What are some common themes of Robert Frost's poetry? Got any examples from his poems?
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In "Mending Wall" and other poems Frost examines the tension between human connectedness and separateness.  \n\nPeople often quote that poem, saying that he says that "Good fences make good neighbors." If you read the poem carefully, you'll see that it is the poet's neighbor that says that, not the poet himself. The poet wants him to think that over, but all he says is "Good fences make good neighbors."
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Wow, this poem is something else. By that I mean it is really abstract in its language and in its metaphors. I have a guess on it's meaning, but that is merely a guess. This author is using so much personal experience that it is hard for me as a reader to really connect well with what is being said, but here is my hypothesis:\n\nFirst of all, I think the title "Call It Fear" needs to be kept in mind when reading through the entire poem. The structure and the wording is suggestive of a person who is caught in the panic of fear ("call it an ocean of fear of the dark"). So, it can easily be assumed that this poem is analyzing fear and the essence of fear in the human mind.\n\nThe author has this deep fear, a fear of the dark, or possibly a fear of the unknown. The author is not alone however as she has found someone, referred to as Goodluck, who also has the same fear. They have come together to escape the fear, and their only escape has been found in the music that they have found on the radio, the church music that plays on a lot of stations on Sunday mornings. \n\nThere is also a question of the repeated imagery of "a string of shadow horses kicking and pulling me out of my belly." This image is repeated in the first and third stanzas and is linked to anxiety, the butterfly feeling that everyone gets in the pit of their stomach when they are controlled by fear. The idea of "shadow horses" seems to suggest the idea that death is pulling and tugging at the speaker of this poem, and it is the fear of death that drives the speaker to use music to escape the fear.\n\nThis is my guess on the meaning of the poem. . . I hope it proves helpful!
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There are lots of poems on line for and about teachers.  check out the websites I've included.  The poesms are not necessarily good-bye poems, but some of them would work I think.  \n\nI hope these help.
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ok summer here is the best i got:\n\nThis poem is (obviously) a lament, or some sorrow for something lost, also known as an elegy.  In this case, the poem is a woman's song.  She is lamenting the loss of her lover (it is possible that he is simply not there, or absent).  \nHowever, it appears as if "her lord" is the same lord that governs the people in this poem.  Therefore, for some reason they are isolating her from him.  Her lord himself tells her to take up a "dwelling" that he has apparently appointed for her.  \nOnce there, she meets a man and falls in love with him, claiming that "death alone" would separate them.\nFor the remainder of the poem, the woman is expressing her deep grief as she is in exile in what seems to be some type of cave or tunnell in the ground.\n\nhere is a paragraph by paragraph analysis:\n1.  \nHere she is introducing her lament as a sorrowful tale of her utmost woe; that never before has she experienced any distress as dire or excruciating as this.\n\n2.\nhere she explains that her lords family/ gentry sent him on a sea journey.  "Dawn-cares" can be interpreted as she either worries about him so much, she is losing sleep, or she wakes up in the morning, and her 1st thought is her husband.  [These compound words are famous in anglo-saxon poetry.]  She decides to go into exile, which was a custom of women to do who were w/o there husbands.  She may have disgraced him and is thencforth banishing herself.  It seems that she is turning to his people for advice, and they have their own plans as to where she should go.  The scheme and plot to send her away and put her in a position which will forever keep them apart. \n\n3.\nHer lord confirms the dwelling place she is to go to.  Where she went for exile, she knows few people.\n\n4.  \nShe falls in love with a man who is depressive and well taken care of.  He also seems to be in exile w/ a broken heart...he may even be suicidal.  They vow together, that, in their exile, they will have eachother.  But, he kills himself, destroying their pact.  she is back to where she stared in her sorrow.\n\n5.  \nFillied with longing, she is sent to live in a cave or some sort of underground hovel.  \n\n6. She describes her surroundings as dismal and "briar-choked".  She bemoans that fact that loves walk the earth and experience joy, while she is condemned to despair.  She explains that she can never gain composure because she used to be so full of hope, promise, and she was enthused for life.  Now that everything is taken from her, she is torn.  She takes a turn to curse her lord and wish upon him sorrow and grief, that he may become lost and wandering in his journeys.  She wished upon him a brooding heart and "breast cares" (broken heart). \n\nWell, I really hope this helps you!! Good luck with everything!  I will also email this to u so u get it.
