ABSTRACT This study explores how reflective essays based on the Analects of Confucius contribute to the development of vocational identity among 68 Chilean health sciences students enrolled in English for Specific Purposes (ESP) courses—40 in physical therapy and 28 in pharmaceutical chemistry. Adopting a mixed-methods approach, the intervention included pre- and post-questionnaires on vocational identity, qualitative analysis of students’ essays, and structured interviews. Quantitative findings revealed significant gains in vocational clarity and commitment. Qualitative analysis further showed that reflective engagement with Confucian principles encouraged greater ethical awareness and reinforced students’ sense of professional purpose. The study concludes that structured reflective essays can support the formation of ethically grounded and purpose-driven professional identities in ESP contexts.

This paper examines the negotiation of cultural identity in the poetic canon of Jeet Thayil through a close reading of select poems that foreground questions of language, place, memory, and selfhood. Positioned within the landscape of contemporary Indian English poetry, Thayil’s work resists monolithic notions of cultural identity and instead articulates a fractured, fluid, and often contradictory sense of belonging. Drawing on postcolonial cultural theory and socio-linguistic perspectives, the study argues that Thayil’s poetry constructs identity as a lived negotiation shaped by urban experience, historical residue, spiritual disquiet, and linguistic hybridity. The analysis focuses on how Thayil employs a deliberately unsettled idioms marked by code-switching, vernacular rhythms, allusive references, and stark corporeal imagery to challenge inherited cultural certainties. His poems reimagine the Indian city, particularly Bombay/Mumbai, as a palimpsestic space where colonial memory, indigenous traditions, and global modernity intersect. In this milieu, cultural identity emerges not as an essence to be recovered but as a process continuously re-scripted through language and experience. By foregrounding marginal voices, desacralised rituals, and fractured narratives, Thayil destabilises dominant cultural myths and exposes the tensions between tradition and transgression. The paper concludes that Jeet Thayil’s poetry contributes to the contemporary poetic canon by redefining cultural identity as performative, provisional, and ethically charged, thereby offering a nuanced critique of cultural authenticity in postcolonial and globalised contexts.

Poetry in the digital space is brief but visually expressive. Writers chose the digital platform as they can instantly publish their point of view and receive immediate feedback/criticism. This paper shall discuss about Thinai, a concept from Tamil language which unites landscape, human emotions and social context reimagined in contemporary English poetry within digital spaces. Right from translated Sangam Poetry to modern poetry published online, this study investigates how ecological and emotional mappings of the Thinai landscapes are echoed in the poems. Thinai concept shall bridge the gap between classical tamil poetry with the fluid digital poetry- thus giving a post-colonial study of identity and emotion in the poems from the English language.

This study investigates the complex relationship between semantic polysemy and syntactic structures in contemporary English. Semantic polysemy refers to the phenomenon in which a single word carries multiple related meanings, with interpretation shifting according to syntactic and pragmatic context. This variability reflects the flexibility of language and the cognitive mechanisms that allow speakers to adapt meaning to diverse communicative situations. By analyzing how polysemous words function across different syntactic environments, the research shows that meaning is not static but dynamically shaped by grammatical structure and contextual usage. The methodology is qualitative, focusing on detailed examination of polysemous words in literature, academic discourse, and online media. Each occurrence was analyzed to determine how syntactic variation influences interpretation. This approach provides a comprehensive view of the mechanisms through which syntax interacts with semantics to generate multiple layers of meaning. The findings reveal that structures such as subordination, repetition, and inversion play significant roles in activating specific semantic nuances, underscoring the importance of syntax in shaping interpretation. The study also adopts a comparative perspective, drawing on examples from contemporary English poetry, particularly the works of Carolyn Forché. Her innovative use of syntax illustrates how polysemy can be enriched through poetic language, inviting readers to explore multiple interpretations and enhancing the emotional and thematic depth of her texts. The analysis shows that syntactic devices such as repetition and variation are not merely stylistic ornaments but essential mechanisms for constructing meaning and guiding interpretive processes. Beyond theoretical linguistics, the implications of this research extend to applied fields. In natural language processing and artificial intelligence, a nuanced understanding of polysemy and its syntactic conditioning is crucial for improving systems that aim to approximate human communication. In language pedagogy, insights into the relationship between syntax and semantic variability can inform teaching strategies that help learners navigate complexities of meaning. The study highlights that awareness of syntactic interplay can enhance learners’ ability to interpret texts more flexibly and creatively. In conclusion, this research contributes to the broader field of linguistics by demonstrating that semantic polysemy cannot be fully understood without considering its syntactic environment. By integrating qualitative, corpus-based, and comparative approaches, the study offers valuable insights into the dynamic nature of language, its cognitive foundations, and its expressive potential. The findings emphasize that syntax is not only a structural framework but also a key factor in the construction and interpretation of meaning.

