“Patterns,” Amy Lowell explores the hopeful of women in the early 20th century through a central theme. A woman’s dream of escaping the boundaries that society has placed on her dissipates when she learns of her lover’s untimely death. She also expresses her emotions and what she truly feels. She mustn’t show any form of feeling, so she feels as if there is “not softness anywhere” about her. Confined by “whalebone and brocade,” the speaker continues to live up to the expectations society enforces upon her. The speaker also uses many images in this poem, the constant motions of the flowers and water drops, the dress the woman is wearing, and her daydreams of her lover are most crucial in developing this theme of freedom.
In the beginning of the poem, as well as throughout the work, the speaker describes daffodils and other types of flowers moving freely in the wind. Using imagery to appeal to the reader’s sense of sight, these flowers are given motion, and they are described as, "blowing," and "Fluttering in the breeze,” This creates a sense of flexibility. The woman in the poem wishes to be like the moving flowers, carefree and self-confident. In the second stanza of the poem, the woman begins to describe the water in the marble fountain. The, "plashing of water drops describe liquid in motion. The fact that she notices such little details in a fountain shows how intent the woman is on being free and able to move about as she pleases. The unconstrained movement of the flowers and the water manifest a way of life that the woman would like to live.
The "stiff, brocaded gown" is mentioned many times throughout the poem. Her “stiff, brocaded gown” serves as a stand to hold her up. Without it, she would crumble with emotion. She mu...
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...oman in the poem. I hope that she finally found another love to rescue her from the confines of tradition. I am truly grateful that I live in a world today where people aren’t oppressed as they were back in the 1800s- early 1900s. It must have been discouraging to know that a woman’s happiness and freedom in life depends on what a man will allow you to have, and it really took a strong woman to overcome the injustice shown to them. From Amy Lowell’s poetry, I can tell that she had a passion to change women’s lives. The way she describes the free movement of flowers blowing in the wind and contrasting it with an image of a stiff, brocaded gown really helps you to understand how she is feeling. Unfortunately, she had to continue with her "patterned" way of life for longer than she hoped. I, on the other hand, am free to chose my own path, or make up a new one.
The composer gives the plant human characteristics to make the poem sound more alive and mysterious. By saying “Dipped her toe in weeds and so we caught her”, the word “her” is a reference to mother nature and gives the water lily a beautiful feminine quality. Therefor, the audience is able to feel a sense of calmness and peace. Also feel the interconnectedness with nature, spirituality and fantasy and appreciate it. Moreover, in “Nature’s Beauty” the poet applies personification to represent the earth as a queen wearing a long green robe and the rain is throwing the precious stones on its crown and cloths to make shiny and brighter
At the beginning of the poem, the speaker starts by telling the reader the place, time and activity he is doing, stating that he saw something that he will always remember. His description of his view is explained through simile for example “Ripe apples were caught like red fish in the nets of their branches” (Updike), captivating the reader’s attention
The readers are apt to feel confused in the contrasting ways the woman in this poem has been depicted. The lady described in the poem leads to contrasting lives during the day and night. She is a normal girl in her Cadillac in the day while in her pink Mustang she is a prostitute driving on highways in the night. In the poem the imagery of body recurs frequently as “moving in the dust” and “every time she is touched”. The reference to woman’s body could possibly be the metaphor for the derogatory ways women’s labor, especially the physical labor is represented. The contrast between day and night possibly highlights the two contrasting ways the women are represented in society.
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
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 submission of women is demonstrated in the text through the symbolic colors of the couple’s bedroom. Indeed, as the young woman’s husband is asleep, the wife remains wide-awake, trying her best to provide the man with comfort, while enjoying her newlywed life. As she opens her eyes to contemplate “the blue of the brand-new curtains, instead of the apricot-pink through which the first light of day [filters] into the room where she [has]
The way that the author explains at the beginning what she had on and how she was so ready to pump the gas. Laux explains how the girl in the poem gets splashed by gas that came out of the pump because of the air bubble that was made in the tank. The image of her on the floating grey cloud to find was love was pretty visible. This poem definitely expressed a lot of imagery.
