Critical Appreciation of Important Poems | Eureka Study Aids

1. Critically evaluate the following.
(i) One day I wrote her name upon the strand,
But came the waves and washed it away:
Again I wrote it with a second hand,
But came the tide and made my pains his prey.
Vain man (said she) that dost in vain assay
A mortal thing so to immortalise;
For I myself shall like to this decay,
And eke my name be wiped out likewise.
Not so (quod I); let baser things devise
To die in dust, but you shall live by fame;
My verse your virtues rare shall eternise,
And in the heavens write your glorious name:
Where, when as Death shall all the world subdue,
Our love shall live, and later life renew.

(Edmund Spenser)

(ii) Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date:
Sometimes too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm'd;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature's changing course, untrimm'd;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st:
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

(William Shakespeare)

2. Critically evaluate the following. 
(i) The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:
Little we see in Nature that is ours:
We have given our hears away, a sordid boon!
The Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not. --- Great God! I'd rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.

(William Wordsworth)

(ii) Do you ask what the birds say? The sparrow, the dove,
The linner and thrush say, 'I love and I love!'
In the winter they're silent -- the wind is so strong;
What is says, I don't know, but it sings a loud song.
But green leaves, and blossoms, and sunny warm weather,
And singing, and loving -- all come back together.
But the lark is so brimful of gladness and love,
The green fields below him, the blue sky above,
The he sings, and he sings; and for ever sings he -
'I love my Love, and my Love loves me!'

(S.T. Coleridge)

3. Critically evaluate the following. 
(i) There be none of Beauty's daughters
With a magic like thee;
And like music on the waters
Is they sweet voice to me:
When, as if its sound were causing
The charmed ocean's pausing,
The waves lie still and gleaming,
And the lull'd winds seem dreaming:
And the midnight moon is weaving
Her bright chain o'er the deep,
Whose breast is gently heaving
As an infant's asleep:
So the spirit bows before thee
To listen and adore thee;
With a full but soft emotion,
Like the swell of summer's ocean.

(Lord Byron) 

(ii) Bright star! Would I were steadfast as thou art --
Not in love splendour hung aloft the night,
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like Nature's patient sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priest-like task
Of pure ablution round earth's human shores,
Or grazing on the new soft fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors --
No --- yet still steadfast, still unchangeable,
Pillow'd upon my fair love's ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever --- or else swoon to death.

(John Keats) 

4. Critically evaluate the following. 
(i) I'm Nobody! Who are you?
Are you - Nobody - too?
Then there's a pair of us!
Don't tell! they'd advertise - you know!
How dreary - to be - Somebody!
How public - like a Frog -
To tell one's name - the livelong June -
To an admiring Bog!

(Emily Dickinson)

(ii) Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.
My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.
He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.
The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

(Robert Frost) 

5. Critically evaluate the following. 
(i) Out of the wood of thoughts that grows by night
To be cut down by the sharp axe of light, --
Out of the night, two cocks together crow,
Cleaving the darkness with a silver blow:
And bright before my eyes with trumpeters stand,
Heralds of splendour, one at either hand,
Each facing each as in a coat of arms:
The milkers lace their boots up at the farms.

(Edward Thomas) 

(ii) Twelve o'clock
Along the reaches of the street
Held in a lunar synthesis,
Whispering lunar incantations
Dissolve the floors of memory
And all its clear relations,
Its divisions and precisions,
Every street lamp that I pass
Beats like a fatalistic drum,
And through the spaces of the dark
Midnight shakes the memory
As a madman shakes a dead geranium.

(T.S. Eliot)

6. Critically evaluate the following. 
(i) Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Easter tide.
Now, of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.
And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.

(A.E. Houseman)

(ii) At school I loved one picture's heavy greenness -
Horizons rigged with windmills' arms and sails.
The millhouses' still outlines. Their in-placeness
Still more in place when mirrored in canals.
I can't remember not ever having known
The immanent hydraulics of a land
Of glar and glit and floods at dailigone.
My silting hope. My lowlands of the mind.
Heaviness of being. And poetry
Sluggish in the doldrums of what happens.
Me waiting until I was nearly fifty
To credit marvels. Like the tree-clock of tin cans
The tinkers made. So long for air to brighten,
Time to be dazzled and the heart to lighten.

(Seamus Heaney)

7. Critically evaluate the following.
(i) The first time I died, I walked my ways;
I followed the file of limping days.
I held me tall, with my head flung up,
But I dared not look on the moon's cup.
I dared not look on the sweet rain,
And between my ribs was a gleaming pain.
The next time I died, they laid me deep,
They spoke worn words to my hallow sleep.
They tossed me petals, they wreathed me fern,
They weighted me down with a marble urn.
And I lie here warm, and I lie there dry.
And I watch worms slip by, slip by.

(Dorothy Parker)

(ii) They're lying; lying all of them:
He never loved his shadow,
And tried to wring its neck.
Not love but murder on his mind,
He grappled with the other man
Inside the lucid stream
Only the surface broke,
Unblinking eyes
Came swimming back in view.
At last he knew
He never would
Destroy the other self
And knowing made him shrink
He shrank into a yellow --- bellied flower.

(Mervyn Morris)

8. Critically evaluate the following.
(i) Why blame the bulbul?
Rather the sound of the land itself,
A night-jar on a rusty string
Or a train whistle going far
In the night, the steam off.
Strange that there's only a road
By the woodland house,
And the infrequent packed car
Intrudes in here not
By a horn but headlights.
A crescent moon hangs over the drapes
Of light music --- from my side of the bed
As my hands exchange the silken sheet
For you, I know what it is to be distracted.

(Alamgir Hashmi)

(ii) I say him leap and thwack you with
Inherited expertise. I
Saw you still the pole and work your
Son to the ground. A dying art
Bridged two generations. You thought.
Now we come for formalities
But you talk of poetry and how
Meaningful some verses become
When the young die and old men live.

(Athar Tahir)