"as freedom is a breakfast food," e.e. cummings.
The themes of this poem are the fleeting nature of all things in life, including intellectual concepts such as freedom, and how all these things are always juxtaposed with their opposite. The poem begins with the title line, as freedom is a breakfast food, suggesting that freedom is the nourishment that gets people through the day. The rest of the poem compares and contrast things with their elementary parts. For example, "truth can live with right and wrong," "water most encourage flame." Each of these juxtapositions is a nuanced look at the concept being discussed. Truth can live with right and wrong, because sometimes being truthful can be hurtful, and wrong: for example telling someone who is ecstatic about their new haircut that you think it's ugly. That may well be the truth, but it's the wrong thing to say. Likewise, water encourages flame in that, by providing the potential to put it out, it gives flame the incentive to grow stronger. In the end, cummings concludes that time is a tree, this life one leaf, and he is for freedom "just so long and long enough." I believe that this whimsical look at freedom captures its contradictory elements. Life is fleeting, and freedom contains the inherent contradiction that it necessitates rules, or curbs against freedom, in order to exist. True freedom, in which all can do what they wish, would quickly turn to anarchy.
"Of Old Sat Freedom on the Heights," Alfred Lord Tennyson
In this poem, Tennyson conceives of freedom as a pure ideal that was handed down to mankind from the heavens. He portrays freedom as a woman hanging in the heavens, with thunder breaking at her feet and the starry sky above her. In this pure and idealized place, freedom rejoices "self-gather'd in her prophet mind." While freedom was content to rejoice in her own sphere, fragments of her voice were carried by the wind down to mankind. Then, ...