Etcetera
The poem "My Sweet Old Etcetera" has an interesting structure where the syntactic flow is broken with intermissions of the word etcetera. The poem is somewhat confusing when one reads it in its entirety, but ignoring the "etcetera" we get to understand what it is about. The speaker of the poem is talking about how his family prepared and talked about his going to the war. The "etcetera" is a representation of continuation and the fact that it's embossed into the poem at random places could be seen as the poet's way to convey a message of pointlessness of the war.
"Maggie and Milly and Molly and May"
This poem is an allegory for loneliness, for isolation and loss. In the poem the four girls go to the beach and each discovers something. At the end May returns home alone with a round stone that is "as small as a world and as large as alone". When one is left alone, when one is overcome with loneliness, world does indeed seem very small compared to it. Every one of the girls went to the beach to play. If we look at the beach as a representation of life, then each girl discovered some distraction that induced their isolation.
