In The Stolen Child, William Butler Yeats illustrates the supernatural world he has created by describing the romantic and peaceful scenarios. In this faery world, every creature shares a harmonious environment. Yeats introduces the beauty of nature in first three stanzas, while he returns to the situations of the modern society in the last stanza. For instance, the mice spin around because they do not have any available food to feed themselves, and human beings are anxious while they are sleeping. Compared with the complicated world of human beings, the faery world seems like the carefree and idealistic paradise. Even though the child is stolen by the faery, this child can enjoy his life in the faery world created by Yeats, rather than …show more content…
“[The] brown mice” (line 48) spin around because there are no available foods to fill their hungry stomachs. On the other hand, human beings probably are short of food supplies as well. Fortunately, when the innocent child goes away with the faery, he or she would not face the starvation anymore. The peaceful faery land, therefore, is extremely appealing to the little child and human beings. However, in the noisy secular world, there are the sounds of “the claves on the warm hillside” (line 45), “the kettle on the hob”(line 46), which “[sing] peace into his breast” (line 47). All the descriptions in Yeats’s The Stolen Child are more or less paradoxical, for there are dangers lurked in the peaceful faery world and the chaotic reality at the same time. There is scarce quietness. The two different worlds are progressively overlapping. Addtionally, when the faery and the child finally are leaving hand in hand, his eyes are solemn. This different expression in his eyes signifies the lost of innocence. At the end of the poem, Yeats does not offer the reader the ending of this little child, who is no longer innocent, and nobody knows whether he is dead, or switched by the fairies, or became a little idiot. This wordless ending leaves the reader to imagine and to ponder the unveiled truth of the faery
Hence, the poem's tone contains elements of remorse as well as impassivity. The traveler's detached description of the mother, "...a doe, a recent killing; / she had stiffened already, almost cold" (6-7), and the wistful detail with which he depicts her unborn offspring, "...her fawn lay there waiting...
"The blood-dimmed tied is loosed, and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned". As many currently see our society today, Yeats was in fear of what the future had in store, and felt it necessary to warn society of their abominable behavior. All of the good in the society has been taken over and overwhelmed by the horrible actions. No longer do ceremonies, or acts of kindness, take place, which Yeats believes is a direct effect of the loss of youth and innocence. "That twenty centuries of stony sleep were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle". This quote from "The Second Coming" informs the society that if they do not begin to correct their transgressions against one another as a whole they will awake the anti-Christ. The anti-Christ will come to claim his Jesus and correct the predicament that they have gotten themselves in to.
Robert Browning's poem "The Pied Piper of Hamelin: A Child's Story" details the strange occurence in a town called Hamelin. This poem is a retelling of a popular piece of folklore about the real town of Hamelin in which children did actually disappear. Browning credits that disappearance to the character of the Pied Piper -- a figure wronged and who retaliates by taking children. In this essay, I aim to explore the depiction of the Pied Piper. He is a character that works on both the levels of child and adult. I believe that Browning is intentional with his descriptions of characters throughout, and I first want to detail Browning's descriptions of the adults and children in order to better understand how the Piper overlaps both classes. Then, I will determine the ways in which the Piper acts out traits of children and adults. Finally, I will conclude with a brief reference to the poem's function as a whole and its relation to the Pied Piper depicted in the piece.
Therefore, Oliver’s incorporation of imagery, setting, and mood to control the perspective of her own poem, as well as to further build the contrast she establishes through the speaker, serves a critical role in creating the lesson of the work. Oliver’s poem essentially gives the poet an ultimatum; either he can go to the “cave behind all that / jubilation” (10-11) produced by a waterfall to “drip with despair” (14) without disturbing the world with his misery, or, instead, he can mimic the thrush who sings its poetry from a “green branch” (15) on which the “passing foil of the water” (16) gently brushes its feathers. The contrast between these two images is quite pronounced, and the intention of such description is to persuade the audience by setting their mood towards the two poets to match that of the speaker. The most apparent difference between these two depictions is the gracelessness of the first versus the gracefulness of the second. Within the poem’s content, the setting has been skillfully intertwined with both imagery and mood to create an understanding of the two poets, whose surroundings characterize them. The poet stands alone in a cave “to cry aloud for [his] / mistakes” while the thrush shares its beautiful and lovely music with the world (1-2). As such, the overall function of these three elements within the poem is to portray the
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
Starting with the first stanza, Blake creates a dark and depressing tone. He uses words such as died, weep, soot, and cry to support this tone. In the first two lines the child shares his family with us, stating his mother’s death and the fact that his father sold him sharing that the child must come from a poor background “When my mother died I was very young, And my father sold me while yet my tongue”(Lines 1-2). The image of a poor child getting tossed into another unhappy place sets the tone for the beginning of this poem. Blake uses the word “weep”, instead of “sweep” in the first stanza to show the innocence of the child “Could scarcely cry weep weep weep weep”(3). The fact that the child cried “weep” instead of sweep shows that the child could not be any older than four. Blake describes that they sleep in soot also meaning they are sleeping in their death bed. The average life span of children who work in chimneys is ten years due to the harsh work environment. The child portrays sorrow in the last line of the first stanza “So your chimneys I sweep & in soot I sleep.”(4)
Through the eyes of Nick Carraway, which in this case substitutes the narrator as well, the author depicts the majestic life of those who, by pure coincidence or happenstance, were born more advantageously than the rest of society. Their life is full of riches and placed in a fairy tale decorous. However, despite all that, their life is not a fairy tale in the least. On the contrary, it is far from that.
