Scotland, or “the land of Scots”, is home to many famous people and poets, including Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the author of the notorious Sherlock Holmes novels. Besides the novels, the poetry published is very influential and astute. “The River of Life”, by Thomas Campbell, is one such example. This poem follows an ABABCDCDEFEFGHGHBIJIGIGI rhythm scheme for the entire poem. The pattern does change near the end, however. “The River of Life” is a poem describing mainly life and time. It describes the stages of life, of childhood, of middle age, of oldness, all thanks due to the slow yet quick passage of time. Youth is compared first, then comes the old age. Death and sadness is laced throughout out poem, being the focus with the mention of old age. At the end, the poem gives a reference to heaven controlling the years between old and young age. This is another “stereotypical” yet sensible poem.
This poem has a total of 7 stanzas, and 24 lines. In the first stanza, the poem begins by talking about how “life’s succeeding stages” seem briefer as one lives more. It expands in the next two lines by presenting a literary element: “A day to childhood seems a year, / And years like passing ages”. Childhood simply goes too fast, or too slow, as in the case of the “passing ages” taking forever as one year passes in childhood. The subject of childhood transfers into the next stanza, as Campbell compares youth to a current and a river. “Passion and disorders” steal along the “grassy borders”, staying in equal measures on the passage from childhood to adult hood. The transformation elaborates in the third stanza as the “careless cheek grows wan/ And sorrow’s shafts fly thicker”. Sorrows come in abundance as the happy and careless person grew o...
... middle of paper ...
...have their first birthday, whatever comes earlier. The poem then comes to life, as the people grow older, and their kids grow up to start a new generation; they are then left alone while all around them close friends are passing away. This also applies to the elders who feel like that life is moving too fast, and want death to come either later or now. In a personal view, this poem is another classic to be read and savored by all. Although it is just another of “those poems”, it is well written and relevant to life. The one line and the tone barely throw the “feel” of the poem off. All people should be aware there is nothing one can do to slow time. Heaven controls all of the years ranging from old to young, and deals the emotions accordingly. People interested in life, and especially psychologists, would enjoy reading “The River of Life” by Thomas Campbell.
The first stanza begins with a familiar setting, a “… winter evening”(1). This is associated with a lack of growth and a loss of vitality. It also describes death and desolation. This does not last long when we are confronted,” with smells of steaks in passageways”(2) paints a picture of a polluted and mundane environment. The precise use of descriptive words composes this mood of decline and despair. As seen when you read ” …the burnt-out ends of smoky days”(4).
The most noticeable aspect of the structure of the entire poem is the lack of capital letters and periods. There is only one part in the entire forty lines, which is at the very end, and this intentional punctuation brings readers to question the speaker’s literacy. In fact, the speaker is very young, and the use of punctuation and hyphens brings to attention the speaker’s innocence, and because of that innocence, the
The poem begins by establishing that the speakers’ father has had more than enough to drink. “The whiskey on his breath/ Could make a small boy dizzy.” These lines (1, and 2) help in the development of the poem because they set ...
An unknown author once wrote “Never take life too seriously; after all, no one gets out of it alive”. When reading this quote, there can almost be an immediate connection between two very good works of writing: Macbeth’s “Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow” speech from Shakespeare’s tragedy, Macbeth, and the poem “Out, Out --” by Robert Frost. Both allude to the idea that a single life, in its totality, denotes nothing, and eventually, everyone’s candle of life is blown out. However, each poet approaches this idea from opposite perspectives. Frost writes of a young, innocent boy whose life ends suddenly and unexpectedly. His poem is dry and lacks emotion from anyone except the young boy. Whereas the demise of Shakespeare’s character, Macbeth, an evil man, has been anticipated throughout the entire play. Through these writings, we are able gather a little more insight as to how these poets perhaps felt about dying and life itself.
