‘you’.