Bye Bye Love Trivia Quiz

Answer: Fall

American author Carl Sandburg (1878-1967) received three Pulitzer Prizes during his lifetime, two of which were for his poetry. Though this lovely poem initially appears to be about harvest season in the fall, we realise by the fourth line that its meaning goes far deeper than that. It's a poem of lingering grief and loss on the death of someone loved on one level, but on another it marks the passing of time and years slipping by for the speaker of the poem. Overall the poem gives the reader a sense of aching loss, as when something very precious in life has gone forever and can never return except in sorrowful memory. Here are its lovely words below.

"Under the harvest moon,
When the soft silver
Drips shimmering
Over the garden nights,
Death, the gray mocker,
Comes and whispers to you
As a beautiful friend
Who remembers.

Under the summer roses
When the flagrant crimson
Lurks in the dust
Of the wild red leaves,
Love, with little hands,
Comes and touches you
With a thousand memories,
And asks you
Beautiful, unanswerable questions"

Answer: Percy Bysshe Shelley

Percy Bysshe Shelly (1792-1822) wrote "Music, When Soft Voices Die" in 1821, the year before his death from drowning. It is considered one of his major poems, brief though it is. This, however, has allowed its lovely words to be set to music in many various solos or choral arrangements. The theme of the poem is that although the physical substance of anything, or anyone, loved and cherished may grow old, fade, or die, the memories of that love never will.

"Music, when soft voices die,
Vibrates in the memory;
Odours, when sweet violets sicken,
Live within the sense they quicken.

Rose leaves, when the rose is dead,
Are heap'd for the belovèd's bed;
And so thy thoughts, when thou art gone,
Love itself shall slumber on"

Answer: Young Charms

Written by the Irish poet Thomas Moore (1779-1852) in 1808, there is a beautiful story behind the creation of this work. Moore's wife had contacted the disfiguring disease smallpox. Because she was afraid he could no longer love her with her face left marked by the disease, she locked herself in her room and refused to let him in. In despair, he wrote this poem, and set it to an old Irish melody which had been written many years prior. He then sang it outside Betsy's bedroom door to assure her that no matter how she looked, he would always love her. Moore wrote years later that upon hearing him sing of this love, she opened the bedroom door and fell into his arms. It's a nice story, but not completely correct. He wasn't quite married to his Betsy at the time. That happy event didn't take place until 1811. Still, this lovely poem is the result of that love, whether legalised at the time or not. While it mourns the loss of beauty as a beloved grows old or loses that beauty in some way, it tells of a love that will remain eternally young and new forever. This poem is absolutely beautiful.

"Believe me, if all those endearing young charms,
Which I gaze on so fondly today,
Were to change by tomorrow and fleet in my arms,
Like fairy gifts fading away,
Thou wouldst still be adored, as this moment thou art,
Let thy loveliness fade as it will;
And around the dear ruin each wish of my heart
Would entwine itself verdantly still

It is not while beauty and youth are thine own,
And thy cheeks unprofaned by a tear,
That the fervor and faith of a soul can be known,
To which time will but make thee more dear.
No, the heart that has truly loved never forgets,
But as truly loves on to the close:
As the sunflower turns on her god when he sets
The same look which she turned when he rose"

Answer: William Wordsworth

The beauty of poetry is its universal appeal to the individual, quite regardless of whether or not that was the emotion or the interpretation that the writer of the poem intended. This short poem was written by English poet William Wordsworth in 1798. Part of the "Lucy" series of poems, of which there were five, this was the one that most appealed to his readers. The poem tells of his sense of overwhelming sorrow at the loss of a woman or child named Lucy. This mysterious Lucy has puzzled people ever since. The power of the poem is the agony of the loss expressed so poignantly in its last two heartbreaking lines.

"She dwelt among the untrodden ways
Beside the springs of Dove,
A Maid whom there were none to praise
And very few to love:

A violet by a mossy stone
Half hidden from the eye!
Fair as a star, when only one
Is shining in the sky.

She lived unknown, and few could know
When Lucy ceased to be;
But she is in her grave, and oh,
The difference to me!"

Answer: William Butler Yeats

Nobel Prize winning William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) was one of the leading figures in 20th century writing. During the course of his life, he was deeply in love with the beautiful female Irish Nationalist, Maud Gonne. Under her spell, he produced some of his most lovely poetry. He proposed marriage to her many times, but was always rejected. This poem was written in the early part of his life when he tried to move away from his obsession with Maud. He had commenced a short, but doomed, relationship with another woman, but he couldn't remove Maud from his heart. It expresses beautifully his awareness of the grief of his forlorn lover on her realisation that his heart had already been given to another.