Old English poetry and digitalization were discussed in the Entangled Histories Series

How to Read Middle English Poetry

Abstract In this article, I examine the depiction of icebergs in late eighteenth-century British poetry, focusing on Erasmus Darwin's The Economy of Vegetation (1791). In this work, Darwin projects a future in which icebergs are systematically transported to tropical waters to regulate global climates. Darwin's proposal, prompted by the disruption of colonial shipping routes by an iceberg, repurposes the model of industrial poetics he had earlier employed to influence the colonization of Australia. Building on the insights of scholars such as Siobhan Carroll and Alan Bewell, I argue that Darwin's poetics not only reflect but also actively support his ideological investment in the global development of industry. Furthermore, I detect a deeper ambiguity in Darwin's visions of the future, and suggest that his climate-controlling aspirations are more concerned with maintaining the conditions for his poetry's cultural reception than with addressing the broader consequences of such interventions.

Kamala Surayya (1934-2009), or Kamala Das, is sometimes called the 'Mother of Modern Indian English Poetry,' is important in Indian literature for her relentless probing of gender, sexuality, identity, and marriage. In this paper, we examine how her poetry embodies the feminist ethos - both in its confessional style and its potential to subvert powers that be and patriarchal constructs. This study employs an examination of Das's main works, including Summer in Calcutta (1965), The Descendants (1967), and The Old Playhouse and Other Poems (1973), to show how Das reinscribes female agency and challenges cultural presuppositions about female identity. Raw with honesty, her poetry blurs lines between the personal and universal and corrals readers into facing an uncomfortable truth about power, repression, and freedom. The reclamation of female sexuality, resistance to patriarchal dominance, and the determined brandishing of identity in the postcolonial Indian scenario are the key themes of this study. Das is still a foundational feminist text, prompting today's conversations around gender and self-expression in South Asia.

This study investigates the forms and functions of code-switching and code-mixing found in Maher Zain’s songs Ramadan and Eidun Saeed, which combine English and Arabic as part of a global religious musical expression. The research aims to identify and classify types of code-switching based on Poplack’s framework and types of code-mixing according to Muysken’s typology, and to understand the sociolinguistic motivations behind their use. Employing a qualitative descriptive method, the data were collected through a close Reading of the official song lyrics available on digital music platforms. The analysis reveals that inter-sentential switching is the most dominant form in both songs, particularly noticeable in the transition between English verses and Arabic choruses. Code-mixing primarily takes the form of insertion, with Arabic lexical items embedded in English sentence structures to maintain religious authenticity and evoke spiritual nuance. The findings indicate that the multilingual style in these songs is not merely decorative but serves important communicative, aesthetic, and cultural purposes. Overall, this study concludes that Maher Zain’s use of language alternation functions as a strategy to strengthen religious meaning and connect diverse listeners across linguistic and cultural backgrounds.

Drawing on literary theory, translation studies, and social identity theory, the research investigates whether reading Louise Glück’s poem “Adult Grief” in English versus Slovenian elicits different affective reactions. Using a repeated-measures design and a specially developed empathy scale, the study differentiates between compassionate and distressed responses of narrative empathy and examines how they relate to the four dimensions of trait empathy as assessed by the interpersonal reactivity index. The findings indicate that empathic concern and fantasy are key predictors of empathic engagement, with fantasy enhancing perspective taking and personal distress. Notably, language significantly influences empathic responses, especially when interacting with personal distress, suggesting that reading in one's native language reduces the self-other differentiation and intensifies emotional experience. However, language exposure also moderates responses, indicating that habitual engagement in a language can enhance emotional resonance regardless of native status. These results underline the complex interplay between language, empathy, and literary affect.

