The poem The Vacuum, by Howard Nemerov, is in a fractured rhyme scheme that contains many imperfect rhymes, such as “mouth/youth” and “enough/dust”. The poem alters between a breathless, flowing and solemn tone such as in“ [. . .] the hungry, angry heart hangs on and howls [. . .]” and “[. . .]when my old women died her soul”, and a shorter yet harsher tone such as in “ [. . .] biting in the air [. . .]”. The poem is three stanzas long with five lines in each stanza. The poem was only three sentences, made of two long complex sentences filled with dramatic clauses that built tension and ending with a short and simpler sentence. There was no consistent meter or end rhyme, making it a free verse. This uneven rhyme and lack of a consistent organization or meter structure help create tone of the poem, which is messy, incomplete and muddled. Also, the ending of the poem creates a forlorn and angry tone. The extended metaphor throughout the entirety of the poem is ‘the vacuum’ which both personifies the widower’s deceased wife and symbolizes the emotional vacuum in his life caused from her death.
On the literal level, the poem talks about a man (the speaker of the poem) whose wife had died and how he refuses to use his vacuum. He says that his house is now quiet since the vacuum cleaner, instead of being used, just sits in the closet untouched. Thus, the bag of the vacuum cleaner is empty. The bottom of the vacuum resembles a person’s grin, smirking at the speaker’s messy life and old age. When the man’s wife died, she possessed the vacuum cleaner. This is why the man won’t use the vacuum or hear the noises it would make. The man’s home was always dirty and his wife would clean every inch of the place. After his wife’s death, life b...
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... sentences creates an air of perplexity that the poet can express to the reader. While these fluctuations and lack of organization causes confusion and anger that the reader might not enjoy, it also lucratively allows the reader to three-dimensionally understand the poet’s mood. By paralleling two separate symbols throughout the poem, Nemerov was also able to eloquently compare and contrast his feelings for his wife and his lifestyle as a widower throughout the poem until the last three words, where he welds the two ideas into one image. Over all, The Vacuum is a noteworthy poem that is very effective in articulating the poet’s emotions to the readers. However, others who read the poem might become frustrated and too overwhelmed with the emotions conveyed through the poem and the lack of structural organization, preventing the poem to become an overall great poem.
The poem, as was already discussed, shows two dominating characteristics used independently: sound and silence. However, even though they are quite contradictory, the poem finds the way to blend them together and to make them be dependent from one another in order to build the creepiness questioned through this paper. Every single component chosen by the author helps to create a ghostly scenario and make the reader feel a negative attitude towards the poem. Also, these elements can generate a similar attitude towards loneliness since the poem helps to think that even if there is nobody around, some supernatural beings might be wandering around, especially in old isolated structures.
Sometimes all one needs to create a better condition is putting in a little effort. However, as the poem implies, it is easier to do nothing for staying in a comfort zone is better than achieving a better condition. She complains of the heat in the room because the sun for sunlight pours through the open living-room windows. All she needs to do is get up and close the windows, but she won't do it either. She also reveals the futility of trying to get out of the meaningless routine that people adopt. In an attempt to be proactive, she thinks about the essence of living and is almost convinced that routine is the nature of life. She thinks for a long time and thinks again but ironically, the same routine chores distract her yet again. She goes to buying a hairbrush, parking, and slamming doors. At the end, she gives up on finding the essence of living; she wants to do things like she has always done
I will discuss the similarities by which these poems explore themes of death and violence through the language, structure and imagery used. In some of the poems I will explore the characters’ motivation for targeting their anger and need to kill towards individuals they know personally whereas others take out their frustration on innocent strangers. On the other hand, the remaining poems I will consider view death in a completely different way by exploring the raw emotions that come with losing a loved one.
In the end of the narrator’s consciousness, the tone of the poem shifted from a hopeless bleak
“It was a large, beautiful room, rich and picturesque in the soft, dim light which the maid had turned low. She went and stood at an open window and looked out upon the deep tangle of the garden below. All the mystery and witchery of the night seemed to have gathered there amid the perfumes and the dusky and tortuous outlines of flowers and foliage. She was seeking herself and finding herself in just such sweet half-darkness which met her moods. But the voices were not soothing that came to her from the darkness and the sky above and the stars. They jeered and sounded mourning notes without promise, devoid even of hope. She turned back into the room and began to walk to and fro, down its whole length, without stopping, without resting. She carried in her hands a thin handkerchief, which she tore into ribbons, rolled into a ball, and flung from her. Once she stopped, and taking off her wedding ring, flung it upon the carpet. When she saw it lying there she stamped her heel upon it, striving to crush it. But her small boot heel did not make an indenture, not a mark upon the glittering circlet.
As the first poem in the book it sums up the primary focus of the works in its exploration of loss, grieving, and recovery. The questions posed about the nature of God become recurring themes in the following sections, especially One and Four. The symbolism includes the image of earthly possessions sprawled out like gangly dolls, a reference possibly meant to bring about a sense of nostalgia which this poem does quite well. The final lines cement the message that this is about loss and life, the idea that once something is lost, it can no longer belong to anyone anymore brings a sense...
