Poetry for Students, Volume 29

McHaney: That reminds me how important narrative is within your lyric poems. What do you find that poetry can do when you want t ...

Trethewey:Yes, and to transform the mean- ing by circling back. McHaney: I also read that in a pantoum the poet tells two storie ...

The story is heroic; the architecture is con- tained. Between the dialectical structure and the variety of carefully crafted pat ...

whathomemeans after we have left, as well as what happens when our home leaves us or refuses to acknowledge our claim to it. The ...

Shipers, Carrie, Review of Native Guard,inPrairie Schooner, Vol. 80, No. 4, Winter 2006, pp. 199–201. Solomon, Debra, ‘‘Native D ...

The Night Piece: To Julia Robert Herrick’s ‘‘The Night Piece: To Julia’’ is a twenty-line lyric poem in which the speaker addres ...

her youngest boy and daughter with her but sent Robert and three of his brothers to live with their uncle William Herrick. The y ...

eyes. Reasonable expectation, considering that the poem is called ‘‘The Night Piece: To Julia,’’ can lead the reader to think th ...

creatures like snakes, or deceptive visions forged in the darkness, may be abroad. Or one may experience the night itself as spo ...

Style Catalog ‘‘The Night Piece: To Julia’’ is essentially a cata- log, or a list. In it, the poet enumerates the positive pheno ...

with a decisive victory for the forces of Parlia- ment at the battle of Worcester. King Charles I was beheaded in 1649. A law wa ...

seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (when hardly any critical attention was paid to Herrick) and into the nineteenth. In fact, ...

of sin in the face of a consuming sense of desire governs the rhetoric of ‘‘The Night Piece: To Julia.’’ Unspoken though it is i ...

significance, suggesting, therefore, a latent tension apparently absent or ignored in the manifest com- munication. The poet is ...

intercourse. Indeed, the poem alludes to this sin but has not spoken of it, as the poem’s goal is to avoid and banish sin from c ...

undermine Herrick’s political poetry (167). While convention operates on the surface of Herrick’s poems on women, a great deal o ...

speculation on such a matter is particularly undesirable.’’ The reluctance of critics to cite such an obvious fact as the poet’s ...

But the relationship of Julia and the persona rapidly moves beyond the level of the admiring poet and the edible woman. Julia an ...

from the Bible, and theological words like ‘‘transgression,’’ ‘‘altar,’’ even ‘‘old religion,’’ all give an unquieting sense of ...

His references to Julia, to the other mistresses, to his muse, his epithalamium poems, his occasional poems addressing both nobl ...