Poetic Elements in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “A Psalm of Life”

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Poetic Element
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “A Psalm of Life” is an encouraging poem in which Longfellow has utilized many different poetic elements including imagery, rhyme, metaphor, simile and others. The poem is very easy to understand and is engaging to the reader because of the images the poem invokes. Of all of the elements used, imagery is the most consistent and prevalent poetic element in the poem “A Psalm of Life”. Using imagery, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem describes a life not fully lived, how to live and what a life fully lived looks like.
Life Not Fully Lived
The theme of “A Psalm of Life” is to motivate and encourage the reader to make the most of this life. The use of imagery adds emphasis to each message the author is trying to send. Imagery is the description of what can be experienced using our senses such as things that are seen, heard, felt, smelled, tasted or touched (Kirszner & Mandell, 2013). The first line of the poem is “Tell me not, in mournful numbers” (p. 1011), which conjures images of a large mass of sad people. “For the soul is dead that...

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