As the poem begins, Sexton starts with how the Prince and Cinderella are living happily ever after, but compromising the original naïve direction, she gives the poem a modern context bringing the reader back to reality. While it is obvious to the audience the discrepancies in Sexton’s version, it brings out many jealousies many of us struggle with, such as wealth and everlasting happiness. Sexton makes her audience notice early on many of the pre-conceived notions and expectations we bring to fairy tales. Sexton knows that real life gives no reason to be perceived as happiness, because why learn something that will never amount to use in reality? This tale is Sexton’s answer to her audiences of the “happ...
Instructor’s comment: This student’s essay performs the admirable trick of being both intensely personal and intelligently literary. While using children’s literature to reflect on what she lost in growing up, she shows in the grace of her language that she has gained something as well: an intelligent understanding of what in childhood is worth reclaiming. We all should make the effort to find our inner child
An intriguing yet commonplace subject in literature, childhood contains multiple themes—both subtle and blatant—that often illustrate a child's journey through and discovery of the world. Said themes include topics such as: love, loss of innocence, struggle with identity, and others. In one such story written by James Joyce, a few childhood themes are discussed through the lens of both direct and indirect characterization. Children playing in muddy alleyways, a profession of love in a veiled drawing-room, and a climax formed around the realization of blatant frustration all bring to light themes of epiphany, loss of childlike hope, and courtly infatuation with a young maiden in "Araby."
Both Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience provide social criticism on the dangers that child chimney sweepers endure but, Songs of Experience provides better social commentary as Songs of Experience directly identifies the potential for death unlike Songs of Innocence which implicitly identifies the dangers child sweeps endure. In Songs of Innocence, the child chimney sweeper dreams that while he was “lock’d up in coffins of black…an Angel who had a bright key… open’d the coffins…set them all free” (Blake, “Innocence” 12-14). The child’s dream of freedom appears happy and optimistic when in reality it is quite chilling that the child views death as freedom. Blake presents the child chimney sweeper as optimistic to suggest that society needs to help the children find freedom so they do not wish to die. The social commentary in Songs of Innocence is implicit in order to emphasize the child’s inability to fully understand and c...
Though written only two years after the first version of "The Shadowy Waters", W.B. Yeats' poem "Adam's Curse" can be seen as an example of a dramatic transformation of Yeats' poetic works: a movement away from the rich mythology of Ireland's Celtic past and towards a more accessible poesy focused on the external world. Despite this turn in focus towards the world around him, Yeats retains his interest in symbolism, and one aspect of his change in style is internalization of the symbolic scheme that underlies his poetry. Whereas more mythological works like "The Shadowy Waters" betray a spiritual syncretism not unlike that of the Golden Dawn, "Adam's Curse" and its more realistic fellows offer a view of the world in which symbolic systems are submerged, creating an undercurrent of meaning which lends depth to the outward circumstances, but which is itself not immediately accessible to the lay or academic reader. In a metaphorical sense, then, Yeats seems in these later poems to achieve a doubling of audience, an equivocation which addresses the initiate and the lay reader simultaneously.
In the stage being the first stanza of the poem Child and Insect the reader meets a little boy who is excited and euphoric because he has managed to catch a grasshopper. The rhythm of the poem is very fast and lively. An evidence for that is the onomatopoeia “clockwork fizz” which describes the insect’s movements as sudden and quick, comparing its legs to the hands of a clock too. It also illustrates its desperate attempts to escape the small palm of the boy described by the opening line of the first stanza “He cannot hold his hand huge enough.” Furthermore, not only the grasshopper’s movements are swift but the boy’s motions as well, shown by the run on line “He races back, how quick he is, look”. This line further emphasizes the rhythm of the poem and the energetic mood it creates. The run on line could also be interpreted as a representation of the child’s speech which is cut and uneven because of his cheerfulness and need for a breath. Moreover, the word choices of the author particularly words such as “snatched”, “quick”, “look”, “sudden” help to reinf...
In the poem, Introduction (Songs of Innocence) we immediately encounter the distinct use of ‘happy’ diction. Words such as ‘pleasant’, ‘glee’...
In An Abandoned Bundle, Mtshali recounts his discovery of an abandoned child, on faeces and garbage, attacked by wild dogs. Mtshali begins the poem with very soothing image of “morning mist” over a “white city”, however this is quickly distorted by the harsh, graphic simile