As the poem progresses, the flower blooms underneath the touch of the man, representing that their passion for each other allows her spirit to bloom just as a flower does. Philip Jason notes the effectiveness of Williams’ metaphor to Queen Anne’s lace, writing, “…it is mainly through metaphor that he transforms his observation, his still life, into a dynamic field of action that reveals the life and energy hidden.” Just as Jason proves, the metaph...
...en a woman conforms to a society’s standards she is not as beautiful as someone who is unrestricted of these limitations. Consequently, comparing her to a “goldenrod ready to bloom” (19) draws implications of flowers blooming in springtime, which are lovely. This allows the reader to see natural life growing from the woman and beginning to break free of the shell society creates. She shows resistance to the ideas of how women should act be look like. The poem ends with potential: the women can change how she is viewed in the world but she has to take the first step.
Lowell was an Imagist poet, and by doing so, she has created a scene with as few words as possible. However, she was able to breathe life into each line by making sure emphasis and connotation fell upon the right words. Through this, she made the theme very clear; that she would be lost without love. Ada Dwyer Russell, the suspected subject of Lowell's desire, was the same reader left at the curb. However, with such vivid imagery, she could be replaced with anyone who reads the poem.
She is known for creating radical novels, which stuck discord in many of its early readers, and writing highly respected sonnets. Similar to Behn, Smith also captures the inner thoughts of not just women, but all human beings in the sonnet “Written at the Close of Spring” and juxtaposes the beauty of the annual spring with the frailty of humanity. In the first stanza of this poem, the speaker uses imagery to help readers connect with the beauty and delicacy of spring flowers. In the second stanza, she calls attention to the fact that the spring flowers are dying and, to experience the beauty again, one will have to wait until next spring to enjoy them.
Society has redefined the role of woman by their works thru poetry that has changed their life
When Laura was sent down to the dead man’s cottage with a basket of leftovers, she sees happiness and beauty in the dead man’s face, and the strange intellect of life hits her straight in the face (114). The man is dead, but he seems to be sleeping peacefully. Furthermore, Katherine Mansfield is a profound artist that has a superior way with words. Mansfield could get to the precise certainty in her writing (43). However, she does it in minor, insignificant little bits and pieces of experience which no one but a delicate artist would indicate or think the value of noticing (43). “In “The Garden Party”, she talks about that absolute inward look that only comes from whipped cream. I do not know whether you feel there, as I do, the intense absorption that is partly the joy of eating whipped cream, partly to the fear of messing. Her similes can be exactly true, so that they are not similes at all but true metaphor. In one of her letters she talks about a “sea like quilted silk” and a whole flock of little winds”. All this is “purity”, perhaps, on a lower level, but it is part of her quality” (43). In Mansfield’s way of writing, she makes her collection of books easily to read and understand. Moreover, Mansfield’s short stories are superlative because a vast number of stories can be
In “I wandered Lonely as a Cloud,” William Wordsworth accomplishes his ideal of nature by using personification, alliteration, and simile within his poem to convey to the reader how nature’s beauty uplifts his spirits and takes him away from his boring daily routine. Wordsworth relates himself in solidarity to that of a cloud wandering alone, “I wandered lonely as a cloud” (line 1). Comparing the cloud and himself to that of a lonely human in low spirits of isolation, simultaneously the author compares the daffodils he comes across as he “floats on high o’er vales and hills” (line 2) to that of a crowd of people dancing (lines 3-6 and again in 12). Watching and admiring the dancing daffodils as he floats on by relating them to various beauties of
Through alliteration and imagery, Coleridge turns the words of the poem into a system of symbols that become unfixed to the reader. Coleridge uses alliteration throughout the poem, in which the reader “hovers” between imagination and reality. As the reader moves through the poem, they feel as if they are traveling along a river, “five miles meandering with a mazy motion” (25). The words become a symbol of a slow moving river and as the reader travels along the river, they are also traveling through each stanza. This creates a scene that the viewer can turn words into symbols while in reality they are just reading text. Coleridge is also able to illustrate a suspension of the mind through imagery; done so by producing images that are unfixed to the r...