In “The Man with Night Sweats,” Thom Gunn, the writer, makes many comparisons and relationships to express how the speaker is feeling. The speaker of the poem, judging by the sweat, pain, fear, and publication date, is suffering from AIDS. You can see the regression from a positive/neutral tone to a fearful, desperate tone and outlook. The poem starts out with lines like, “prosperous their dreams of heat,” and, “my flesh was its own shield,” but ends on a pessimistic note with, “As if hands were enough/To hold an avalanche off.” An avalanche is extremely difficult to escape once it has begun to happen and leaves few survivors after running its course, similar to many diseases.
Not only do the words express the speaker's feelings. The structure of the poem has a memorable effect as well. The sentences in the first half of the poem are shorter with a two-line, a four-line, and a six-line sentence. Even in the six-line sentence there are pauses to keep order. However, there are only two sentences in the second half, with one being eight lines. This sentence also has very little structure and runs on. There is no caesura present in the second half, even though there is plenty of it in the
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Auden, the poet who wrote “Funeral Blues,” uses hyperbolic and metaphorical language to convey the thoughts of the speaker. The tone throughout the poem is very consistent, as evidenced by the similar themes of the first and last stanzas. The speaker essentially proposes that, due to the death of this man she so dearly loved, all functions of the universe should stop immediately. The third stanza stands out from the other three, though, because it explains what her feelings were toward this man, and why her sorrow was so deep. She also expresses regret in having believed their love would last forever, which may actually reference the demise of the attraction between them, not the death of a man. Nonetheless, there is more than just language that gets the speaker’s point
The first stanza describes the depth of despair that the speaker is feeling, without further explanation on its causes. The short length of the lines add a sense of incompleteness and hesitance the speaker feels towards his/ her emotions. This is successful in sparking the interest of the readers, as it makes the readers wonder about the events that lead to these emotions. The second and third stanza describe the agony the speaker is in, and the long lines work to add a sense of longing and the outpouring emotion the speaker is struggling with. The last stanza, again structured with short lines, finally reveals the speaker 's innermost desire to "make love" to the person the speaker is in love
The main character in Zora Neale Hurston’s “Sweat” is a black woman who resides in the South that clutches on to her belief in God to help her get through the suffering that she endures from her abusive and adulterous husband, Sykes. “Sweat” is full of religious symbolism that demonstrates that Hurston was using the theme of good vs. evil in the short story.
In the novel Night, Elie Wiesel faces the horrors of the Holocaust, where he loses many friends and family, and almost his life. He starts as a kind young boy, however, his environment influences many of the decisions he makes. Throughout the novel, Elie Wiesel changes into a selfish boy, thinks of his father as a liability and loses his faith in God as an outcome his surroundings.
This line was very unexpected and this line makes the poem what it is. The poem transition from a love poem to a darker more painful story. The tone of the poem also shifts to a more eerie tone. Another thing about the third stanza is that at this moment in the poem, I can connect the poem to the Greek mythological story of Persephone and Hades. The allusion sets up the rest of the poem and gives the poem a lot more meaning.
When someone is exposed to danger, their character can change in unthinkable ways. Someone can act strong but cower in fear when a life changing event occurs; meanwhile, someone timid can be vicious and cruel. This change occurs in many different scenarios, one being the Holocaust with Elie Wiesel. In the book, Night, Elie is first seen becoming closer to his once distant father. Later, he starts to become less concerned with what happens to his father but still tries to assist him. The real change occurs towards the end when Elie is considering letting his father die by taking his father’s food for himself. So as time went on, the Holocaust breaks Elie’s will to save his father because of Elie’s realization of his father’s weaknesses, the
Elie’s motif of night showed just how unbearable it was to fight for survival. Fear ran wild throughout everyone. Fear not only the present time but for the future. In this case, when Elie utters, “Despite the growing darkness, I could see my father turn pale” he illustrates how fearful people were, one of the only emotions left (pg. 13). The fear of reality and the future became overwhelming, which Elie’s father showed because it seemed as if the end was near. The night cast an overwhelming shadow that seemed to devour the world. The darkness from this shadow was not only a thought, but a reality. For instance, Elie expresses how he “never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, that turned my life into one long night…” (pg.
