Electrop The Poem Adelstrop

1744 Words4 Pages

World War I would bring about a change in which governments would rule their people depending on the outcome of the war. Edward Thomas would enlist in the summer of 1915, he volunteered to go oversees to France, and then he died on Easter Sunday of 1917, by an artillery shell blast. Edward Thomas’ dear friend Robert Frost was left to keep Edward Thomas’ poems alive within the literature circles and make sure that his friend got that credit that he deserved. Robert Frost said this about Edward’s death in 1917: “Edward Thomas was the only brother I ever had…[and that it][w]as the greatest friendship of my life” (Cubeta, 147). Edward Thomas at the time of his death left behind a wife and three children. Throughout his limited work as a poet, …show more content…

Which is a complete contrast compared to the poem Rain. Adelstrop is about a town that Thomas was able to visit while he was serving in WWI. A scholar could interpret this poem as one that was straight to the point, and more of an observational poem of what Thomas encountered within the small town. Unlike ‘Rain,’ which has many metaphors and can be widely interpreted for its meaning and place within World War I poetry. Thomas’ peers within the literary world received his poem about Adelstrop very well, and many of scholars have written about the poem and whether or not there are some meaningful metaphors that some readers may have overlooked throughout the past …show more content…

Cash writes:
Being on a train journey, he has the straightness of the railway-line to remind him of the linear movement of time…What happens at Adlestrop Station? Time stands still: ‘for that minute’, hereby an illogical unit of measurement, the poet enters an alternative dimension and has an apprehension of timelessness—a supernatural experience to which he gives a name, the strange name on the sign (Cash 70).
From this passage one can clearly tell that this poem can be taken metaphorically into a place that some readers may never have thought the poem was going in that direction. With the realization that this poem could be about the movement of time, one can see that it opens up a whole new aspect of what is taking place within the poem. By looking at the train in this form scholars might be able to infer that each stop along the way not just this stop, is a

Show More
Related

  • Because I Could Not Stop For Death Analysis

    1067 Words  | 3 Pages

    While the poem starts with Death picking her up in his carriage, the final resting ground is not the grave site. It is said “We paused before a House that seemed / A swelling of the Ground” (17-18) which tells us they stop at the grave for the narrator’s death but they only pause there inferring it is not the last place they will visit on their journey. In the final stanza of the poem she says “Since then –‘tis Centuries –and yet / Feels shorter than the Day / I first surmised the Horses’ Heads / Were toward Eternity –” (21-24). This can be interpreted as an image that shows the horses who are guiding the Narrator and Death on their carriage ride, have their heads pointing straight towards eternity, which proves that once she is buried it is not the end as she is existing in some form of an afterlife. She also says, although it was centuries ago, it “Feels shorter than the Day” (22), proving that time plays no role in eternity and that her burial feels shorter than it actually was, once again supporting the idea of her existence in an afterlife. Once reading the final stanza and seeing her existence in eternity, the quote “The Carriage held but just Ourselves –/ And Immortality” (3-4) from the first stanza begins to make more sense for the readers. If you are in a carriage with death, you are thought to be on your final ride and so the only way to

    Read More

  • Traveling Through The Dark Poem Analysis

    1039 Words  | 3 Pages

    To understand a poem you have to know the setting, the poem’s persona, the tone, the kind of situation that is occurring throughout the poem, and you have to know the clear message of the poem, if there is one. In “Traveling Through the Dark” these five key details are presented to the readers. The poem’s persona is the narrator himself. The narrator is

