Winter-Piece, by Charles Tomlinson, depicts the effects of the wintery season; blinds are drawn, windows are sprayed with hail and possibly rain and snow. The fierce wind closes the gates ‘like gunshot’. Birds, like crows, are coerced to fly away leaving behind them a home which they once loved, due to the cold that deprives them of the provision of food. The spider ends up frozen to death, ‘ death-masked in cold ‘ yet it does not let go f its grip. Through the thick snow, the house peeks out behind ‘its holed and ragged glaze ‘, which highlight sense if destruction and mutilation.
This piece of literary work has a free form, and it is made up of one stanza, hence the poet does not utilize stanza breaks, with twenty-one verses. The poem has no rhyme scheme- free verse, therefore it is not musical, making these lines humourless and more serious. Employment of punctuation is translucently visual, due to the strong use of commas, therefore creating a pause so to wind down the reader, for that reason using caesura, making the poem have a slow flow. Tomlinson works with grammatically cor...
The most noticeable aspect of the structure of the entire poem is the lack of capital letters and periods. There is only one part in the entire forty lines, which is at the very end, and this intentional punctuation brings readers to question the speaker’s literacy. In fact, the speaker is very young, and the use of punctuation and hyphens brings to attention the speaker’s innocence, and because of that innocence, the
“Those Winter Sundays” by Robert Hayden, “My Father as a Guitar” by Martin Espada, and “Digging” by Seamus Heaney are three poems that look into the past of the authors and dig up memories of the authors fathers. The poems contain similar conflicts, settings, and themes that are essential in helping the reader understand the heartfelt feelings the authors have for their fathers. With the authors of the three poems all living the gust of their life in the 1900’s, their biographical will be similar and easier to connect with each other.
For my poetry paper I chose to examine poetry from the family album. The family album stood out to me significantly because I thoroughly enjoyed all of the poems because I had a personal connection with it. Family has always been an important part of my life and I think this particular album speaks volume. This album has many levels to it, some deeper than others. I feel that from reading poetry, it expands our ability to think and form ideas that we would have not thought about before. Poetry gives readers the ability to make connections on a deeper level and see things from a different perspective. The two poems that spoke to me in this album specifically were “Those Winter Sundays” By Robert Hayden and “Begotten” by Andrew Hudgins. These two poems are both similar because they are from a son’s point of view, talking about their parent(s). “Those Winter Sundays” was one of my all-time favorite poems from this album because it shows a hard working father who is dedicated to his family, but does not get any recognition for his hard work.
The main theme of Snowbound is that no-matter what happens, family will be there to help and comfort. This theme is demonstrated widely throughout the poem and even more so in the last stanza of this excerpt. Another, less prominent, theme of Snowbound is the meaning and involvement of God in the lives of people.
... is shown moreover through these pauses. We also see that he places question marks at the end of sentences, which is another way he is showing us the uncertainty in the voice of society. Through his punctuation and word placement, we clearly see the voice of society in his poem, but in a way that tells us not to conform to it.
"Characteristics of Modern Poetry - Poetry - Questions & Answers." ENotes - Literature Study Guides, Lesson Plans, and More. Web. 09 Jan. 2012. .
The poem begins by explaining the sluggishness of time and sets the mood for the rest of the piece. The repetition of the word “slow” was employed by the author in order to emphasize that changes in life occur very slowly and may even pass unnoticed. However, it is still important to recognize that time is progressing, but it takes so long that it’s hard to realize so. The last sentence expands on this idea by introducing “palsied apples”, comparing time’s speed of movement with that of a paralyzed being. It is also important to highlight the relevance of the syntax present in the first lines of the poem, as its analysis will lead to an interesting contrast with the last stanza. Nevertheless, in the first stanza, the author describes a “copper-coated hill”, and in fact, the author continues to describe the setting of his poem by employing a variety of warm colors to capture the true essence of autumn.
In The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe, the poet uses the winter season in a traditional way.
