Reflections on Poets

Out of the four poets we read, I liked Yeats and Frost the most. For Yeat's Lake Isle of Innisfree, I could tell the character will arise and go to Innisfree, where he will build a small cabin “of clay and wattles made.” The character believes he will have peace there, for peace drops from “the veils of morning to where the cricket sings.” The poem is written as a hexameter, with six stresses in each line, in a loosely iambic pattern. The last line of each stanza shortens and becomes a tetrameter with only four stresses like for instance “And live alone in the bee-loud glade.” Each stanza has the same ABAB rhyme scheme. This poem is tranquil as well as hypnotic because the hexameters recreate the rhythmic sound of the tide. The simple imagery of the quiet life the speaker longs to lead can lull any reader into his idyllic fantasy.

As for Frost's famous poem "The Road Not Taken," the character stands in the middle of the woods while considering which path to take from this fork in the road. The character chooses one, telling himself that he will take the other path another day. Yet he knows it is unlikely that he will have the opportunity to do so. And he admits that someday in the future he will recreate that scene and perhaps regret not taking the other road.This poem consists of four stanzas with five lines. The rhyme scheme is ABAAB. This has always been one of his best-known and perhaps misunderstood poem. I'm sure generations of careless readers have considered the message its conveying from it simple words, and resonant metaphor but it seems as if “The Road Not Taken” gets memorized without really being read thus making it a cliché.