In the poem “Spinster” by Sylvia Plath, a girl and her lover take a walk through the woods on a spring day. As they are walking, the lover attempts to make romantic gestures towards the girl, which frightens her. The girl’s physical withdrawal from spring and her act of embracing winter is a metaphor for her fear of love and longing for the predictability and control that is not found in love.
While on their walk through the woods, the disorganization that the girl feels emphasizes the girl’s discomfort in embracing unpredictable feelings such as love. The speaker’s choice to begin the poem with the word “now” implies that this scene of the girl walking with a lover in the woods is not new and it has been seen before (1). The feelings of the girl throughout the poem are reoccurring ones and not just ones of this particular scene. The repetition of her actions further highlights the depth of her fear of love because she is so terrified by the idea of love that she cannot overcome her fear. The description of the girl as “particular” reveals the speaker’s critical tone as the word describes her as picky and peculiar (1). This foreshadows that the girl is unlike others in her actions. The speaker includes that the walk is occurring in “April” in order to illustrate that the time they are taking the walk is ideal (2). Instead of seeing the setting of April as the perfect time to walk, the girl becomes “struck/By the bird’s irregular babel and the leaves’ litter” (4-6). The girl is irritated by all of the disorganization that is present in spring and love. The girl is unable to control the sound of the birds or the growth of the plants. Nature, like love, happens on its own. This reflects how she feels about love because she is also ...
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...self (29-30). The word “love[‘s]” ability to stand alone on its own line expresses the great threat that love has to the girl. The other words that describe the threats of the man are harsh but grouped together. Love is such a great threat that it carries the weight of all of those threats combined by consuming an entire line. This again enforces the girl’s fear of love, as she believes it has the ability to completely ruin her.
The girl’s fear of love causes her to long for control. The title of this poem, “Spinster,” highlights the speaker’s highly critical tone of the girl. While the girl may not be an old lonely woman yet, the continuation of her actions of withdrawal will cause her to be alone forever. The metaphor used in this poem as spring representing love and winter representing control is perfect because spring is variable while winter is monotonous.
Nature, that washed her hands in milk” can be divided structurally into two halves; the first three stanzas constitute the first half, and the last three stanzas make up the second half. Each stanza in the first half corresponds to a stanza in the second half. The first stanza describes the temperament of Nature, who is, above all, creative. This first stanza of the first half corresponds to stanza four, the first stanza in the second half of the poem. Stanza four divulges the nature of Time, who, unlike Nature, is ultimately a destroyer. Time is introduced as the enemy of Nature, and Ralegh points out that not only does Nature “despise” Time, she has good reason for it (l. 19). Time humiliates her: he “rudely gives her love the lie,/Makes Hope a fool, and Sorrow wise” (20-21). The parallel between the temperaments of Nature and Time is continued in stanzas two and five. Stanza two describes the mistress that Nature makes for Love. This mistress, who is made of “snow and silk” instead of earth, has features that are easily broken (3). Each external feature is individually fragile: her eyes are made of light, which cannot even be touched, her breath is as delicate as a violet, and she has “lips of jelly” (7-8). Her demeanor is unreliable, as well; it is made “Only of wantonness and wit” (12). It is no surprise that all of the delicate beauty Nature creates in stanza two is destroyed by Time in stanza five. Time “dims, discolors, and destroys” the creation of Nature, feature by feature (25-26). Stanzas three and six complete the parallel. In the third stanza, the mistress is made, but in her is “a heart of stone” (15). Ralegh points out that her charm o...
For each seasonal section, there is a progression from beginning to end within the season. Each season is compiled in a progressive nature with poetry describing the beginning of a season coming before poetry for the end of the season. This is clear for spring, which starts with, “fallen snow [that] lingers on” and concludes with a poet lamenting that “spring should take its leave” (McCullough 14, 39). The imagery progresses from the end of winter, with snow still lingering around to when the signs of spring are disappearing. Although each poem alone does not show much in terms of the time of the year, when put into the context of other poems a timeline emerges from one season to the next. Each poem is linked to another poem when it comes to the entire anthology. By having each poem put into the context of another, a sense of organization emerges within each section. Every poem contributes to the meaning of a group of poems. The images used are meant to evoke a specific point in each season from the snow to the blossoms to the falling of the blossoms. Since each poem stands alone and has no true plot they lack the significance than if they were put into th...