"Pale brows, still hands and dim hair,
I had a beautiful friend
And dreamed that the old despair
Would end in love in the end:
She looked in my heart one day
And saw your image was there;
She has gone weeping away"

Answer: Edgar Allan Poe

Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) is perhaps more noted for his tales of horror and the macabre rather than his poetry. Yet his poetry is beautiful. It possesses a delicacy of expression, beauty and emotion than far outstrips anything produced in his other works. "A Dream Within A Dream" (1849) questions the meaning of life, and asks whether we are all perhaps really living a non-corporeal existence. The speaker in the poem struggles to deal with an overwhelming sense of separation and alienation, as all that gave meaning to his life slips away from him, much as the falling grains of sands slip through his fingers. This agonising expression of loss in the second stanza is linked back to the first stanza of the poem where the speaker is farewelling a lover with the same sense of desolation. The torment of his inability to deal with loss causes him to doubt the very reality of life itself.

"Take this kiss upon the brow!
And, in parting from you now,
Thus much let me avow -
You are not wrong, who deem
That my days have been a dream;
Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.

I stand amid the roar
Of a surf-tormented shore,
And I hold within my hand
Grains of the golden sand-
How few! yet how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep,
While I weep - while I weep!
O God! can I not grasp
Them with a tighter clasp?
O God! can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?"

Answer: Robert Lee Frost

The amazing Robert Frost (1874-1963) received four Pulitzer Prizes during his lifetime for his poetry, as well as the top of the range Congressional Gold Medal for same. His personal life however was dogged by a series of tragic deaths and mental illness in his family. He himself suffered from bouts of deep depression, and, whether intentional or not, this darkness sometimes emerges in his work.

This 1916 poem can be taken literally of course, that of a man standing by two paths in a wood and finally choosing which one to take. This is interpreted by many people as a poem looking to the future, with the speaker feeling quite satisfied at the choices made in life. However, another view of this work, one that I personally favour, is that this work echoes with profound regret at a decisions, or decisions, made in the past and how this has coloured the speaker's life ever since. It's a bitter-sweet tribute to "What if". Frost himself said the poem was poking fun of people "who might think I would yet live to be sorry for the way I had taken in life". An individual poem is not necessarily about the writer himself however, but about the speaker in the poem, two separate entities entirely. To me though, "The Road Not Taken" is a poem reflecting the deepest sorrow and regret for what might have been - and, try as he may to laugh it off, that voice in the poem is that of Frost himself, along with the deep sense of loss that the work expresses.

"Two roads diverged in a yellow wood
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that, the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood and I-
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference"

Answer: Emily Dickinson

The reclusive Emily Dickinson lived from 1830 until 1886. The older she grew the more withdrawn from society she became, spending days alone in her room, and refusing to see anyone but family members. During her short and terribly lonely life, Emily wrote more than 1,800 poems, most of which never saw the light of day during her lifetime. This sorrowful little poem can be interpreted in a number of ways, but the one theme that runs through any interpretation of it, is that of loss. Loss of friendship, loss of youth, loss of life and loss of love. Sorrow at the passing of time seems to permeate through this work, a deep grief at how quickly life seemed to slip through her fingers. Once young, brightly coloured and full of promise, that life, with its love, in what seemed a heartbeat or a brief dream, has all too quickly passed her by, leaving her to mourn in its sombre and darkening shadow.

"I held a Jewel in my fingers
And went to sleep
The day was warm, and winds were prosy
I said, "Twill keep"

I woke - and chid my honest fingers,
The Gem was gone
And now, an Amethyst remembrance
Is all I own"

Answer: Cigarette

Pulitzer prize winning American poet Edna St Vincent Millay (1892-1950) is considered to have written some of the best sonnets ever penned, and an examination of this work more than testifies to this fact. "Only Until this Cigarette is Ended" (1921) is a wonderfully visual poem about a lover trying to set a time limit on her emotions of love after a love affair has ended. She likens its memory to that of the ashes of a cigarette after her last cigarette is finally ended. His face is forgotten already she insists, drifted away like smoke in the air, his smiles not quite yet, but his words never. This is the beauty of this poem. It's a haunting tribute to the power - and the pain - of love.

"Only until this cigarette is ended,
A little moment at the end of all,
While on the floor the quiet ashes fall,
And in the firelight to a lance extended,
Bizarrely with the jazzing music blended,
The broken shadow dances on the wall,
I will permit my memory to recall
The vision of you, by all my dreams attended.
And then adieu - farewell! - the dream is done.
Yours is a face of which I can forget
The colour and the features, every one,
The words not ever, and the smiles not yet;
But in your day this moment is the sun
Upon a hill, after the sun has set"

Answer: Stop All the Clocks

Wystan Hugh Auden (1907-1973) was born in England but became a naturalised American citizen in 1946. He is looked upon as one of the greatest writers of the 20th century. This magnificent poem "Stop All the Clocks", also known as "Funeral Blues" was written in 1936 and amended and published in 1938. Originally intended as a satiric work of mourning for a political figure, the second version was rewritten to be sung by a well known soprano - yet, over time, this work has more than grown out of its early beginnings, to become one of the finest works on loss ever written. The first two stanzas are more of an oration. They speak of loss as a public sorrow. It is the last two stanzas that brings this poem to its heartbreaking conclusion. They capture perfectly the speaker's appalling sense of personal desolation and grief. Loss has been refined down to its purest essence, its effect upon the heart of the individual.

"Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead,
Put crêpe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood;
For nothing now can ever come to any good"