Love and Loss
In the poem [Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone] by W.H. Auden, the speaker of the poem has experienced a loss of great proportions. The subject of the story was a great love who took up the days and nights of the narrator and was described as “my North, my South, my East and West.” (Auden) So this person was basically “home” for the narrator. While the loss of this person probably was not as big to everyone else as it was the speaker, to him or her it was a devastating loss. It was one of those moments where time stood still, like with 9/11 where everyone remembers exactly where they were and what they were doing. What, though, if the person did not die? What if it was just a bad break up and the person is now “dead” to the narrator and that is the great loss they are feeling. There is nothing worse than mourning the loss of someone who is still alive. Also, known as “Funeral Blues” it was initially written as a song for a play that Auden
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This verse is the most stunning one, this one expresses precisely what the orator felt for the subject. “He was my North, my South, my East and West, My working week and my Sunday rest.” (Auden). You can feel the love there; when someone means that much, they are everything you want and everywhere you want to be. This demonstrates the relationship between the two men and implies this relationship to be of a very intimate nature. “The author’s love for this man is so all encompassing he describes him as the points of the globe. This love is so strong that the speaker believes it will last forever, not until the death of his companion was the realization made that love, like everything else, will come to an end.” (Hixon) At the same time the stanza discloses the misfortune of human life, which is that every person will experience being severed from a loved one; love does not, after all, last endlessly in this
The overall themes of this poem are beauty, love, and destiny. The speaker constantly discusses beautiful things and how they can help us. Love can be felt throughout the entire poem. In the first stanza, the speaker verbalizes how he “came with love of the race.” He also expresses love for the beautiful things around him. The theme destiny can be seen in the third stanza when the speaker talks about staying on course. It can also be identified in the last stanza when he describes something inevitable that was about to
In his poem entitled “Grief”, Williams accurately describes his grief at the loss of a loved one. In Part One, the feeling is heavy and overwhelming. The speaker, (most likely Williams), recalls days of sitting bedside with a slow-dying love. Some writers waste time in getting to the heart of the poem, but Williams wastes none. In the first line, he leaves his readers with no question as to what is going on in the poem. He writes, “Gone now, after the days of desperate, unconscious gasping, the reflexive / staying alive,” (29). All readers are instantaneously reminded of an experience with watching a loved one pass slowly, perhaps painfully.
The diction of this poem influences the imagery with the tone of the words . They are used to convey the message of how it feels to not feel the spark of love
...s thou perceivest, which makes thy love more strong, / To love that well which thou must leave ere long [before long] (Shakespeare 13-14). Through these last two lines, Shakespeare conveys to his readers the importance of holding on to life and love while it exists for one day it will cease to be.
It is also saying that wars will end up destroying the monuments, but not poetry because it makes you immortal and you cannot be destroyed by the horrible means. You will outlive death and everything that seeks to destroy you, even in the future. The couplet/ turning point then doesn't change the mood but instead demands that you stay in this place until the day they come to judge you. The theme of this poem is immortality because the whole time the author is talking about how if you stick to one thing like your lover, nothing can ever hurt you. This poem follows the idea of love and marriage, because it hints that if you are faithful to your lover and marriage that nothing can hurt you as long as you have
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 death of a loved one can often cause a stillness in time. In his poem “The Vacuum,” Howard Nemerov uses a variety of poetic devices in order to portray a husband’s struggle to cope with his wife’s death. Through the use of symbolism, the speaker is able to portray a common household item, a vacuum, as being a physical reminder of his dead wife. The speaker, a widower, also personifies the vacuum and his heart in order to express his sorrow. The poem uses symbolism and personification in order to show how death seems to stop the passage of time.
When reading the title, we often associate a love song as something jaunty, pleasureable, and celebrating, or its other extreme, regretting, nostalgic, and full of pity for the singer’s troubles in love. With Williams the singer, the main idea revolves around the concept of an incomplete union in first person point of view, which makes the reading more personal as the reader is using I instead you or he. From this concept stem the ideas that this poem is about hopelessness or happiness, communal sex or masturbation. Delving into history, literary techniques, association with the author, and own opinion of it, there is easily more to it than meets the eye.
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.
These three metaphors exemplify beauty, but also an end to nature and life. Death is slowly creeping up to him and taking over his life as realized in this comparison of him to nature. The poem shows the need to seize the moment in life before death. The last couplet talks about the topic of love and the power of it. Love lasts through the struggles in life, and the changes of seasons. Love of life keeps us from realizing that an end will eventually come. “This thou perciev’st, which makes thy love more strong.” Encompasses the idea that although everything comes to an end, love still fuels everything within a person. He realizes everything will come to an end and death is inevitable but the passion is still
Man is a poem that has fully formed stanzas - each stanza can be viewed as a separate point, and has it’s own central metaphor. When all of the stanzas are added up, they act as points in an essay, each a fully developed argument on the importance of man, and humanity’s closeness with
if the minor details were not taken into consideration. The literary device ; connotation and imagery supports the figurative meaning of the poem very well. However, this poem could be considered as an irony in today's world. The theme; feelings are more important than wisdom in life is just another way of saying the thoughts are less important than the feeling that are being produced. The wisdom is just a minor detail and if we consider it, the feeling that are produced will be ignored. The poem literally talks about a man expressing his love to his beloved women. This poem is in a stanzaic form with a total number of 16 lines. It is a wonderful poem that makes the readers think about the life they are living.
The third stanza uses hyperboles to describe the depths of love between the two people and the line “He was my North, my South, my East and West” leads the reader to believe that the person who died set a course and now the speaker does not know what direction to take. The deceased was the speaker’s whole world. The disappointment the speaker is experiencing is conveyed when he says, “I thought that love would last fo...
(Burns, 2014) So when he speaks of his feelings they are intense and he uses similes such as the” melody sweetly played in June”. (Burns, 2014) Then he uses earth’s elements as smiles to show the depths of love; Such as “So deep in luv an I; And I will love thee still , my dear, Tilla the seas gang dry.” (Burns, 2014) This is really deep for when in time will all of the seas ever go dry. Then he goes on to state “Till a the sea’s game dry, my dear, And the rocks melt wi’ the sun; And I will luv thee still, my dear, while the sands o’ life shall run.” (Burns, 2014) This is epic for his love will never end until the Earth dies for; or he does.
Although the speaker acts extremely conceded in parts of the poem, perhaps he is actually insecure and fears that another man will steal the heart of his lover. Maybe the sun is symbolic of another man, which may be the reason that the speaker is really upset. It is also a possibility that the speaker realizes that he is getting old and is worried that his "time" is soon going to run out. He seems to worry a lot about "time." In the first stanza, he is saying how love is eternal and should not be measured by seasons, hours, days, or months.