The poem opens with an introduction of the speaker: “When my mother died I was very young, / And my father sold me while yet my tongue / Could scarcely cry ’weep! ‘weep! ‘weep! ‘weep!” (ll. 1-3). The speaker’s pathetic circumstance is stressed here, and he quickly wins the sympathy of the reader; Blake makes this possible by quickly relating some but doubtfully all the previous sorrow that the speaker has endured. First, his mother died when he, and perhaps she, too, was quite young, a common occurrence in Industrial Age England, given the dismal shape of the inner city, which was host to such problems as over-crowding, poor hygienic practices and sub-par means of sanitation—all of which ultimately led to the deaths of thousands. Second, his father apparently sold him, or, more likely, forced him to work to supplement the family’s income. Child Labor laws had yet to be enacted in England in 1789, s...
Before delving any deeper into this poem and its meaning, a few basic questions must be answered first. I believe the speaker to be William Blake himself. I am able to infer this from the repeated use of the pronoun “I.” Thought the course of the poem, the speaker’s temperament changes. At the start of the poem the speaker ...
This essay is anchored on the goal of looking closer and scrutinizing the said poem. It is divided into subheadings for the discussion of the analysis of each of the poem’s stanzas.
The first thing that strikes me about this poem is the structure. The poem is very ordered written with 4 lines a stanza and a total of 6 stanza’s. This looks like a professional poem created by an adult, showing experience right away. The syllables are normally 7 per line but there are exceptions to this rule as all of stanza 5 has 8 syllables a line. The first stanza and the last stanza are nearly the same apart from the last line of each differing by a word. This poem uses many poetic devices well to create a vivid picture in the readers mind. There are rhyming couplets, alliteration, repetition, rhetorical questions as well as many biblical and egotistical references to the artist and poet himself. Now we will look at the poems meanings.
The poem seems to get faster and faster as life goes through its course. In
Robert Herrick’s poem “Corinna’s going a Maying” at its surface is a love poem from a young man to his lover asking her to come with him to celebrate the festival and activities that surround the famous May Day. But on a deeper examination of the poem’s core is a lesson about exploring and experiencing our days before they fly by “as fast away as do’s the Sunne”(61). Within the last stanza (lines 57-70) the apprehension towards time is used to persuade Corinna to experience life before it begins “decaying” like time always does (69).
Blake's portrayal of childhood is far from happy. A small child's mother dies while that child is still very young; this is sad but not all together strange. However the child's father then, very soon after, sells him off to be a chimney sweeper. Blake does not stop here; after a description these children's living conditions few emotions are left except for pity. As Americans living in the twenty first century, this all seams very strange. We see childhood as a time of joy, and innocence; a time to embrace, and to not let slip by too fast. We see childhood as Robert Frost does.
The first half of the poems’ images are of life, coming of age, and death.
Not only the words, but the figures of speech and other such elements are important to analyzing the poem. Alliteration is seen throughout the entire poem, as in lines one through four, and seven through eight. The alliteration in one through four (whisky, waltzing, was) flows nicely, contrasting to the negativity of the first stanza, while seven through eight (countenance, could) sound unpleasing to the ear, emphasizing the mother’s disapproval. The imagery of the father beating time on the child’s head with his palm sounds harmful, as well as the image of the father’s bruised hands holding the child’s wrists. It portrays the dad as having an ultimate power over the child, instead of holding his hands, he grabs his wrists.
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...
The poet uses end rhyming to give the poem a sing-song quality which enforces that the speaker is a child. “Young, tongue, weep, sleep” are examples of end rhymes from lines 1-4. At the end of the poem the speaker switches the sound quality to assonance where he uses the non-rhyming words “behind, wind” (16-17), “dark, work” (21-22), “warm, harm” (23-24)” which are near enough in sound to hear the echo of the syllables but illustrate opposing meanings. “Work” is “dark”, being “warm” should not cause “harm”. “When my mother died I was very young, / And my father sold me while yet my tongue / Could scarcely cry 'weep!’weep! 'weep! 'weep!” (1-2). Repeating the words “weep, weep, weep” sounds like a nursery rhyme, chorus of a song or maybe even the ringing of an alarm. We see the imagery of the young, crying child and also hear his grief. It is possible that the child is so young th...