I do not know how without being culpably particular I can give my Reader a more exact notion of the style in which I wished these poems to be written, than by informing him that I have at all times endeavored to look steadily at my subject; consequently, I hope that there is in these Poems little falsehood of description, and my ideas are expressed in language fitted to their respective importance. Something I must have gained by this practice, as it is friendly to one property of all good poetry, namely, good sense; but it has necessarily cut me off from a large portion of phrases and figures of speech which from father to son have long been regarded as the common inheritance of Poets.
Robert Hayden poem ”Those Winter Sundays” explores his father as an unsung hero and it also presents an acknowledgement of poets lack of gratitude for his father. The speaker reflects on the childhood memories of his father and goes on to find all kinds of disabilities he had in terms of realization regarding the pain father bared for the poet. Story is very emotional in the way that the speaker reveals sacrifices of his father during his childhood throughout the poem. It is agonizing and the words used in the poem are really an expression of desperation and sadness as he is really missing that time. There are a number of sacrifices made by the father during the harsh winter season of writer’s childhood. In his childhood he was not actually aware about the harshness of those lovely and affectionate feelings that his father had about him. In the poem ”Those Winter Sundays” Robert Hayden uses imagery and sound devices to portray his father as an unsung hero and to acknowledge his own lack of gratitude
This essay is anchored on the goal of looking closer and scrutinizing the said poem. It is divided into subheadings for the discussion of the analysis of each of the poem’s stanzas.
The structure of the poem is a villanelle. The villanelle comes from the French middle ages and is composed of nineteen lines. It has five tercets and a concluding quatrain: ABA-ABA-ABA-ABA-ABA-ABAA. Two different lines are repeated. Lines one, six, twelve, and eighteen are all the same. Line three reappears in line nine fifteen and nineteen. Each tercet will conclude with an exact or very close duplication of line one or three. The final quatrain repeats line one and three. The villanelle is one of the most difficult forms of poetry to follow. Perhaps Thomas wanted to use this form to show how special his father meant to him. Dylan Thomas speaks of death throughout this poem. Death is the major theme of the vil...
“The Snow Man,” by Wallace Stevens, dramatizes a metaphorical “mind of winter”, and introduces the idea that one must have a certain mindset in order to correctly perceive reality. The poet, or rather the Snow Man, is an interpreter of simple and ordinary things; “A cold wind, without interpretation, has no misery” (Poetry Genius). Through the use of imageries and metaphors relating to both wintery landscapes and the Snow Man itself, Stevens illustrates different ideas of human objectivity and the abstract concept of true nothingness. Looking through the eyes of the Snow Man, the readers are given an opportunity to perceive a reality that is free from objectivity; The Snow Man makes it clear that winter can possess qualities of beauty and also emptiness: both “natural wonder, and human misery”. He implies that winter can also be nothing at all: “just a bunch of solid water, dormant plants, and moving air.” (The Wondering Minstrels). “One must
To begin, the sound of this poem can be proven to strongly contribute an effect to the message of this piece. This poem contains a traditional meter. All of the lines in the poem except for lines nine and 15 are in iambic tetrameter. In this metric pattern, a line has four pairs of unstressed and stressed syllables, for a total of eight syllables. This is relevant in order for the force of the poem to operate dynamically. The poem is speaking in a tenor of veiled confessions. For so long, the narrator is finally speaking up, in honesty, and not holding back. Yet, though what has been hidden is ultimately coming out, there is still this mask, a façade that is being worn. In sequence, the last words in each of the lines, again, except for lines nine and 15, are all in rhythm, “lies, eyes, guile, smile, subtleties, over-wise, sighs, cries, arise, vile...
The consistent pattern of metrical stresses in this stanza, along with the orderly rhyme scheme, and standard verse structure, reflect the mood of serenity, of humankind in harmony with Nature. It is a fine, hot day, `clear as fire', when the speaker comes to drink at the creek. Birdsong punctuates the still air, like the tinkling of broken glass. However, the term `frail' also suggests vulnerability in the presence of danger, and there are other intimations in this stanza of the drama that is about to unfold. Slithery sibilants, as in the words `glass', `grass' and `moss', hint at the existence of a Serpent in the Garden of Eden. As in a Greek tragedy, the intensity of expression in the poem invokes a proleptic tenseness, as yet unexplained.