How Do Poems Use Language to Create Imaginary Worlds That Question Our Understanding of Human Nature?

The use of simile in the last stanza ‘matchstick hands as pale as the violet stems they lived among’ is used to compare a frog to violet flowers, which are very delicate and easily broken. The innocence of childhood is painted through this visual technique as the narrator only sees the frogs being very delicate, but to the readers the simile also creates a vivid image of the condition of the ‘Frogs’/ the French. The use of first person helps to create a reminiscent tone about the narrator’s experiences, and further helps to stress the ideas of childhood innocence and the influence of war on children because the poem is written from a child’s perspective. The use of enjambment generates a conversational and personal tone, emphasizing to the readers the reality of the themes discussed throughout the poem. The use of symbolism of frogs as pets and also representing the French highlights the idea that adults saw ‘Frogs’ as insignificant or unworthy to speak about, whereas the children could not understand this adult thought, and they placed exemplary regard to the wellbeing of the

In the poem “Postscript” by Seamus Heaney, the speaker describes an experience with a natural landscape in order to illustrate how experiences can evoke feelings that overwhelm us with their transcendent beauty and leave us speechless. Finding words for the beautiful, sublime, uplifting moments can be difficult when encountering such places, and even though the speaker leaves space for the ineffable, the poem makes the reader feel as though they have received a glimpse of something true, a valuable piece of advice about how to move through the world. This essay will therefore analyse the poem in order to discover and articulate how and why this poem advises the reader on how to create their own version of his unique fleeting experience.

      Yet this darker revelation is quickly eclipsed by one last happy irony, a revelation of sorts: the poem so artfully represents it subject, its conspicuous ingenuities of form so undulate and glitter like the mist of mayflies, that the poem itself becomes the mayflies?or means to come as close as language can take it.  As a special way of seeing, the poem means to breech the gulf between seer and thing seen and thus forge a connection to the object world, the speaker?s own absence from which he ostensibly laments.  That this attempt is successful seems implicit in the last lines of the poem.  There, it occurs to the speaker that his sense of separateness and mortality can be allayed by the idea that he has been ?called? to be a poetic seer, ?one whose task is joyfully to see/ How fair

The poem immediately begins with the poet’s headmaster bearing tragic news to him regarding his father’s death. Lucie-Smith describes the headmaster’s bald head as a ‘shiny dome’. This detailed description gives us inkling that when somebody is grief-stricken, their surroundings instantly become conspicuous. This is proven when the poet notices the headmaster’s ‘brown tobacco jar’ as well. We think that grief is a gradual process in one’s childhood, and the first stage of it would be heightened awareness of one’s surroundings because as a child, the moment he learns of the loss of his father, is when he

The writing styles of Edgar Allen Poe and Jorge Luis Borges are very in sync when it comes to literary devices such as irony, imagery, setting and so on. In many of their stories, the authors demonstrate their extraordinary technique through the short story “The Purloined Letter” written by Poe and “The Garden of Forking Paths” written by Borges. Piquing the readers mind and causing a sensation of awe at the end their story, they entice the reader to experience a whole new world of literature, forcing the reader to scrutinize the text in a manner, in which a pedestrian reader would find complex. These authors are one when it comes to “painting an imagine”, however differences do occur within the actual use of literary devices that both authors

What is poetry? According to the 47 Essential Poetry Terms, poetry is “abstract language.” There are multiple ways of exploring the abstractness of poetry. One is DIDLS, touching upon the areas of Diction, Imagery, Details, Language, and Sentence Structure. Another is TPCASTT, which touches upon Title, Paraphrase, Connotation, Attitude, Shift In Attitude, Revisitation of the Title, and Theme. The last one is the aforementioned 47 Essential Poetry Terms, 47 devices that describe various occurrences found in poetry. The 3 poems that will be examined in this in this essay. Alliteration, Couplet, and Personification reflect the three most prominent poetry devices found in Holy Sonnet 10, Macavity The Mystery Cat, and The Sunshine Kid.

When a writer calls his work a romance, it need hardly be observed that he wishes to claim a certain latitude, both as to its fashion and material, which he would not have felt himself entitled to assume, had he professed to be writing a novel. The latter form of composition is presumed to aim at a very minute fidelity, not merely to the possible, but to the probable and ordinary course of man's experience. The former--while, as a work of art, it must rigidly subject itself to laws, and while it sins unpardonably so far as it may swerve aside from the truth of the human heart--has fairly a right to present that truth under circumstances, to a great extent, of the writer's own choosing or creation. If he think fit, also, he may so manage his atmospherical medium as to bring out or mellow the lights, and deepen and enrich the shadows, of the picture. ("Preface")

