A firefly, a lover, a memory: all can disappear within the blink of an eye. Experiencing loss is a dreadful time that all humans must undergo. Deena Larsen compares one’s lover who has passed to a firefly who has lost his light. Larsen’s Firefly has six stanzas each five lines long and six lines deep which uncovers the ulterior meaning of loss and loneliness from unrequited love. On the surface, it is just a simple poem about nature, but the six-line depth gives it a greater purpose. The firefly represents a vulnerable human companion that has lost his connection with the living. In one reading of the poem, the narrator states, “I long for the sound of his wings to hear symphonies between us” (Larsen Stanza 5). When grieving, the speaker finds it difficult to let go of her lover, and she yearns for one last goodbye. The narrator watches, “his dark body fly off toward other lights obscuring the horizon” (Stanza 6). Thus, she is finally …show more content…
It begins with the narrator stating, “Slowly I slip into oncoming twilight in unutterable silence of fog and green light” (Stanza 1). The dark foggy atmosphere represents her loneliness now that her lover has vanished. When the narrator lays her, “back against the ancient elms until they shiver with their age,” (Stanza 2) she reminisces the memories of her lover. Larsen demonstrates how the elms are shivering with age just like her lover did, and she slowly starts illustrating the memorial in the background as the reader continues. As the memorial becomes more visible, the narrator recounts, “I watch him light on a blade of grass and he stays without breath, without motion,” (Stanza 4). Using the firefly to represent the deceased, Larsen also compares the forest to a memorial through her description of the atmosphere and visuals faded behind her
Without the use of stereotypical behaviours or even language is known universally, the naming of certain places in, but not really known to, Australia in ‘Drifters’ and ‘Reverie of a Swimmer’ convoluted with the overall message of the poems. The story of ‘Drifters’ looks at a family that moves around so much, that they feel as though they don’t belong. By utilising metaphors of planting in a ‘“vegetable-patch”, Dawe is referring to the family making roots, or settling down somewhere, which the audience assumes doesn’t occur, as the “green tomatoes are picked by off the vine”. The idea of feeling secure and settling down can be applied to any country and isn’t a stereotypical Australian behaviour - unless it is, in fact, referring to the continental
The timeline carries on chronologically, the intense imagery exaggerated to allow the poem to mimic childlike mannerisms. This, subjectively, lets the reader experience the adventure through the young speaker’s eyes. The personification of “sunset”, (5) “shutters”, (8) “shadows”, (19) and “lamplights” (10) makes the world appear alive and allows nothing to be a passing detail, very akin to a child’s imagination. The sunset, alive as it may seem, ordinarily depicts a euphemism for death, similar to the image of the “shutters closing like the eyelids”
The death camp was a terrible place where people where killed. Hitler is who created the death camp for Jews. The death camp was used for extermination on Jews. This occurred on 1939 – 1945. The death camps were in the country of Europe. Hitler did all this because he didn’t like Jews and the religions. The book Night is a autobiography written by Elie Wiesel. The poem called First they came for the communist written by Martin Neimoller is a autobiography.
Starlight by Ted Kooser speaks to me. It encourages me to think about how something so common or small can cause pain, or happiness. In this poem, he could be speaking about how on a rainy night something dreadful happened to him. That’s what Mr. Kooser wants. He wants us to think about the language he is using, and how we can relate his words to our own lives. As I am writing this paper, I notice that right now it is raining. Soft rain drops glide down the windows. This wouldn’t be a sad memory for myself in the future, but to someone else it may be. His way of looking at something small and making it seem larger
The poem “To You” by Kenneth Koch is a romantic love poem that the persona uses to express his deep love to his love. The title of the poem “To You” further reveals how the persona treasures his love. He directly addresses her and showers her with deep and romantic emotional feelings. The poem is radiant and possesses high spirits as well as the rare moods in which inspiration, affection, and happiness are the same, since they reflect how you feel. At the end of the poem, there is unity between sunlight and the attention of the lover. This depicts the persona’s world. That is, the water that is heart is swimming in. this further portrays love to him, as a pathway and a necessity from which he derives his joy and happiness.
As a young mother that experienced post-partum depression, the poem “Daystar” by Rita Dove and “To a Daughter Leaving Home” by Linda Pastan were easy to relate to. Each of the poems successfully represented the positives and negatives of being a mother. Poetry was never exactly my thing; I hated trying to decipher the symbols in poems and never quite understood why it was okay to use incomplete sentences. Dove and Pastan each wrote about their experiences as mothers but stood on completely opposite sides on the emotional spectrum, ironically, I couldn’t agree more with both of them.
Some people are born into this world without as many chances to get a better position in life. This can affect the people born into a lower class for the entirety of their life. In the poem “Saturday’s Child,” Countee Cullen uses imagery, personification, and similes to suggest the differences between people that are born into poverty and those that are born into an upper class part of society. Throughout this poem Cullen speaks about how the different social classes affect people; he does this with a pessimistic tone throughout the entirety of the poem.