...ttachment or emotion. Again, Heaney repeats the use of a discourse marker, to highlight how vividly he remembers the terrible time “Next morning, I went up into the room”. In contrast to the rest of the poem, Heaney finally writes more personally, beginning with the personal pronoun “I”. He describes his memory with an atmosphere that is soft and peaceful “Snowdrops and Candles soothed the bedside” as opposed to the harsh and angry adjectives previously used such as “stanched” and “crying”. With this, Heaney is becoming more and more intimate with his time alone with his brother’s body, and can finally get peace of mind about the death, but still finding the inevitable sadness one feels with the loss of a loved one “A four foot box, a foot for every year”, indirectly telling the reader how young his brother was, and describing that how unfortunate the death was.
Death can both be a painful and serious topic, but in the hands of the right poet it can be so natural and eloquently put together. This is the case in The Sleeper by Edgar Allan Poe, as tackles the topic of death in an uncanny way. This poem is important, because it may be about the poet’s feelings towards his mother’s death, as well as a person who is coming to terms with a loved ones passing. In the poem, Poe presents a speaker who uses various literary devices such as couplet, end-stopped line, alliteration, image, consonance, and apostrophe to dramatize coming to terms with the death of a loved one.
..., the content and form has self-deconstructed, resulting in a meaningless reduction/manifestation of repetition. The primary focus of the poem on the death and memory of a man has been sacrificed, leaving only the skeletal membrane of any sort of focus in the poem. The “Dirge” which initially was meant to reflect on the life of the individual has been completely abstracted. The “Dirge” the reader is left with at the end of the poem is one meant for anyone and no one. Just as the internal contradictions in Kenneth Fearing’s poem have eliminated the substantial significance of each isolated concern, the reader is left without not only a resolution, but any particular tangible meaning at all. The form and content of this poem have quite effectively established a powerful modernist statement, ironically contingent on the absence and not the presence of meaning in life.
On the surface the poem seems to be a meditation on past events and actions, a contemplative reflection about what has gone on before. Research into the poem informs us that the poem is written with a sense of irony
Excellent literature often leads to a deep involvement that can cause the reader to no longer be aware of their surroundings. In this poem, the subject gains much from the literature, forgetting that he is poor and malnourished. This forgetting of his state of being continues in the next line, which states that he did not remember that “his frame was dust” (4). Once again, the theme of literature transforming the body as if it were nourishment reappears. The capitalization of the word “dust” significantly changes the meaning. In the Bible, God created humanity of dust and returns humanity to dust when a person dies. In capitalizing dust, Dickinson says that this man is dying, returning to dust. This is also the first evidence of a rhyme scheme in the poem, with the rhyme of robust and
In the celebrated poem by American author Wallace Stevens, “Anecdote of the Jar,” we are driven to examine and understand the many symbolic connotations of “the jar” in its particular placement upon a hill; those of which may potentially coincide with the many interpretations of this world. While “the jar” represents many ideas corresponding to our paradigms of how we perceive our world, the most profound idea to me is the notion of emptiness which parallels the reality of emptiness in the prose “Clay” by James Joyce. The jar is an empty object, unable to give, only enabled to be acknowledged its presence. This is similar to the many depths in which the character Maria in “Clay” feels endlessly vacant to the core of her soul. They are comparable to each other in the lonely concept of emptiness.
As a child, Sharon Olds childhood was described as a “hellfire.” Growing up, she was told that she was going to hell. In Olds’ poem, she tries to express how she felt about her early childhood with an abusive father and relationships with her family. Olds wrote many poems about her relationship with her helpless, alcoholic father and her path to help deal with these memories and forgiving her father to loving the dying man. Most of Olds poems are about her journey from an abusive household to healing her past memories from a man she disgusted with. Her poems are ways of her speaking in loud tone describing domestic violence, sexuality, and family relationships. Like any poem, “His Stillness” the theme of the poem was about Olds getting close to her father w...
I found that throughout this poem there was much symbolism within it. Identifying that it was written in first person form showed that this poem relates to the author on a personal basis, and that it was probably written to symbolize his life. But when talking about people’s lives, you can conclude that people’s lives are generally and individually very diffe...
To begin, the sound of this poem can be proven to strongly contribute an effect to the message of this piece. This poem contains a traditional meter. All of the lines in the poem except for lines nine and 15 are in iambic tetrameter. In this metric pattern, a line has four pairs of unstressed and stressed syllables, for a total of eight syllables. This is relevant in order for the force of the poem to operate dynamically. The poem is speaking in a tenor of veiled confessions. For so long, the narrator is finally speaking up, in honesty, and not holding back. Yet, though what has been hidden is ultimately coming out, there is still this mask, a façade that is being worn. In sequence, the last words in each of the lines, again, except for lines nine and 15, are all in rhythm, “lies, eyes, guile, smile, subtleties, over-wise, sighs, cries, arise, vile...