Widows Lament Actors, singers, and writers all have their individual trademark that they are known for. Cameron Diaz is known for her many roles in romantic comedies, while Taylor Swift is known as a teen pop sensation with country roots. Authors also have a style they are known for; William Carlos Williams is famous for making his poems more contemporary and local. He wanted to make his pieces connect to the readers on a more personal and real level. He is also big on making the poem seem like it was written in the same time and place that is being described in the poem. The speaker in “The Widow’s Lament in the Springtime” by William Carlos Williams is very composed and distant considering she just lost her husband. This poem was published …show more content…
With these themes and the natural chatty tone of the poem, it creates a realness that helps the widow. The author is allowing the speaker to speak for herself, to help her mourn her husband. The title of the poem is “The Widow’s Lament in the Springtime” implying that the poem is going to be a persona poem. This means that the poem is not written in the author’s voice, but rather in the Widow’s voice and her words. The first line of the poem immediately uses figurative language. “Sorrow is my own yard,” (line 1) is a metaphor. The speaker is comparing her yard and sorrow to each other; they are one and the same. The yard surrounds the house, just like the sorrow of the speaker is engulfing her. Lines 2-4 use visual imagery, “where the new grass/flames…” (Lines 2-3) creating an ominous feel in the poem. Almost as if the yard is on the offense. Other readers may just interpret the grass as simply growing, but the author describing it in a more elaborate way. New growth in the grass …show more content…
The last line suggests that the speaker wants to commit suicide. This would be plausible, because the whole poem, the widow is expressing her heavy and all-encompassing sorrow. She is basically alone in the world and even the one thing that brought her joy doesn’t bring a smile to her face anymore. The speaker wants to, “sink into the marsh near them.” (Line 28) Again, the author uses a strong word such as “sink” that suggests the worst. But at the same time, he uses the word “near,” which could also mean that sinking into the marsh could be her way of reuniting with the world she has become detached from. The widow used to find joy in the natural world, so by killing herself in their surroundings, she could pass happily and find her husband once
My initial response to the poem was a deep sense of empathy. This indicated to me the way the man’s body was treated after he had passed. I felt sorry for him as the poet created the strong feeling that he had a lonely life. It told us how his body became a part of the land and how he added something to the land around him after he died.
“A Song in the Front Yard”, by Gwendolyn Brooks, illustrates the desire people develop to experience new things and live life according to their own rules. In the first stanza, Brooks uses diction of propriety and unfamiliarity to emphasize the author’s desire to change her life. In the first line, the author establishes that she is only familiar with one way of life since she has “stayed in the front yard all [her] life.” The author “stayed” in the front yard suggesting that she was able to leave the yard and experience new things, but she just was not ready. She was raised in the “front yard,” highlighting the idea that the “front” is the proper way for her to live her life. In the second line, the author realizes there is much more to experience in life and she “[wants] a peek at the back.” At this point in her life, she is not ready to abandon the only life she knows, but she wants to look at the other side of things and all of the different experiences she can have. In the third line, the back yard is described as being, “rough and untended and hungry weed grows,” again representing how Brooks is only used to one place. In the front yard, everything is neat, properly tended, and no weeds grow. After seeing this, she realizes that life is not always as perfect as she was raised to believe, so she wants a taste of something new. In the fourth line, the author says, “a girl gets sick of a rose,” showing how Brooks has had enough of the front yard life and needs to experience new things. The “rose” is used to represent life in the front yard. A “rose” is usually associated with perfection and beauty, reflecting the author’s life in the “front yard.”
