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Summer and winter poem analysis
Analysis of the poem the winter
Analysis of the poem the winter
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The Transition of Season in Summer and Winter by Mary Shelley and Winter and Summer by Stephen Spencer
Both Summer and Winter by Mary Shelley, and Winter and Summer by Stephen Spender discuss the transition of both seasons. In Summer and Winter, the author is a spectator. She discusses only her observations of the seasons. In Spender's poem, the author partakes in the poem, noting his feelings about winter and summer. Spender's views are a more personal account; he actually participates in the poem. In both pieces, the authors view winter as death; life stops in the season. In Summer and Winter and Winter and Summer, the authors alludes to the birth and death of nature.
Summer and Winter by Mary Shelley notes the transitions of the seasons from summer to winter. The author uses rhyme scheme in the form of (aa)(bb)(c)(d)(ee)(ff), (gg)(hh)(ii)(jj). The poem is divided into two stanzas. The first stanza discusses summer, and all the beautiful things it encompasses. It describes clouds, the sky, and praises the birth of nature. The second stanza discusses winter, about how nature suffers so much in the freezing cold that it dies.
Shelley uses literary techniques to get her points across. Shelley uses only one example of an oxymoron in her work. "And the firm foliage of the larger trees." This example is an oxymoron because the words "firm" and "foliage" are contradictory. The leaves on a tree are soft and bendable, not stiff. The author uses a total of two similes in this poem. "A wrinkled clod as hard as brick…" Shelley compares the dirt to brick, because in the winter the ground freezes. "and the stainless sky opens beyond them like eternity." Also an example of a simile, this line describes the clear ...
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...nsition of both seasons. Both poets allude to this transition in different ways, Shelley beginning with summer and Spender with winter. This affects how each view the changeover of seasons. While both poets discuss the transition, Spender examines the seasons in more detail, with more description and feeling. The dying of nature is the underlying theme in both poems. Shelley begins with nature delighted in summer, and ends with birds dying and fish frozen under ice. For a simple poem, Shelley gets her point across. Spender begins with an everlasting winter, continues on to the rebirth of summer, and ends once again with winter. Shelley is more understated in her views, and Spender is powerful in his opinions of the seasons. Spender succeeds in passionately describing what his "inner eye" sees, while Shelley blandly shows what is obvious about winter and summer.
The common factor found within these two poems were in fact, metaphors. The writers Waddington and Tennyson both apply them to accentuate crucial opinions that influence love relations. In the third stanza, line one Waddington writes, “late as last autumn…”, however in the beginning of the poem he had written, “Late as last summer”. Therefore, autumn is a metaphor for different phases of life; spring represents childhood, summer is young adulthood and in this case autumn represents the middle age as winter would be death. Metaphorically speaking, as the season changed from a blissful summer to a dry autumn, so did their relationship. And we can all agree that as long as the clock remains to tick, time can change everything, even love. In Tennyson’s poem the fourth stanza, line two it mentions, “A shinning furrow, as thy thoughts in me”. This charmingly written metaphor refers to the author and his significant other. Tennyson uses a farmer’s tractor which produces furrows on the ground to relate to his sense since this person has had furrows of her thoughts leave a shining trace in his mind.
In John Knowles’ novel, A Separate Piece, the main Character, Gene Forrester, has to learn to become friends with his hazardous roommate, Phineas, at his school, Devon, in New Hampshire. The novel is affected by a number of changes, however the largest and most significant change is the change in seasons. In Thomas C. Foster’s novel, How to read literature like a Professor, chapter twenty explains the significance of the seasons. Foster states that, “Summer [symbolizes] adulthood and romance and fulfillment and passion,” while, “ winter [symbolizes] old age and resentment and death.” John Knowles’ book A Separate Peace, all aspects of Summer, Fall, and Winter are excellently represented as explained in Thomas C. Foster’s novel, How to read
Shelley uses symbolic meaning to depict the destruction of a statue and the “sands that stretch far away” in relation to the effects of pride, a direct contrast from the words on the pedestal. The images of the deteriorating items gives the readers an understanding of time’s ultimate power beyond both life and pride. However, the cliché use of sands as a means of representing time still explains to readers that the passing of time is prevalent in the poem and related to the destroyed items presents the concept of a useless
You can see this shift through the use of punctuation. This form of punctuation is the second of the total of three main sections in this poem separated through periods. In line 14 states, “it has finally ended.” This is the first period that appears in the poem. You are starting from light, fluffy, flowing snow to now a transition. “The silence is immense,” (15-16) is how the next section is started. This moves from the snow as a whole to a snowy night. Snow takes things away from us like described in this next section. “nowhere the familiar things:stars, the moon, the darkness we expect and nightly turn from.” (18-22), the snow is covering what would normally be in sight. Then relating back to the beginning, the poem seems to suggests that “snow” can blind you from the answers that you seek. This is also the end of the second section, and once again the mood is immediately
In “What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why?” Edna St. Vincent Millay says that “the summer sang in me” meaning that she was once as bright and lively as the warm summer months. In the winter everyone wants to bundle up and be lazy, but when summer comes along the sunshine tends to take away the limits that the cold once had on us. She uses the metaphor of summer to express the freedom she once felt in her youth, and the winter in contrast to the dull meaningless life she has now. There are many poets that feel a connection with the changing of seasons. In “Odes to the West Wind” Percy Bysshe Shelley describes his hopes and his expectations for the seasons to inspire the world.