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Cool Question!\n\nTPCASTT is a way of analyzing a poem.\nSee the link below for how it works.\n\nT-Title - what does title mean *before* you read the poem.\nP-Paraphrase - put the poem in your own words.\nC-Connotation - what meanings are implied?\nA-Attitude - what is tone or attitude of speaker & poet?\nS-Shift - poem shifts, changes, develops\nT-Title - after reading, does title have other meanings?\nT-Theme - what *might* the poet be saying here?\n\nSo this is all about "critical thinking" -- teachers do not care about what YOU think about Frost. The purpose is to teach YOU to think and analyze.\n\nCheck out the link Explication of "Road" to get some ideas on how to use TP CASTT for the poem.\n\nBest wishes!
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The theme is the main idea of the poem--you could almost say what the poem is about. A poem may talk about frozen birches, but the bigger message is how ice bends the branches, like life bends people sometimes. Here's a good source (below). I am answering this because I love poetry. Only in school does it matter what the theme seems to be. The truth is, a poem means what it means to you personally and that is the truth. Read some modern poets like Mary Oliver, Ted Koozer, Langston Hughes, Dorianne Laux before you give up on poetry.
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First look at the tone of the poem. Then look for the nouns in the poem, and what they could represent metaphorically. Then see if they're connected. I don't know this poem, but say, for example, maybe falling snow (noun) is a metaphor for the author's declining health. Maybe the cold (another noun) is similar metaphorically. There's your theme.
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OK, I'll give it my best shot...\n\n* Who is the speaker or speakers in the poem, and what is the situation?\n\nThe speaker appears to be a military trainee, learning about the names of parts in (bolt, breech, saftey, etc. ) and functions of his rifle.\n\n* What basic contrasts are represented by the trainees and by the gardens?\n\nThere are several:\n"..eloquent gestures, Which in our case we have not got."\nNot much eloquent about cleaning a rifle...\n\n"If you have any strength in your thumb. The blossoms\nAre fragile and motionless"\nStrength vs fragility\n\n"Easing the spring. And rapidly backwards and forwards\nThe early bees are assaulting and fumbling the flowers:\n          They call it easing the Spring"\nTwo different definitions of spring, one in the rifle, one a season.\n\nand more...\n\n* What statement does the poem make about war as it affects men and their lives?\n\nWar is about hard, cold things like rifles and all that goes with war, whereas the gardens represent beauty, silence, peace.\nThe gardens bring out the best in man, wars the worse.\n\nHope this helps!
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There are a lot of poems out there.  Could you be a little more specific in what you're looking for?
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The best poem is one you would write yourself. If you need help just contact me through my e-mail on my Q&A page. Here is a poem for you.\n\nIf I Never\n\nIf my days were untroubled\nAnd my heart always light\nWould I seek that fair land\nWhere there is no night?\n\nIf I never grew weary\nWith the weight of my load\nWould I search for God’s Peace\nAt the end of the road?\n\nIf I never knew sickness\nAnd never felt pain\nWould I reach for a hand\nTo help and sustain?\n\nIf I walked not with sorrow \nAnd lived without loss\nWould my soul seek sweet solace\nAt the foot of the cross?\n\nIf all I desired was mine\nDay by Day\nWould I kneel before God\nAnd earnestly pray?\n\n\n\nIf God sent no “Winter”\nTo freeze me with fear\nWould I yearn for the warmth\nOf “Spring” every year?\n\nI ask myself this . . .\nAnd the answer is plain\nIf my life were all pleasure\nAnd I never knew pain.\n\nI’d seek God less often\nAnd need him much less\nFor God’s sought more often \nIn times of distress\n\nAnd no one knows God\nOr sees him as plain\nAs those who have met Him\nOn the Pathway of Pain
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Robert Burns is the Poet Laureate of Scotland.   He wrote many wonderful poems, most of which are in Scotish dialect, which is fascinating to read.   In Scotland they still have an evening dedicated to him, in which they traditionally eat haggis.  (He even has a poem called "To a Haggis".)  You can read some of his more famous poems here.\n\nhttp://www.poetry-archive.com/b/burns_robert.html\n\nBurns was part of the larger group of Romantic Poets, including John Keats, Percy Bysse Shelley, George Gordon Lord Byron, and William Blake.  Each of these men had a great impact on the way society at the time thought and the way ideas were expressed.\n\nBurns is probably most famous for two of his poems, "Auld Lang Syne" and "To a Mouse".  "Auld Lang Syne" is the traditional song sung on New Years Eve.  "To a Mouse" is not a necessarily well known poem, but it did inspire author John Steinbeck.  His famous novel "Of Mice and Men" was named after a line in the poem which states "the best lain plans o mice and men gang aft agly".  The poem is saying that, even though people (or mice!) may plan and work and hope for the future, they can't predict what will happen and often their plans will go awry (gang aft agly).  Fate plays a part in everything; this was a major theme of Steinbeck's novel.
