Ask Me

Overall, this poem shows the past, present, and future of the writer. His life is full of regret at points and then seems hopeful in others. This poem could be viewed in many ways but mostly you understand it as a man who wishes he could change his past because he knows his future is near and his life will soon be coming to an

You can tell that in the poem the season is fall because of the color of the wood. In the fall the color of the wood turns yellow which indicates that the poem takes place in the fall. The season’s representations of what time frame a person life is in. How spring represents how someone is at that kid stage of their lives and how they are getting ready to bloom into their personalities. Summer shows how people are at the fun stage of their lives. That teenage to adult hood part of life. Winter is that time of life when all the excitement has went away, kind of like the years a person is elderly. Here is a man that has had many outcomes from the decision he had made in life, so he understands how important it is to it is to make a choice and live with whatever comes after making the choices. In lines 11-12 the speakers says “And both that morning equally lay, “In leaves no step had trodden black”. When he says the leaves haven’t been trodden black indicates that the leaves haven’t been crushed from people stepping on them. So this means he was the only that have been on that

I believe, from a literary stance, Stafford was effective in his paraphrasing by explaining the emotion behind the enjambment of his piece. With the way Stafford breaks up his thoughts with enjambment, he begins to mold an underlying theme of silent examination through the course of his life. Although subtle in the poem, Stafford points out in his paraphrase description that his use of this style “would have to be achieved at certain costs, either in

“Introduction to Poetry” and “Traveling Through the Dark,” are poems written by Billy Collins and William Stafford. The poem’s, “Introduction to Poetry”, main conflict is a teacher who tries to get his students to read and appreciate a poem, but what all the students only care about is figuring out what it means. The conflict is highlighted through the many uses of metaphors to help us understand how he wants the students to look and decipher a poem and how they only focus on finding the meaning instead of taking their time to listen and see the art of poetry. William Stafford’s poem, “Traveling Through the Dark,” describes a driver’s dilemma of deciding whether to throw a dead pregnant deer into the river, or leave it laying on the road where it can cause an accident. In both poems, the use of literary devices such as metaphors, personification, imagery, and diction are effective in making and building up the conflict and reaching the resolution.

personifying the river and actually making it a character at the end of the novel, it

The passionate tone within the poem assists in bringing out the author’s message. For example in lines twenty-seven to thirty-eight:

The poem at first comes off as a simple poem about spring and winter, but there are many hidden meanings as well. As well as the fear of the end of the world.

“The Life River” was written to allow readers to understand the difficulties of life and how this Poem explains how people feel and act when things continuously doesn’t go they way it was supposed to, or when something bad happens over and over again. The people eventually turn to their last source of secretary to escape. Their mind. In “The Life River,” the writer uses simile, metaphor, and personification to portray that although life is frustrating, the only way to deal with it is to face the fact and go with the flow.

Stafford uses his unique writing skills to create poems that help connect with people, even if they do not understand the poem— pieces of the poem can create a pull on the reader.

is saying, and Frosts personal pain that he is suffering from that he ingrains into this poem. The

Winter is a time of cold, when forests die and animals hide from the shrieking winds and biting cold. Winter is a time for survival against the odds. How apt that the speaker is struggling against the "lovely, dark and deep" woods to remember that he has "miles to go before [he] sleep[s]." The "easy wind" calls to him, and the "downy flake" beckons him to a comfortable sleep. If the speaker had paused on a bright summer day, the sleep might be just a short rest, but the poem is set on the "darkest evening of the year" while the "woods fill up with snow," and any rest taken in the "lovely, dark and deep" woods would result in the eternal sleep of death (474).

The repeated sounds of word interior consonants, or consonance, also plays a role in adding to the verbal flow of the poem with the sounds of the words “all, fills, alabaster, wool, wrinkles, and stump, stack, stem, and wrists, posts, ghosts” More of the beautiful imagery of the poem is obvious when it is paraphrased and also reveals the emotional theme of the peace and tranquility that is experienced in the leaden silence of a heavy snowfall. This is the poem paraphrased-Snow falls silently from dark and heavy clouds and sprinkles the forest and roads that are blanketed in white, it fills in and equals out the mountains and the valleys in a continuous blanket covering fences in a heavenly sheet, all the remains of the summer’s harvest in the fields with covered with snow and showing not a clue, beautifully highlighting the remaining exposed features, then vanishing in a vapor, leaving no traces of their presence. It instantly reminds anybody that has ever experienced a winter storm of this beauty in nature, and of the peace and beauty in the purity of the clean snow. Dickinson also makes the reader subliminally realize the perceptual pleasure and heightened imagery of the scene by associating the scenes with other things normally associated with beauty such as the application of powders and makeup to a person’s face, celestial veils, and the ruffled ankles of a Queen.

Like “The Road Not Taken”, in “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”, the speaker has to make a big decision in his life. He has to choose between isolation and social obligation. At first glance, this poem might denote stopping in the woods to escape the hustle and bustle of city life. Different symbols in this poem though reveal that stop in the poem could be referring to death. In this phrase “Between the woods and frozen lake”, the wood becomes a symbol of life where frozen lake signifies death. When the speaker reaches the woods, he finds a world offering perfect, quiet and solitude, existing side by side with the realization that there is also another world, a world of people and social obligation. Both

The reader must participate in the making of the poem or story by digging the structure out and create coherence out of the seeming incoherence. Therefore, the search for meaning, even if it does not succeed, becomes meaningful itself.

This is a cold poem in more ways than one.The subject matter is seasonally icy and so is the tone of the speaker. The insouciant delivery suggests