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Muse: one of nine goddesses in Greek mythology who inspired artists; now used for any figure, usually though not always female, who is the source of inspiration for a creative artist.
This is an unrhymed sonnet with the turn halfway through line 9. The sonnet seems to finally allow the muse to answer the poet/lover (who may or may not be male, like the dog in her simile). Or is it the affectionate lover who is the muse for Shapcott’s speaker?
The irregular meter and lack of rhyme contrast with the traditional expectations set by the title.
What is this?
The Genius annotation is the work of the Genius Editorial project. Our editors and contributors collaborate to create the most interesting and informative explanation of any line of text. It’s also a work in progress, so leave a suggestion if this or any annotation is missing something.
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What is this?
The Genius annotation is the work of the Genius Editorial project. Our editors and contributors collaborate to create the most interesting and informative explanation of any line of text. It’s also a work in progress, so leave a suggestion if this or any annotation is missing something.
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What is this?
The Genius annotation is the work of the Genius Editorial project. Our editors and contributors collaborate to create the most interesting and informative explanation of any line of text. It’s also a work in progress, so leave a suggestion if this or any annotation is missing something.
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“The Silken Tent” is a Shakespearean-style sonnet, published in 1942, in which Robert Frost uses an imaginative if somewhat bizarre extended metaphor or conceit. A woman who has close relationships to others is compared to a silk tent in summer breeze. Through this comparison the poet shows that the woman is paradoxically strongest and most free when bound by ropes and poles which are her personal commitments.
Today we might find Frost’s idea patronising and sexist, but it belongs to its time. The composition is beautifully crafted.
Structure
A Shakespearean or English sonnet follows a fourteen line template of three quatrains and a rhyming couplet. Usually, each quatrain forms a separate image. However, Frost deviates from this by using one sentence for the entire poem and by developing the one, inventive idea.
The rhyme scheme, however, follows the traditional pattern ABAB CDCD EFEF GG. The metrical rhythm is the expected iambic pentameter, that is, five iambs or metrical feet per line, where a iamb is made up of one unstressed followed by one stressed syllable.
Language and Imagery
The voice is that of a third person narrator, we can assume the poet, referring to a woman also in the third person as “she”. There is no indication who “she” is, except that the admiration of the speaker is expressed through the outlandish extended metaphor.
Frost develops his idea cleverly. The tent needs ropes and poles to support it, just as the woman’s strength and resilience are derived from “silken ties of love and thought”. Other aspects of the metaphor are also appropriate; silk is soft, erotic to the touch, suitable for a loving woman.
Frost uses soft alliterative “s"s throughout to mimic the sound of the breeze blowing through silk.
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This begins the conceit, which is a form of elaborate comparison, here expressed as a simile. It is the only explicit mention of “she” in the whole poem. The syntax of the line is unexpected and archaic, with the “silken tent” placed for emphasis at the end, an example of anastrophe.
The style is taut and spare, no words are wasted. All words, with one exception, are monosyllables, and the line flows smoothly. The metrical rhythm is iambic pentameter, that is five metrical feet or iambs where a iamb is one unstressed followed by one stressed syllable.
Note that this begins the single sentence that makes up the whole of the sonnet.
As the mind deserts the body it has used. T.S. Eliot – La Figlia Che Piange
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What is this?
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The title is Italian and translates to “the weeping girl” or “the girl who weeps.”
T.S. Eliot wrote this poem after failing to find a stele with this title that a friend recommended he see on a trip to Italy. The elusive work of ancient art that Eliot sought is a symbol for the elusive woman and the failed love affair. It first appeared in his volume Prufrock and Other Observations (1917).
The poem describes a lovers’ parting. The speaker describes the girl and his feelings when remembering her, but he also directs her as he would an actress on a film set. So the speaker plays a dual role, unhappy lover and aesthetic observer.
Structure
The poem is divided into three stanzas with irregular rhyme scheme and irregular line-lengths. The first stanza is the most lyrical and the metrical rhythm relatively regular iambs. The second and third stanza are more free-flowing, but Eliot returns to the iambic meter in the last three lines of the poem.
There is an irregular rhyme scheme that creates some cohesion in a complex poem.
The Yale Modernism Lab has a great article on this poem here.
So I would have had her stand and grieve,
So he would have left T.S. Eliot – La Figlia Che Piange
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What is this?
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To learn more about participating in the Genius Editorial project, check out the contributor guidelines.
What is this?
The Genius annotation is the work of the Genius Editorial project. Our editors and contributors collaborate to create the most interesting and informative explanation of any line of text. It’s also a work in progress, so leave a suggestion if this or any annotation is missing something.
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These lines are sarcastic. The speaker loses his emotional restraint in the final alexandrine, which is contrasted with his other more controlled and consistent lines.
In other words, the speaker is saying that any ‘goodbye’ would have been ‘Simple and faithless as a smile and shake of the hand’ compared to how much he loved her. There is emphasis in the two descriptive words ‘light and deft’, a device known as hendiadys, two similar-meaning words that give added weight and rhythm.
Finally, the speaker stops referring to himself in the third person (‘him’) and only speaks in the first person (‘I’), in the shortest line of the poem, ‘I should find’. Also, the modal ‘would’ of the first three lines is replaced by ‘should’. This shows his inevitable inability to remain a detached aesthete: he is personally involved. The bitter sarcasm and irritation only adds emphasis to his emotional involvement.
Derivative from an early influence of Eliot’s; Jules laforgue. Peter Quenell heeds to this direct homage, which Eliot offers Laforgue, in his book Baudelaire and The Symbolists:
As illustrative of his (Laforgue) nearly achieved Classicism, I would quote, for example, the line, adapted in a poem by T. S. Eliot:
‘Simple et sans foi comme un bonjour’
-Peter Quenell
‘Simple and faithless as a smile and shake of the hand’ draws a blatant parrelel to Laforgue’s ‘Simple and faithless as a greeting’.
It is a testament to Eliots mastery of citation (or capacity to inflict the more aesthetic feeling of an entire piece work into a short phrase). Additionally, it bears the mark of Eliots debt to the Poetes Maudits of the French Symbolist movement, borne in several other instances of Eliots work, though perhaps no more pungently than Laforgues aforementioned snippet.
The most famous example of this debt is found in The Wasteland and untranslated:
Hypocrite lecteur, mon semblable, mon frere- Charles Baudelaire