"We stood by a pond that winter day," (1) This line indicates a still quietness, with lack of the movement of life. There is a vast difference in appearance and movement around a pond in winter and a pond in the midst of summer. This indicates no leaves, and no visible signs of life. The poet is painting a stark and lifeless scene.
In both texts, they mentioned the seasons being created to provide different weather for the things that are vital to our lives. For example, in the winter is meant to rest and relax and the summer is meant to ripen as stated in the Hymn to the Sun. An example of the winter being a resting time is when bears and squares go into hibernation. During the summer, fruit starts to ripen for humans to eat. Without having different seasons, some of the things that humans need to survive would not be
For each seasonal section, there is a progression from beginning to end within the season. Each season is compiled in a progressive nature with poetry describing the beginning of a season coming before poetry for the end of the season. This is clear for spring, which starts with, “fallen snow [that] lingers on” and concludes with a poet lamenting that “spring should take its leave” (McCullough 14, 39). The imagery progresses from the end of winter, with snow still lingering around to when the signs of spring are disappearing. Although each poem alone does not show much in terms of the time of the year, when put into the context of other poems a timeline emerges from one season to the next. Each poem is linked to another poem when it comes to the entire anthology. By having each poem put into the context of another, a sense of organization emerges within each section. Every poem contributes to the meaning of a group of poems. The images used are meant to evoke a specific point in each season from the snow to the blossoms to the falling of the blossoms. Since each poem stands alone and has no true plot they lack the significance than if they were put into th...
The sun has been an endless source of inspiration, both physical and spiritual, throughout the ages. For its light, warmth, and the essential role it has played in the maintenance of the fragile balance of life on earth, the sun has been honored and celebrated in most of the world's religions. While the regeneration of light is constant, the relative length of time between the rising and setting of the sun is affected by the changing of the seasons. Hippocrates postulated centuries ago that these changing patterns of light and dark might cause mood changes (9). Seasonal downward mood changes of late fall and winter have been the subject of many sorrowful turn-of-the-century poems of lost love and empty souls. For some, however, “the relationship between darkness and despair is more than metaphoric (6).
These poems have radically different settings, which sets the tone for each of the pieces. In Frost’s poem, the speaker finds himself one morning in a “yellow wood” (1), and no other people are apparently present. Both of the roads are “grassy” (8) and have “leaves no step had trodden black” (12), which implies that the roads are generally not traveled very frequently, and certainly not very recently. In Eliot’s poem, it is nighttime, which is likened to a “pat...
...n himself (13-14, 16). Perhaps, as this is the earlier of the two poems, Frost had not yet worked out the conditions and paths one must meet in order to find an inner peace.
...fall of snow and the unremitting “sweep” of “easy wind” appear tragically indifferent to life, in turn stressing the value of Poirier’s assessment of the poem. Frost uses metaphor in a way that gives meaning to simple actions, perhaps exploring his own insecurities before nature by setting the poem amongst a tempest of “dark” sentiments. Like a metaphor for the workings of the human mind, the pull between the “promises” the traveller should keep and the lure of death remains palpably relevant to modern life. The multitudes of readings opened up through the ambiguity of metaphor allows for a setting of pronounced liminality; between life and death, “night and day, storm and heath, nature and culture, individual and group, freedom and responsibility,” Frost challenges his readers to delve deep into the subtlety of tone and come to a very personal conclusion.
As each work progresses, a personal change is expressed. The first section of “Ode to the West Wind” presents a speaker —who is also the author— who seems to be intently overserving the wind; however by the final section, he desires to be like the wind. When he writes that the Wind should “Be thou, Spirit fierce, / My spirit! Be thou me” (Lines 61-62), the author expresses a deep desire to be one with powerful force. A few lines later, he asks the wind to “Drive my dead thoughts over the universe / …to quicken a new birth!” (Lines 63-64) “Scatter, as …/ Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind” (Lines 66-67). In this instance, the “dead thoughts” are Shelley’s previous works. By making a comparison between his words and “ashes and sparks” (Line 67), Shelley expresses the idea that even though his previous works are dead and separated from him, he hopes his words will be able to inspire or ignite new thoughts and artistry in others. At the same time, Byron presents a different sort of personal experience. In the first stanza, Byron writes that “There is a pleasure in the pathless woods, /…rapture on the lonely shore” (Lines 1-2). He later writes that when he is in solitude, and surrounded by nature, he feels “What I can ne’er express, yet cannot all conceal” (Line 9). By using these descriptions, Byron shows that there is a type of restoring quality that the natural world can have on a person, an
Both poets present readers with characters questioning the apparent transience of nature. Whitman's young girl weeps to see the black "burial-clouds that lower victorious soon to devour all," (line 12) just as Stevens' young woman is saddened "when the birds are gone, and their warm fields/Return no more" (lines 49-50). These characters, unable to grasp the entirely of the cycle of mortality, are dismayed by earthly loss they continually observe.
Both Shelley, in "Ode to the West Wind," and Wordsworth, in "Intimations of Immortality," are very similar in their use of nature to describe the life and death of the human spirit. As they both describe nature, these two poets use the comparison of how the Earth and all its life is the same as our own human life. I feel that Shelley uses the seasons as a way of portraying the human life during reincarnation. Wordsworth seems to concentrate more on the stages that a person goes through during life. Shelley compares himself to such things as clouds, leaves, and waves.