Federico Garcia Lorca’s “Romance de La Luna, Luna” is a Spanish poem that tells the story of a young gypsy boy and the moon. His love and infatuation with the moon leads to his death. This poem not only tells the story of this young child’s demise, but also shows the effects when someone is lured in by an appealing temptation. The poem uses many literary devices to enhance the meaning the words provide. The poem starts at the beginning of the story as the moon comes to visit the forge. The moon is said to be wearing “her skirt of white, fragrant flowers” (Lorca 2) as its bright light penetrates the scene. The poem states “the young boy watches her, watches. / The young boy is watching her” (3-4). The repetition of the phrase emphasizes the young boy’s infatuation with the moon. The scene is set with intensity by the phrase “electrified air” (5) and a tense feeling is brought into the poem. As “the moon moves her arms” (6), she is given traits of being alive and having her own human qualities. Personification of the moon into a woman exemplifies the desire that the child would have for the woman, and creates a more appealing form for the moon to appear as. The child cries, “flee, moon, moon, moon” (9) with urgency, showing his concern for her. He warns her “they would make with your heart / white necklaces and rings” (11-12). This refers back to the metaphor that the moon is made of hard tin, but still personifies her by giving her a heart. The moon is additionally personified when she says “ young boy, leave me to dance”(13). She has now taken the form of a sensual and erotic gypsy dancer furthering the desire of the young boy. This brings Spanish culture to the poem because gypsies are known to travel throughout Spain. The mo... ... middle of paper ... ... The story of this poem tells about a young boy that is lured in by the sensuousness of the moon, and then dies because of his own desire for her. The symbolic meaning is much more hidden and disguised by the literary elements of the poem. The storyline and aspects of the literal story add meaning when searching for the figurative meaning. The warning learned from this poem is that infatuation with anything can lead to a downfall. The moon seemed to offer a comfort that attracted him, but it was only a disguise to lead him to death. The passion the young boy felt for the moon can easily be modified to describe the passion a person can feel for anything. The young boy saw safeness in the moon that brought him closer to her. Any obsession will seem to offer the same comforts that the young boy also saw, but this poem warns that death can always disguise itself.
The readers are apt to feel confused in the contrasting ways the woman in this poem has been depicted. The lady described in the poem leads to contrasting lives during the day and night. She is a normal girl in her Cadillac in the day while in her pink Mustang she is a prostitute driving on highways in the night. In the poem the imagery of body recurs frequently as “moving in the dust” and “every time she is touched”. The reference to woman’s body could possibly be the metaphor for the derogatory ways women’s labor, especially the physical labor is represented. The contrast between day and night possibly highlights the two contrasting ways the women are represented in society.
The poem begins with a young woman (the dancer), she craves attention and has big dreams of ultimately becoming famous. She is young, full of life, talented and gorgeous. However, the attention she craves is only fulfilled through performing on stage. This limits her, in all aspects of her life, because this uncontrollable desire could lead to her ultimately destruction. As a result, Barnes wrote, “Life had taken her and given her. One place to sing.” (Barnes). The dancer is trapped in this life not only by the opportunities life had given her but also for her own selfish desires. Yet, the thing she desires more than fame is love. Although her life is busy, with performing and partying she is in search for love. Barnes explained the dancers quest for love, “looked between the lights and wine. For one fine face…. found life only passion wide” was an unsuccessful one instead she only found lust. In other words, although she is looking for love she is looking for it in the wrong places, because she is trying looking in between the “lights” she letting her desire for fame interfere with her definition of love. She should look for someone who yearns to care for her spiritually, mentally and physically. Yet, what she aspires is for someone to love her that has status and wealth. To obtain what she wants she is
Sometimes we all feel as if no one person could or would ever truly love us as we deserve. This is the case in the Moon for the Misbegotten. A young, not so attractive, wants to be loved but fears that if she did love, her life would not be as it is now. She fears change and not because she wants the life she is leading but because it means she would have to free herself from who she pretends to be.
