In the poem “The Warm and the Cold”, Ted Hughes uses many different types of literary devices to convey his message. The main devices used are similes, metaphors, personification, and imagery. Every stanza begins with the theme of cold, with the exception of the last stanza. After a stanza begins with the theme of freezing and frost. Hughes then compares warm, burrowed animals that are in their habitats to other warm things; such as “the badger in its bedding, like a loaf in the oven”. The main theme of the poem is how all forms of life adapt to cold weather. Even plants and nonliving things such as hills are described in the poem. Although the animals are perfectly adapting to the cold weather, the farmers compared in the last stanza seem to be suffering as they “turn in their sleep like oxen on spits”. This comparison makes a clear contribution to the theme that is present in most of Hughes’ poems; the theme of nature.
The first and most present literary device in the poem is imagery. In the three main stanzas, animals that are burrowed into their habitats are compared to other warm things. For example, “and the butterfly in its mummy like a viol in its case” first describes a butterfly cosily cocooned in its home, and then compares it to an instrument locked safely in a case, protected from all outside dangers. Many different animals described in the poem in order to emphasize how all animals have their warm, cosy homes to retreat to when they need to, such as in the
Analyse (tell me how the poet creates this image - choice of words, literary devices, implication etc)The idea of a freezing, harsh climate is emphasized with "winter's city" and "winter's leaves". The poet uses words like "death" and "terrible" to highlight the freezing, barren winter.
One of the more beautiful things about nature is that it is constantly changing and hold so many mysteries that we don’t understand. Each day brings new beauties and scenes that weren’t there yesterday. Having grown up on the east coast might have caused me to have a greater appreciation for all of the seasons, but one of my favorite things about season is being able to witness the changing over form one to the next. How each plant knows that the change is coming and they all magically start to prepare themselves for the new setting they’re going to create. The romantics capture the mysteries of nature in some of the most beautiful poetry. They delve deep into the possible meanings of what nature could be attempting to tell us or simple what they find beautiful about what they see in nature. One piece that stuck with me this quarter was The Snow Storm by Ralph Waldo Emerson. Winter has always been one of my favorite season since I was a little girl and have always anxiously awaited that first snow fall, dreaming of a white Christmas that year. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s The Snow Storm brought back nostalgic memories of snow filled days in my childhood and made me appreciate having actually experienced snow in real life and the beauty
Nature is first described in a peaceful and confident mood as something majestic, with the sun as the powerful being which controls this nature. However, by the end of the first stanza, “The hawk comes”. This phrase is said as if the narrator is afraid of the hawk and its presence is going to change the mood of the rest of the poem. The next stanza suddenly uses sharp diction, such as “scythes”, “honed”, and “steel-edge”, to illustrate the hawk’s stunning motions and the powerful aura of the hawk that is felt just from its existence, causing the mood of the poem to slowly transition to fearful, yet respectable. The narrator adores this change the hawk is causing on nature, and describes the scene with the hawk in awe, showing how the poet finds the changing of nature attractive.
The fact that enjambment is used throughout the poem such as in the lines, “like a colour slide or press an ear against its hive” portrays a lack of structure and therefore emphasizes the initial enjoyment one feels when reading a poem before the chore of analyzing it begins. This is also emphasized through the fact that the poem is a free verse poem.
The American Civil War is one of the most impactful course of events in American History due to the massive violence, inadequate medical care, and destruction of the southern landscape. The war, which last from 1861-1865, resulted in over 625,000 casualties on the battlefield and a large unknown number of civilian and slave deaths. Due to the horrifying conditions of battle and of grossly understaffed and unequipped field hospitals, many soldiers deserted their positions and attempted to return home; such is the story of a confederate soldier named Inman in the novel Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier. The Civil War also massively impacted the nations African-American populations as slaves were now free, however,
Ted hughes uses literary techniques in the most vivid way, to illustrate what his idea of a water lily painting looked like. In all of his works, the goal is to describe a task or a thing, but make the reader understand it by using nature as the key. The task in this poem is presented by the title “How To Paint A Water Lily”. The reason he wrote this poem, was to describe nature by decorating the spirit of the environment around the lily. The two literary techniques that will be discussed in this paper are imagery and alliteration.