Sylvia Plath was known as an American Poet, Novelist and Shorty story writer. However, Plath lived a melancholic life. After Plath graduated from Smith College, Plath moved to Cambridge, England on a full scholarship. While Plath was Studying in England, she married Ted Hughes, an English poet. Shortly after, Plath returned to Massachusetts and began her first collection of poems, “Colossus”, which was published first in England and later the United States. Due to depression built up inside, Plath committed suicide leaving her family behind. Sylvia Plath was a gifted and troubled poet, known for the confessional style of her work, which is how “Mirror” came to be. Although this poem may seem like the reader is reading from first person point of view, there is a much deeper meaning behind Plath’s message throughout the poem. Plath uses several elements of terror and darkness to show change to the minds of the readers.
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
He thought he kept the universe alone,” to most people the thoughts of being alone are very frightening. It is human nature to search for companionship. In the poem “The Most of It,” Robert Frost uses a wealth of strong imagery to tell a story of a person who has lost his loved one to death and has to suffer the feeling of loneliness and emptiness created by it. Frost uses the setting of a lake surrounded by a forest to convey a feeling of peace and of being alone to the reader. A man is sitting on the edge of the lake, crying out for someone, his echo being his only company. After time, a buck swam across the lake and appeared on the shore and abruptly runs into the brush, away from sight. Although the man only caught a glimpse of the deer for a short moment, it was long enough for him to feel that he was no longer alone, but had something there, even though it was not tangible. The clues given to the reader that someone has passed on are the words “wake” and three lines down, the word “morning.” A wake can be many things; one is that it is a vigil that is held in honor of a person who has recently died.
In the beginning of “The Death of the Moth” Woolf describes ”a pleasant morning, mid-September, mild, benignant” (193), the usual autumn day, with regular work on the field, rooks on the tree tops that looked like “a vast net with thousands of black knots” (194). The picture is calm, but rooks, symbol of death, bring dark color to it. Gradually, with the development of the events, when death starts winning over moth’s struggle to live, the image changes, “work in the fields had stopped” (195). Like in the slow-motion picture, everything becomes stiff. Woolf uses words “still”, “indifferent”, “impersonal” to increase a sense of despair. Author uses such an imagery to empower the hopelessness of the moment and to make the reader feel the futility of the life and death struggle.
She describes the September morning as “mild, benignant, yet with a keener breath than the summer months.” She then goes on to describe the field outside her window, using word choice that is quite the opposite of words that would be used to describe a depressing story. She depicts the exact opposite of death, and creates a feeling of joy, happiness, and life to the world outside her room. After this, she goes into great detail about the “festivities” of the rooks among the treetops, and how they “soared round the treetops until it looked as if a vast net with thousands of black knots in it had been cast up into the air”. There is so much going on around her that “it was difficult to keep the eyes strictly turned upon the book.” Descriptions like these are no way to describe a seemingly depressing story about a moth, but by using these, joyful descriptions, Woolf connects everything happening outside to a single strand of energy. These images set a lively tone for the world around her, and now allow her to further introduce the moth into the story.
Even from the first paragraph, Hurst's use of vocabulary evokes an emotional response to the story line. His word choice as the narrator describes his surrounding and hints to a fatal event that awaits the reader's attention. Hurst uses words and phrases such as “dead autumn,” “rotting brown magnolia,” “graveyard flowers.” The last sentence, “...speaking softly the names of our dead” adds one final melancholy statement (91). The imagery throughout the paragraph helps to imagine an eerie swamp land surrounded by death and depressing memories. This melancholy setting foresha...
He begins with a shift, “ There they are, the moon’s young, trying/ Their wings.” (5-6), these lines make a shift because the tone before this line is more quiet and lonely, the tone after this line sounds more exciting. Then, he starts to talk about what he feels when he sees the birds, “There wings” here indicates the birds, and the birds is a metaphor that represents the inspiration in author’s life. “ young” and “trying” here allude to author himself, the author is trying to say that he is still young and he should still carry hope in his own darkness just like the birds. Right after that, he sees the woman, “ Between trees, a slender woman lifts up the lovely shadow of her face,” (7-8) the author uses “ slender” and “lovely” these two words to describe the “woman” which we can tell how excited the author is to see someone else show up in this lonely and dark field. This part might also allude to the author’s love or hope of his life. The author then uses “ and now she steps into the air, now she is gone/ Wholly, into the air.” (8-9) to finish the twist or climax of the poem, then again the tone turns into peaceful but more lonely. In this line, has a repetition of “O” sound, so it is an assonance, and the “O” sounds has a hallow feelings which express that the author is really sentimental when the women is gone. In the line 8-9, there is a repetition of “she”, it
In the second stanza the poet describes the things while he was praying for his daughter. He walks for an hour and notices the "sea-wind scream upon the tower", "under the arches of the bridge", "in the elms above the flooded stream." They probably represent the dreaming of the human beings and they are decisive. They are all about the present things and they block people from thinking about the future events. The last four lines of the second stanza clearly explain this idea: