Poetry

1. Portrait of a landscape depicts the story of klien’s own mental state. He is stating the poet differs from your average being “It’s also possible that he is alive/ amnesiac, or mad or in retired disgraces / or beyond recognition of love” Klein attempts to reach a point that the poet analyses and reanalyzes life and tries to depict it with a manipulation of words, this over analyzing may lead to a complete destruction of the actual meaning of things and lead one to go crazy.

2. The man in the poem represents Layton himself, and the theme of man, nature, and religion is in direct correlation to Layton’s article. The poet says, “That’s the way I feel about gnats . . . and crushed grass-snakes. Both are a part of nature, and yet the gnats become a nuisance while the snake is heralded as the “manifest of that joyful wisdom.” The snake plays a much greater and long-lasting role. It also has a history usually bad within the annals of religion and mythology. Perhaps because the serpent has so often been a symbol of evil and of temptation to do wrong, the tall man (and Layton) finds it an appropriate beast to make the point about mankind’s ironic treatment of nature. Human beings are “natural” too, but they consider themselves above everything else that constitutes nature

3. A very recurrent theme in E.P Johnson’s poems is First nation’s people and the west. In the poem Silhouette she emphasizes the simplistic beautiful life of the first nation’s people.

The tent poles lift the loom in thin relief/The upward floating smoke ascends between /And near the open doorway, gaunt and lean, / shadow-like, there stand an Indian chief

This gives you a sense of a simplistic beautiful life, much unlike any colonial powers who lives are hectic.

4. In this poem, Livesay addresses the difficulty of being a woman and a poet in contemporary society. The three Emilys of the title are presumably Emily Bronte, Emily Dickinson, and Emily Carr, each of these women escaped marriage and motherhood, allowing them to pursue their artistic careers with greater ease. The speaker wishes to join the three Emilys, but due to her children and her husband, "only a brief span" of time can be devoted to her poetry.

5. Atwood divides her poem, “Variations on the Word Love,” into two concrete sections, which represent two different ways of looking at the word love. The first stanza is dedicated to expressing love as a word and the second focuses on love as a feeling. The Readers notice a drastic change in Atwood’s tone between the two stanzas because in the first stanza, her attitude about love is expressed quit bitterly. The bitterness is evident in her description of love as “a word we use to plug/holes with.” Although Atwood’s attitude towards love appears bitter in the first stanza, her bitterness vanishes

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