Short Poems Research Articles

Lady Caroline Lamb and Miss Elizabeth Spence: Limits of Femininity in Early Nineteenth-Century Salon and Album Culture

In November 1825 middle-class salon hostess and travel writer Elizabeth Spence contributed a short poem titled ‘M.S. Lines on Lady Caroline Lamb’ to Anna Birkbeck’s album. Spence’s choice of subject, Lady Caroline Lamb, was, in many ways, unusual. Coming from a very different world to Spence, the aristocratic Lamb was a household name, most well known for her much publicized personal life, which included a disastrous love affair with Lord George Gordon Byron. Through a close reading of Spence’s poem, this article interrogates the ‘friendship’ between these two women of differing classes and backgrounds and considers the complex gender and social dynamics at play informing Spence’s ambiguous poem. The album, like the salon, existed within the space between the masculine/public and the feminine/private worlds. It is in this space that it is possible to explore the limits of femininity in the early nineteenth century, as its semi-public position enables a view of the fringes of what society deemed acceptable, and what provoked dissent for overstepping. As one famed for her overstepping, Lamb demonstrated the risks and the penalty for pushing these boundaries, but Spence’s poem offers a more complex, and even contradictory, picture of Lamb and by extension the limitations which condemned her.

The Martijn Trilogy Manuscripts: An Open Dataset for Analyzing Scribal Variation

Abstract The authors present a dataset containing transcriptions of manuscripts of the Middle Dutch strophic poem Martijn Trilogy by the Flemish poet Jacob van Maerlant. Of his very large oeuvre, Maerlant’s Strophic Poems had the longest tradition: originally written in the thirteenth century, copyists and printers continued to disseminate them until about 1500. These ten shorter poems on social, religious, and ethical issues stand out for their unusual and complex stanza form. The Martijn Trilogy was his most successful strophic poem: 17 text witnesses are extant, and the trilogy was imitated and even translated into French and Latin. This dataset contains hyperdiplomatic transcriptions of all witnesses, amounting to a total of 15,814 verses or 79,337 tokens. This open-access dataset abides by the fair principles, is licensed under a cc-by-sa license, and is made available in multiple, complementary file formats. Since these transcriptions are strictly diplomatic, this corpus offers valuable possibilities for research on scribal attributions (scribal profiling), abbreviations, stemmatology, textual stability and more.

The Motif of Death in Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Short Poems

In the early 19th century poetic tradition, there was a great emphasis on the poet as the creative genius, and subjectivity was cherished more than ever. As a poet of the Romantic Era, Percy Bysshe Shelley conveyed his emotions, philosophical beliefs, and religious convictions, as well as his fears and motivations, through his literary works. Death was an omnipresent theme in Shelley’s life, and he used poetry as a means to express his thoughts and feelings about it. The passing of those close to him, such as his wife Harriet and children Clara and William, confronted him with his own mortality. He responded to the death of his beloved ones by composing poems. In addition to expressing his grief over these losses, he also voiced the decrease of his life instincts and his death wish. This paper will examine Shelley’s short poems (“Death”, “On Death”, “To William Shelley”, “Stanzas Written in Dejection, near Naples” “Ode to the West Wind,” “To Night,” and “O world! O life! O time!”) through the lens of Sigmund Freud’s concepts of mourning and melancholy, as well as death wish. The chosen autobiographical poems reveal Shelley’s mourning process and his journey towards accepting death, showcasing his death drive, and reflecting his genuine emotions as well as his Neoplatonic philosophy.

You talkin’ to me? Functional breed selection may have fundamentally influenced dogs’ sensitivity to human verbal communicative cues

BackgroundThe ability to learn from humans via observation was considered to be equally present across properly socialized dogs. We showed recently that cooperative working breeds learned from a human demonstrator more effectively. We hypothesized that functional breed selection could affect sensitivity to human attention-eliciting behavior. Accordingly, we ran the first ever study on dogs that compared the effect of ostensive and neutral verbal communication in a social learning scenario. We used the detour paradigm around a transparent V-shaped fence with either ostensive (addressing the receiver both with words and specific, attention-eliciting prosody) or neutral speech (monotonous reciting of a short poem) demonstration. The other features (gestures, movement) of the demonstration sequence were kept identical between the two conditions. We tested (N = 70) companion dogs from 17 cooperative and 16 independent breeds in three 1-min trials. Subjects had to obtain the reward by detouring around the fence.ResultsDetour latencies of the cooperative dogs improved after both ostensive and neutral speech demonstrations. The independent dogs did not improve their detour latency in either of the conditions. Remarkably, ostensive verbal utterances elicited longer relative looking time towards the demonstrator, cooperative dogs looked longer at the demonstrator, and longer looking time resulted in more successful detours.ConclusionsOur study provides the first indication that functional breed selection had a significant impact on dogs’ sensitivity to ostensive human communication, which, apart from being crucially important for social learning from humans, until now was considered as a uniformly present heritage of domestication in dogs.Graphical