The sun has been an endless source of inspiration, both physical and spiritual, throughout the ages. For its light, warmth, and the essential role it has played in the maintenance of the fragile balance of life on earth, the sun has been honored and celebrated in most of the world's religions. While the regeneration of light is constant, the relative length of time between the rising and setting of the sun is affected by the changing of the seasons. Hippocrates postulated centuries ago that these changing patterns of light and dark might cause mood changes (9). Seasonal downward mood changes of late fall and winter have been the subject of many sorrowful turn-of-the-century poems of lost love and empty souls. For some, however, “the relationship between darkness and despair is more than metaphoric (6).
In his poem “Field of Autumn”, Laurie Lee uses an extended metaphor in order to convey the tranquility of time, as it slowly puts an end to life. Through imagery and syntax, the first two stanzas contrast with the last two ones: The first ones describing the beginning of the end, while the final ones deal with the last moments of the existence of something. Moreover, the middle stanzas work together; creating juxtaposition between past and future whilst they expose the melancholy that attachment to something confers once it's time to move on. Lee’s objective in this poem was to demonstrate the importance of enjoying the present, for the plain reason that worrying about the past and future only brings distress.
This is a complex poem. She even began with a complex idea, love. What exactly is love? Is it a feeling, an emotion that no one has control of? Is love something you can feel or touch? Some say it is not something that you can feel or touch, but you are well aware when love touches you, because you can feel it. It is an emotion that causes pleasure and pain. In this poem, Millay is showing how complex love is. The first half is about what love cannot do. Love is not a lifesaver, shelter, or a doctor. The second half is about the power of love. Even though love is not tangible, is it as important as something that is? Millay seems to be coming from the idea that love is not everything, but it is important. A question is raised, is love necessary for survival?
As the tone changes the perspective of the reader changes as well. There is no clear way to determine whether the speaker is responding to her situation with the appropriate amount of madness or is actually going mad and escaping into her own mind. Plath’s poem shows how a woman 's happiness was defined by her relationship to a man, which is enough to infuriate or drive any woman insane. The speaker struggles to continue her very existence because of her lost love. It is true that the speaker is very emotional and feels things very deeply, but that is not enough to prove that she had lost her mind. By the end of the poem the speaker seems to realize that she is wasting her time waiting on a man. She would rather have a present love that is completely unfathomable than a real love that is not around. The repetition in this poem makes the reader believe this loss is actually causing the speaker to lose her mind, but through changing tones that mirror the emotions anyone would go through in a situation of loss like this the speaker’s response is completely
Literally, this is a poem discribing the seasons. Frosts interpertation of the seasons is original in the fact that it is not only autumn that causes him grief, but summer. Spring is portrayed as painfully quick in its retirement; "Her early leaf's a flower,/ But only so an hour.". Most would associate summer as a season brimming with life, perhaps the realization of what was began in spring. As Frost preceives it however, from the moment spring...
Mallard gets close to the window and sees the new outside life which a tall tree represents. The narrator shows, “The delicious breath of rain was in the air.” For Mrs. Mallard it can represent a lot of things, but this day she feels like it is a sign of her new beginning. Now she will have the opportunity to be herself and not to be what everyone wants her to be. “She [is] young, with a fair, calm face, whose lines bespoke repression and even a certain strength.” She has an entire life in front of her eyes, which now she is able to do what she wants with anyone on her back stopping her. The narrator shows the reader how Mrs. Mallard is not going to live for someone else but herself and even though “…she [loves] him—sometimes. Often she [doesn’t]” No matter how much Brently loves her, sometimes Mrs. Mallard does not feel like loving
I first came across “Spring and Fall”—as I did a similar poem, Frost’s “Nothing Gold Can Say”—through two teen movies of the 1980’s. The Frost poem was featured in Copola’s adaptation of the popular S.E. Hinton young adult novel, The Outsiders, and Hopkins’ in Vision Quest, a forgettable movie about a young man searching to find himself by taking on the unbeatable state champion in a wrestling match. (Our hero beats him!) In both films, the themes of the pains and triumphs of growing up are presented in familiar formulas, and the poems lend a sense of gravity to that theme. In any case, lots of my friends in high school, who never would have read poetry otherwise, knew these poems and could recognize them, having heard them in a movie. (The same can be said of my generation in terms of another Victorian poem in our reading, “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” recited in class memorably by Alfalfa in one of the “Our Gang” comedies.) That said, hearing these poems in contexts outside of an academic setting really made them stick with me, and I’d like to use this paper as an opportunity to examine precisely what lends “Spring and Fall” in particular its haunting power.
