Figurative Language In Sailing The Byzantium

The images of a war-torn landscape and the anonymity of the mother murdered at her door evoke the feelings of fear felt by readers in the time. Bradley writes “Yeats’ language broadens the context so that so that it could be any mother and child in the ravaged landscape of wartime” (115). The violet nature of the poem provides a domineering relation to place, one which feels inescapable. According to Michael Wood, violence in Yeats’ poetry “whether personal, political or apocalyptic—is always sudden and surprising, visible, unmistakable, inflicts or promises injury and is fundamentally uncontrollable.”

In the first stanza Yeats expresses his conflicting loathing and admiration for modernity through the juxtaposition of “vivid faces” and “grey houses”. This represents the possibilities that modernity can bring; the revitalising of the community or the destruction of tradition and age old energy already lost by the modifications in the city. The repetition of the phrase “A terrible beauty is born” in the first and fourth stanzas articulate this inner turmoil revolving around modernity. This oxymoronic declaration is emphasised throughout the text by Yeats’ confusion towards the rebellion and its necessity. The fourth stanza embodies this conflict, removing the previously represented idea that life in pre-rebellion Ireland was a “casual comedy”, alluding to an Elizabethan play where the characters were content. By asking the rhetoric questions “was it needless death” and “O when may [British rule] suffice?” Yeats parallels the unresolved contradiction of “terrible beauty”. However, this sensitive treatment of conflict allows the retainment of ambiguity and can be related to any change within life, hence allowing audiences to superimpose their own beliefs and ideas into the poem. Yeats continues to explore his aversion towards modernism in The Second Coming with the appointment of a new “gyre” standing as the symbol for a new age. The fear of

While both Keats and Longfellow’s poems, “When I Have Fears” and “Mezzo Cammin,” focus on the unfulfillment of goals in life and the menacing appearance of death, their final assumptions of death are related but different. Both poems share similarity focusing on the poets’ thoughts as they contemplate the inevitability of their deaths and whether their accomplishments have meaning after death, but the poets exhibit a different attiutude towards their subject. Keats fears that he will not be able to fully accomplish his life goals before he dies, but he acknowledges the frivolity of earthly aspirations when faced with death. On the other hand, Longfellow, while also mourning the loss of his chance to accomplish his goals, maintains comfort in the past compared to the uncertain future. Longfellow maintains a grim, pessimistic tone throughout his poem juxtaposes the almost hopeful tone Keats exhibits throughout his poem. Through the use of imagery, literary devices, and diction, Keats and Longfellow convey their overall contrasting attitudes toward death.

In the poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Samuel Taylor Coleridge uses Figurative language to portray the different moods, tones and scenes that are displayed throughout the story being told. A constant figurative language that is used throughout this poem is the use of repetition and its different forms, such as alliteration and anaphora. Each one of these devices are used to give character to the writing and emphasize a certain point. The use of irony is also being displayed, specifically in part II starting on lines 37, where the mariner explains the amount of water there was, but not one drop to be drank. This also represents a hyperbole because it exemplifies the immense thirst of the mariner and how he can’t have any of the large

Samuel Taylor Coleridge 's “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” is a very influential poem in the English language. “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” is well known for its extensive use of vivid imagery and sound. The language used throughout the poem is beautiful, and it portrays the Romanticism of the time. The use of simile, metaphor, and personification in “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” enhances the images a reader gains through this dramatic poem.

The sages represent the father-like figure that hold to power to life, which the aging man requests from sages. As Simon O. Lesser, author of “Sailing to Byzantium”-Another Voyage, Another Reading, states, “In this poem, it appears to be widely believed, Yeats triumphantly confronts and liquidates his fears of aging and death…. [H]e discovers that engrossment in poetry is the only, but a sufficient, recompense for the privatizations of old age” (291), which Yeats’ reasoning for writing this poem: to spread the message that anyone can live forever through their art. While the narrator in the poem never officially possess a proper name, the poet Yeats writes this poem to express his lack of fear for death after discovering that his memory continues to live through all his poems. William Butler Yeats knows that he lives forever through all those who continue to read and understand his poems, because his works lives on in others. While Yeats never explicitly states this, the idea that poems keep the poet alive forever derives from philosophical thought and reasoning, similar to the aging man that visits the mosaic painting. Similar to the aging man in the poem, Yeats searches for the sage-like figures that provide the answer to death that

Often times, nature is perceived in many different ways. This can be as a result of people having their own opinions and knowledge. The Romantic era was an intellectual movement that lasted from about 1800-1850. Romantic poets believed that nature is beautiful and controls fate. The Romantics often used figurative language to describe and give nature traits.

