4156000972 | Safe in the Alabaster Chambers by Emily Dickinson | SUMMARY: the planets will continue to orbit when the living die; even huge events will happen like royalty will resign but it will all have no effect the dead THEME: the dead are in eternal bliss, | 0 | |
4156000973 | Ozymandias by Percy Bysshe Shelley | SUMMARY: traveler tells the poet about two stone legs that stand in the desert. Near them on the sand lies a damaged stone head. Huge fragments stretch the empty desert. THEME: Transience-nothing lasts forever | 1 | |
4156000974 | My Last Duchess by Robert Browning | SUMMARY: A duke is talking to an unnamed servant about his late wife who supposedly was too happy with the world around her when she should have gained joy only from her husband. He indirectly states that he had her killed for the offense. THEME: male power and pride over women | 2 | |
4156000975 | To His Coy Mistress by Andrew Marvell | SUMMARY: Told from the perspective of a man to his lover, he attempts to persuade her to copulate by telling her that time is finite and he won't be able to cherish her beauty, which will deteriorate with death. Ultimately, it's poet's view of time, mortality, and carpe diem mentality. THEME: Time, Mortality, Sex | 3 | |
4156000976 | Dulce Et Decorum Est by Wilfred Owen | SUMMARY: A man reflecting on his time in the war and how someone was killed by gas, how he still has nightmares of that time. War isn't worth the horrors that it brings to the soldiers that are foolishly enticed into it. THEME: war, anti-patriotism CONTEXT: WWI | 4 | |
4156000977 | The Colonel | -grapples more with the weight of recounting atrocities than the atrocities themselves -some things can't be poeticized | 5 | |
4156000978 | Bells for John Whiteside's Daughter by John Crowe Ransom | SUMMARY: there was an unexpected death of a young, lively girl, John Whiteside's daughter. Everyone was astonished and the speaker kept dwelling on the past, her past, when she was alive. THEME: death, life is fragile/short, no one knows when their time will come | 6 | |
4156000979 | The Second Coming by William Butler Yeats | SUMMARY: Expressing the belief of the coming of another war or apocalypse following WWI. This apocalypse in the poem is referred to as The Second Coming, alluding to the book of revelation. THEME: apocalypse, transition | 7 | |
4156000980 | In The Waiting Room By Elizabeth Bishop | SUMMARY: young Elizabeth is sitting in a waiting room reading the National Geographic when she has a major realization. She sees pictures that scares her and then she questions about her world and everyone around her. Overall she is afraid of growing up THEME: growing up and changes are scary, racism | 8 | |
4156000981 | Those Winter Sundays By Robert Hayden | SUMMARY: The father of the speaker would get up early every morning to warm the house for the family and clean his son's shoes for school. No one would ever thank him for his hard work throughout the week, so the father felt neglected. The speaker never showed any affection towards his father because of their distant relationship, leaving the son with sorrow and regret after realizing his father truly loves him. THEME: Love and sacrifice. The father's love is powerful which drives him to make sacrifices for his family. | 9 | |
4156000982 | Do Not Go Gentle Into that Good Night By Dylan Thomas | SUMMARY:The speaker's father is near death but the speaker begs him to not let death overcome him easily. There is still time to capture to light of life and the speaker wants his father to cherish this light. THEME: dark vs. light (death vs. life) , cherish your life, endurance, desperation | 10 | |
4160369569 | Sunday Morning By Wallace Stevens | SUMMARY: A women daydreams about heaven while she misses church that morning. She questions her religion and the afterlife, all while finding comfort in nature. She wants to believe in only nature because that is freeing as it means her destiny is hers to decide, but she also likes having faith in a God because it means we are not alone in the world. THEME: Religion, paradise, nature, life and death, and the afterlife. | 11 | |
4164760020 | Dover Beach by Matthew Arnold | SUMMARY: opens with a quiet scene. A couple looks out on the moonlit water of the English Channel, and listens to the sound of the waves. The sound of the waves makes the speaker think first of ancient Greece. Then he turns the sound of the surf into a metaphor for human history, and the gradual, steady loss of faith that his culture has experienced. The poem ends on a gorgeous, heartbreaking note, with the couple clinging to their love in a world of violence and fear and pain. THEME: spirituality, man and the natural world | 12 | |
4164760021 | A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning by John Donne | SUMMARY: The speaker begins with a weird metaphor of an old man dying. He says that the parting between him and his wife should be like the gentle death of an old man—you can't even tell when he's stopped breathing. Then he shifts gears and compares shallow love to earthquakes that make a big scene and cause a big fuss, but don't have tremendous lasting effects. On the contrary, his love is like the unnoticed, subtle movements of the stars and planets that control the fates of every person (well, according to popular belief). That super-handsy couple can't stand to be apart because their love is based solely on physical contact, but the love he has can stretch any distance because the pair share one soul. But he says that he and his wife are like a compass when drawing a circle. One foot of the compass (Donne) goes way out and travels around, while the other (his wife) stays planted at home and leans after it. But those two compass feet are part of one unit and will always end up back together. THEME: love, lust, loyalty | 13 | |
4164760022 | The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T.S. Eliot | SUMMARY: Prufrock seems to be addressing a potential lover, with whom he would like to "force the moment to its crisis" by somehow consummating their relationship. But Prufrock knows too much of life to "dare" an approach to the woman: In his mind he hears the comments others make about his inadequacies, and he chides himself for "presuming" emotional interaction could be possible at all. The poem moves from a series of fairly concrete (for Eliot) physical settings—a cityscape and several interiors—to a series of vague ocean images conveying Prufrock's emotional distance from the world as he comes to recognize his second-rate status ("I am not Prince Hamlet'). THEME: love, manipulation, appearances | 14 | |
4164831546 | Mending Wall by Robert Frost | SUMMARY: A stone wall separates the speaker's property from his neighbor's. In spring, the two meet to walk the wall and jointly make repairs. The speaker sees no reason for the wall to be kept—there are no cows to be contained, just apple and pine trees. He does not believe in walls for the sake of walls. The neighbor resorts to an old adage: "Good fences make good neighbors." The speaker remains unconvinced and mischievously presses the neighbor to look beyond the old-fashioned folly of such reasoning. His neighbor will not be swayed. The speaker envisions his neighbor as a holdover from a justifiably outmoded era, a living example of a dark-age mentality. But the neighbor simply repeats the adage. THEME: isolation, communication | 15 | |
4164864854 | Let America be America Again by Langston Hughes | SUMMARY: Someone who feels that America does not live up to what it should be. The tone is angry and resentful. In this poem it's not representing the point of view of one particular group. It's saying that there are many people who've come here with hopes and dreams and they're being let down. He's also saying that there is an economic disparity (difference) between people. In essence the rich get richer, and the poor get poorer, because there is not equal opportunity. That idea is something that is not real for many people because of their race, economic situation, and come up. THEME: The American Dream, inequality | 16 | |
4164894454 | Ode on a Grecian Urn by John Keats | SUMMARY: In this ode, Keats studies a marble Greek urn and contemplates the story, history and secrets that lie behind its carved pictures. Throughout the poem, he constantly juxtaposes the immortality of art with the mortality of man. His feelings seem confused, as he is torn between jealousy and bitterness that the urn will live forever and be remembered when he is long dead and forgotten, and pity for this inanimate object that has no experience of life, despite its endurance through the ages. THEME: transience, innocence | 17 |
AP Literature: Poems Flashcards
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