Plot in line three was changed to garden. The feel was slightly changed in line three because while plot means, “A small piece of ground marked out for a purpose such as building or gardening” (oxforddictionaries.com). A garden is more specific. It is a plot set aside for the use of vegetation. Therefore, garden gives the poem more of feel for nature. Line four has three alterations. The first of which is changing rain to precipitation. The author’s use of nouns is better; since rain has a natural feel, and precipitation has more of a scientific feel. The author’s choice of green was better than my choice of vegetation again for the same reason as the last alteration. Green has more of a natural connotation than vegetation. Line four’s last switch was replacing the prepositional phrase “are gone” with “have receded.” The phrase “have receded” gives the feeling that something has fled slowly. Yet, the phrase, “are gone” just states that they/it are/is no longer
The first stanza incorporates a lot of imagery and syntax. “A toad the power mower caught,”(line1). The use of syntax in the very first sentence is to catch the reader’s attention and to paint an image for them. The stanza goes on to talk about how the toad hobbles with it’s wounded leg to the edge of the garden, “Under the cineraria leaves”(line4). The speaker uses the word cineraria, which is similar to a cinerarium, a place where the ashes of the deceased are kept. By using this, the speaker further illustrates the death of the toad. “Low and final glade.”(Line6) this line is like a metaphor for the dying toad, the final rest for the toad could be the final glade. In the first stanza it seems as if the speaker is making fun of the dying toad saying the garden sanctuaries him as if he were a person. The opening line even seems a bit humorous to the reader. The following stanzas also have a tone of sarcasm.
Millay is associating death with happiness. This unlikely comparison allows the reader to become relaxed about the hardships the author was facing in the earlier passages of the poem. As the earth gave way and Millay sank softly and perfectly six feet under the ground, the reader celebrates as if a runner was finally crossing the finish line. Comparing death to a successful situation is an unusual way of looking at the end of life. Yet, this view of death is a positive outlook and is quite wonderful as opposed to other literary views of death such as "death: the gatekeeper of hell who has conquered the Earth." Millay makes the reader believe that the sinking earth is more of a pair of open hands waiting to hold the weary soul of man. Death is a chance of catching up on that sleep that you never quite caught up on. Another image that Millay gives the reader is that of a mother embracing her child. Mother Earth welcomes home her tired child and allows him to rest his head upon her soft breast. She runs her hands through his hair and lays them on his brow as to cool him off. She whispers her tired child to sleep through the sweet and friendly sound of rain.
The first literary quality that gives insight to the meaning of the poem is imagery. The phrase “don’t cross my village wall” is seen in the first stanza; this gives the image of someone crossing a line in which the speaker does not want to be crossed. Then in the second stanza the speaker says, “don’t cross my fence”(LXXVI.10), which again gives the image of someone crossing a line. In the third stanza the phrase, “don’t cross into my garden”(LXXVI.18)
In the 'piano' the poet's style is one that is very emotional to do this, the poet hast. used lots of emotive language 'weep' and 'flood of remembrance' also.
It describes how the conservative farmer follows traditions blindly and the isolated life followed by him. It reflects how people make physical barriers and that later in life come to their social life too. Where neighbor with pine tree, believes that this separation is needed as it is essential for their privacy and personal life. The poem explores a paradox in human nature. The first few lines reflect demolition of the wall, ?Something there is that doesn?t reflect love a wall? this reflects that nature itself does not like separation. The "something" referring to the intangible sense of social interaction. Furthermore "that sends the frozen-ground-swell under it" refers to Frost or to the author. Although the narrator does not want the wall, ironically, the mending of the wall brings the neighbors together and literally builds their friendship. An additional irony of the poem is that the only time these two neighbors sees each other is when they both mend the wall. The narrator sees the stubbornness in his neighbor, and uses the simile 'like an old-stone savage' to compare him to a stone-age man who 'moves in darkness', that is, set in his ways, and who is unlikely to change his views.