    Read More

  • Analysis Of Death By John Dickinson

    1401 Words  | 3 Pages

    “We paused before a House that seems” (line17 Dickinson). In the third stand, the speaker “passed” (lines 9,11,12) her lifetime on the trip, but the speaker and the death “paused” before an architecture now. The speed of the trip is slow down, and the speaker sees her destination. “A Swelling of the Ground/The roof was scarcely-/The cornice in the ground-”(lines 18-20 Dickinson). According to this description, it is easy to infer that the architecture is a cemetery, which is the destination of the speaker and her new house after she dead. “Since then-/Centuries-and yet/Feels shorter than the day” (Lines 21-22 Dickinson). To the speaker, it makes no difference, whether it is only one day or a thousand years because her body was dead and cannot leave the cemetery forever, but the speaker’s soul is get rid of the limitation of the body and has the eternal life. Compared with the immortality after death, the speaker feels the lifetime is shorter than a day and time is meaningless to her. “I first surmised the Horses’ Heads/Were toward Eternity-” (lines 23-24 Dickinson). The speaker starts to suspect that the destination of the trip is not the “House”, but immortality. Although, the body of the speaker was buried in the cemetery and stay there forever, her soul can continue the trip, and the direction of the horses’ head is the

    Read More

  • Carl Sandburg And Ezra Pound

    825 Words  | 2 Pages

    When arriving at the station of Pound’s poem we are already underground and isolated from nature. We start the poem with “The apparition of these faces in the crowd” (line 1). The speaker is clearly watching the train cars rapidity enter the station. Only slowing down fast enough to pick-up passengers, like trash being taken onto a garbage truck. The train’s passengers appear as apparitions, quick to fade in and just as quick to go.

    Read More

  • Abigail Deutsch's Poem After The Disaster

    512 Words  | 2 Pages

    From the combination of enjambed and end-stopped lines, the reader almost physically feels the emphasis on certain lines, but also feels confusion where a line does not end. Although the poem lacks a rhyme scheme, lines like “…not long after the disaster / as our train was passing Astor” and “…my eyes and ears…I couldn't think or hear,” display internal rhyme. The tone of the narrator changes multiple times throughout the poem. It begins with a seemingly sad train ride, but quickly escalates when “a girl came flying down the aisle.” During the grand entrance, imagery helps show the importance of the girl and how her visit took place in a short period of time. After the girl’s entrance, the narrator describes the girl as a “spector,” or ghost-like figure in a calm, but confused tone. The turning point of the poem occurs when the girl “stopped for me [the narrator]” and then “we [the girl and the narrator] dove under the river.” The narrator speaks in a fast, hectic tone because the girl “squeez[ed] till the birds began to stir” and causes her to not “think or hear / or breathe or see.” Then, the tone dramatically changes, and becomes calm when the narrator says, “so silently I thanked her,” showing the moment of

    Read More

  • The Pronoun Character

    1239 Words  | 3 Pages

    In “anyone lived in a little how town”, the passing of time is strongly conveyed throughout the poem. The repetition of lines such as “spring summer autumn winter,” and similar prose give off the undeniable imagery of passing time1. The cycling of seasons, weather and moon and sun are all understood to be ideas behind the passing of time because these are ways through which humanity measures time. Seasons divide our year, each of these seasons has a weather pattern associated with it. The moon and sun too suggest the passing of day by day. These images, cyclical in their nature, repeat throughout the poem. The repetition of these images displays the theme of time.

    Read More

  • Railway Train Figurative Language

    129 Words  | 1 Pages

    We see figurative language in most writing styles, but especially poems. Emily Dickinson’s poem, “The Railway Train,” uses a variety of figurative language. This poem uses personification and metaphors is to explain what the train does. In doing so it is compared to a horse.

    Read More

  • Adonais By Will Wallace Harvey: Poem Analysis

    610 Words  | 2 Pages

    The October 1878 edition of Harper’s Magazine included a mix of numerous short stories, articles about travel, articles about the homestead and a couple of poems. The general theme of this magazine seemed to be knowledge. The pieces about America were farm-based, as one article titled “New England Dairy Farming” and even included a chart on how to judge the “perfect” cow. The majority of the articles, however, were about landmarks and an assortment of information about different places around the world. From information about the St. Gothard tunnel in Switzerland to observations made about a Japanese school, it seems as though most Americans were interested in learning about the workings of other countries. The countries in this edition included

    Read More

  • Contrasting the Natural and Mechanical Worlds in Hathaway's Oh, Oh

    761 Words  | 2 Pages

    The images, content, and focus of the poem change with the intrusion of the train.  Before the protagonist's girl notices the train, the two characters are concerned with the cows, grass, and simply ambling down a country lane.  But, as soon as the train approaches, and as it passes, the characters are no longer concerned with nature.  Rather, they suddenly begin dreaming of "being president" (11) and of "wonderful, faraway places" (14).  This switch from the serenity of nature to the dreams of the world finally ends with the poems last line -- a punishment or at least a warning.  The tranquil and peaceful nature suddenly becomes filled with "fifty Hell's Angels" (17).  But, more than simply motorcycles waiting at a railroad crossing, Hathaway has personified the motorcycles creating the mechanical Hell...

