True Love Poem Analysis

1) On a literal level, what is this poem about?
On a literal level, this poem is bashing true love. This is made apparent throughout the poem. The speaker states things like “listen to them laughing-it’s an insult” and “it’s obviously a plot behind the human race’s back”. It is apparent that the speaker doesn’t have a positive opinion about true love. They even so far as to claim that it an outrage to justice and that it “disrupts our painstakingly erected principles”. This poem is about how true love is just illusion; especially to those people that never find it. 2) What is the tone of this poem? How do you know? Support your claims!
The tone in the first stanza of the poem is thoughtful. It is as if the speaker is contemplating the value

I know this because that is exactly what the author did in the poem “True Love”. Punctuation is utilized by using question marks to ask rhetorical questions and by using em dashes to separate thoughts in the same line. The rhetorical questions support the purpose of the poem because they create a scornful tone as explained in the question above. Em dashes isolate the speaker from the people they are talking about. “Listen to them laughing--it’s an insult. They language they use--deceptively clear”. The em dashes serve to separate “them” from the speaker of the poem. Everything about “them” is completely different from the speaker; it illustrates that the speaker and the people are completely separate entities. The speaker does not want to be associated with “them” which supports the purpose of the poem. Structure is utilized to make some parts of the poem stand out. The last two stanzas stand out a lot because of their length. They are significantly shorter than the others which emphasizes their

This poem is literally about a person who is grieving but is okay with the world moving on without them. The speaker says that they are okay with plants blooming, people in relationships, and not having control. They are not willing to come back into the world; they were hurt so badly that they do not want to come back to life.
2) What is the tone of this poem? How do you know? Support your claims!
The tone in the first 11 stanzas of the poem seems very resigned; the speaker has accepted that the world is moving on without them. They says things like “I don’t reproach the spring for starting up again” and “I don’t resent the view for its vista of a sun-dazzled bay”. By using words like “resent” and “reproach”, the author indirectly implies that the speaker has a reason to dislike beautiful things. The grief that has affected the speaker so much hasn’t affected life itself and they has come to accept that. The author chooses to use phrases like ‘it doesn’t pain me to see” and “I respect their right” which show how the speaker has completely detached themself from the word around them. While everything outside is starting to come back to life, the speaker is anything but lively. “I expect nothing from the depths near the woods.” They don’t expect anything from the world and want the world to do the same thing in return. This detachment proves that the speaker feels resigned about themself and the world around