The features of an elegy are exercised in the most effective way during the last stanza, even though the loss described in the last stanza is also an anticipated loss. Millay transitions from justifying that perhaps few natural things will notice the anticipated death, to clarifying that the beauty of the essential elements will be lost due to this certain

One of the important themes in William Butlers Yeats’s poem “Sailing to Byzantium” and Audre Lordes poem “Coal” is their explanation of different transformations and transitions.Each challenge that they faced was embraced to help them face any challenges they faced.In both poems the person seeked for changes in their life.Each poem also showed how certain items were significant to each author.Both proved how the specific items helped each have a reason for the changes each person wanted to make.

Yeats has composed an effectively concise poem of only twelve lines in iambic pentameter. Iambic pentameter is harnessed to replicate human speech patterns; as if the four rhetorical questions are being posed to the reader from the speaker. The romantic and personal content of this poem creates a certain level of intimacy the reader will feel with Yeats. With a simple ABABCDCDEFEF rhyming structure there is a crucial lack of rhyming couplets (often used to accentuate a couple 's closeness). Therefore a distance is already established between the speaker and their subject. Additionally, Yeats creates the emotional response to this poem by exploring historical, personal, political and classical mythological elements. Yet, at the very foreground this is a love poem, and the underlying focus on love makes this poem a typical lyric.

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 the line “I can sing a true song of myself,” (1) which tells the reader that this story is specifically about the speaker. The speaker is a seafaring man, and most of his hardships have to do with his difficult life at sea in the winter. The speaker’s voyage is a tumultuous one, filled with winter storms that he cannot find shelter from. Throughout the first half of the poem, there is diction invoking the cold. “Pinched with cold were my feet, bound by frost in cold fetters,” (8-10) and “hung with icicles while hail flew in showers.” (17) It is notable that his voyage takes place in the winter, because winter has historically been a time when people lacked the things they needed and worried for their survival. The Seafarer, too, lacks things he needs. He lacks shelter from the cold, because “the anxious night-watch often held [him] at the ship’s stem,” (6-7) as he looked ahead for obstacles in the ship’s path. This can be seen as a metaphor for anxiety about the future, which is a struggle not only for the speaker himself, but for many people at the time of this poem’s creation. English speakers in this time lived among the ruins of Rome; they understood that things fall apart over time. The seafarer himself later says “The days are lost, and all the pomp of this earthly kingdom,” (81-82) referring to the fall of Rome and the loss of those days of plenty.

In “The Man Who Dreamed of Faeryland”, Yeats uses iambic pentameter to keep the consistency of this narrative poem moving forward. Similarly to the fragments Yeats uses in “The Stolen Child”, Yeats keeps the reader tethered to “The Man Who Dreamed” by leaving them with a cliffhanger at the end of each line.

In the second stanza, the speaker beholds a piper joyfully playing under the tress for his lover to find him with song. “Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on; not to the sensual ear, but, more endeared. The use of imagery of the senses is effective here. For I consider poetry to be more musical in nature than literary text. The speaker claims to be hearing melodies emanating from the urn, which for me the sound transmission from the urn correlates to the finite aspects of fleeting love. While the nature of art of the urn seems to me to represent the exquisiteness and infinity of the universe. Indeed, the sounds of silence from art is akin to vastness of space and time. “She cannot fade, though, thou hast not thy bliss,” (line19). Keats is asking the readers to not grieve for him. Because, her beauty will not diminish over time it is everlasting.

The poem by W. B. Yeats is considered one of the greatest poems in the English language and quite frankly, it’s very understandable to why it is. He speaks up about growing old in this poem and he brings up how as you get older, people tend to realize that the world is for young people and that old people are just around, watching as the younger generation makes the world the way it is. Sailing To Byzantium is one of the more well-known poems that point out that as you get older, a person begins to realize what is actually going on and that the world isn’t really meant for the old and more so the young. In the poem, Sailing To Byzantium, the three messages that were the most pointed out is wisdom comes with age, the world is for the young and