This blues poem discusses an incredibly sensitive topic: the death of Trethewey’s mother, who was murdered by her ex-husband when Trethewey was nineteen. Many of her poetry was inspired by the emotions following this event, and recounting memories made thereafter. “Graveyard Blues” details the funeral for Trethewey’s mother, a somber scene. The flowing words and repetition in the poem allow the reader to move quickly, the three-line stanzas grouping together moments. The poem begins with heavy lament, and the immediate movement of the dead away from the living, “Death stops the body’s work, the soul’s a journeyman [author emphasis]” (Tretheway 8, line 6). Like the epitaph from Wayfaring Stranger, Trethewey indicates that the dead depart the world of the living to some place mysterious, undefined. The living remain, and undertake a different journey, “The road going home was pocked with holes,/ That home-going road’s always full of holes” (Trethewey 8, line 10-11). Trethewey indicates that the mourning is incredibly difficult or “full of holes”, as she leaves the funeral and her mother to return home. ‘Home’ in this poem has become indicative of that which is not Trethewey’s mother, or that which is familiar and comfortable, in vast contrast to the definition of home implied in the
...ple. The way that Frost uses body language, shows how distant that the couple is becoming. There are many ways that people can handle grief, this poem is just one way that two people handle their lost. “Home Burial” also gives the “morbidness of death in these remote place; a women unable to take up her life again when her only child has died. The charming idyll” (Robyn V. Young, Editor, 195).
The poem begins with the poet transcending reality and reminiscing of one of his childhood memories. In this case it is one of when he as a child, watched a team of horses ploughing the stubble back into the field, during a rainy day which got progressively stormier. In the first two verses, the poet gives the reader a meaningful hint. what the circumstances of his times were. This was most probably the case.
The speaker started the poem by desiring the privilege of death through the use of similes, metaphors, and several other forms of language. As the events progress, the speaker gradually changes their mind because of the many complications that death evokes. The speaker is discontent because of human nature; the searching for something better, although there is none. The use of language throughout this poem emphasized these emotions, and allowed the reader the opportunity to understand what the speaker felt.
The growing flowers are said to be “all Dizzy/ Gillespie with the utter/ sufficiency of everything” (23-25). This metaphor uses the flowers as a tenor and Dizzy Gillespie as the vehicle. Dizzy Gillespie was a phenomenal trumpeter in the twentieth century, who invented be-bop and brought it to popularity among the musical community. While performing he was always fully present with sound and personality. This metaphor explains how the flowers have everything sufficiently present to become successful plants. The most used figurative language in this poem is the act of personifying nature, where the vehicle of the metaphor is human characteristics. This is evident through “The grass is under the same/ simple-minded impression,” with the grass being the tenor (3-4). The mindset of the grass shows that it has not been exposed to the complex nature of reality. This is beneficial for “it feels so good” for them to be in the world with innocence, rather than living in an unsheltered world, which could lead to worries about events to come (7). Next, “They don’t imagine lawn/ mowers, the four stomachs/ of the cows” (26-28). As the flowers think of these circumstances, it makes one think of them as living, breathing creatures rather than concrete objects. As the flowers imagine this detrimental event, it shows that they have fears just as
Funeral Blues by W. H. Auden is a short poem that illustrates the emotions that he is dealing with after the love of his life passes away. The tone of this piece evokes feelings that will differ depending on the reader; therefore, the meaning of this poem is not in any way one-dimensional, resulting in inevitable ambiguity . In order to evoke emotion from his audience, Auden uses a series of different poetic devices to express the sadness and despair of losing a loved one. This poem isn’t necessarily about finding meaning or coming to some overwhelming realization, but rather about feeling emotions and understanding the pain that the speaker is experiencing. Through the use of poetic devices such as an elegy, hyperboles, imagery, metaphors, and alliterations as well as end-rhyme, Auden has created a powerful poem that accurately depicts the emotions a person will often feel when the love of their live has passed away.
“Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” is a poem composed by Thomas Gray over a period of ten years. Beginning shortly after the death of his close friend Richard West in 1742, “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” was first published in 1751. This poem’s use of dubbal entendre may lead the intended audience away from the overall theme of death, mourning, loss, despair and sadness; however, this poem clearly uses several literary devices to convey the author’s feelings toward the death of his friend Richard West, his beloved mother, aunt and those fallen soldiers of the Civil War. This essay will discuss how Gray uses that symbolism and dubbal entendre throughout the poem to convey the inevitability of death, mourning, conflict within self, finding virtue in one’s life, dealing with one’s misfortunes and giving recognition to those who would otherwise seem insignificant.