Eating Poetry and The Ruined Maid

A poem's diction can reveal a great deal about the narrator and/or the protagonist of the poem. Strand's, "Eating Poetry," is one of my longtime favorites because of the madness in the piece. The scene opens mid-action with the speaker enraptured and intoxicated by the experience of poetry, much to the irritation of the rigid academic keeper of books. Love the frenzy of the speaker whose eyes and heart have been opened, whose soul has been transformed, by the power of poetry. Great juxtaposition against a prudish bookist surrounded by books she'll never experienced with hands stuck in her pockets.

An obvious choice is Thomas Hardy's, "The Ruined Maid." Hardy uses the juxtaposition of diction in a dialog between an unsophisticated, conservative bumpkin from the farm and the newly liberated, refined city-woman as a vehicle to delivery his larger statement about the unreasonableness of the social morals of his day.

Nipperkin. What a great sounding word! Imagine it's familiar to those frequenting the English and Scottish pubs. A nipperkin is a small drink and could be used equally for the measure or for the container it was served in. Curiously, it's a legal measure in Australia and New Zealand, of size 30ml. In the USA it's usually one-third of a local pint.