    Read More

  • modernism

    656 Words  | 2 Pages

    The the story starts off with a tenden of modernism; it opens to a scene where men are waiting for an evening train, “The men on the siding stood first on one foot and then on the other, their hands thrust deep into their trousers pockets, their overcoats open, their shoulders screwed up with the cold; and they glanced from time to time toward the southeast, where the railroad track wound along the river shore.” We have no background information on why the men are there or who they are, all we know is that they are at a train station. One tendency among modernized pieces of literature to start off a scene in the middle of a situation. It draws in readers making them read more to fully understand what is happening in the story.

    Read More

  • Life and Death

    1197 Words  | 3 Pages

    Secondly, Ernest Hemingway illustrates the other side of the train station to represent life. “Across on the other side, were fields of grain and trees along the banks of the Ebro” (402). Literally, the fields of the grain and trees represent fertility and fruitfulness because a field without crops represents infertility. However, symbolically, the fertile land symbolizes Jig’s current pregnant state, life in Jig’s womb.

    Read More

  • Edward Thomas Poetry Analysis

    832 Words  | 2 Pages

    Edward Thomas displays similar themes of nature, the constant presence of war, and the intensity of memory within the poems, “The Sun Used to Shine” and “The Sorrow of True Love”. The words of Robert Frost, an American poet during the early 20th century, greatly influences nature scenes that Thomas chooses. His relationships with Frost, other prominent figures in his life, and also his own personal life experiences shape the memories that Thomas depicts in his poetry. Thomas fought in World War I, therefore war is a significant element of his lifestyle, which translates into his poetry by usage of imagery of battles and the feeling of isolation given to the reader.

    Read More

  • Metaphors in The Road Not Taken, by Robert Frost

    780 Words  | 2 Pages

    The two roads presented in this poem represent difficult decisions we are faced with in life. He uses the relationship between the paths and real life decisions throughout the whole poem. This is an example of extended metaphor, which is used to help the readers understand the analogy between the two. The man in the poem said: “long I stood” (3), which lets us know the decision was not made instantly. It was hard for the man to make a final judgment.

    Read More

  • Analysis Of Attack By Siegfried Sassoon

    1031 Words  | 3 Pages

    He experienced the effects of this new industrialized warfare, personally and physically. The year he wrote “Attack,” he was shot in the head mistakenly by a member of his own troops. Previously during his service his little brother had been killed in the trenches, and in 1916 he both risked his life by crossing no-man’s-land in order to rescue other wounded soldiers and managed to take a German trench by himself. He experienced the war to its fullest degree of bloodshed, all the while writing poetry in the vein of “Attack” about this

    Read More

  • Elements In "The Road Not Taken"

    710 Words  | 2 Pages

    The main theme of the poem that Frost attempts to convey is how important the decisions that one makes can be, and how they affect one’s future. In lines 2-3, he expresses the emotions of doubt and confusion by saying, “And sorry I could not travel/ And be one traveler, long I stood”, which explains how the speaker contemplated their decision of which road to take. In the closing, line 20 of the poem further reestablishes the theme when it states, “that has made all the difference”, meaning that making the decision of which road to take for themselves is the important key for a successful future. Frost helps to express this theme by using symbolism to portray a road as one’s journey of life. Using symbolism, Frost suggests that the speaker of this poem is taking the harder of the two roads presented before them, because the road the speaker chooses, “leaves no step had trodden black” (12...

    Read More

More about Electrop The Poem Adelstrop

Open Document