Swarming Bees and Floating Signifiers in Margaret Cavendish’s Poems and Fancies

ABSTRACT Margaret Cavendish’s seventeenth-century poem, “The Head of Man Compared to a Hive of Bees,” calls attention to the position of honeybees as floating signifiers in literature. In her short poem, she creates simile after simile, comparing bees to physiological, political, social, and literary concerns. Bees appear to be mere similes, divorced from their “real,” natural state, but Cavendish’s poem in fact reveals the fraught nature of bee similes. The lived reality of honeybees is a secondary concern to poets, Cavendish’s poem implies, for bees are more important as recognizable and polysemous symbols than as creatures with their own experiences and needs.

To the Parents of the Boy We Lost.

Recently, we took care of a teenage boy in our PICU who had been struggling with a lifelong chronic illness and accompanied him and his parents during the last few days of his life. We had the privilege of getting to know him and his parents quite well during the last few years, as he required hospitalization several times during this time. We saw how extremely dedicated his parents had been to him and his care, how they left no stone unturned and sacrificed everything they could to help him have the best quality of life possible. I happened to not be on service, nor know about the moment when he passed away. I also missed when his funeral took place. I wanted to reach out to his parents, to express how much his life and their love for him had meant to me, too, and to find some closure. So I wrote this short poem for them, and for all the other parents, who have to go through the most difficult time a parent can ever go through-as a pediatric intensivist, a Mom who has never been where they had to go, a fellow human being, and a grieving friend.

Integrative, Hierarchic, and Anarchic Oikos in Ancient Tamil Poetry: An Analysis of Ainkurunuru’s Translation by Martha Ann Selby

This paper explores the intricate depiction of oikos in the Sangam literary corpus, specifically through an analysis of the Ainkurunuru’s translation by Martha Ann Selby, namely, Tamil Love Poetry: One of the most influential collections of the Tamil literature is known as the Five Hundred Short Poems of the Ainkurunuru. Using tiNai poetics’ model by Nirmal Selvamony, the study digs into how the environment and society are depicted in the ancient Tamil poetry and it is manifested on integrative oikos which has “all-inclusive harmony”. This approach of harmony and unity of the universal Tamil culture, on the other hand, is the epitome of the close ecological bond transcended by the people, as they do not just merely live in the environment but also significantly contribute to the community’s cultural and daily lifestyle through the natural world. The paper further identifies and analyses two additional aspects of oikos depicted in the poetry: from the top-down decision making systems to the anarchist movements alike. The oikos of nature is highly hierarchical. It shows up in the social stratification and environmental stability, which mirrors the society’s respect to leaders with decision-making power. On the contrary, a sort of anarchy may show up in the oikos fragments that in turn encompass turmoil and subversion, the deviance away from ordinary principles in both nature and society, symbolizing the flow of life together with its upheavals that the man and nature relationship represents.

Analisis Unsur Intrinsik Pada Film “Mencuri Raden Saleh”

Literary works are creative expressions that focus on the human experience and life, utilizing language as a means of communication. Furthermore, literature is the outcome of human creativity conveyed via the use of writing and language as a means of communication. Literature is essentially a form of artistic expression by humans that use language as a medium to convey experiences, thoughts, feelings, and ideas. Common literary works encountered in daily life include short tales, poems, novels, films, and dramas. The aim of this research is to identify the inherent components contained in the film "Mencuri Raden Saleh". The approach used in this research is to conduct an analytical investigation of a literary work, followed by collecting verifiable evidence. In this analysis, researchers explore the inherent components contained in films, such as topic, characters/characterization, plot, setting, point of view, language style, and message.

Odes to Miami

This paper investigates ›Zip Odes‹, a format developed for the O, Miami poetry festival, as an example of sociopoetic practices between the urban and digital space. Zip Odes are short poems written by residents that transform their zip code »into an occasion for place-based, lyrical celebration« (festival website). The Zip Ode’s composition principle is based on the number in the author’s zip code, and it is unlike traditional verse as words rather than syllables are counted. Each year, dozens of poems are displayed in the streets and performed in front of audiences. Further performances take place on the festival’s Instagram page, where written odes are animated in serial form or presented as video clips recited by the poets. After introducing the context of the O, Miami poetry festival, the paper will take a sociocultural perspective to discuss the Zip Ode as a popular adaptation of a classical lyrical genre. In the literary tradition, odes are song-like poems expressing strong feelings, particularly admiration, and addressed to sublime nature or an abstract entity. Here, they are directed at a place, a neighborhood, or a city. By performing a textual examination of exemplary Zip Odes, this paper will analyze the form and themes of the genre before discussing its various presentation formats. The paper sets the festival concept and, in particular, this innovative poetry format in relation to the notion of ›lyric address‹ and considers it as a practice of place-making.