This poem dramatizes the conflict between love and lust, particularly as this conflict relates to what the speaker seems to say about last night. In the poem “Last Night” by Sharon Olds, the narrator uses symbolism and sexual innuendo to reflect on her lust for her partner from the night before. The narrator refers to her night by stating, “Love? It was more like dragonflies in the sun, 100 degrees at noon.” (2, 3) She describes it as being not as great as she imagined it to be and not being love, but lust. Olds uses lust, sex and symbolism as the themes in the story about “Last night”.
Everyone in the world has one thing in common. Every single person wants love. Ted Hughes’s beautiful poem “A Moon-Lily” uses an extended metaphor to compare a moon-lily to love. At the poem’s beginning, the speaker describes the “moon-lily” as “marvelously white” (1). The speaker uses the color white as a symbol of purity, wholeness, and completeness. A person feels whole and complete when they are in love. The speaker is implying that the flower is love and that the love is pure. The persona uses this image of love to describe the type of love one person tries to give to another. In this poem the person giving the love is the woman and the person refusing their love is the man. In Hughes’s “A Moon-Lily” the speaker compares a moon-lily to
Through her use of the words “dreamed”, “sweet women”, “blossoms” and the Mythology of “Elysian fields” in lines one through three, she leads the reader to the assumption that this is a calm, graceful poem, perhaps about a dream or love. Within the first quatrain, line four (“I wove a garland for your living head”) serves to emphasise two things: it continues to demonstrate the ethereal diction and carefree tone, but it also leads the reader to the easy assumption that the subject of this poem is the lover of the speaker. Danae is belittled as an object and claimed by Jove, while Jove remains “golden” and godly. In lines seven and eight, “Jove the Bull” “bore away” at “Europa”. “Bore”, meaning to make a hole in something, emphasises the violent sexual imagery perpetrated in this poem.
Not only does this personification alter the pace of the poem, but the fact that the woman’s breasts – important sexual organs and symbols of female sexuality – are portrayed as sleeping conveys a lack of arousal and general desire, particularly on the behalf of the woman. This sense of a lack of desire between the gypsy and the woman is communicated later in the poem through the description of the characters’ undressing before they begin to have sex:
A strong feeling of wanting to have something or wishing for something to happen is defined as desire. Desire is an emotion and it is the focus of the poem “Astrophil Laments” which convinces the reader of the power of this emotion. “Astrophil Laments” is a lyrical allegory sonnet consisting of one stanza without a known author or published date. It is written in third person omniscient point of view and focuses on the power of emotions, desire in particular. Through the authors use of sound and diction the poem emits the depth, strength and unpredictability of the power of desire.
In the poem there is an ABAB rhyme scheme along with use of alliteration, onomatopoeia, and imagery. By using all of these techniques, it helps the reader to better understand the message which is being relayed in the poem. Some of the subjects of this poem include, urbanization, dystopia, nature, dying and the fall of man. The reader gets a vivid image of a huge industrial city built in “valleys huge of Tartarus”(4).
