“A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal”: Wordsworth’s Deathly Tale

In this essay I hope to uncover the many instances that William Wordsworth inconspicuously places his mother into The Prelude and to explore the multimodal occurrence of paternal loss throughout the text. Although both of Wordsworth's parents perished while he was young in years, it seems that his mother, Ann Wordsworth, was the greatest influencer of his poetic artistry. The loss of Ann Wordsworth can be said to be a defining point in the young William Wordsworth's life, and have had more of an impact on him than the loss of his father. If any of Wordsworth's poetic artistry came from the influence of the loss of his parents, it was most likely from the anger he felt towards his mother's desertion of him and his siblings, rather than the guilt that he associated with his father's death.

The poem suddenly becomes much darker in the last stanza and a Billy Collins explains how teachers, students or general readers of poetry ‘torture’ a poem by being what he believes is cruelly analytical. He says, “all they want to do is tie the poem to a chair with rope and torture a confession out of it”. Here, the poem is being personified yet again and this brings about an almost human connection between the reader and the poem. This use of personification is effective as it makes the

The study of any poem often begins with its imagery. Being the centralized idea behind the power of poetry, imagery isn’t always there to just give a mental picture when reading the poem, but has other purposes. Imagery can speak to the five senses using figurative language as well as help create a specific emotion that the author is trying to infuse within the poem. It helps convey a complete human experience a very minimal amount of words. In this group of poems the author uses imagery to show that humanity is characterized as lost, sorrowful and regretful, but nature is untainted by being free of mistakes and flaws and by taking time to take in its attributes it can help humans have a sense of peace, purity, and joy, as well as a sense of

Wilfred Owen’s poetry is shaped by an intense focus on extraordinary human experiences. In at least 2 poems set for study, explore Owen’s portrayal of suffering and pity.

Atwood’s “Death of a Young Son by Drowning” perfectly grasps the life-altering heartbreak that occurs after the loss of a child by utilizing literary devices such as imagery, personification, simile, and metaphor. In the poem, an image of a voyage is used to characterize a child’s journey from life to death. “The dangerous river”, is used as a metaphor to describe the birth canal which the child victoriously navigates, but after embarking upon the outside world, the child goes into a “voyage of discovery” (4) that results in his death in the river. “On a landscape stranger than Uranus” (14) emphasizes the estrangement felt by the mother without having any knowledge of the environment. Comparing it to Uranus she describes it to be just as strange as a another planet. In the ninth stanza, the mother reminisces the death of her child as she says, “My foot hit rock” (26) which is a representation that she has hit rock bottom and her life will now never be the same. The final simile of the poem, “I planted him in his country / like a flag” (28-29) identifies the relationship between the dead child and the land. It ties the mother to the land in a way that had not been thought of, a way that is fraught with grief. An extended metaphor is developed throughout the poem, comparing the experience of giving birth that the character had, to a river and its contents. It helps to understand the different stages of birth by expressing the hurricane of emotions, and incidents that occurred with the use of waves expressing times of difficulty and pain.

When a reader initially reads Donald Justice’s “The Poet at Seven,” he or she might take the easy route and conclude it for what it says, only. If this method were taken, the poem’s presumed plot would have been taken quite literally: the poet is reminiscing about his childhood memories; the poem is sweet, simple, and nostalgic. However, poems are not that simple. They are complex riddles, full of hidden meaning. To truly shed light on Justice’s purpose of the poem, it is necessary to look at the “what-if’s” through its intricate designs of language. The poem’s form is an important start when close reading. Also, to discern the hidden meaning, it is important to consider the specific word choice and how it paints a picture inside the reader’s mind. As a result, the reader will grasp the poem’s true intention. By doing this, the reader will sincerely have an understanding of “The Poet at Seven,” the way Justice probably would have wanted.