In the light of Cultural Studies’ focus on the signifying practices of forms of power, this article concentrates on some poems from Hannah Lowe’s The Kids (2021) and Moniza Alvi’s Fairoz (2022), in order to highlight the modalities through which they undermine the discriminatory profiling of minorities effected by the so-called war on terror. By means of a textual analysis of the poems in relation with contextual references, it is argued that both poets unveil the presence of power structures behind symbolic processes. Thus, they unmask the constructedness of apparently natural categories, offering a springboard for undermining them.

Jidi Majia, a member of Yi ethnic group, is a highly productive and world-renowned poet whose works have been published in large quantities at home and abroad. Due to the huge difference between ethnic context and global context, the works sometimes are hard for western readers to perceive. The study selects three of the English poetry anthologies that were published overseas. Under the framework of Genette’s paratext theory, the study collects and categorizes all types of paratexts contained in Jidi Majia’s English poetry anthologies, further analyzing the contents and organization strategies of these paratexts in an attempt to reveal what functions these paratexts play in the overall books.

This study re-examines Ted Hughes’s Hawk Roosting through the prism of gender theory, arguing that the poem enacts a distinct mode of predatory masculinity embedded within its language, symbolism, and ideological posture. Traditionally interpreted as a poetic embodiment of political tyranny, individual ego, or natural instinct, the hawk’s monologue has rarely been investigated in relation to the cultural scripts of masculine authority it performs. Addressing this lacuna, the present paper analyses how Hughes’s representation of predation intersects with post-war British anxieties surrounding power, violence, and the naturalisation of hierarchical control. Drawing upon close reading, discourse analysis, eco-masculinity studies, and contextual literary history, the research contends that the hawk’s voice stages a form of hypermasculine identity characterised by sovereign self-authorization, vertical dominance, and uncompromising territoriality. The findings reveal that Hughes neither straightforwardly condemns nor glorifies such masculinity; instead, the poem deliberately holds readers within an uneasy tension between natural behaviour and ideological aggression. The discussion extends this argument by situating predatory masculinity within broader ecological and ethical debates. The study concludes by outlining avenues for future scholarship within eco-gender criticism and modern British poetry.

Abstract This article pursues the metrical innovations that arose from adapting French vers libre to English. Far from hailing the liberation of verse from classical meter as an end in and of itself, poets from high modernism to the avant-gardes saw it as an opportunity to develop new metrical schemes. H.D. is on the forefront of these developments. Her poem »Hermes of the Ways« unfolds a ternary metrical structure inspired by the molossus. A close reading of this poem serves as an example for how a detailed metrical analysis can engage with twentieth-century poetry in English.

Geoffrey Chaucer and John Gower are known to have borrowed images of death and decrepitude from Maximianus’s sixth-century Latin Elegies, a work studied in fourteenth-century English grammar schools. Fleshing out one of David R. Carlson’s obiter dicta (2017: 75), this essay confirms the place of the third major named Ricardian poet, William Langland, on the roster of fourteenth-century poets whose reading of Maximianus informed their own poetry in English. As Carlson suggested in passing, Langland’s representation of the dreamer’s impotence in Piers Plowman B.20 owes much to the racy, morose, self-pitying, but always elegant and frequently sublime Latin elegiac couplets of Maximianus. Rather than identifying direct parallels of phrasing, the essay explores the revealingly similar tonality of both authors’ descriptions of impotence.

This research paper explores the cognitive and conceptual metaphors embedded in Farzana Aqib’s poem Who Are You, employing George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s (1980) Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT) as its theoretical framework. The study examines how Aqib’s poetic language transforms abstract spiritual and psychological experiences into tangible metaphoric expressions that reflect self-awareness, inner conflict, and divine connection. Through a detailed textual analysis, the poem reveals recurrent conceptual mappings such as SELF-AS-MIRROR, LIFE-AS-JOURNEY, and GOD-AS-LIGHT, which frame the poet’s quest for identity and transcendence. Situated within the Pakistani socio-cultural context, the poem mirrors the struggle of individuals to find authenticity amid societal judgment, moral surveillance, and collective hypocrisy (Akhtar, 2021; Rauf, 2019). Aqib’s metaphors serve as mental models that shape the reader’s perception of reality and spirituality in a conservative yet evolving society. The study highlights how metaphoric cognition in Pakistani English poetry becomes a tool for negotiating faith, morality, and selfhood. By integrating cognitive linguistics with literary interpretation, this paper contributes to the growing scholarship on South Asian English literature and its cognitive dimensions (Gibbs, 2017; Kövecses, 2020), offering insight into how metaphor operates as both a linguistic and cultural bridge between thought and emotion.

