Real Estate Poem Analysis

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The most important feature of Willis’ “Real Estate” is the tone of the poem, which expresses a plain easiness that both tells the poem’s “feel” as well as paints a gloomy image of the overall life on Earth. In a comfortable setting, the poem describes a man engaging in conversation with somebody talking about remembering how the old neighbor’s trees looked before starting to die. The speaker’s voice creates a tone of miserable hopelessness in which the traditional mood of the poem becomes more important than a simple chit-chat at the beginning of the poem. This chit-chat are simple, while the short conversation between these two people suggests that they are getting older and how the future does look very welcoming. The vagueness of the scene, …show more content…

The narrator talks specifically about an oak tree, as if saying that even though the oak is very important to life, it will eventually start dying off. So too, when talking about the oak tree, he even mentions how when the cones fall down to the ground, mice even end there life because they fall with the cones. We must suspect that the comparison of the tree to himself, is that he looks at how he soon will not be able to have a great life and will not be able to do things like he normally would have been able to do in the past. The conversation, from the beginning of the poem, is very short and could indicate both of their sadness about what the future holds for them since they are getting older. Moreover, they both agree that it is another part of life and it is just like turning another page in a …show more content…

Indeed, there is no scene that we can actually tell what is time or place this is occurring at, except that these two people are looking at his neighbor’s lawn and that the spider dies when he is reading a book by the fire. In the poem, Real Estate, presents the speaker who might be understanding death through this idea,
In the course of the eighteenth century the soul loses its key status in the discourses on the human. Subsequently, however, it becomes an important aspect of literature, or, rather, literature begins to fulfil the soul's function of promising immortality. In a sense, one can say that once the immaterial soul is no longer attached to the human body it is attached to the body of the poetic text – most significantly in the form of the imagination. (Haekel, 681)
The speaker might have only found the courage to talk about death and feel comfortable with it by using and writing poetry to symbolize what he is actually feeling. If this is what the speaker found comfortable doing, he probably felt peaceful knowing that he was able to explain himself using this technique before he died so that his feelings were out in the open and were not burdening him

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