American Lit final summery, characters names, phrases, places

SummaryA 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.FormBlank verse is the baseline meter of this poem, but few of the lines march along in blank verse's characteristic lock-step iambs, five abreast. Frost maintains five stressed syllables per line, but he varies the feet extensively to sustain the natural speech-like quality of the verse. There are no stanza breaks, obvious end-rhymes, or rhyming patterns, but many of the end-words share an assonance (e.

g., wall, hill, balls, wall, and well sun, thing, stone, mean, line, and again or game, them, and him twice). Internal rhymes, too, are subtle, slanted, and conceivably coincidental. The vocabulary is all of a piece—no fancy words, all short (only one word, another, is of three syllables), all conversational—and this is perhaps why the words resonate so consummately with each other in sound and feel.

SummaryThe poem presents a few moments of charged dialogue in a strained relationship between a rural husband and wife who have lost a child.

The woman is distraught after catching sight of the child's grave through the window—and more so when her husband doesn't immediately recognize the cause of her distress. She tries to leave the house; he importunes her to stay, for once, and share her grief with him—to give him a chance. He doesn't understand what it is he does that offends her or why she should grieve outwardly so long. She resents him deeply for his composure, what she sees as his hard-heartedness.

She vents some of her anger and frustration, and he receives it, but the distance between them remains. She opens the door to leave, as he calls after her.FormThis is a dramatic lyric—"dramatic" in that, like traditional drama, it presents a continuous scene and employs primarily dialogue rather than narrative or description. It is dramatic, too, in its subject matter—"dramatic" in the sense of "emotional" or "tense." Form fits content well in this poem: One can easily imagine two actors onstage portraying this brief, charged scene. Rhythmically, Frost approaches pure speech—and some lines, taken out of context, sound as prosaic as anything.

For example, line 62: "I do think, though, you overdo it a little." Generally, there are five stressed syllables per line, although (as in line 62), they are not always easy to scan with certainty. Stanza breaks occur where quoted speech ends or begins.

SummaryThe speaker stands in the woods, considering a fork in the road. Both ways are equally worn and equally overlaid with un-trodden leaves. The speaker chooses one, telling himself that he will take the other another day.

Yet he knows it is unlikely that he will have the opportunity to do so. And he admits that someday in the future he will recreate the scene with a slight twist: He will claim that he took the less-traveled road.Form"The Road Not Taken" consists of four stanzas of five lines. The rhyme scheme is ABAAB; the rhymes are strict and masculine, with the notable exception of the last line (we do not usually stress the -ence of difference). There are four stressed syllables per line, varying on an iambic tetrameter base.

SummaryWhen the speaker sees bent birch trees, he likes to think that they are bent because boys have been "swinging" them. He knows that they are, in fact, bent by ice storms. Yet he prefers his vision of a boy climbing a tree carefully and then swinging at the tree's crest to the ground. He used to do this himself and dreams of going back to those days.

He likens birch swinging to getting "away from the earth awhile" and then coming back.FormThis is blank verse, with numerous variations on the prevailing iambic foot.

SummaryOn the surface, this poem is simplicity itself. The speaker is stopping by some woods on a snowy evening.

He or she takes in the lovely scene in near-silence, is tempted to stay longer, but acknowledges the pull of obligations and the considerable distance yet to be traveled before he or she can rest for the night.FormThe poem consists of four (almost) identically constructed stanzas. Each line is iambic, with four stressed syllables:Within the four lines of each stanza, the first, second, and fourth lines rhyme. The third line does not, but it sets up the rhymes for the next stanza. For example, in the third stanza, queer, near, and year all rhyme, but lake rhymes with shake, mistake, and flake in the following stanza.The notable exception to this pattern comes in the final stanza, where the third line rhymes with the previous two and is repeated as the fourth line.

Do not be fooled by the simple words and the easiness of the rhymes; this is a very difficult form to achieve in English without debilitating a poem's content with forced rhymes.

the sense of the poem's being literally autobiographical—an effect that is characteristic of much of Williams's poetry. Although some critics identify the poem's narrator as Williams himself, one cannot do this with any certainty, since the poem may be partly or entirely fictional. The most one can say with certainty is that the narrator possesses the skills of a poet and storyteller.

The second element is a thematic one: "The Young Housewife" is about women—a subject that is often at the heart of Williams's poetry. The poem is an early, successful rendering of several themes relating to women that Williams treated throughout his career, all of which can be summed up under the theme of how a lustful man sometimes behaves in response to a desirable but unobtainable woman.

Our speaker is invisible. We know he is wise, because he apparently knows what depends upon a red wheelbarrow, while we are stumped.

We know he is an appreciator of life, and, in particular, of the small things in lifeWilliam Carlos Williams wasn't into writing complex poems that take the reader a lot of work to unlock and digest.

We start out with the title of this poem, which could be telling us that this poem is written for no other reason than to say exactly what it says. Deep, right?And what it says is that the speaker ate the plums, which he thinks "you," someone who, we can guess, lives with the speaker, was saving for breakfast.

The speaker gets excited about a painting called "The Kermess" by Brueghel, and he tells us all about it. The rhythmic, swirling language of the poem paints a picture of a peasant festival, complete with beer, big-bellied dancers, and tons of raucous music. Celebrate good times, gang.

setting is an art museum

A man sees a bunch of faces in the subway and thinks they look like flowers on a tree branch.in a subway in paris kind of a haiku

its a at a wake a lady dies n a broad sense, the wake represents the enactment of the speaker's central message: even in the presence of death, we should enjoy the taste of ice cream—and the focused moment of bliss that pleasure affords.

no capitalizations

ryhme sceem repetitionthis poem traces the adventures of a couple throughout the night. Jumping on and off of the ferry, they manage to wander through town (stopping for dinner) and ramble through the wilds (making a fire and lying on a hill to star-gaze).

rhymesdude it was a one night stand get over it social doubble standereds

londondont want people to see him dramatic monologuegradually reveils more and more about a person some lines rhyme some dont called rhyming couplets

country singer blues famous blues rhythempeople come from cape girardeau and poplar bluffspeaks language of a black southerners earlyth 20th century many poems about aferican american experience in the rural merican south

song. bout jobs and women

jim crow erablack servent with dreams usmaybe slave or close to itassert the narrator's identity as a human being, an American citizen - and a beautiful one, at that. race ambition freedom are themes

about a piano player they heardfree verse walt whitman influenceLenox Avenueharlemwritten 1920s

black college student 22 years old in harlem

jake barnes narratorRobert Cohn lady brett ashelyspain paris madridbull fighting

after civil war grandparents formaer slavesspeeks of washingtonsteels electricity

fake ryhming on island of cost of maineknown for twists and turnes

about blues singer

dad burned wood in morningold rifty housetrancends race could be white or black

drug users Carl Solomonlong lines free verses

chicagosalesmanLevene, Roma, Moss, and Aaronow—and their supervisor, Williamson, who work together selling undesirable real estate at inflated prices.

sonny boybasketball

creat lifeocean beach

domestic violenceshocking subject matter