Insomnia Poem Figurative Language

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The poem, “Insomnia”, written by Elizabeth Bishop, is about the thoughts that overtake one’s ability to fall asleep at night. Elizabeth Bishop includes the use of personification, symbols, and inversion in “Insomnia” to convey the realization of being in a dreamlike world that is different from the current society of Bishop’s time. The society of Elizabeth Bishop’s time was not able to recognize true love between two people and how their disapproval of people’s decisions may affect one’s ability to sleep at night. Bishop wrote to reflect her life and her time by using her moral sense and sharp wit. Elizabeth Bishop develops a somber tone to appeal to similar feelings and experiences to her audience.
Personification is first introduced in …show more content…

She includes the use of some rhyming but not enough to categorize it under any literary device. Her poetry was influenced by Marianne Moore, who stabilized forced in her life. She includes the use of parenthesis in the first stanza to emphasize her point to the audience. This is due to the fact that she hopes of creating and impact of what the audience is about to read. “Insomnia” is a very ambitious poem that can be interpreted in many different ways. She includes the use of parenthesis in hope of trying to have the audience sway their beliefs and perceptions in the beginning of what they have read so far. Elizabeth Bishop’s images conveyed in her poetry are true to her life. Throughout the final stanza of “Insomnia” she includes the use of repetition of the word “where” in hope of emphasizing her point of inversion of a world that is backwards. She hopes to get the audience to see things in a different perspective and she continues this by using inversion in the last line of the poem by saying “is now deep, and you love me” (line 18). The phrase “you love me” is backwards for ‘I love you’, and here it is finally revealed that the speaker was referring the moon to be a past lover. These are the descriptive words that give the audience details about the speaker’s feelings and

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