This poem opens up the eyes of the reader and teaches us a lesson about life. It is essentially an example of the saying “Don’t judge a book by its cover”. The woman seems so perfect on the outside and for that reason the man wants to be with her, but when he knows that the cover of her book is different from that of most, then he instantly makes up his mind that he won’t even open
These three metaphors exemplify beauty, but also an end to nature and life. Death is slowly creeping up to him and taking over his life as realized in this comparison of him to nature. The poem shows the need to seize the moment in life before death. The last couplet talks about the topic of love and the power of it. Love lasts through the struggles in life, and the changes of seasons. Love of life keeps us from realizing that an end will eventually come. “This thou perciev’st, which makes thy love more strong.” Encompasses the idea that although everything comes to an end, love still fuels everything within a person. He realizes everything will come to an end and death is inevitable but the passion is still
The reader learns that Mikage has yet to cry over the death of her grandmother and has not yet dealt with the overwhelming emotion regarding the situation. In this scene, the moon represents the notion that light shines even in the darkest moments of our lives, “my eye came to rest on the still-new moon making its gentle way across the sky.” The adjective ‘gentle’ softens the atmosphere and creates a peaceful feeling. This is contrasted to the following breakdown as she gets off the bus, “tears were flooding out.” Connotations of ‘flooding’ emphasizes the uncontrollable nature of it as floods are typically nature’s doing, a force to be reckoned with; this implication emphasizes how overwhelmed Mikage is. A ‘new moon’ symbolizes new beginnings, relating to Mikage’s recovery from her sudden breakdown. In addition, Mikage is now in a refreshed state as a result of dealing with the death of grandmother in a very emotional way, “unburdened after my good cry, I slept like a baby.” By linking Mikage to a baby, Yoshimoto is able to emphasize the idea of peace and acceptance. The moon’s symbolic meaning emphasizes the impact this pivotal point has on Mikage’s future as it is as if she has been reborn. This scene is strangely uplifting for the reader as by releasing her grief, Mikage is left feeling so much happier and more content. The moon is then seen as a symbol of both despair and acceptance.
Much of the second stanza parallels the first in concepts, but contrasting in development. While in the first stanza the mirror describes itself as absolute truth, it degrades both the candles and the moon that the woman turns to as liars in the second. This comparison of the mirror to the moon and candles helps contrast how the mirror sees itself versus how the mirror is seen by the world, particularly the woman. The concept of how the mirror is perceived by the woman is carried throughout the second stanza, particularly in the line: “she rewards me with tears and an agitation of hands,” helps convey her negative attitude to how the mirror reflects herself. The poem closes with another metaphorical parallel, connecting back to the first line of second stanza. If the mirror is a lake, than the woman, constantly viewing herself in it, is a fish. This all supports the mirror’s interpretation of itself, absolute, tacit and unaffected by its
Sir Philip Sidney’s “Sonnet 31” paints the portrait of a lover scorned. Sidney examines the subject of unrequited love through the sonnet’s male persona, Astrophel. Rather than using a precise enumeration of the sequence of events that led to Astrophel’s painful rejection, Sidney instead leaves the reader to infer the condition of the speaker based on a scene in which Astrophel projects his sorrows onto the moon. Unable to accept the cruelties the “beauties” of his world perpetrate against those who love them and moreover unable to make his particular “beauty” reciprocate his feelings, Astrophel seeks to delineate his understanding of the injustices of unrequited love to an audience devoid of the capacity to either disagree with his assessment or further injure his already wounded pride.
Rossetti shows us the woman being painted as many different things. Although she is just a painting, the woman symbolizes how the artist views women in real life: as objects. Irony is used when the woman is painted as “a queen”(5). She is put on a pedestal in a position of power, yet she is only described as being “in [an] opal or ruby dress”(5), cementing her role as an ornament. The ruby symbolizes passion and perhaps promiscuity. Opal is a white stone that reflects many colors. White symbolizes purity; while the different colors reflected symbolize how her meaning can change, and how the artist controls her identity and can make her fit any persona he desires. The woman is also depicted as a “nameless girl”(6), indicating her identity is not important to the artist. It also shows that he does not personally know the women he’s painting, but only their looks, affirming that he bases their value off of their appearances. Lastly, the artist portrays a woman as “a saint [and] an angel”(7) and compares her to the “moon”(11), an allusion to Artemis, the goddess of virginity. In this painting, she is established as a pure virgin, which was a requirement of the time period Rossetti lived in. However, because it is one of the fantasies the artist creates, and the poem antagonizes him, this line also expresses the idea that a woman’s purity should not define her. He makes the innocent virgin and the licentious queen the only ways women can be viewed. Yet, they are the same to him. Lacking depth, their physical description is the only thing giving them any meaning. Rossetti describing the portraits conveys the idea that no matter the position in society; or what their actual personalities are like, women are just blank canvases for men to project their fantasies onto. Uninterested in a real person, the artist worships the idea of a