“We pluck and marvel for sheer joy. And the ones still green, sighing, leave upon the boughs…” (14-16). This emphasis on nature reflects the respect and connection to the natural world the culture was trying to convey in their poetry. The colorful and illustrative descriptions of the physical world are indicative of the mindset and focus of these poems. Namely the fact that they were concerned with the world around us and the reality we experience as opposed to that of abstract concept of god or the supernatural as seen in other historical texts. This focus on nature is important because it sets the context in which the major theme of loss and separation originate from. In this poem the poet chooses to emphasize the passing of time in the choice of comparing the two seasons. Spring, in which life begins a new, and fall, in which the leaves begin to fall off and die. The poem reads “And the ones still green, sighing, leave upon the boughs- Those are the ones I hate to lose. For me, it is the autumn hills” (15-18). This juxtaposition of these two
In our ever-changing society, there are more and more non-traditional families, women are more liberated than previous years and some opt to be single. As Mrs. Mallard retreats to the security of her bedroom to reflect and grieve about her loss, she notices all the rejuvenation of spring out her window. Kate Chopin uses Mrs. Mallard senses to cleverly describe the new life t...
“Spinster” by Sylvia Plath is a poem that consists of a persona, who in other words serves as a “second self” for the author and conveys her innermost feelings. The poem was written in 1956, the same year as Plath’s marriage to Ted Hughes, who was also a poet. The title suggests that the persona is one who is not fond of marriage and the normal rituals of courtship as a spinster is an unmarried woman, typically an older woman who is beyond the usual age of marriage and may never marry. The persona of the poem is a woman who dislikes disorder and chaos and finds relationships to be as unpredictable as the season of spring, in which there is no sense of uniformity. In this poem, Plath not only uses a persona to disclose her feelings, but also juxtaposes the seasons and their order (or lack thereof) and relates them to the order that comes with solitude and the disorder that is attributed with relationships. She accomplishes this through her use of formal diction, which ties into both the meticulous structure and develops the visual imagery.
Unlike her brother, Dorothy seems to be less solitary in her experiences, her accounts of what happened and who was with her are less personal than William’s. Dorothy tends to include everyone who surrounded her at that point and time – ‘We [Dorothy and her brother William] were in the woods beyond Gowbarrow park’ – whereas William makes it a companionless experience, he forgets everyone that may have been sharing the moment with him – ‘I wandered lonely as a Cloud’ . This, in conjunction with the use of imagery, similes and personification, not only makes William’s poems more accessible to a wide range of readers but it also adds character and personality, whereas Dorothy’s journal tends to be more reserved and closed to interpretation. Although both use semantic field of nature, William’s use is more affective as it conveys emotion, passion and attachment to his work.
The poem is in free form and divided into five stanzas of unequal length. Weaving through the poem is a series of metaphors, these link physical aspects of life to abstract ideas regarding love. The essence of these changing metaphors remains the same: love is a journey, a journey of
... feared time. At times he seemed as if he was angry at the fact that time went by too quick and not enough time allowed him to spend summer with his beloved. Other times he spent glorifying how beautiful his beloved one was and how the beauty can’t ever be taken away. It makes it difficult for the audience to take his reason serious at times because at one point in the poem he seems to have contradicted himself. I found out that this poem had a portion of metaphors, similes, and imagery and personification throughout the entire poem. He begins the poem with a simile and ends it with a personification on the poem.