Clarity
Lord Byron’s poem, “On This Day I Complete My Thirty-Sixth Year”, demonstrates many themes, including the power of self-worth. Lord Byron’s speaker is powerful with his message to audiences. The speaker reveals how reevaluating oneself can reignite the soul’s fire. Lord Byron uses several literary tools in order to make his poem substantive with its message. The strength of “On This Day I Complete My Thirty-Sixth Year” comes directly from the tone, diction, and form of the stanzas.
Firstly, Byron presents this poem in a unique fashion. The flow of the poem is a narrative. This type of poem is useful because it sounds similar to a monologue. The flow of the narration makes the poem easy to follow and understand. The narration also adds to the tension in the poem. Audiences are able to see this clearly in the first two lines of the second stanza. The speaker states, “My days are in the yellow leaf; / The flowers and fruits of Love are gone;” (Byron 743).
The specific word choice here allows feeling and emotion to take over. Byron capitalized the word love to make it a symbol and of higher importance. The fact that this love is gone also dramatizes the emptiness that the speaker is undergoing. Audiences become hooked on the poem here because natural curiosity pushes them to understand why love is gone.
Furthermore, the poem’s dramatic situation pushes the speaker to flourish. As the tension rises through the poem so does the eloquence. The diction that Byron chooses
‘When we two parted’ is an elegy of the loss of love, Byron is reflecting and analyzing a relationship that has already ended. His grief, anger and despair, intensifies his use of first person, which maintains a strong impact on the audience throughout. The poem is powerful, personal and unreserved, the emotion and passion is definitely felt through his writing. Byron’s message is ambiguous; so the reader is able to make their own assumption this is the beauty of the poem,
11. A poet can work its magic on the reader by “choice of images, music of the language, idea content, and cleverness of wordplay” (Foster 17).
the poem. Not only does the choice of diction determine the tone, but also the order in which
Lord George Gordon Byron was most notorious for his love affairs within his family and with Mediterranean boys. Since he had problems such as incest and homosexuality, he did not mind writing about his love for his cousin in “She Walks in Beauty”. Byron wrote the poem after he left his wife and England forever. Byron made his own trend of personality, the idea of the ‘Byronic Hero’. “Byron’s influence on European poetry, music, novels, operas, and paintings have been immense, although the poet was widely condemned on moral grounds by his contemporaries” (Dick, 54). Overall, the study focuses on the life of Lord George Gordon Byron, imagery, and about the lyrics of
Prompt: Write a unified essay in which you relate the imagery of the last stanza to the speaker’s view of himself earlier in the poem and to his view of how others see poets.
Imagery was also used in the poem. I found that the yellow in the first line represented that the future the writer was facing was bright and warm regardless of his choice. The undergrowth was, as undergrowth in any forest, damp and dank smelling, but not necessarily unpleasant, just something that the writer would have to face. The image of traveling through a forest also brings to mind thoughts of birds in flight, chirping and singing. Squirrels dashing through trees, rustling leaves and dropping the occasional acorn or nut also create an image of sight and sound. The sun reflecting through the trees, casting shadows and creating pockets of warm and cool air and the occasional breeze stirring through the trees are also brought to mind by this poem. The end of the poem brings to me
Unlike other forms of literature, poetry can be so complex that everyone who reads it may see something different. Two poets who are world renowned for their ability to transform reader’s perceptions with the mere use of words, are TS Eliot and Walt Whitman. “The love song of J Alfred Prufrock” by TS Eliot, tells the story of a man who is in love and contemplating confessing his emotions, but his debilitating fear of rejection stops him from going through with it. This poem skews the reader’s expectations of a love song and takes a critical perspective of love while showing all the damaging emotions that come with it. “Song of myself”, by Walt Whitman provokes a different emotion, one of joy and self-discovery. This poem focuses more on the soul and how it relates to the body. “Song of myself” and “The love song of J Alfred Prufrock” both explore the common theme of how the different perceptions of the soul and body can affect the way the speaker views themselves, others, and the world around them.
In these few lines, the speaker abruptly switches the tone from bitter to sympathetic. The poem becomes urgent, with a need to know. “The peculiar screeching of strings” characterizes the man’s thoughts, and “the luxurious fiddling with emotion” directly refers to the man’s emotional state.
symbolic richness, but at the same time the poem supplies the reader with a wide
Poetry has a role in society, not only to serve as part of the aesthetics or of the arts. It also gives us a view of what the society is in the context of when it was written and what the author is trying to express through words. The words as a tool in poetry may seem ordinary when used in ordinary circumstance. Yet, these words can hold more emotion and thought, however brief it was presented.
Another one of the most important aspects of a great poem, is it’s form. The author’s
Lord Byron’s works, such as Don Juan and other poems reflect not only the suave and charming characteristics of the Romantic Period, but they also reveal the nature of Byron’s uncommitted and scandalous life. Byron, like most Romantic era authors, was very unpredictable and opinionated in all of his writings. From the hatred of his upbringing, to the love of adventure, and also to the love of meaningless relationships with various women were majorly influenced and illustrated through all of his works and especially in “Don Juan.” Yet he still managed to infiltrate his poems with charm, romance, and heroism. Byron was a perfect fit for the Romantic Period and his poems and he was therefore known as a great contributor towards the era.
The second stanza of Lord Byron's poem focuses on the woman's perfect face. The beautiful shades and rays of the womans complexion make her a “nameless grace” (2, 2). This conveys the idea that her inner beauty is reflected in her outer beauty in the sense that she is pure and innocent on the inside so she radiates that beauty on the outside. This stanza reveals her serene thoughts:
Perhaps the most basic and essential function of poetry is to evoke a particular response in the reader. The poet,
The power of love and emotion is evident in Lord Byron's poems, "She Walks in Beauty" and "So We'll Go No More A-Roving." Because of their consecutive placement in the book, "She Walks in Beauty" and "So We'll Go No More A-Roving" tell a story of a relationship. In the first poem, "She Walks in Beauty," the speaker glimpses a beautiful woman who reminds him of "the night" and "starry skies." Throughout the piece, the speaker is fascinated by her beautiful facial features. The last stanza summarizes this beautifully when he comments on her "eloquent" characteristics. In the last half of the story, "So We'll Go No More A-Roving," however, the speaker is losing the sparks of passion that he once had for his lover. This is largely