Wordsworth’s famous and simple poem, “I wandered lonely as a cloud,” expresses the Romantic Age’s appreciation for the beauty and truth that can be found in a setting as ordinary as a field of daffodils. With this final stanza, Wordsworth writes of the mind’s ability to carry those memories of nature’s beauty into any setting, whether city or country. His belief in the power of the imagination and the effect it can have on nature, and vice a versa, is evident in most of his work. This

The whole poem is centered in nature. The speaker experiences agile portrayal and grieving all through the short stanzas. It is done in such a way the poet can value the delicate magnificence and significance of Lucy. The speaker sets up her depiction so she can be acknowledged from his perspective. This glaring difference has a distinct difference to her disagreeing with individuals in life. She is made out to be an overlooked and underestimated lady as opposed to a lady with foes. Even though few knew about her passing, it had a gigantic effect in the life of the speaker. She unquestionably emerged as a violet and solitary star to in any event this one individual.

Reading chapter three was truly a thoroughly enjoyed adventure. In that, it was like a hunt, where the prize catch was a deeper understanding of word choice, word order, and tone. Furthermore, understanding the poets have a duty to words opened up new revelation as the poems in chapter three were read. Notably, the poet Gwendolyn Brooks stated that “I still feel that a poet has a duty to words, and that words can do wonderful things And it’s too bad to just let them lie there without doing anything with and for them” Poetry goes far beyond the simple rhyming of words, it is an art.

The anthology is compiled of my favorite poems, and I purposely selected poems with controversial and subjective meanings. Unlike other forms of literature, such as narrations, in which the meaning and language is more direct, poetry tends to be more personal and open to interpretation. In many cases, even the poet never clearly reveals their poem’s true intent, allowing a myriad of theories to formulate. The subjectiveness of poetry allows the audience to develop various interpretations, which also ensures that more people are identify with them through different ways. For example, the meaning of A Girl by Ezra Pound is still debated, and while it is mostly accepted that the poem is based off the myth of Apollo and Daphne, there are still

unclear why she writes so much about death because she had not experienced death close to her

I have decided to expand this short literary analysis paper into a research paper in a bid to explain fully the issues about the poem. The poem has a vast base of issues that need critical analysis in the interpretation to bring out the real meaning behind every word used in the poem. The literary analysis paper sort of locked out many ideas in the poem due to the brief nature of it. By going back to the poem and also reading from secondary sources, I intend to use this research to more vividly describe the themes of the poem as per my own understanding and that of other people. By reading from secondary sources, I will get the understanding of others and cite it in my research paper.

In Wordsworth’s Preface to Lyrical Ballads, he writes, “I have wished to keep my reader in the company of flesh and blood, persuaded that by so doing I shall interest him” (297). With this assertion, Wordsworth highlights his desire that readers of his poetry respond with sentiment when presented with genuine, unembellished characters. His attempts to prove this claim can be seen in the poems Michael and The Ruined Cottage. Observing how the two poems handle certain rhetorical devices—a frame of narration, personification of nature, meditation on ordinary objects, and Biblical allusion—reveals their intended purpose as promotions of empathy. Discerning the similarities and differences between Michael and The Ruined Cottage allows the moral lessons within Wordsworth’s poetic experimentation to be uncovered.

“The relationship between the energies of the inquiring mind that an intelligent reader brings to the poem and the poem’s refusal to yield a single comprehensive interpretation enacts vividly the everlasting intercourse between the human mind, with its instinct to organise and harmonise, and the baffling powers of the universe about it.”

Where Wordsworth focused too on love and nature at first, he then took on more spiritual subjects. Further, if we assume that Wordsworth’s imitation of “The Retreat” was intentional, then Vaughan may have even been a poetic model (in some sense) for Wordsworth later in life. True, Wordsworth is not generally considered a religious poet; he would never have originally considered Vaughan a model because of the latter’s extreme religiosity. Yet if these two poems don’t echo in godly gestures per se, they do in a more spiritual sense—and perhaps Wordsworth, as a man confronted with his own mortality, found Vaughan’s treatise on the spirit’s immortality a sympathetic sentiment. Thus by comparing the two, we also might better understand Wordsworth’s poetic progression.