In my view, the poem works out Hughes's apprehension, his feeling that his ability to understand the emotions that generated this form of artistic expression was not on a par with the expression itself This is indicated by the last line of the poem, where the speaker notes that the piano player "slept like a rock or a man that's dead." ... He never enters that space whereby the piano player is speaking for him, giving utterance to his loneliness. ...

• Word Count: 547
• Approx Pages: 2
• Grade Level: Undergraduate

Perhaps the most traditional of her poems is the well-known "South of My Days" with its nostalgia for an idealized Australian past. ... Her own strong relationship to this past is evident in the first person possessive pronoun of the title and the metaphor "part of my blood's country" but this also imitates an Aboriginal phrasing about the connection to land, suggesting an indigenous presence which is absent from the rest of the poem. ... This time the singer is not a bush storyteller as in 'South of my Days' but the earth struggling to make a "cry ...

• Word Count: 1047
• Approx Pages: 4
• Grade Level: Undergraduate