It was important to oil the universal joint of an automobile before driving.

Cummings’s metaphor is brilliant because, considered outside the context of this poem, this phrase could be completely asexual. You could imagine it in an automobile’s instruction manual (“Having thoroughly oiled the universal joint, you are ready to drive”). Yet in context, the lubricating diction takes on extremely sexual overtones that sexually charge the lubrication process, as the “universal joint” becomes a vaginal analogue.

Note the universal joint below the gear-shifting lever

The poem begins by immediately linking the ideas of a woman and a car through the common practice of referring to a car with a feminine pronoun.

The comparison between car and woman may seem hackneyed, but Cummings makes the metaphor interesting by comparing specifically a new car from the 20s to a virgin woman.

Cummings uses his typically idiosyncratic capitalization to emphasize the word “Brand,” as opposed to “she,” which implies that the speaker thinks of this woman with something of the same commercial mind-set of buying a certain “Brand” of car. The fact that the woman is described with mechanical language at all objectifies her, and this first line underscores the way in which the speaker thinks of her.

In this stanza, Tennyson shifts his rhythm to trochaic tetrameter, and starts using feminine rhymes. The effect, first, is a rhythmic variation that keeps readers interested and the music of the poem fresh.

But it also accelerates the reading, since the unstressed line endings flow readily into the stressed syllables beginning the next lines.

This line moves especially quickly coming right after the caesura in the preceding line, and this leads nicely into the “flowing” effect Tennyson wishes to create in the following lines as he considers “the wave that runs for ever.”

In this sardonic analogy, Homer attributes a situation extremely similar to that of Ulysses and Telemachus to the reunion of Eumaeus and Telemachus. This comparison works on few different levels.

First, Homer conveys the paternal affection Eumaeus feels for Telemachus, and simultaneously underscores Ulysses’s absence. It seems that without a real father present, the closest thing to a father-son relationship Telemachus had was this relationship with his swine-herd.

Second, Homer reminds us of the fact that Ulysses is sitting in the same room as Telemachus at last, and we admire his impossible self-restraint. It should really be Ulysses who embraces his actual son, not Eumaeus who embraces Telemachus as if he were his son. But note that Eumaeus embraces Telemachus as if a father had been separated from his son for 10 years, but Odysseus has been separated from Telemachus for almost twice that. Homer asks us to consider how much stronger the emotions Ulysses restrains in this scene must be.

At last, after the extreme tension in the preceding scene, Telemachus recognizes Ulysses as his father. Homer underscores the realization of their father-son relationship by casting Telemachus in a filial role, as he “threw his arms about his father and wept,” as a child would.

With the emotional significance to Ulysses described in the previous annotation in mind, Telemachus’s refusal to believe that Ulysses is his father is heart-wrenching. In this scene, Homer conveys an intense emotional tension and discomfort that arises because of the disparity between Ulysses’s desperation to be reunited with his son and Telemachus’s skepticism.

In these lines, Ulysses finally reveals his identity as Telemachus’s father. He couples this revelation with a display of genuine paternal sympathy, which Telemachus has gone without for virtually his entire life.

Homer offers us an image of father and son that’s completely antithetical to the typical relationship. We would expect a son to know his father more intimately than most other people, but in this scene, Telemachus cowers in fear at his “stranger father.”

Ulysses recognizes that his magnificent appearance is an impediment to their reunion, so Ulysses humbles himself here, which is an important step in Telemachus seeing Ulysses not as a god, but a human being.