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Autobiography Essay

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Autobiography

The title autobiography is ironic. This poem works on deception. It's simple but deliberate deceptive as some emotions are quite dark. The poem characterises the illness and death of Louis MacNeice's mother.

The poem starts off quite happy, the use of colour is important in this poem, as green suggests spring and happiness. Yellow suggests sunlight, youth and pleasant. Black suggests horrific and ghastly images and dark also suggests horrific and frightening images.

The rhyming couplets give us a sense of ease in his childhood but the refrain "Come back early or never come" introduces us to loss and abandonment. MacNeice gives his mother happy colours like yellow, showing that he loved her, but he gives …show more content…

The refrain "come back early or never come" refers to his mother, who died while his young. He wants her to come back very soon or not to come back at all, it could be a direct plea aimed at his mother. The refrain shows haunting quality which emphasizes MacNeice's sense of loss. The "Gentle, gentle, gentleness" of his mother is opposite to that of his loud father. It indicates his love for his mother opposite to his father, who I think he loathed.

The bright colours yellow and green which we met in the first three stanzas have now gone in stanza four. He uses gothic colours black.
The use of the colour black there is important, as it represents death and fear. In the same stanza MacNeice says, "When I was five the black dreams came, nothing after that was quite the same". Again, he was referring to his mothers' death as when she died he started to get lots of nightmare and his life was never the same.

In the next stanza when he says that the dark was talking to the dead, this is personification. Its shows of the child's terror. MacNeice also says that the lamp was dark beside his bed, this shows that things that usually bring MacNeice comfort aren't anymore and they are bringing him darkness instead.

When he mentions "Nobody, nobody was there", we can tell that because the word nobody is repeated, it highlights the child's loneliness and terror. In the seventh stanza it says silent terror - terror is such a

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