“Work Without Hope” is a sonnet that relates to the nature of the speaker’s emotions. The poem uses imagery that reflects the real world, and references it to the speaker’s state of mind. The speaker in the poem uses seasons to relate his feelings and the effects of his feelings to the life he is living. “Work Without Hope” is presented at the beginning of the spring and the speaker is indeed considering the ideas offered throughout the poem. The poem unfolds as a sonnet though it is not presented as a traditional one. Coleridge developed the work in a way that the poem fully develops in the first twelve lines. The last two lines unfold the overall theme to the reader. The poem as a whole shows the way the world is busy, and everything is at work, but in contrary, he is idle, unlike the working natural world. The contrast is illustrated by the first six lines which open up the beauty of nature in a standard manner using traditional terms. In the poem, “All Nature seems at work. Slugs leave their lairs; the bees are stirring-birds are on the wing!” (1-2). But then the contrast is much significant. The speaker just tells the difference between him and the busy world, “And I the while, the sole unbusy thing, Nor honey make, nor pair, nor build, nor sing.” (5-6). The speaker in the poem agrees that nature is beautiful, but then he cannot identify …show more content…
The subject of contrast continues through the poem. Amaranths are beautiful unfading flowers. The speaker is fading progressively, and he is aware that he is a sign of lack of success, “With lips unbrightened, wreathless brow, I stroll:” (11) exposes the speaker’s deficiency as his efforts are compared to the productivity in the natural scene surrounding. The speaker is in great anguish as he realizes that he has not done anything to contribute to nature. He is unproductive as the winter that came before the current fruitful
This narrator is sad and burdened by the lack of work and by the lack of people that actually know what work is. “You know what work is----if you’re old enough to read this you know what work is, although you may not do it. Forget you.” (Levine 1036) The narrator is waiting for hours in the rain to be lucky enough to get work, however at some point he knows he may be turned away, “to the wasted waiting, to the knowledge that somewhere ahead a man is waiting who will say, “No, we are not hiring today.”” (Levine 1036) The narrator then goes on to also describe the work that relationships require, the one in the poem is between the narrator and his brother. The narrator speaks of a brother that works nights and that he is now disconnected with, he has never said that he loved him, nor kissed his cheek, “You love your brother now suddenly you can hardly stand the love flooding you for your brother, who’s not beside you or behind you or ahead of you because he’s home trying to sleep off a miserable night shift at Cadillac so he can get up by noon to study his German.” (Levine
The poet begins by describing the scene to paint a picture in the reader’s mind and elaborates on how the sky and the ground work in harmony. This is almost a story like layout with a beginning a complication and an ending. Thus the poem has a story like feel to it. At first it may not be clear why the poem is broken up into three- five line stanzas. The poet deliberately used this line stanzas as the most appropriate way to separate scenes and emotions to create a story like format.
To that end, the overall structure of the poem has relied heavily on both enjambment and juxtaposition to establish and maintain the contrast. At first read, the impact of enjambment is easily lost, but upon closer inspection, the significant created through each interruption becomes evident. Notably, every usage of enjambment, which occurs at the end of nearly every line, emphasizes an idea, whether it be the person at fault for “your / mistakes” (1-2) or the truth that “the world / doesn’t need” (2-3) a poet’s misery. Another instance of enjambment serves to transition the poem’s focus from the first poet to the thrush, emphasizing how, even as the poet “[drips] with despair all afternoon,” the thrush, “still, / on a green branch… [sings] / of the perfect, stone-hard beauty of everything” (14-18). In this case, the effect created by the enjambment of “still” emphasizes the juxtaposition of the two scenes. The desired effect, of course, is to depict the songbird as the better of the two, and, to that end, the structure fulfills its purpose
As a way to end his last stanza, the speaker creates an image that surpasses his experiences. When the flock rises, the speaker identifies it as a lady’s gray silk scarf, which the woman has at first chosen, then rejected. As the woman carelessly tosses the scarf toward the chair the casual billow fades from view, like the birds. The last image connects nature with a last object in the poet's
The diction surrounding this alteration enhances the change in attitude from self-loath to outer-disgust, such as in lines 8 through 13, which read, “The sky/ was dramatic with great straggling V’s/ of geese streaming south, mare’s tails above them./ Their trumpeting made us look up and around./ The course sloped into salt marshes,/ and this seemed to cause the abundance of birds.” No longer does he use nature as symbolism of himself; instead he spills blame upon it and deters it from himself. The diction in the lines detailing the new birds he witnesses places nature once more outside of his correlation, as lines 14 through 18 read, “As if out of the Bible/ or science fiction,/ a cloud appeared, a cloud of dots/ like iron filings, which a magnet/ underneath the paper
The speaker begins the poem an ethereal tone masking the violent nature of her subject matter. The poem is set in the Elysian Fields, a paradise where the souls of the heroic and virtuous were sent (cite). Through her use of the words “dreamed”, “sweet women”, “blossoms” and
The use of diction throughout the poem aids the author in displaying the idea that
the poet is trying to portray the fragility of a life, as it is created with the intent to be lost (death
“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
with the alliteration of the frst five lines : "Kubla Khan'', ''dome decree'', and ''sunless sea''. Coleridge interlaces short exclamations (''but oh!'', ''a savage place!'') and exageratedly long exclamations (''as holy and enchanted as e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted by a woman wailing for her demon lover!'') reinforces the feeling of flowing which is related to the time ''ticking'' irregularly away, creating a sense of timelessness.
Moreover, these various fragments all combine to instill a sense of ambiguity throughout the poem. In a sense, as the poem progresses, the audience discovers further and more troublesome questions regarding its message and its implications. The audience, perhaps, even begins to wonder if there are indeed absolute answers or whether Coleridge consciously intended to create an unresolved poem. Amid this unsettling tumult of questions, one is left to dedicatedly follow Coleridge’s journey in a sequential manner in an attempt to consider and ponder these ambiguities as they arise. Inevitably, however, lingering questions will ...
and in? The Ancient Mariner? , we see that Coleridge shows the struggle against the overwhelming forces of nature. It is an important theme for the Romantic poets. Another difference between the two poets is that Wordsworth deals with everyday people from small villages, and while reading the words, I felt as if it was not a poem at all, but a story being told.
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.
Wordsworth and Hopkins both present the reader with a poem conveying the theme of nature. Nature in its variety be it from something as simple as streaked or multicolored skies, long fields and valleys, to things more complex like animals, are all gifts we take for granted. Some never realize the truth of what they are missing by keeping themselves indoors fixating on the loneliness and vacancy of their lives and not on what beauty currently surrounds them. Others tend to relate themselves more to the fact that these lovely gifts are from God and should be praised because of the way his gifts have uplifted our human spirit. Each writer gives us their own ideals as how to find and appreciate nature’s true gifts.
The words become a symbol of a slow moving river and as the reader travels along the river, they are also traveling through each stanza. This creates a scene where the viewer can turn words into symbols while in reality they are just reading text. Coleridge is also able to illustrate a suspension of the mind through imagery; done so by producing images that are unfixed to the reader.... ... middle of paper ...