“Carrion Comfort,” one of Gerard Manley Hopkin’s Terrible Sonnets, expresses a sentiment atypical of Hopkins’s usually ecstatically worshipful poems. Hopkins was deeply religious, and much of his poetry invoked a euphoric, worshipful experience of the natural world and its connection to God. Toward the end of his career and his life, however, Hopkins wrote his Terrible Sonnets, which dealt with darker emotions and internal conflict; “Carrion Comfort” is one such sonnet. The original sonnet structure is preserved, for the most part, in its rhyme scheme as well as the traditional tonal shift at the end of the octavo. However, Hopkins separated the octavo into two quatrains and discarded the iambic pentameter. This dismissal of certain rules …show more content…
The poem’s introspective process suggests that Hopkins was familiar with the inner struggles he depicted. The narrator of “Carrion Comfort” slowly succumbs to the despair he so vehemently rejects in the first stanza as he suffers a crisis of faith and identity, reflected in the coherency – or lack thereof – of each line. The first stanza of the poem begins with the explicit and confident rejection of despair and death. The rejection of despair operates as a thesis of some kind, as the speaker announces that he will “not feast on [Despair]” in the first line. He shall not, as it were, enjoy the morbid satisfaction of giving up. Rather, he goes on, he has the power to act; he “can something, hope,” and this refuses to relinquish that power. The repetition in these lines illustrates the depth of the speaker’s commitment; the word not is emphatically reinforced, and the speaker’s list of what he could do rather than despair is born of his sense of his own agency. The narrator insists on remaining human, with human ties, but nevertheless he betrays his doubts. “These last strands of man in [him]” are evidently slack and weak. The speaker resists the untwisting of these strands and thus the dissolution of his humanity, but still recognizes his weakness. He clings to his humanity and disavows death, or rather, rejects the possibility of killing himself out of hopelessness. He asserts that he will not cry that he “can no more;” giving up and resigning himself to nihilism is
Firstly, the speaker’s attitude or the tone demonstrates how a person can be the cause of their own misery. From the very start of the poem the speaker has a depressing tone. Any little event that occurs the speaker reads it as a negative occurrence that adds to his ever growing misery. For Example, when the speaker says “Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there wondering, fearing, Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before.” The speaker hears a knock on the door and opens it to see that there is no one there. Instead of going back to sleep he demonstrates his negative attitude by
expressed that all death is the same, and one will go out of the world
Although this is a short poem, there are so many different meanings that can come from the piece. With different literary poetic devices such as similes, imagery, and symbolism different people take away different things from the poem. One of my classmates saw it as an extended metaphor after searching for a deeper connection with the author. After some research on the author, we came to learn that the
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
In the first stanza the reader realizes that Sylvia Plath is scared of her father. It is quite clear that she never spoke up to him to defend herself. In the first line it is apparent that something is ending. “You do not do, you do not do any more,
The article offers a unique view into Hughes’s poetry, revealing another side of Hughes’s expertise as a poet. Although she does spend a great deal of time on the discussion of the importance of Hughes’s diction to the rhythms he wanted to infuse into the aforementioned five pieces, Dickinson does more than the traditional literary analysis in order to explain Hughes’s talents as a writer. With special attention given to the five of his lesser-known works, she gives the reader an opportunity to hear the music within the lines of many pieces.
In 1573, George Gascoigne published “For That He Looked Not upon Her,” a poem in which his careful and methodical approach to the sonnet form is evident. Two years later, he published “Certayne Notes of Instruction on Making of Verse,” which only further served to cement his reputation as meticulous and deliberate with his choice of language and form—every choice Gascoigne makes is made with a purpose in mind. This is especially evident in “For That He Looked Not upon Her,” wherein Gascoigne utilizes both the intentionally-chosen sonnet form and vivid imagery to develop his criticism of the classic sonnet in which the beloved’s refusal of the author only serves to make him more determined to pursue her.
A second way the theme of this poem can be seen is through imagery. The first glimpse of this is in stanza one: Cullen writes, “Pierce to the marrow…and past the bone.” This passage provokes feelings/images of pain in our minds, addressing the same pain one feels when shunned in the world, whether on the basis of appearance, gender, nationality, etc. This describes the part of the theme that says people must care for each other. When pain pierces one’s heart, Cullen proposes that these feelings must “Be fused and mingle, diverse yet single,” with others’, as he states in the second stanza. His meaning is that individuality is good but people must help each other; this is the path to an equal society where all are accepted. A final example of imagery is the “shining and unsheathed” description of a blade in the last stanza. Cullen wants the reader to perceive grief as dangerous and ready to strike. Along with reiterating the fact that all humans must help one another, Cullen now states an ultimatum: either society works to eliminate grief, or they can never be truly content with their lives. The “sword” of grief will come down on the public if they cannot coexist. The unique characteristics of each human being must be cherished and respected, not rejected and ridiculed.
