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In June of 1875, William Ernest Henley was told that he was going to die due to tuberculosis. Against all odds, Henley survived, not only recovering from tuberculosis, but also avoiding amputation on both his legs. While in the infirmary, Henley was inspired to write the verses that soon became the poem Invictus. With simple form and rhyme, Invictus is a poem that demands deep analysis to determine its true meaning. When analyzing Henley’s work, one notices how the use of literary elements such as metaphor, imagery, and personification convey the poem’s central ideas: suffering, resilience, and spiritual fortitude.
Henley establishes the sense of suffering that the speaker is experiencing through the use of multiple literary devices. By beginning the poem with images of darkness and despair, Henley sets the tone for
In the first line, he writes, “Out of the night that covers me.” “Night” evokes images of the darkness and emptiness that has taken over the speaker’s life. Henley then objectifies the speaker’s suffering, by comparing it to a vast, empty “pit.” In the second stanza, Henley uses analogy to continue the description of the speaker’s suffering, by attributing animalistic qualities to the abstract concept of “circumstance.” He compares the relation between “circumstance” and the speaker to the relation between a predator and its prey. Line 6, “In the fell clutch of circumstance,” instills the image of the grip of a predator on its prey. The speaker is being held in the tight grip of a tragic circumstance, and is extremely close to death. Though cursed with a great burden, the speaker does not “wince nor cry aloud,” that is, complain vociferously about his pain,
Another similar poem that expresses “a memorable evocation of Victorian stoicism and the stiff upper lip” is William Ernest Henley's poem “Invictus” which means unconquered in Latin. The poem represents Henley’s struggle with tuberculosis, a lethal disease he had fallen victim to at the age of twelve. The poem depicts the true meaning of courage, ...
The Norton Anthology of Poetry, Fifth Edition. Margaret Ferguson, Mary Jo Salter, & Jon Stallworthy. Copyright 2005, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.
This essay will explore how the poets Bruce Dawe, Gwen Harwood and Judith Wright use imagery, language and Tone to express their ideas and emotions. The poems which will be explored throughout this essay are Drifters, Suburban Sonnet and Woman to Man.
In her poem entitled “The Poet with His Face in His Hands,” Mary Oliver utilizes the voice of her work’s speaker to dismiss and belittle those poets who focus on their own misery in their writings. Although the poem models itself a scolding, Oliver wrote the work as a poem with the purpose of delivering an argument against the usage of depressing, personal subject matters for poetry. Oliver’s intention is to dissuade her fellow poets from promoting misery and personal mistakes in their works, and she accomplishes this task through her speaker’s diction and tone, the imagery, setting, and mood created within the content of the poem itself, and the incorporation of such persuasive structures as enjambment and juxtaposition to bolster the poem’s
‘War Photographer’ differs structurally from ‘Prayer Before Birth’. Firstly it is a narrative and the voice is the poet’s itself, as opposed to a persona. It also follows a conventional structure of 4 stanzas with an equal number of lines where each ends on a rhyming couplet as if to conclude argument. This also keeps the readers interested in the poem or the particular phrase as it creates a flow of rhythm. Alternatively, ‘Prayer before Birth’ is written in free verse and uses alliteration and assonance to create rhythm. The structure of the poem also supports this dichotomy in that there are two contrasting worlds: the world of war zones (‘Belfast. Beirut. Phnom Penh.’) and the quieter and calmer world of ‘Rural England’. The photographer is portrayed as a struggling man who wants to adapt back into ‘normal’ life having witnessed such tragedies. The war has made everyday life meaningless and trivial to him in comparison to the suffering experienced by others. The sentence structure also helps emphasise the contrast the poet is creating between everyday life back in leafy England and the shocking reality of a war zone.