In Cold Blood, written by Truman Capote, is a book that encloses the true story of a family, the Clutters, whose lives were brutally ended by the barrel of a 12-gauge shotgun. The killers were 2 men, each with 2 different backgrounds and personalities, each with his own reasons to take part in such a harrowing deed. Capote illustrates the events leading up to the murder in sharp detail and describes its aftermath with such a perspective that one feels that he is right there with the culprits, whose names are Dick Hickock and Perry Smith. They had very critical roles in the murder and how they themselves were caught, and in many ways they were foils for one another. Through Capote's extensive descriptions
In” Winter Saturday” by Earle Birney, the poet develops the comparison between the farmers and caterpillars by visual and kinesthetic imagery. The harsh weather echoes the farmers’ empty feeling. A storm hit the town and the wind and the snow start while the farmers “find in the Ford their cocoon” (4), implying that they are alone facing the cold weather similar to caterpillars struggling to survive in the cruel nature. Their feeling of void is amplified by the chilling environment which induces their “dreams of light and sound” (7) which matches moths’ behaviour to approach light. When they arrive in the city centre where the lights are concentrated, their movement is compared to the moths beating wings as they “flutter to movie / [and] throb
Metaphoric language is used in both works to establish tone, but the approaches differ. In Cold Mountain, Frazier uses similes to bring emphasis on different aspects of nature. For instance, the author describes the heron's legs and wings as "black as the river." This is to continue the smooth, even tone of the passage and establish that there is a continuous circle, spawning from nature and leading right back to nature. Relating the heron to another awe-inspiring aspect of nature simply elevates its divinity. Personification is also used in this passage to give the paragraphs an ironic tone. When Frazier describes the heron as "look[ing] high as a man in the slant light with its long shadow blown out across the water", he establishes a tone of irony. The heron is mocking mankind, who stands in front of nature (and supposedly above it) and allow themselves to consume it entirely. The irony continues as the heron looks as if it does not know where to step next, lost in its own conceit. This ironic tone is a laugh at mankind for being so selfish. However, in the poem, Oliver speaks in the first person narrative, as if mankind is attached to nature and can comprehend what is happening. This gives the poem a cynical tone, full of anticipated destruction and isolation. Metaphoric language adds to tone immensely.
Mark Strand’s poem, “Poor North” depicts the life of a married couple facing countless struggles during a harsh winter. It tells of a man working in an unsuccessful store while his wife sits at home, wishing for her old life back. The way the wife copes with her sadness is both intriguing and perplexing. She misses her old life, even though it is described to have not been special; however, the wife may be a person who never feels satisfied or fulfilled by the external world due to internal conflict. Despite the wife’s obvious misery, she stays by her husband’s side and they stroll in the cold together, bracing the wind. As a means of escape from life, she peers into her past in order to find hope in the present.
Many authors use literary devices such as allusions, metaphors, similes, imagery, euphemisms, and others to create a more enhanced effect to their work. Ray Bradbury, the author of the acclaimed dystopian novel, Fahrenheit 451, cleverly incorporated several of these, throughout the text, along with a lot of symbolism. One example is the relentless burning of literature, symbolizing the ignorance of human beings, as well as the censorship of knowledge and freedom of thought. Another example is the many fascinating technological innovations featured in the novel, such as the TV walls or the mechanical hound, which expresses how people had mindlessly replaced the “real” stuff with the artificial.
“Ink smeared like bird prints in snow” is the first simile that appears in the poem and serves multiple purposes. The most obvious one is the creation of imagery, where it compares the black words the persona writes on paper to the bird’s foot prints that are left behind when a bird walks on snow. The imagery alludes that the persona will leave a “footprint” in the form of a note that people can use to trace her path but she will never be there anymore. From line thirty-six to forty, the poet creates another imagery of a sparrow (a tiny and a delicate bird) flying in windy snowing weather. The sparrow is dizzied and sullied by the violent wind; it encounters a lot of difficulties and fear. In this imagery, the persona compares herself with the delicate bird. She compares the challenges that the sparrow goes through to the suffering she encounters relating to her parents.
In the second stanza it is the semantic field of cold: ‘winter’, ‘ice’, ‘naked’, ‘snow’. All these lexical items give us a feeling of cold which evokes loneliness, unknown, fear.
Although this poem also is connected with nature, the theme is more universal in that it could be related to Armageddon, or the end of the world. Even though this theme may seem simple, it is really complex because we do not know how Frost could possibly
In a country where Divorce is more normalized than ever before, one can be guilty of neglecting to consider the pain it can cause, not just the couple, but also their children. The short story “Hot or Cold” by Maile Meloy is a remembrance from the author's life which communicates the divorce of her parents represented in a nostalgic memory from her past. In the piece, the author’s young self plays in a van while her parents deal with an unexpected encounter with a bear. After a brief chase, the parents escape and the family drives away. The author masterfully develops the story by hinting at the nature of the parents relationship by adding clever metaphors, until it is apparent that the parents eventually divorce and that the story is only a dream. In the short story, the author utilizes juxtaposition, a motif, and metaphors, to suggest that memories create narratives, true or otherwise, that help one comprehend events that are otherwise incomprehensible.