Diversity and complexity of arthropod references in haiku.

Haiku are short poems, each composed of about 10 words, that typically describe moments in nature. People have written haiku since at least the 17th century, and the medium continues to be popular with poets, amateurs, educators, and students. Collectively, these poems represent an opportunity to understand which aspects of nature-e.g., which taxa and biological traits-resonate with humans and whether there are temporal trends in their representation or the emotions associated with these moments. We tested this potential using a mix of linguistic and biological methods, in analyses of nearly 4,000 haiku that reference arthropods. We documented the taxa and the life history traits represented in these poems and how they changed over time. We also analyzed the poems for emotion and tone. Our results reveal a mix of predictable trends and compelling surprises, each of which stand to potentially inform engagement strategies. At least 99 families of arthropods, in 28 orders, are represented in these haiku. The eight most commonly referenced taxa, from highest to lowest number of references, include: Lepidoptera, Hymenoptera, Diptera, Coleoptera, Araneae, Orthoptera, Hemiptera, and Odonata. Several common, conspicuous orders were never referenced, including Trichoptera, Plecoptera, and Megaloptera. The most commonly referenced traits relate to ecology (especially habitat, phenology, time of day), behavior (especially sound production), phenotype (especially color), and locomotion (especially flight). The least common traits in haiku relate to arthropod reproduction and physiology. Our analyses revealed few obvious temporal trends in the representations of taxa, biological traits, or emotion and tone. The broader implications of these results and possible future directions are discussed.

Problems of alcohol consumption in the oral and written literary tradition of the Yakuts (late 19th – early 20th centuries)

The research subject of this article is the texts of folklore and literary works of the late 19th to the early 20th centuries, dedicated to the issue of alcohol consumption. The research was conducted using historical-cultural and comparative-historical methods. The scientific novelty of the work lies in the authors’ attempt to comprehensively study the problem of alcohol in folklore and written literary works of the pre-revolutionary period. The study examines the initial instances of critical understanding of alcohol consumption in Yakut society, as expressed in oral and written literary traditions of the people. In their analysis of the texts, the authors explored previously undiscovered archival documents. They conclude that, starting from the late 19th century, “songs about vodka” emerged in Yakut folklore, addressing the issues of alcohol consumption and explaining the harmful effects of alcoholic beverages to the population. The article acknowledges the contribution of folk singers who, alongside intelligentsia, initiated efforts the combat excessive drinking in Yakutia. In the 1910s, A.E. Kulakovsky, the founder of Yakut literature, authored two works addressing the problem of alcoholism. These were the first works in Yakut literature presented in the form of literary genres: a short poem and a narrative poem with a clearly expressed and developing plot, and a well-balanced composition. While folk singers raised awareness of the issue of drinking in their songs and portrayed its harmful effects on individuals, Kulakovsky, recognizing alcoholism as a potential national threat, vividely illustrated the potential consequences of alcohol addiction and its destructive impact on people's lives. A.E. Kulakovsky, as an educator, public figure, and spiritual leader of the nation, endeavored through his creative work to caution his people against excessive alcohol consumption.

Mourning an Oenophile

Abstract In Petrus Nannius’ posthumously published commentary on Vergil’s Eclogues (Basel: Johannes Oporinus, 1559), one section contains a forgotten mock epitaph ascribed to Erasmus. The short poem, omitted in modern editions of Erasmus’ poetry, is written for a man simply referred to as “Theodoricus”. In the present article, I offer a diplomatic transcription, translation, and contextualization of the epitaph and the commentary section in which it is imbedded. In my discussion of the epitaph, I identify “Theodoricus” as Dirk Martens of Aalst (Theodoricus Martinus Alustensis/Alostensis), Erasmus’ close friend and the publisher of many of his works.

