Spring in New Hampshire by Claude McKay

Spring in New Hamphire

by Claude McKay, 1920

Too green the springing April grass, 
Too blue the silver-speckled sky, 
For me to linger here, alas, 
While happy winds go laughing by, 
Wasting the golden hours indoors, 
Washing windows and scrubbing floors. 

Too wonderful the April night, 
Too faintly sweet the first May flowers, 
The stars too gloriously bright, 
For me to spend the evening hours, 
When fields are fresh and streams are leaping, 
Wearied, exhausted, dully sleeping.

Source: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/21416

Analysis: Claude McKay whose work preceded, influenced and participated in the Harlem Renaissance was a unique poet. His work can nearly be divided into two categories his pastoral contemplative work, and his activist modern work. Though McKay gets most of his acclaim for his bleak unapologetic poetry primarily about racism and the urban experience, he wrote enough poetry that is softer in tone that we have to accept it as sincere, and not simply as subversive and ironic. "Spring in New Hampshire" is an excellent example of this style. 

     McKay's poem, which encourages us to get out doors and experience nature, is as relevant today as ever. He is proposing simply, that the day is too beautiful to stay inside. The most striking poetic touch has to do with how he's constructed his two stanzas. Each use a simple end rhyme scheme ABABCC, familiar as the last six lines of a Shakespearean sonnet, but also starts the sentence with the same letter scheme TTFWWW, except his second stanza adds switches the third W for a third T.

Sound and Sense by Alexander Pope

Sound and Sense

by Alexander Pope, 1711

True ease in writing comes from art, not chance,
As those move easiest who have learned to dance.
'Tis not enough no harshness gives offense,
The sound must seem an echo to the sense:
Soft is the strain when Zephyr gently blows,
And the smooth stream in smoother numbers flows;
But when loud surges lash the sounding shore,
The hoarse, rough verse should like the torrent roar;
When Ajax strives some rock's vast weight to throw,
The line too labors, and the words move slow;
Not so, when swift Camilla scours the plain,
Flies o'er the unbending corn, and skims along the main.
Hear how Timotheus' varied lays surprise,
And bid alternate passions fall and rise!

Source: http://www.poetry-online.org/pope_sound_and_sense.htm

Analysis: Alexander Pope was an English Poet of the early 1700's. His work is most often identified with the Baroque period. To the student reader, Pope is often very accessible because of his use of heroic couplets, a form widely used by Dr. Seuss and still used in greeting cards. A heroic couplet is two lines of text immediately together that use end rhyme, they also form a complete thought. We can see in "Sound and Sense" that at the end of each couplet Pope ends either with a semi-colon, colon, period or at the end an exclamation point.
     This poem comes from Pope's first collection, published when he was only twenty three years old, and as a man many described as arrogant, Pope apparently couldn't pass up the chance to praise himself saying that being a writer was not a matter of chance, but of being an artist. He uses a series of Greek mythological characters throughout the rest of the poem. Zephyr was the god of the west wind; Ajax the a tremendously strong warrior from The Iliad; Camilla a Roman character who walked across the corn fields so fast the grass beneath her feet burned; and Timotheus was a Greek poet who added a string to the lyre, bringing much praise and scorn.