In poetry, three things are used to help the reader understand the poem better. These things are syntax, imagery, and connotation.
Obviously, William Butler Yeats used very meaningful symbols in his poetry. It seems as though he is great at picking the best object to represent an idea or a feeling, whether it be swans with companionship or a log cabin with peace. Also, he is great at using cultural ideas such as the sky, sailing, and the birth of Jesus Christ to get other points across.
...ach other “Frosts poetry has a very vast range, from extremely long detailed poems, like ‘after apple picking” and “a servant to servants” or relatively short like, “A soldier” or “A question” (which is only four lines). Each of his poems encompasses something different but all have a strong sense of sameness when it comes to the message he wants to communicate to us. A brook in the city represents to a great extent, Frosts overall style and view on poetry. The poem has a rhyme scheme, he uses a vast amount of figures of speech and his language is colloquial, this goes for most, if not all of Frosts poetry. The poem also encompasses his thoughts and views on mankind and their response to the universe. Frost wants us as the reader to comprehend his message and find some sort of wisdom in it. If we do, then Frost has accomplished what he set out to do with his poetry.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Emily Dickinson, and Walt Whitman all use different varieties of themes, mood, structure and literary devices throughout their poetry. Poetry uses aesthetic and rhythmic qualities of language. Poetry has been around for years, even back in the early 1900’s.
In each poem the author uses the literary devices of personification, description, and dialogue to develop their subject or theme. The imagist poems, although all very short and to the point, use a literary device to help the poem develop overall. Edgar Allen Poe uses the devices to show the slow progression of the speakers descent into madness and insanity.
“Some say the world will end in fire,/ Some say in ice./ From what I’ve tasted of desire/ I hold with those who favor fire./ But if it had to perish twice,/ I think I know enough of hate/ To say that for destruction ice/ Is also great/ And would suffice.” This poem by Robert Frost is an excellent example of how even though people tend to think that Frost’s poems are just fun easy to read poems, a lot of them actually have dark themes to them. The poem “Fire and Ice” quoted above is a poem all about death and his prefered way to die/ destroy the world. So, although the average reader will quote Robert Frost as being a poet of positivity, yet many of his poems actually point out the dark side of human existence.
... ice are, after all, the inextricable complementarities of one apocalyptic vision: that endlessly regenerative cycle of desire and (self) hatred that necessarily brings the productive poet to scourge his own voice as he mocks both the poetic vocation and the state to which poetry - and if poetry then all language - has come. Frost anticipates modernism's lament and, it may be said, prefigures in his dualism its dubious palliative of self-referential irony. The lyric birds and the weary speakers tell us the genuine Frostian wisdom of achieving a commonsensical accommodation with the fallen world, while inciting at another, and ineffable, level a profound disquiet.
In summary, the explication of “Design” served to process both poems by examining one, then identifying and comparing the changes. Such a maneuver provided a clearer perspective of Frost’s initial rendering and subsequent finished work. Thus, exposing their subtle differences resulted in a way to compare the work and draw a subjective conclusion regarding the more effective poem. However, one must remain mindful that without the lesser first “draft,” the second would have had no life. Indeed, an exercise in refinement, the poet revised this piece with a delicate hand, shaping precise images and giving voice to each word, producing a superior message which posed more questions than solid answers about whether life (or death) happens by coincidence, or by “Design.”
...each a resolution by the end of the poem. Both meter and rhyme are very essential in building a solid, yet fluid structure to each poem.
For a small poem, “The Red Wheelbarrow,” by William Carlos Williams, has a great meaning behind it. This poem uses images, symbolism, and form to get the entire picture of the poem across. Meyers defines images, ”as a word, phrase, or figure of speech that addresses the senses, suggesting mental pictures of sight and sounds, smells, tastes, feelings or actions.” (Meyer 1593). Symbolism is, “ a person, object, image, word, or event that evokes a range of additional meaning beyond and usually more abstract than it’s literal significance.” (Meyer 1604). Then there is form, “images and symbolism, as the overall structure or shape of a work which frequently an established design.” (Meyer 1591). Williams uses images, symbolism and form to catch ones attention, tell a simple story, and tell a greater story behind it all.
Through the use of numerous literary techniques in his poems, Robert Frost continues to engage audiences to the paradigms of everyday life. By writing about everyday life he was able to layer the key meaning of his poem with extended metaphors. Robert Frost’s poems are multi-faceted, which leads the reader with unending possibilities of analysis and ultimately possesses a greater connection to each poem. Most of his works are mostly autobiographical which includes two of his great poems Mending Wall and Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening alongside The Road Not Taken.
In today’s modern view, poetry has become more than just paragraphs that rhyme at the end of each sentence. If the reader has an open mind and the ability to read in between the lines, they discover more than they have bargained for. Some poems might have stories of suffering or abuse, while others contain happy times and great joy. Regardless of what the poems contains, all poems display an expression. That very moment when the writer begins his mental journey with that pen and paper is where all feelings are let out. As poetry is continues to be written, the reader begins to see patterns within each poem. On the other hand, poems have nothing at all in common with one another. A good example of this is in two poems by a famous writer by the name of Langston Hughes. A well-known writer that still gets credit today for pomes like “ Theme for English B” and “Let American be American Again.”
Nature is an important theme in every frost poem. Nature usually symbolizes age or other things throughout Frost’s poems. In lines 5-10 it says, “Often you must have seen them loaded with ice a sunny winter morning after a rain. They click upon themselves as the breeze rises, and turn many-colored as the stir cracks and crazes their enamel. Soon the sun’s warmth makes them shed crystal shells.” This demonstrates how nature can sometimes symbolize something. Also in lines 29-33 it says, “ By riding them down over and over again until he took the stiffness out of them, and not one but hung limp, not one was left for him to conquer. He learned all there was to learn about not launching too soon.” In lines 44-48 it says, And life is too much like a pathless wood where your face burns and tickles with the cobwebs broken across it, and one eye is weeping from a twig’s having lashed across it open. I’d like to get away from earth for a while.”
Symbolism in the Poems of Robert Frost Nature has inspired countless poets from primitive times to the present. They have used it as a metaphor for virtually all human emotions — his stormy brow, her sky blue eyes, as wild as a summer storm. Very few, however, have so masterfully crafted their verse to fully express the range of nature’s power and influence, or suited the tone of a poem to encompass both human nature and ‘true’ nature. This is true in the poetic works of Robert Frost. The aspects of nature that are continually demonstrated in the poems of Frost symbolize both the physical world and its changes, and the nature of humans.
Poetry unlike fiction is solely based on the author’s personal take on a certain subject. The tone, diction, syntax, and mood of a poem are all determined by the author of the poem. For some readers, to interpret a poem or explain the plot can be a difficult task. Other forms of literature such, as fiction is much easier to understand and discuss.