In most literature, the main protagonist often endures circumstances that spark mental, social, and physical changes and may cause unfathomable and permanent transformations. This is especially prevalent in Night, a memoir written by Elie Wiesel that depicts the hidden truth of life during the Holocaust. Wiesel discusses his life as a young adult in concentration camps and his experience with anti-semitism. Throughout the memoir, Elie Wiesel undergoes several dramatic changes, which are his loss of faith, his changing relationship with his father, and his loss of humanity; all of these changes relate back to different themes in this work of literature.
In literature, the significant themes of a story can sometimes be developed within dramatic death scenes. With that being said, Zora Neale Hurston 's presents an unappreciated housewife and her high-class husband 's sinful ways which ultimately lead to the husband 's unplanned death, in her short story “Sweat”. The concluding death scene can best be described as illustrating the theme as “what goes around comes around”. Sykes was abusive and tried plotting his wife, Delia 's, death by using a rattlesnake, but his plan backfired and it was Sykes that was killed in the end.
Elie Wiesel born in Transylvania, on September 30, 1928. A survivor of the Holocaust, is a writer, orator, teacher and chairman of the United States Holocaust Memorial Council. The third of four children and the only son, Wiesel was educated in sacred Jewish texts. When he was 15, Wiesel was taken off with his family to the concentration camps at Birkenau and Auschwitz, where he remained until January 1945 when, along with thousands of other Jewish prisoners, he was moved to Buchenwald in a forced death march. Buchenwald was liberated on April 11, 1945, by the United States army, but neither Wiesel's parents nor his younger sister survived. After the war Wiesel went to France where he completed secondary school, studied at the Sorbonne, and
The speaker connects a symbol of death with her brain and says her “mind is going numb,” which implies that a part of her is dying (Dickinson 8). At the end of the poem, the speaker also states “a plank in reason broke / and I dropped down and down” (Dickinson 17-18). The statement of an interruption of logic followed by her descent is a hopeless ending that shows the speaker is losing her rationality and declining mentally. Dickinson portrays a speaker who is dying physcologically and thus is becoming mad. In addition, “I Felt a Funeral,” characterizes death as forcefully acting upon the speaker beyond her control, much like it is in her poem “Because I could not stop for Death.” In the former, Dickinson does not demonstrate the funeral and the downturn as stoppable or preventable, and in the latter she unsuccessfully avoids death. The opening lines “Because I could not stop for Death / He kindly stopped for me” shows the speaker did not want to give up her earthly life (Dickinson 1-2). Though the figure of death treated her politely, it is clear that the presence of death was unavoidable, as it was in the previous poem.
Like millions of Americans or hundreds them that never really enjoy a poem I’m definitely one of them. There is so much anger in this poem that it quickly grabs my attention and pulled me into his world. I have never knew that such a poem could express such a strong emotion on paper, and even though, I don’t consider myself a communist lover I can clearly understand why he might have been one. His world was clearly different from mine and through his words I was able to feel his pain and suffering because of it. For people that never consider reading a poem they should give it a try because one’s never know what they will find.
I believe that the structure of this poem allows for the speaker to tell a narrative which further allows him to convey his point. The use of enjambment emphasizes this idea as well as provides a sense of flow throughout the entirety of a poem, giving it the look and feel of reading a story. Overall, I believe this piece is very simplistic when it comes to poetic devices, due to the fact that it is written as a prose poem, this piece lacks many of the common poetic devices such as rhyme, repetition, alliteration, and metaphors. However, the tone, symbolism, allusion and imagery presented in the poem, give way to an extremely deep and complicated
A caesura appears in line two separating “Nay, I have done:” and “You get no more of me.” This break allows both of these thoughts to be extra powerful lines. They are also worded abruptly and intensely. “And I am glad, yea, glad, with all my heart…” (line 3...
The poem was also very long, I had a notion that poems are always short but to my surprise the length of
Funeral Blues by W. H. Auden is a short poem that illustrates the emotions that he is dealing with after the love of his life passes away. The tone of this piece evokes feelings that will differ depending on the reader; therefore, the meaning of this poem is not in any way one-dimensional, resulting in inevitable ambiguity . In order to evoke emotion from his audience, Auden uses a series of different poetic devices to express the sadness and despair of losing a loved one. This poem isn’t necessarily about finding meaning or coming to some overwhelming realization, but rather about feeling emotions and understanding the pain that the speaker is experiencing. Through the use of poetic devices such as an elegy, hyperboles, imagery, metaphors, and alliterations as well as end-rhyme, Auden has created a powerful poem that accurately depicts the emotions a person will often feel when the love of their live has passed away.