Detailed Analysis of Selected Poems: An English Literature Assignment

This assignment presents an analysis of several poems, including T.S. Eliot's "Preludes," Theodore Roethke's "Prayer," Lorna Crozier's "Forms of Innocence," Louise Gluck's works, and Ezra Pound's "The River Merchant's Wife: A Letter." The analysis covers various aspects of each poem, such as the use of meter, rhyme schemes, themes, symbolism, and literary devices like alliteration, consonance, and assonance. The responses delve into the interpretations, central ideas, and imagery employed by the poets to convey their messages. The assignment explores the themes of urban life, aging, innocence, and the complexities of relationships, providing a comprehensive understanding of the selected poems.

Answer to Question One
The word “prelude” is taken from a French word prelude that denotes “notes sung or
played to test the voice or instrument”. While the Latin word “preludium or preliminary” means
to play something beforehand in order to practice or a preface. T. S. Eliot in his poem “Preludes”
uses various forms and meters in order to experiment with the rhyming scheme of the poem.
“The winter evening settles down
With smell of steaks in passageways.
Six o’clock.
The burnt-out ends of smoky days (Hongmei, 2008).”
The first stanza is based on a winter evening in the city. It contains images of people
returning home from work. In the first four lines, the syllables can be counted as eight, and can
be broken down into feet of four. By using iamb that consists of one unstressed syllable and one
stressed syllable. It forms to be iambic tetrameter because it consists of four iambs.
Answer to Question Two
The interpretation of the poem has been many, while the most promising interoretation
remains to be the request for having an insight. The theme is very similar to the poem “Dover
Beach” by Matthew Arnold. The theme is similar in the manner of Arnold as an aging man,
trying to hold on to his poetic capabilities. “preserve-serve”, “lose-choose”, and “dead-head” are
the end rhymes in the poem “Prayer” written by Theodore Roethke (Roethke, 2011). One of the
main messages that is delivered by the poem is a notion that the light that is present in holiness
also conveys a essence that is of immense greatness to the human being. The rhymes produce an

effect that eases off the pain and graveness in the poem while reverting the focus away from the
sense of sarcasm to the metrical rhyming words.
Answer to Question Three
The chief symbol in “Forms of Innocence” by Lorna Crozier is the “black swan”. The
black swan represents the innocence of the girl- “A strange shape for innocence when you think
of Leda but the girl insists it was a swan, black not white as you might expect”. A Canadian
poem where the poet describes the transformation of a young girl along with her interactions
with a guy in the region of Saskatchewan, Canada. Just like a black swan is a very rare
occurrence, similarly to it is a girl’s innocence. The central idea the girl losing her innocence and
the central image of the poem being the black swan.The representation of the protagonist in the
poem losing her virginity is evident in the lines- “took flight, how it soared from the window
beating its wings high above the stubble field”.
Answer to Question Four
The works of Louise Gluck has emerged from a collection of extensive read and
researched series of works unlike the shorter collection of his pieces. The boundaries that are
present in the individual poems are somewhat overlapping and hence becomes difficult to
segregate them. The themes revolve around the seclusion of thoughts that are analytic. “Here is
my hand that will not harm you” is an example of alliteration in the poem “Epithalamium” where
the poet uses the sounds that are very soft. “the terrible charity of marriage (Glück, 2015)” is an
example of consonance, where the poet puts much harsher sounds in order to get the message
across to his readers. The example of assonance in the poem is-“There were others; their bodies
were a preparation” where again the poet uses much harsher tones for conveying the message.

Answer to Question Five
The theme of the poem is about a wife who is extremely lonely and has not been able to
be united with her husband for months. In an attempt to recall about their instance of meeting for
the first time, she writes a letter. She also remembers her marriage that took place at a very
young age of fourteen. “The River Merchant’s Wife: A Letter” by Ezra Pound contains the
imageries of plants and vegetation that portray an act of communication. It consists of a message
of love that the wife has for her husband. “pulling flowers” is the image of a young girl, where
the flowers symbolize the initial stages of relationship that is growing between the little boy and
the young girl. At the end, the imageries mature in “you dragged your feet when you went out.
By the gate now, the moss is grown, the different mosses (Pound, 1998)”, portraying the
decaying relation between the husband and the wife as the former goes to be more distant.