An Echo Sonnet Poetic Devices

The meaning of An Echo Sonnet is that you are your own enemy. People must take chances to get places in life, but they stop themselves. The poem expresses this through diction, imagery, patterns and structure. To fully understand the poem, one must know who the speaker is and who they are talking to. The speaker in An Echo Sonnet is a poet writing a sonnet and they are speaking to an empty page, though it is their subconscious answering. The poet is writing down questions about life while they are being answered by their subconscious. The tone of the poem is very pessimistic. This is evident in the use of words such as “grief”, “end”, “disease”, “enemy”, and “weep”. All these words have negative feelings tied to them and lead the reader to reflect depressingly on the message of the poem. These words create a sense of gloominess that generates a pessimistic attitude. Tone isn’t just displayed though diction, but also through imagery. Imagery in the poem also expresses a pessimistic tone. Imagery such as “I’d leap into the dark if dark were true” displays a pessimistic tone by directing the reader into a place of darkness full of

One poetic device that was used in An Echo Sonnet is symbolism. There are several examples within this poem, but one is life’s long disease which is a symbol of aging. This contributes to the meaning of the poem by calling out the unfortunate cause for death. The meaning of the poem is strongly expressed in the middle lines of the poem. The line “Leaf blooms, burns red before delighted eyes” shows the blooming of leaves and then the bright death of the leaf as people watch happily. The blooming is a symbol for new life, but the speaker then compares this action and the death of the leaf to the life of a person and ultimately decides that if it isn’t death that is bad, then there must be something else. The speaker resolves that this thing is them