Tone, Theme, and Symbolism in Boy at the Window” by Richard Wilbur

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Poem Reflection
Poetry is tricky because very few words are used in them. Authors use hidden meaning in their words to get the reader’s attention. The messages in the words are to be found by symbols which naturally do not mean what we think they mean but to an author it means something different. Understanding what poems are and how they are worded is the key to finding the hidden message.
The poem that I have decided to write about is “Boy at the Window” by Richard Wilbur.
Richard Wilbur said that he wrote “Boy at the Window” after seeing how distressed his five-year-old son was about a snowman they had built (Clugston, 2010). As I was reading the poem I could tell that this might just have been a personal experience that the author had went through at some point in his life. Whether it is when he was a child or a child of his own. It was evident once you started to read more of the poem. He was able to give off a sense that he had been put through this.
The three elements that stood out the most to me were the tone, theme and symbolism. The tone in a poem helps you feel what is going on in it. It requires you to pay close attention so you can imagine what is happening. As stated in Chapter 10, Poets rely heavily on sound effects, choosing words that not only convey sound but also emphasize the particular sound (tone) they want the reader to sense (Clugston, 2010). They choose to do this to help us get connected to what we are reading. The author intensified the tone of this poem by including rhyme into his poem. He emphasized the vowels making it more dramatic. The tone being used is an emotional meaning to the author and what he watched his five year old go through. The little boy sees the snowman lonely and the author c...

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.... The way he spoke it showed fear in the boys face; helping me to paint the picture of the boy in the window and feel what the boy was feeling. According to David Hanauer (2004) he defines poetry as a literary text that presents the experiences, thoughts, and feelings of the writer through a self-referential use of language that creates for the reader and writer a new understanding of the experience, thought, or feeling expressed in the text. I agree with his definition of poetry and you can see that in the poem “Boy in the Window”.

Works Cited

Clugston, R.W. (2010). Journey into literature. Retrieved from https:// content.ashford.edu

Hanauer, D., & Rivers, D. (2004). Poetry and the meaning of life [electronic resource] : reading and writing poetry in language arts classrooms / David Ian Hanauer ; [edited by Dyanne Rivers]. Toronto : Pippin Pub. Corp., c2004

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