Dorothy Parker, poet and literary wit, wrote “Resume” after her first suicide attempt in 1926. The brief poem is one of Parker’s better known due to the use of her sardonic humor on a tragic subject. The theme of suicide and death are trivialized by the poet’s use of poetic sound and irony. Parker uses rhythm and rhyme to create a “sing-song” pace reminiscent of a nursery rhyme. The two quatrains are trochee diameters, rhymed abab cdcd, much like Humpty Dumpty. This pattern gives the poem a quick but steady beat. Use of these poetic sound devices creates a playful tone when contrasted with the serious list of ways to commit suicide. Parker continues to make light of the destructive theme with the use of verbal irony. In each line she
Parker attempts to use pathos in order to appeal to her audience's emotion. For example, she appeals to her audiences’ weaknesses by saying that women who have undergone an abortion feel shame, yet how can someone determine that another feels shameful because they realize that abortion is wrong. You could easily argue that they were in a state of depression because they miss their baby; that does not make them shameful.
Parker uses the relationship between two true lovers to portray the strength one grasps when overcoming obstacles to hold onto true love. Parker begins the poem with a peaceful tone. This tone is created through the images of the “birds” and the “lilacs”, thus revealing that nature enhances a buildup of hope and strength within a character. The blending of the natural beauty of both birds and flowers
When sorting through the Poems of Dorothy Parker you will seldom find a poem tha¬t you could describe as uplifting or cheerful. She speaks with a voice that doesn’t romanticize reality and some may even call her as pessimistic. Though she doesn’t have a buoyant writing style, I can empathize with her views on the challenges of life and love. We have all had experiences where a first bad impression can change how we view an opportunity to do the same thing again. Parker mostly writes in a satirical or sarcastic tone, which can be very entertaining to read and analyze.
The constant rhythm throughout the poem gives it a light beat, like a waltz; the reader feels like s/he is dancing. The rhyme pattern of...
A phenomenal writer’s work generates a powerful bond between their words and the reader. This is factual of Sylvia Plath’s poetry. It contains universal, timeless themes of depression and death that, in these dejected days, many people can relate to. Sylvia Plath was a confessional poet whose oppressive life led to her relatable story. She wrote many astonishing poems, such as “cut”, “Among the Narcissi”, and “A Birthday Present” that all chronicle and showcase her struggle for a release from the suppressed world she subsisted in, a world that many remain to live in today. Sylvia Plath’s poetry narrates both her distinct, individual story and yet universal tale of a woman who searches for a way out of her depressed state of mind.
Sylvia Plath may be one of the most remarkable and idolized modern poets of the twentieth century. Sylvia Plath had an emotional life, and a troublesome past with her father's death, insecurities because of self-doubt, a tragic break up with her husband and severe depression, leading to her suicide in 1963. These tragic events in Plath’s life played a vast part in her career as a poet and novelist, by inspiring her to create her melancholy and notorious masterpieces.
Not only the words, but the figures of speech and other such elements are important to analyzing the poem. Alliteration is seen throughout the entire poem, as in lines one through four, and seven through eight. The alliteration in one through four (whisky, waltzing, was) flows nicely, contrasting to the negativity of the first stanza, while seven through eight (countenance, could) sound unpleasing to the ear, emphasizing the mother’s disapproval. The imagery of the father beating time on the child’s head with his palm sounds harmful, as well as the image of the father’s bruised hands holding the child’s wrists. It portrays the dad as having an ultimate power over the child, instead of holding his hands, he grabs his wrists.
Throughout his villanelle, “Saturday at the Border,” Hayden Carruth continuously mentions the “death-knell” (Carruth 3) to reveal his aged narrator’s anticipation of his upcoming death. The poem written in conversation with Carruth’s villanelle, “Monday at the River,” assures the narrator that despite his age, he still possesses the expertise to write a well structured poem. Additionally, the poem offers Carruth’s narrator a different attitude with which to approach his writing, as well as his death, to alleviate his feelings of distress and encourage him to write with confidence.
Writing the poem in ballad form gave a sense of mood to each paragraph. The poem starts out with an eager little girl wanting to march for freedom. The mother explains how treacherous the march could become showing her fear for her daughters life. The mood swings back and forth until finally the mother's fear overcomes the child's desire and the child is sent to church where it will be safe. The tempo seems to pick up in the last couple of paragraphs to emphasize the mothers distraught on hearing the explosion and finding her child's shoe.
The tone of irony/sarcasm in Sexton’s “Cinderella” story can be observed in the repeating line of “That story.” The author uses particular phrases that sounds like she is criticizing the tale that anticipates the line. Another way that the tone can be understood is that the author is p...
“The Bells,” a poem written by Edgar Allan Poe, conveys a cheerful tone through distinct sounds and repetition of words. A deeply onomatopoeic poem, “The Bells” progresses after every stanza. Primarily, the alliteration, assonance, and onomatopoeia in the poem produce a happy tone; but, towards the end of the poem, the sound devices help establish a gloomier tone. In each stanza, the bells are made of a different metal substance. In the first stanza, the bells are described as silver. In this case, the bells are pleasant, precious, and strong. Moreover, the bells portray the stages in life. The first stanza explains a man’s happy childhood. The golden bells in the second stanza are an example of a man’s love life through marriage. The brazen bells in the third stanza depict the terror of a human’s life through aging, and the iron bells in the fourth stanza show the mourning and death of a human. To fulfill the sense of excitement and happiness throughout the first stanza, Poe uses repeating words and consonants, long vowels, and imitation of sounds. The alliteration, assonance, and onomatopoeia all contribute to the joyful and merry tone of “The Bells.”
Poetry is the wind for a trapped and wounded soul. A great example of a wounded soul is, Sylvia Plath. She was an immaculate poet, who expressed her personal troubles through writing. As Plath’s life smouldered into a heap of dust at the age of 30, her poetry grew and bloomed. In the years before her death, her most troubled period, Plath penned three of her most well-known poems, “Daddy”, “Lady Lazarus” and “Tulips”—all three illustrating the horrors of despair with strong, expressive literary devices. Plath, who committed suicide in 1963 at the age of 30, has been hailed ubiquitously as one of the most acclaimed and preeminent poets of the 21st century. Plath’s poetry was influenced by tragic events in her life and her prolonged battle against her deep depression and obsession with death. Plath’s personal issues made her the definition of a confessional poet. In the poems, “Daddy”, “Tulips”, and “Lady Lazarus”, Plath confesses her emotional and nervous breakdowns during her endless depression.
To begin, the episodic shifts in scenes in this ballad enhance the speaker’s emotional confusion. Almost every stanza has its own time and place in the speaker’s memory, which sparks different emotions with each. For example, the first stanza is her memory of herself at her house and it has a mocking, carefree mood. She says, “I cut my lungs with laughter,” meaning that...
Lyric poetry is based off song and establishes human condition, in this poem the condition of African Americans.
In the poem, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” by Walt Whitman, He interrupts the rest of the poem for his bird to belt out a song, a song about death. The speaker of the poem was charmed by the song. Whitman uses this poem to push across a new, unmentioned image of death as the “dark mother always gliding near with soft feet.”