Poems and Fancies Literary Elements

Various: some poems feature an “invisible” external observer narrator while others are composed as dialogues between characters.

Varies with no strict adherence to a particular form or meter, although the verse does exhibit a heavy reliance on iambic rhyme.

A poem metaphorically titled “The Brain Compared to the Elysium” opens with the lines: “The brain is the Elysian fields, for there / All ghosts and sprits in strong dreams appear.”

Rather interestingly, the poet routinely manifests a greater interest in assonance and alliteration in titling her poems than she does in utilizing them within the body of the verse. Among the many example in the volume: “Of Airy Atoms,” “Of Fire and Flame,” “The Reason of the Roaring of the Sea,” and “A Dialogue Between Melancholy and Mirth”

Cavendish is at her most corrosively ironic in quoting Mary Wroth’s own ironic summation of the feelings men had toward her daring to make a claim for her writing in public: “Work lady, work, let writing books alone, / For surely wiser women ne’er wrote one.” The irony is deepened by the fact that while Cavendish lives on, many male writers of the time have long since been forgotten.

Scientific poetry/dialogues/pastoral/epic/allegorical poetry.

The setting of the poems in this collection literally stretches from the atomic to the infinite with occasional forays into the mind of mankind, fantasy worlds, and sites of historical events.

The tone is often one of the wonderment of the eternal questioner probing and poking for answers. At other times, a very subtly and sly irony suggests that those finding value in her verse are part of an exclusive club recognizing what goes completely unnoticed by her critics.

Protagonist: curiosity. Antagonist: ignorant self-contentment.

The major conflict in this collection is centered within the poet’s own expression of self-doubt. Prefatory material—almost to an excessive degree—makes excuses before the fact. And yet, the poet also has the reputation of being a self-described genius. Thus, the tension in the poetry is whether the elements stimulating doubt are sincerely made or exist as ironic distractions.

The text reaches a climax with the last of its excusatory entries, in which the poem claims she was neither born nor bred to be a poet, but having married one just naturally drifted into the act herself.

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In “The Circle of the Brain Cannot be Squared” allusions are made to the mathematical foundations established by Archimedes and Euclid.

“Nature” is used throughout the collection in a number of different poems as a metonym covering the entire interaction of the natural elements of the universe.

“The Animal Parliament” is an extended example of this literary device.

From “The Poetress’s Hasty Resolution” in the Prefatory Material section: “I writ so fast, I thought if I lived long / A pyramid of fame to build thereon.”

“A Dialogue of Birds” overflows with examples which replicate the “speech” of various species: “So doth my voice wind up a trillo too…When I begin to sing, they cry, ‘hark, hark!’…And then instead of singing, cried, “Peep, peep!”