By analysing the structure (shift from external to internal landscape), language (tenses, pronoun), and presentation of the experience of seeing the daffodils, I seek to demonstrate that feelings of the sublime are only evoked when the narrator’s imagination participates in the scene he has internalized in his memory. While the first three stanzas exemplify a merely physical stimulus and response mechanism to nature, the last stanza shows how active poetic imagination enables man to recreate and amplify emotions encountered, thus resulting in feelings of the sublime. Why does the observer not recognise the ‘wealth’ the scene brings in that moment? How does poetic imagination connect the physical eye and the inner eye to allow for sublime, transcendental experience? Hess argues that the poem “depend[s] for [its] power on the narrator’s ability to fix a single, discrete, visually defined moment of experience in his mind, to which he can later return in acts of private memory and imagination” (298). An example of the recapturing of emotions is seen where “gay” (I. 15) is recaptured as “pleasure” (I. 23) at the end. Active imagination, which draws inspiration from memory of the initial encounter, is now a permanent possession that

Word choice plays a crucial role in understanding the poem “Dialogue.” The words “love”, “body”, “bore”, “shape”, and “lips” are all used in this short poem. Immediately, this keens the reader into a commentary about love between the two speakers, He and She. The conflict in the poem arises from He being bound to love full of “abundance and splendor” and She being inhibited, by an immense barrier, to love. She even exclaims how without love, She’s blind, and that if “this [love] were to occur” She’d be resurrected. Furthermore, She mentions how “currently nothing remains to survive,” that her present is banal. The poem thus takes on the form of a warning call about how a romance can only truly come to fruition through requited love. This reciprocation enables a healthy open mind, as opposed to a singular lens of a He or She. The idea of a requited romance and selection of lustful words are not unique to “Dialogue”, similar motifs and techniques occur throughout

Clearly, poetic techniques and structure are used to convey and influence the meaning of the poems. In the poems ‘Limbo’ and ‘What were they like?’, the poets create powerful symbols which can convey a range of key ideas. Levertov focuses on how

This essay is included my own understanding, plus some information that I gathered from a lot of researches and critics’ comments on this poem. I, myself interpret this poem through the first perspective I would explain about, and in two other perspectives my ideas hardly is included.

Nature and the Romantics are two sides of the same coin. In almost every single poem we have read over the course of this semester we have been able to find hints of the natural world. These instances were moments of hunger. While industrialization was tearing landscapes up by their roots, Romantic poets were desperate to experience the euphoric sense of sublimity they had come to associate with the highest level of consciousness. However, this sense of sublimity is not a constant achievable state. For each poet the definition is different, and time was altering the facets of this theory. This paper will look critically at two poets and one essayist in an attempt to study the changing “face” of sublimity. For

It celebrates light as a mediator between human subject and physical environment noting that a house meets the sun: “As if stone left its hard and quarried state/ To be reciprocal to light” (18).This focus on the physical environment and on embodied, sensory depictions, disturbs the tightly controlled neatness of Jennings’s earlier lyrics. The depicted scene is formed into a choral whole but then is taken apart. The idea of stone and light as ‘common’, and of ‘houses which contrive to be designed of sun’, the overall impression is created of the landscape as unified: the stone might almost seem to have ‘left’ the ground willingly to form the current scene; the houses actively ‘contrive’ to establish the current situation; and in that situation they are ‘designed of sun’. If the speaker’s sense of a unified scene is resistant to the compartmentalizing of landscape to make possible clear expression then her poem accordingly perplexes and conflates rather than clarifying. This further leads to fractional crumpling of the scene and of singular meaning: as the “falling beams bound and rebound upon/Shutter and wall’, there are many meanings within the speaker’s perception of the landscape. The poem presents a complex view of the landscape and on the other hand it serves the expressive purpose of the Movement

Poetry is a craft of near-paradox. Poets often say that they aim to encase the abstract within the concrete, describe without adjectives or adverbs, and expound upon concepts with the utmost concision. To meet these formidable challenges, they keep several important literary devices at their disposal, one of which is the conceit. Commonly defined as an elaborately extended metaphor, the conceit often allows poets to capture complicated ideas through comparison with images closer to readers’ everyday experiences. If the concept that the poet wishes to illustrate comes from the theological or philosophical fields, figurative language like the conceit can rescue the poet from didacticism as well as opacity. “On a Drop of Dew,” a short

The breakdown of the basic nature of Chinese and English lyrical relations shows that they can be distinguished from one another through the use of metaphor to evoke the relationship between scene and feeling and vehicle and tenor respectively. The Western poetry’s use of metaphor celebrates the use of human deception through a made-up connection between that which is being talked about (tenor) and the one who talks about it (vehicle). On the other hand, the Chinese poetry’s relies on the metaphor to come up with the context of scene and feeling which involves the appreciation of the dynamic lyrical resonance between nature and the human being. Moreover, while the Western practice engages in purposeful process of conveyance to formulate such explicit correspondence between tenor and vehicle, the Chinese tradition is set apart by the spontaneous encounter that evokes the implicit correspondence between scene and feeling. This paper therefore looks into the use of scene and feeling in Chinese poetry and tenor and vehicle in Western poetry in relation to the metaphor with an effort to highlight their differences and application.