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Robert Frost\n\nNature's first green is gold, \nHer hardest hue to hold. \nHer early leaf's a flower; \nBut only so an hour. \nThen leaf subsides to leaf. \nSo Eden sank to grief, \nSo dawn goes down to day. \nNothing gold can stay.
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Poem by W.H. Auden\n\nStop all the Clocks.\n\nStop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,\nPrevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,\nSilence the pianos and with muffled drum\nBring out the coffin, let the mourners come.\nLet aeroplanes...\n\nFor the rest visit...\nhttp://www.npr.org/programs/death/readings/poetry/aude.html
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Robert Frost - Nothing Gold Can Stay\n\nNature's first green is gold\nher hardest hue to hold\nher early leaf's a flower\nbut only so an hour\nleaf subsides to leaf\n...?....I forget..\nDawn goes down to day\nNothing gold can stay
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Robin_Thor has a good understanding about this literary giant and this is to let him know that we appreciate a good effort. \nWell itsamystery, hopefully you are rested up from your Spring Break because if this is an assignment that needs to be turned in I am afraid that you have some work to do.\nIn gratitude to you for your question I will answer you with 'my start' into this work which if not for your question I would still be outside on the patio.  \n\nHere goes a swell beginning:\n\n.\n\nWhy, Death Be Not Proud\nIn “Death Be Not Proud” the protagonist literary presenters are chosen teenagers for the reasons that the importance of this poem is to have a definite and positive impact on younger students and young adults alike across the world.  For it serves as guide for the confrontatious attitudes necessary in the face of, emotional, physical and spiritual adversity.  To forge a better social function among us that will inevitably present to our younger generations. These are all here and within this poem and which all support the theme of this magnificent writing.  In  “Death Be Not Proud” is found a generational social cohesiveness that is necessary for a functional society’s survival, and which is so well prayed by John Gunther’s 1947 memoirs.  \nIt is a penned offering intellectually and emotionally secured as a memoir to his son whose ultimate youthful death by a brain tumor at the age of seventeen is eminent. Gunther draws from his heart and from John Dunne’s 17th century “The Holy Sonnets: X” in producing this writing.  It is a poem, in which Gunther argues that ‘death should take no pride in what it does, as it is ultimately powerless to prevent the resurrection of all humanity.’ It can be presented at a literary discourse for educational purpose or as a play on a stage.  \n“Death be not proud, though some have called thee / mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so,\nFor those whom thou think’st thou dost overthrow,\nDie not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me.\nFrom rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be,\nMuch pleasure:  then from thee much more must flow,\nAnd soonest our best men with thee do go,\nRest of their bones, and soul’s delivery.\nThou art slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men,\nAnd dost with poison, war and sickness dwell;\nAnd Poppy or charms can make us sleep as well\nAnd better than thy stroke; why swell’st thou then? \nOne short sleep past, we wake eternally,\nAnd death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.     John Donne\nIt is a versified oratory free-verse poem with melodic tone, chant, and supple plea/defiant texture composed about young Johnny Gunther.  About his attitudes and strife for living in the face of a natural and inevitable defeat.  It is the presentation of the life of Johnny’s family and their recourse to every medical possibility known at the time, taken from an elegy of a long time past, converted from a poem of love and not a poem of mourning. And even unto an eternal spiritual search for the healing of the body, of the mind, and of the spirit of their son by John Gunther and his wife.  About their tessellated forms draught from their experiential abilities within such frames of human suffrage.  In explicit honesty are laid bare the pains and struggles of a family trying to delay the ultimate inevitable end for a son that is as brilliant as Johnny.  From the radical surgeries to strictly controlled diets in endless effort to save his life by a determined harmonious familial union in the face of adversarial reality as they live on for life’s sake. All while in defiance of any honor attributable by mere mortals to death’s demands. \n\nhttp://www.cs.rice.edu/ ssiyer/minstrels/poems/796.html  \n\n\nJose