О влиянии романа «Что делать?» Н. Г. Чернышевского на творчество С. А. Есенина

The article discusses the origins of Sergei Yesenin’s acquaintance with the novel What Is to Be Done? by N. G. Chernyshevsky: this happened in Spas-Klepikovskaya second-class teacher’s school in 1909-1912. The work was read among the intellectuals, and students outside of school hours argued about it and embraced the ideals of the “new people”. Later Yesenin encountered Chernyshevsky’s novel at the lectures on Russian literature by P. N. Sakulin at Moscow City People’s University named after A. L. Shanyavsky. As a result, a number of elements of Chernyshevsky’s poetics were associatively reflected in Yesenin’s long and short poems as well as in his story Yar. In the works of Yesenin figurative echoes with Chernyshevsky are noticeable. The main ideological moments that worried both writers include: the wonderful future of the Fatherland, the conscious creative arrangement of the earthly paradise in the country. Among artistic means, the writers used the epithet “new”, applied it to the re-interpretation of the biblical laws of human society in terms of freedom, e quality and brotherhood. Both writers considered this epithet to be the main element in describing both the process of building a just state system, and in characterizing the creators of a better life. Understanding the importance of the nuances of psychology for each person, Chernyshevsky and Yesenin developed the concept of mystery. Chernyshevsky used the successfully found philosophical solution to create reliable everyday pictures, and Yesenin endowed it with further biblical and mythological meanings, asserting the “mystery” as a comprehensive postulate of sophianis m. In his personal life, Yesenin in his youth followed the example of the everyday habits of Rakhmetov, but without repeating the entire line of behavior of Chernyshevsky’s literary character. Yesenin gave his main characters in the story At the White Water (<1915>) unusual names that appear in minor characters and characters mentioned in passing in Chernyshevsky’s novel. However, in order not to assert the comprehensive nature of Yesenin’s borrowings of Chernyshevsky’s creative findings, the article presents other possi ble sources of na mes and biographical foundations for some of the poet’s behavioral lines.

Zabawy literackie pracowników Biblioteki Polskiej Akademii Umiejętności: powinszowania imieninowe dla dyrektora Karola Piotrowicza z 1938 r.

Literary games of the employees of the Scientific Library of the Polish Academy of Arts and Sciences: 1938 name day greetings for Karol Piotrowicz The paper is a preliminary study for the biography of Karol Piotrowicz (1901–1940), a respected historian, Jagiellonian University professor, academic activist and a publisher. Since 1931 to 1939, he has also been the Director of the Scientific Library of the Polish Academy of Arts and Sciences; he successfully managed and modernised the Library. In Summer 1939, he was called into the Polish Army, and after the September Campaign was taken into Soviet slavery. In April 1940, in Kharkov, together with hundreds of other Polish prisoners, he was murdered by Russians. He bereaved wife and two daughters who stayed in Krakow. Among the Karol Piotrowicz’s family documents kept by his grand daughters Teresa Wolska and Elżbieta Wolska, there are still some personal documents of Piotrowicz which will by donated to our Library in the future. Now we present the edition of one of these papers. It is a humorous work by some librarians, Karol Piotrowicz’s employees, given to him for his name day on November 4, 1938. It consists of 10 pages and contains a bibliography of works allegedly written by the library employees which is light-heart and full of allusions, accurately pointing at their professional interests as well as private passions and even weaknesses. The following pages contain short poems, anecdotes, humoresques and riddles. The author is not given but it may be assumed that the text was mainly created by Władysław Ogrodziński, a writer and a culture activist who became famous in the post-war period. Such literary games practice was known among that time librarians and archivists. Some similar works written in the Jagiellonian Library or Ossolineum have also survived. The small miscellany presented here is not only a moving piece of work and a preliminary study for Karol Piotrowicz’s biography but also an interesting example of a bottom-up culture of our Library in the 1930s.

Традиционное цитирование Гомера как способ идентификации в надписях южной Малой Азии

After the conquests of Alexander the Great, many Greeks migrated to the southern regions of Asia Minor, including Lycia, Pisidia, Pamphylia, and Cilicia. They brought along their cultural traditions, which gradually merged over several centuries with the most enduring aspects of the indigenous culture. The ancient Greek language completely supplanted the Lycian, Pisidian, and other Anatolian languages. Education followed the established Greek canons, with Homer’s poems serving as primary texts. But, while the ruins of cities that have survived to this day provide an opportunity to gain an idea of the Hellenization of architecture, it is much more difficult to assess the extent to which the Anatolian population was able to familiarize itself with the Greek education system. The author of the article aims to establish the level of familiarity of the inhabitants of southern Asia Minor with the poems of Homer, to determine their personal attitude toward this poet, and argues that only inscriptions found in this region can be the material for such research, namely inscriptions written not in prose, but in hexameter or elegiac distich. Epigraphic material usually stands outside the scope of literary studies. Therefore, the relevance of this work lies not only in the formulation of the research problem but also in the choice of material for research. The article examines in detail four epitaphs. Their text indicates a very close familiarity of their creators with Homer’s poems. But even more sticking is the fact that there were quotations from the Iliad or the Odyssey in these epitaphs, and these quotations served to identify or even self-identify the one to whom these short poems were dedicated. One such quotation even appears in a prose inscription from the Adada city territory. These examples signify that during the Roman Empire, Homer evolved into an undisputed authority for the descendants of the original inhabitants of Anatolia, the same as he had always been for the ancient Greeks themselves.