Gascoigne uses three quatrains and a couplet to create the English sonnet “For That He Looked Not upon Her.” The first quatrain introduces the reader to the speaker and his issues with his beloved, while also describing the speaker’s appearances after being heartbroken. In the second quatrain, the speaker builds onto his accounting of suffering and sorrow with an analogy of a “mouse” (Gascoigne
This is expressed by the multiple examples of old men whom regret certain aspects of their lives and defy death even when they know their time is up. The speaker is urging his father to fight against old age and death. The meaning and subject of the poem influence the tone and mood. The tone is one of frustration and insistence. Thomas is slightly angry and demanding. His words are not a request, they are an order. The mood of the poem is is serious and solemn due to the poem focusing mainly on the issue of death. This mood and tone is created by words such as “burn”(2), “Grieved”(11) and “rage”(3) along with phrases such as “crying how bright”(7), “forked no lightning”(5), “near death”(13) and “fierce tears”(17). The insistent feeling is also created by the repetition of the lines “Do not go gentle into that good night”(1), and “Rage, rage against the dying of the light”(3). The figurative language used also affect how the meaning, tone and mood are interpreted.
The Poem begins with a personification of death as "kindly" (3). By doing this, the speaker introduces a portrayal on death that might have conflictions. Most of the times, death has a negative connotation. Whether it is an inevitable or tragic view, it opposes to what is seen in the poem. The speaker accepts death as a friendly invitation when the time is right, rather than something that is bound to happen. The speaker then joins immortality, personified as a passenger in a carriage. Immortality simply cannot be a passenger as it is a non-living thing. The reasoning for this could be that immortality ties together the link between the speaker and death, ultimately introducing the voyage to come. The first stanza sets a precedent of a meter to follow throughout most of the poem. The first line contains eight
It uses figurative language and imagery to show pathos, or emotion. “Become a stranger, to the need of pity” is an example of imagery, describing pity is someone we know, and what we should do to that feeling of pity. What the poem’s message is trying to say is that we need to no longer pity ourselves, that the feeling of pity should be absent from our mind. “Tame wild disappointment” is an example of personification, where she uses disappointment as a noun, and tell us we need to tame it, or reduce it. She is saying you shouldn’t linger on the feeling of disappointment, to not get caught up on huge disappointments.
People would not want to hear that their loved ones merely gave up and died passively. This poem in itself is a celebration of life, the poem is not only about death but it is an affirmation of life. To further emphasise the points being made Dylan Thomas utilises a wide range of literary devices. Parallelism is used from lines seven to fifteen to juxtapose the different attitudes of the so called “genres” of men at their death. This is used to outline that if you continuously lead one set type of lifestyle whether it is as a “wild man”, a “grave man” or a “good man” you will not be satisfied when your time comes to die. The only true way to be satisfied is to live a life of balance; only with a good contrast can you be at peace.
This piece has several “mini” themes given to almost each stanza, emphasizing reminiscing, grief, and isolation. Appearing to be from the point of view of a man (apparently the writer himself) profoundly grieving the departure of a lover who has passed on. He starts by calling for quiet from the ordinary objects of life; the phones, the clocks, the pianos, drums, and creatures close-by. He doesn't simply need calm, but be that as it may; he needs his misfortune well known and projected. Its tone is significantly more dismal than earlier versions, and the themes more all inclusive, despite the fact that it talks about a person. There is almost an entire stanza demonstrating a bunch of analogies that express what the speaker intended to his lover. The style in the piece readers typically perceive it as a dirge, or a mourning for the dead. It has four stanzas of four lines each with lines in
Some of the recurrent themes and motifs in Hopkins’ poetry include the idea that the world resembles a book written by God, through which he expresses himself in order to provide humans with an opportunity to understand and approach him (Gardner 11). In ‘God’s Grandeur’ Hopkins can be seen to express his concern about the spiritual crisis of the Victorian period. During this time of urbanization and industrialization, Hopkins voiced his distress about human indifference to destruction. This poem is one of the very few which he wrote during the time when he served as a priest.