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"Confessional poetry" is highly autobiographical, marked by irony and lyrical emotion, and often dwells on themes of madness and death.\n\nTry reading Anne Sexton or Sylvia Plath...  Robert Lowell or Hart Crane.  \n\nAll of which committed suicide.\n\nHere is one of my favorites...\n\nThe Ballad Of The Lonely Masturbator\nAnne Sexton.\n\n\nThe end of the affair is always death. \nShe's my workshop. Slippery eye, \nout of the tribe of myself my breath \nfinds you gone. I horrify \nthose who stand by. I am fed. \nAt night, alone, I marry the bed. \n\nFinger to finger, now she's mine. \nShe's not too far. She's my encounter. \nI beat her like a bell. I recline \nin the bower where you used to mount her. \nYou borrowed me on the flowered spread. \nAt night, alone, I marry the bed. \n\nTake for instance this night, my love, \nthat every single couple puts together \nwith a joint overturning, beneath, above, \nthe abundant two on sponge and feather, \nkneeling and pushing, head to head. \nAt night, alone, I marry the bed. \n\nI break out of my body this way, \nan annoying miracle. Could I \nput the dream market on display? \nI am spread out. I crucify. \nMy little plum is what you said. \nAt night, alone, I marry the bed. \n\nThen my black-eyed rival came. \nThe lady of water, rising on the beach, \na piano at her fingertips, shame \non her lips and a flute's speech. \nAnd I was the knock-kneed broom instead. \nAt night, alone, I marry the bed. \n\nShe took you the way a women takes \na bargain dress off the rack \nand I broke the way a stone breaks. \nI give back your books and fishing tack. \nToday's paper says that you are wed. \nAt night, alone, I marry the bed. \n\nThe boys and girls are one tonight. \nThey unbutton blouses. They unzip flies. \nThey take off shoes. They turn off the light. \nThe glimmering creatures are full of lies. \nThey are eating each other. They are overfed. \nAt night, alone, I marry the bed.
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I had to go back and reread the poem to remember it in particular from my high school Lit Class (5 years...  sheesh!).  Anyway, its main theme is basically as everyone has said- a warning that even mankind's greatest works shall eventually crumble to dust.\n\nWithin Temptation does a song on their Mother Earth CD entitled "Never-ending Story" that sums up the main point of Ozymandias nicely with the lyrics, "We'll all be forgotten  |  There's no endless fame".\n\nHowever, we can go into a bit more depth about the secondary themes of hope and rebirth.  In lines 10 through 14, Ozymandias reads as such:\n"'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:\nLook on my works, ye mighty, and despair!'   \nNothing beside remains: round the decay   \nOf that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,   \nThe lone and level sands stretch far away."\n\nThese lines serve to anchor the somewhat depressing mood, but give infinite hope as well.  Even though King Ozymandias is telling us to despair, for all we do will eventually disappear, he is also telling us to look upon his works as they are in the here and now.\n\nThe boundless sea of sand that was once his great kingdom may seem like it has been destroyed, but in fact Ozymandias has *created* it as his buildings and monuments have crumbled.  Essentially, the poem is commenting that nothing mankind can build will last- but as those things are annihilated they create the soil, and in turn the plants and stone, that generations down the road will use to build their own monuments.  Even though we may die and rot in the present, we are immortal as part of the life cycle that is always recycling into the next incarnation of life.  Who knows, when we eventually croak, we might all come back as daisies!