Compare Plath and Larkin

Some of the poems Emily Dickinson wrote, usually offered many different views of death that involve physical and emotional responses of the soul and body’s journey through nothingness, madness and even eternity. The greatness in her poems comes from the use of literary devices to give meaning to death and the different interpretations of the journey through death. Although Dickinson presents contradicting thoughts sometimes, it is clear that she believes that there are many types of deaths in a human being’s life. This paper compares and contrasts the theme of death in Dickinson’s three poems titled “I heard a fly buzz”, "Because I Could Not Stop for Death” and “After great pain a Formal Feeling Comes”.

She is somewhat prepared to meet her demise. Although the tone of the poem is mainly calm, it does change as the speaker becomes closer to death. It is also very ironic because the speaker is referring to death in blithesome imagery. “We paused before a house that seemed a swelling of the ground the roof was scarcely visible the cornice in the Ground “ (5.1-4) the speaker refers to her grave as her home. The fact that she characterizes her grave as her home shows how comfortable she is with the idea of death. In the first three stanzas the poem is very relaxed. The usage of words such as “kindly” (1.2), “slowly” (2.1) and “civility” (2.8) give off an attitude of comfort. Furthermore in the 4th stanza the reader can recognize the speaker growing cautious as she begins to question her life and what exactly are the intentions of her companion. As the poem reaches the last stanzas the tone shifts from the once calm and casual tone to a more sad and serious resonance. The speaker is coming to the realization of her inevitable destiny.

In “Lady Lazarus” by Sylvia Plath, the speaker’s tone is revealed through many different poetic aspects. Throughout her writing, the speaker’s attitude towards death appears to be happy but, when looking more closely at Plath’s use of poetic devices her attitude is bitter. Shown mainly through the diction, images, sounds and repetition, this depressing tone emphasizes the speaker’s feelings about death. First, diction or word choice used throughout this poem depicts apart the meaning and stresses the tone. Next, the images used to describe the speaker’s experiences with death shows the emotions and thoughts that go through the speaker’s mind concerning death. These events the speaker

She also presents a slight rhythm to the reading that allows for smooth reading. In keeping with her open form, there is no set scheme to the rhyme pattern. However, there is a single ending sound constantly repeated without a set pattern throughout the work. She also connects pairs of lines at random just for the sake of making connections to make that particular stanza flow. At the same time, she chose blatantly not to rhyme in certain parts to catch the reader’s attention.

In her poem, “Lady Lazarus,” Sylvia Plath uses dark imagery, disturbing diction, and allusions to shameful historical happenings to create a unique and morbid tone that reflects the necessity of life and death. Although the imagery and diction and allusions are all dark and dreary, it seems that the speaker’s attitude towards death is positive. The speaker longs for death, and despises the fact the she is continually raised up out of it.

Larkin’s poem ‘Ambulances’ describes the fate of a person falling victim to death. The onlookers watch as an individual is put inside an ambulance which transforms a scene of a placid mood to a construct of an elegy. Throughout his

The three authors, Edgar Allan Poe, Anne Bradstreet, and Emily Dickinson, had poems in which they explored the common theme of death. Their unique views on death, as reflected in their poems, tells us of the different ways people looked at death during their respective times. In this essay, I will explore and explain three poems of Edgar Allan Poe, and one from Anne Bradstreet and Emily Dickinson respectively, and then compare the differences between the three authors.

Unlike in Dickinson 's poem, the rhyming scheme carries throughout the whole poem, although the AABBCDED rhyme pattern contains a few cases of near rhyme.

rhyming every other line. The poem continues in this pattern until the last two lines of the

The ways death is approached and depicted in literature are diverse and numerous. Not unlike the ways different religions throughout the world and history have interpreted, and continue to interpret, this inevitable phenomenon, art and literature offer a wide variety of views as to what happens after death and what dying means. Of course, there are some common threads and themes associated with dying that are frequently seen and used, both in prose and in poetry. The tropes of death are familiar and common, but each writer still brings its own vision and frames it in its own personal way. Ernest Dowson and Dylan Thomas are two writers who, while not separated by a long period of time, came from very different period and wrote in different literary movements. Despite those differences, they share some similarities in the way they chose to depict and portray death in their poetry. In the poems Do Not Go Gentle Into

The Victorian Age consisted of many poets using death as the main topic of their poems. Most deaths during this Age occurred at home and the mortality rate was much higher than it is in our time. Most of the deceased stayed in their homes until the burial. Some were not burried for a week, which made the poorer people of the Age have to stay in a room with the deceased for a week or more. Poets like Elizabeth Barret Browning and Robert Browning were influenced by the death of their love ones during this Age of time. The Victorian Age consisted of high mortality rates, lost loved ones, and many years of grief for the deceased.

Furthering the persona’s introduction, lines two through four of the poem exemplify the narrator’s feelings of isolation, both spiritually and personally. Caused by the divine and men’s shame, the persona inhabits an “outcast state.” Isolated from peers and friends, the persona weeps when stating “I all alone.” The alliteration emphasizes the narrator’s emotion of complete desolation. Not only does he doubt his faith, but also feels distant from God. In line three, the poem reads, “Trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries.” The persona’s desperate prayers not only seem useless and unheard, but also the use of “trouble” connotes his “cries” cause annoyance. Employing metonymy by referring to God as “deaf heaven,” the persona indirectly distances himself farther from his faith by refusing to directly name the unresponsive listener to his bellows. The line’s meter deepens the persona’s distance from God. Although the poem reads in iambic pentameter, the word “heaven” and its syllables create a trochee, the complete opposite of the iamb. The slight change in meter brings emphasis to his isolation. The entirety of the poem speaks of the persona’s identify and emotions in iambs except for the mention of God, from whom he feels the most

Emily Dickinson once said, “Dying is a wild night and a new road.” Some people welcome death with open arms while others cower in fear when confronted in the arms of death. Through the use of ambiguity, metaphors, personification and paradoxes Emily Dickinson still gives readers a sense of vagueness on how she feels about dying. Emily Dickinson inventively expresses the nature of death in the poems, “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain (280)”, “I Heard a fly Buzz—When I Died—(465)“ and “Because I could not stop for Death—(712)”.

Because the poem is long, it won’t be quoted extensively here, but it is attached at the end of the paper for ease of reference. Instead, the paper will analyze the poetic elements in the work, stanza by stanza. First, because the poem is being read on-line, it’s not possible to say for certain that each stanza is a particular number of lines long. Each of several versions looks different on the screen; that is, there is no pattern to the number of lines in each stanza. However, the stanzas are more like paragraphs in a letter than

The poem begins with two lines which are repeated throughout the poem which convey what the narrator is thinking, they represent the voice in