Kamala Das, one of India’s most powerful and controversial poets, redefined the contours of Indian English poetry through her confessional style and bold articulation of female desire. Her poetry dismantles patriarchal constructs of womanhood by foregrounding the female voice as a site of resistance, identity, and self-realization. This research paper offers a gendered reading of Kamala Das’s confessional poetry, focusing on her exploration of female sexuality, emotional vulnerability, and the quest for autonomy. By analyzing selected poems such as An Introduction, The Looking Glass, The Old Playhouse, and Composition, the study examines how Das uses personal experience as a feminist tool of protest against the suppression of women’s desires and subjectivity. Das’s poetry not only challenges male-centric notions of morality and purity but also reconstructs the female body and voice as instruments of liberation.

The article deals with the origin of “rhythmical figures” serving as “rhythmical italics” to enhance meaning in English poetry from Chaucer to Frost (14th–20th centuries). In Surrey’s translation of The Aeneid (the first decades of the 16th century) the rhythmical figures already resemble their use in the later 16th-century poetry by Sidney and Spenser who were aware of the role of rhythmical deviations from the meter and used them to emphasize meaning, i.e., as rhythmical italics. Shakespeare inherited this device and widened its scope. Eighteenth-century Classicists (Pope, Thomson) confirmed the link between the “deviations” from the meter and semantics, while 19th-century Romantics (Shelley, Byron) in spite of their critique of Classicism used the same rhythmical figures on syllabic positions WS(W), the same grammatical patterns (“verb plus object”) and the same lexicon (the verbs “tremble, shake”) as Surrey, Spenser, Shakespeare and Pope, turning them into formulas.

This paper maps English poetry from Bihar highlighting twenty-two poets who have made Bihar speak its rich tradition of quest and cultural ethos. Though this poetry has its roots in local soil, it transcends the local boundaries and becomes universal by virtue of its fusion of cultural rootedness, philosophical questionings and modern poetic expressions. Thematically and technically, this poetry is rich enough to quench the thirst of readers across the globe by its universal concerns of life, death, love, society and spirituality. Babu Avadh Biahri Lall, R. K. Singh, Prabhat Kumar Singh, Pashupati Jha, Punita Jha, C. L. Khatri, Kalpna Singh-Chitnis, Binod Mishra, Tabish Khair, Sumirasko, Bhaskarananda Jha and Abhay Kumar are some of the significant English poets who have touched almost every aspect of life—be it social, political or religious or cultural.

This study investigates the challenges encountered by undergraduate students at Taiz University, Yemen, in comprehending English poetry. Despite its significance in enhancing linguistic and cultural proficiency, poetry often poses substantial interpretative challenges for non-native English speakers. The main aim of this research is to find out the difficulties encountered by students in understanding poetry. Data were collected using a Likert scale questionnaire including (15) items administered to 86 male and female students enrolled in the department of English in the faculties of Arts and Education at Taiz University, Yemen, during the academic year (2024/2025). The findings of the study revealed that students face multifaceted obstacles in understanding English poetry. Language-related issues, such as limited vocabulary and unfamiliarity with idiomatic expressions, were prominently cited. The complexity of poetic devices, including metaphors, similes, and symbolism, compounded the difficulties. Cultural references and historical contexts embedded in poems further impeded comprehension, highlighting a gap in students' background knowledge. The study also uncovered that students' anxiety and lack of confidence in interpreting poetry contribute significantly to their difficulties. Many students reported feeling overwhelmed by the ambiguous nature of poetic language and the open-ended nature of its interpretation. In conclusion, understanding the specific difficulties faced by Taiz University students in interpreting English poetry can inform more effective pedagogical strategies, ultimately enhancing their literary appreciation and overall linguistic competence.