„Wjeżdża, ale nie szablę niezgody przynosi” Poseł moskiewski – poemat dyplomatyczny Jana Żabczyca

The article is divided into three main parts. First, the author introduces the subject, genre and historical background of the poem. The main content of the poem is a legation from False Dmitry to Cracow sent in order to keep an alliance with the Commonwealth by wedding per procura of Dmitry and Maryna Mniszech. Similar works of literature from the seventeenth century are also presented. The second part focuses on the details of the poem, referred to as a diplomatic poem, in New Diplomatic History’s language, since the subject of diplomacy determines the structure, the nature of the characters and the main purpose of their actions: agreement and settlement, as opposed to victory over the enemy as the subject of heroic poems. The third part provides a detailed analysis of diplomatic ceremonies, gifts, habits and customs, e.g. speeches and table seating during the wedding. It also proposes an interpretation of the tzar and aristocrat’s wedding as an image of the alliance between Russia and the Commonwealth. It is concluded that Poseł moskiewski is a short but important poem in the history of Polish epics. As a representative of diplomatic literature, it is unique among early modern Polish epic poetry.

Стереотипы о культурных героях в комической интернет-поэзии: их развитие и разрушение

The article analyzes modification of cultural stereotypes about famous people in the postfolklore space of small poetry genres that appeared on the Internet in the 2000s and are usually called stishki (short insignificant poems, sing. stishok). The most popular among them are pirozhki (sing. pirozhok) and poroshki (sing. poroshok). We also consider material from other close genres found at the website “Poetory” — https://poetory.ru: ekspromt (impromptu), depressiashka (depressing poem), dve deviatki (two nines), artishok (artichoke). Both real people and fictional characters are the object of research. The article considers stishki about the Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin and Clara and Karl, characters from a tongue-twister, as well as the postfolklore ties between Beethoven and Van Gogh. The article traces their ties with other characters, both those existing in a common cultural space (for Gagarin it is Korolev, Titov and the like) and those appearing in poetic postfolklore (for Gagarin these are God and Lenin). The convergence of characters can occur not only on the basis of stereotypes, but also on the basis of random similarities, both external to the language (event, thing) and linguistic (for example, coincidence or consonance of names). The “logic of postfolklore” is described, that is, associative links that connect “distant” characters (separated by time or social standing) and form pantheons of postfolklore heroes.

Why is Milton ‘Milto’? Giovanni Salzilli, John Milton, and Aelian

In 1638 the Italian scholar Giovanni Salzilli sent the young John Milton who had recently arrived in Italy a short Latin poem in which Salzilli addressed Milton as ‘Milto.’ He did not use the more commonly found form of Milton’s Latin name, Miltonus and Miltonius. Using archival and print materials as evidence this paper examines this apparent hapax legomenon and suggests that its source can be found in Aelian’s Varia Historia.

The Wonder Test

Carol Lee’s short poem highlights the enduring and unquantifiable aspects of nature. To do so, the poem invites the reader to see the natural world with fresh eyes. The poem states that if one is immersed in the natural world that it cannot be reduced and measured in a mechanical manner.

Japanese poems as magical formulas: Unveiling the connection to female physiology

This paper explores the reinterpreted use of early Japanese short poems tanka (henceforth referred to as waka) as magical formulas, particularly examining Moto yori chiri ni majiwaru…, a pseudo-classical waka attributed to Izumi Shikibu (976–1031) (also to Ono no Komachi, a ninth-century court poetess) and Naniwazu ni saku ya…, a poem recorded in Kokin wakashū [Collection of Ancient and Modern Japanese Poems]. These examples, which are wellfounded in literature, illustrate how waka were repurposed for supernatural applications. The focus is on their practical role in female physiology, particularly as magical formulas to regulate menstrual cycles and ward off impurity caused by menstrual blood. The paper argues that these waka endured through their incorporation into talismans (gofu), and the study includes examples of talismans from the author’s private collection. Through this exploration, it sheds light on the dynamic interplay between waka, Buddhism, and ritualistic purity