The Disillusionment of Ten O'Clock, what a time of night! "The houses are haunted by white night-gowns." Everything is the same from one house to the next. Not only does Wallace Stevens hint at the Disillusionment of Ten O'Clock, he also brings forth feelings of loneliness and despair through his select use of neutral diction. Stevens emphasizes neutral diction using parallelism and repetition, the sameness of the syntax, and an ironic change in wording. Nevertheless, the emotion of the poem is only brought about by Stevens' specific use of neutral diction.
"None are green, or purple with green rings, or green with yellow rings, or yellow with blue rings." A common theme runs throughout this poem, which is linked together through the
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These feelings are reflected onto the reader, who in turn obtains the same emotions as the author, those of loneliness and despair for the situation.
In every poem, the diction an author chooses can drastically change the impression the reader acquires. Disillusionment of Ten O'Clock has proven itself to not be an exception. Likewise, the order the words are placed in can also alter a poem. Stevens was aware of this fact and so in his poem, he paid special attention to the syntax of his words. More specifically, the author used the sameness of the syntax to help get his point across to the reader. The majority of the sentences and lines in this poem are similarly structured. "...Or purple with green rings, or green with yellow rings..." In doing this, Stevens was able to show the emotions of loneliness and despair that he felt at this hour.
Syntax and parallelism also played a large part in the author's emphasis of his point. By piecing both of these things together, Stevens was able to provide the reader with an ironic change in wording for the last four lines of the poem. It is perhaps, these last four lines that are most important in the entire poem. Not only do they offer the reader juxtaposition between characters, but they also illustrate the author's loneliness and despair. "People are not going to dream of baboons and periwinkles. Only, here and there, an old sailor, drunk and asleep in his boots, catches tigers in red weather." The sudden change
To conclude, author’s inspire their audience through evoking empathy and compassion in them. This is important because it helps people understand more about the world and know when changes
The poem also uses end rhyme to add a certain rhythm to the poem as a whole. And the scheme he employs: aabbc, aabd, aabbad. End rhyme, in this poem, serves to effectively pull the reader through to the end of the poem. By pairing it with lines restricted to eight syllables. The narrator creates an almost nursery-rhyme like rhythm. In his third stanza however, his last line, cutting short of eight syllables, stands with an emphatic four syllables. Again, in the last stanza, he utilizes the same technique for the last line of the poem. The narrator’s awareness of rhyme and syllable structure provides the perfect bone structure for his poem’s rhythm.
The most significant part of the entire text is that most of the readers will never feel the pain of author. The ability not to be able to relate and understand someone’s struggle is very impactful.
Having each story been written in a third-person narrative form, the reader knows the innermost feelings of the
Hurst uses the mood of the story to convey the character's’ feelings and tells the audience, indirectly, how to feel emotionally
Repetition is another key poetic device used in the poem, and considering its effect on the reader gives insight as to what the speaker may be emphasizing as significant. The word “dread” is repeated several times throughout the poem, specifically in lines 12 and 15. The Oxford English Dictionary defines it as “feared greatly…dreadful, terrible.” Because this word is used so many times, it draws the reader’s attention and contributes even more to the imagery of the Tyger. The repetition of the first stanza forms a sort of introduction and conclusion. The few differences between them get the reader’s attention and point out significant ideas that go along with the meaning of the poem. The comma in line 21 shows hesitation, and the colon in line 22 commands the attention of the Tyger as the speaker
In this poem, we see the tone light and free, also much imagery. We see this immediately with the first line saying, the “afternoon was the colour of water falling through sunlight” (1). We immediately get a sense of a beautiful day, maybe even fall with the trees descriptions in the following line, “trees glittered with the tumbling of leaves” (2). Lowell shows such beautiful imagery throughout her poem especially in her first two stanzas, that when we read that they are in the middle of war in the third stanza, that it is slightly shocking. That there are “two little boys, lying flat on their faces” (7) and that they are, “carefully gathering red berries” (8). Here Lowell shows that it is still a beautiful day but the darker reality is that they are currently in a war. Then we start to see the poem more in a melancholy light. That these two little boys are picking berries to save for later, instead of enjoying it right now. However one day the boys wish that “there will be no more war” (10), and that then, they could in fact enjoy their berries, their afternoon and “turn it in my fingers”. In this poem, we clearly see the different tones throughout. Lowell shows us the light tone, then a more melancholy tone and then finally a hopeful tone.
Colour imagery is used in the beginning of the poem as the speaker describes his
This mood found in each chapter can be reflected to the feelings that
, the characters in the story often show emotions whether it be externally or internally. The
The author also makes the reader feel sad and also makes them feel the emotions Lo feels throughout her struggles. The tone is important to any novel to make readers feel connected to the
Stevens, again, was very meticulous in using both a pirate and red weather. The pirate is the antithesis of the people he is focusing on. Pirates are adventurous, bold, and place their faith in abstract concepts like mermaids and treasure maps. They are not haunted by houses or suburbia (1). Pirates are free to imagine what they want and when. The “red weather” part of the poem is Stevens’s way of exploring the pirate’s own imagination. Since he is free to allow his mind to roam, he can come up with obscure ideas like red weather. It does not make sense that the weather is red, but that is the point. The reader is supposed to question why the weather now has color, and how. It is the transitional point from dreaming only in white, to suddenly experiencing bright color. “Disillusionment of Ten o’clock” reaches out to the reader’s inner child. It speaks to the part of the reader that wants to create something. It urges them to move past trivial adulthood and get in touch with the imaginative part of
The depressing realization of the captain’s death is evident and seen most within the last stanza as the tone changes from that of triumph and elation to heartbreak and grief. This is shown through Whitman’s use of imagery as the speaker states, “My Captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still, / My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will” (lines 17-18). This provides a detailed description of the lifeless captain as he lies on the deck. The following lines describe the successfulness of the mission as the captain has led his crew to safety after accomplishing the goals which were set. This alteration in tone
Along with the use of metaphors, the form of the poem plays an important role in uncovering the views of Whitman. First and foremost, this poem was written in free verse which is a form of poetry that lacks structure. The free verse stucture of the poem is shown in the lack of form in the stanzas of the poem. Some stanzas are six lines long while others are only one, and the lines can be either concise or drawn out. The poem also lacks any apparent rhyming scheme or rhythm. Unlike Shakespearean poetry, where the foot of the poem stays the same, the lack of any apparent structure to the poem leaves the reader unable to predict what is coming next. In addition to this, at the time this poem was written, free verse was not common. In fact, Whitman may have been one of the first poets to use this form, showing that he may have been rebelling against the predominant structured form in poetry. The lack of any apparent structure guides the reader towards the conclusion that Whitman did not like structure in poetry, and can even be
Stevens makes this fact apparent from the beginning of the poem, when he notes not only “human revery” but also “the sexual myth” and the “poem of death” (1). Therefore, these defined formulations are only categories of a greater whole, which remains unmentioned in the poem. In deliberating on Stevens’s poems, we can come to understand this encompassing whole as the imagination, which impels an individual to make “eccentric propositions” about his or her life and fate (4-5, 10).