ENG 110 Lecture Notes - Lecture 4: Enjambment, Margaret Atwood, Howard Nemerov

• School: Ryerson University
• Department: English
• Course: ENG 110
• Professor: Ruth Panofsky

Document Summary

Until the end of the 17 centuries; could mean a love poem or a poem of mourning. Only a poem of mourning (usually consolation of the death of a specific person) source of consolation for the speaker. Sustained and formal poet setting both their mediation on death or another solemn theme. Conventional elegy stanza: iambic pentameter quatrain (rhyme: a b a b) Poets meditation is occasioned by the death of a particular person but it may be a generalized observation or the expression of a solemn mood. The vacuum cleaner sulks in the corner closet, Its bag limp as a stopped lung, its mouth. But when my old woman died her soul. Went into that vacuum cleaner, and i can"t bear. To see the bag swell like a belly, eating the dust. And the woolen mice, and begin to howl. She used to crawl, in the corner and under the stair. I know now how life is cheap as dirt,