Discussion week 6-

Ode on a Grecian Urn has never done anything for me, personally. I cannot grasp what the writer is talking about without the title. It bores me. I don't want to feel boredom when reading poetry, I want to feel....moved. Enraptured. Angry, perhaps. But not bored. Never bored. It does, however, incorporate a lot of symbolism and make use of several other literary devices. But luckily, we are writing about the most EFFECTIVE use, not the most use. I feel Keats's poem was the most heavily laden with literary devices of the choices given this week, where William Carlos Williams's Landscape with the Fall of Icarus sorely lacked symbolism or figurative speech, and was quite clear in its diction, making me feel it was the most light handed in the literary device category this week.It was not flowery, it was straight forward.  I however, was most taken with Michael Hamburger's Lines on Brueghel's Icarus, this week, on a personal level. It was my favorite. So to me, it had the most effective use of literary devices.

Here it is---

The ploughman ploughs, the fisherman dreams of fish;- imagery
Aloft, the sailor, through a world of ropes-imagery
Guides tangled meditations, feverish-- metaphor
With memories of girls forsaken, hopes--
Of brief reunions, new discoveries,
Past rum consumed, rum promised, rum potential.-- LOVE THIS LINE
Sheep crop the grass, lift up their heads and gaze
Into a sheepish present: the essential,-- Play on words
Illimitable juiciness of things,
Greens, yellows, browns are what they see. - Sheep focus on eating, and see only this)
Churlish and slow, the shepherd, hearing wings
Perhaps an eagle’s–gapes uncertainly; hears the wings, thinks it's an eagle- dumb
Too late. The worst has happened: lost to man,- no one helps, no one knows
The angel, Icarus, for ever failed, ( Forever Failed is a EUPHEMISM for DEAD)
Fallen with melted wings when, near the sun-  his wings melted. (This is a FLASHBACK)
He scorned the ordering planet, which prevailed- the earth won
And, jeering, now slinks off, to rise once more.--metaphor
But he–his damaged purpose drags him down —gravity brings him to Earth
Too far from his half-brothers on the shore,-- not near enough for man to save him
Hardly conceivable, is left to drown.-no one notices, he dies.

Slanted end rhymes- repetition- imagery- ecphrasis- Narrative Chiasmus- Cosmic Irony- Parable-