Edward Taylor’s Upon Wedlock, and Death of Children and Upon a Wasp Chilled with Cold are similar in their approach with the illustration of how beautiful and magnificent God’s creations are to humankind. However, each poem presents tragic misfortune, such as the death of his own children in Upon Wedlock, and Death of Children and the cold, enigmatic nature of human soul in Upon a Wasp Chilled with Cold. Taylor’s poems create an element of how cruel reality can be, as well as manifest an errant correlation between earthly life and spiritual salvation, which is how you react to the problems you face on earth determines the salvation that God has in store for you.
“Still I Rise,” by Maya Angelou, and “Invictus,” by William Ernest Henley, are both poems about Perseverance. They focus on still staying strong even after people and things in life have tried to bring them down. However the differences of the two poems may be as significant as the similarities.
The beginning of the poem instills both the physical and mental awareness of the speaker, a person engrossed with the sensory imagery displaced before them. In the first few lines of the poem, the visual imagery suggests a feeling of calamity and serenity with phrases like “The sea is calm to-night.” “The tide is full, the moon lies fair” and “o...
The poem ‘Futility’ was written as a result of an incident where a soldier actually froze to death in February 1917. Therefore, in the poem Owen’s main focus is on a single casualty whose death is given a representative status. ‘Futility’ is also a poem which describes the wastefulness of war. Henceforth, that many young soldiers could have lived their life in a better manner where Owen perceives war as ‘wasteful’. Therefore, quotations are used which describe the war’s futility. “Are limbs, so dear achieved, are side” utilises a metaphor to show that war is wasteful in representing it with the ‘limbs’. Owen argues that our limbs take time to grow, our guardians waste all their time keeping us healthy, however with a result of a bullet by the foe can take it all away. Moreover, “was it for this clay he grew tall?” suggesting is this why we grow up, keep ourselves healthy and educate ourselves if it can be taken away within an instant, where Owen questions the meaning of life and religion through the utilisation of a rhetorical question. Furthermore, biblical allusion is used which confirm the story of our creation. Words like ‘clay’ emphasise biblical allusion as religious view says ‘we humans were made out of clay’. Therefore, the idea of the futility of war has also been explored in ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’. Hence, purpose of the poem is to illustrate the
The poets of the discussed poems are each greatly influenced by suffering. They have each outlined either the cause or result of suffering, and drawn their conclusion from one of their own belief or morals. For example; ‘Valentine’ and ‘Sonnet 116’ are greatly related, due to their authors morals that have been attributed to the poems. ‘The Tyger’ is influenced largely from William Blake’s beliefs in origin. ‘War Photographer’ is an example of a poem that has contributed the result of suffering and ‘Poison Tree’ has outlined the cause of suffering. This has occurred through a wide range of poetic devices that made the reader to question their own beliefs or morals. Suffering is an often deeply discussed topic, which is continued to be used in literature in many ways today.
...tention in the world, and the subjectivity of human suffering. Auden emphasizes that the reality of modern humanity is that people have learnt to be indifferent to the pain of other’s, like the ploughman and the ship attendants or uninformed like the children skating on the pond. Ultimately, Auden reminds us that tragedies and human suffering are a part of life; they can happen anywhere at anytime but when they do, life continues to go on.
Explore how the poems Prayer before Birth, Mother in a Refugee Camp, War Photographer and three other poems consider the trials and/or fears of life.
Collins, Billy. "Introduction to Poetry." Literature for Composition. Ed. Sylvan Barnet, William Burto and William E. Cain. 10th ed. New York: Pearson, 2014. 203-204. Print.
In the Songs of Experience, Blake continues his contrast of the two states of the human soul with the second state, experience. Just as Blake used children to represent innocence, he uses adults as the victims of experience. These poems show the inhumanity and cruelty under the surface of civilization. They show how humans are constricted and laden with despair, that the institutions of society have lain upon them. One of the most prevalent institutions of this ti...
One of the most prevalent themes in poetry is that of alienation and despair. The two feelings are ones many poets delve into exploring and expressing