Poetry In Kaidin Witzberger's 'She Lets Me Breathe'

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.

The poem makes one feel very depressing and sad. The event that took place starts out when one is a psyche looking around at the people who are still alive, and they realize that they are dead, but ask questions like, “ Why did I have to die?”, “How did I die?”. All of a sudden, the reader’s closet friends rise up out of their graves, but they are there to help one out, so one needs to listen to what they have to say. While the speaker is listening to their closest relatives, the speaker sees that his or her family and friends are sad because, one is dead and they won't be able to see the speaker until they die. The speaker figures out that he or she is the only one in the graveyard, and they haven’t went to Heaven yet, and they figure out that there might not be a place where everyone can meet up when he or she is dead.

Once I was able to associate these words to emotions and issues present in everyday life, the poem started to make me feel sad. I began thinking about all of the emotions and feelings that everyone hides as they go about life. For example, how the waitress I see once a week may have an eating disorder, or how the singer I look up to just lost her son, or the businessman who got laid off today. Everyone has their own personal battle that they carry everywhere, at any given moment. This explains why the setting is so plain, since the internal struggles people face affect them even at a bus stop. While each person waits, the waitress may be thinking about how much skinnier the person next to her is. The singer could be remembering when she held her baby. And the business man could be planning how to break the news to his wife. No matter how small, everyone experiences a type of trauma or bad experience, and this poem seemed to show what happens when these emotions become bottled up. No one can help each other because they are so stuck within their own issues. The difficulty helping others reminded me of the idea of having to take care of yourself before being able to take care of others.

The first stanza introduces the speaker’s earliest memory as they are starting the journey of crossing over. Right away the reader is introduced to a fly buzzing around the room, “I heard a Fly buzz- when I died-“(1). The fly represents the soul leaving the body and witnessing the surroundings of the life they are leaving behind. The speaker is aware that the people around have crying and Dickinson illustrating the scene with a metaphor, “Was like the Stillness in the Air- Between the Heaves of Storm-“ (3-4). The speaker realizes that the family members who have come to mourn have not made any sounds during the periods of wailing and quietly sniffling. Dickinson’s comparison to a storm that changes sound constantly it perfectly displays how people mourn. First loudly, then quietly before the wails rise again.

The reader begins to wonder if it is actually just the man she is afraid to be in love with rather than the idea of love itself. According to her, the man sees her simply as a problem that he can solve with his wits and charm, suggesting that he would not be interested in her once she has dissolved in the heat of his charm. Perhaps she is aware that this man might not be a good choice for her, yet she cannot control her feelings for him. However, in the following lines, she expresses her own incapacity to survive and be happy, bringing the reader back to the theme she started the poem with. Despite being blown away by his acts of kindness time after time, she finds herself beyond recovery and asks the man to reconsider his intentions since she is a problem he might never be able to solve. Therefore, the second stanza shows the grave nature of the poet's

Using a pensive and sorrowful tone, Bronte portrays her sadness for a love cut short by her death, and her regret that she is forgetting her memories of her lover. ‘Helena’ complements this with the emotional lyric My Chemical Romance’s singer, Gerard Way, wrote about the painful passing of his beloved grandmother whilst he was on tour, and how he felt he neglected her due to his travels. Obviously, as this song was written about his grandmothers passing, the theme is death. This is supported by the line where it says ‘and like a blade you stain, well I’ve been holding on tonight’, which is a metaphor for how the death of his grandmother has stained his heart, (possibly meaning he is ‘cut up’ about her death),he can’t forget her nor let go of his guilt for leaving her before she died. Both ‘Helena’ and ‘Remembrance’ complement each other due to the fact that they both speak of a lifetime terminated too early. The tone of ‘Helena’ is mournful but angry, perhaps at himself for not being there when he lost a love one, one could even say fervent and regretful, for example, when he says ‘you are the very hurt you sold’ which reflects his hurting and how he was angry towards others because he was angry with himself, ‘we are so far from you’ which depicts his realisation that he will never see his grandmother again, and ‘every star fall brought you to tears again’, which tells of how every little thing that reminded him of her brought him to grief. Both poems

This shows an unstable mental state. It reminds the reader of someone who is stressed out or worried, so they are just scribbling on the page. It also shows someone who is not sure of themselves. The reader can clearly see there was writing, but cannot make sense of the words crossed out. This shows that someone had thoughts and then decided after writing them they did not want them anymore. This indecisive and unstable personality that is revealed through the cross outs makes the reader think the person is going through a rough time which is another reason the reader may think it is about when someone finds out about a loved one passing away. The author writes “my head feels foggy-light and dark” (15) to describe how someone feels when they find out tragic news. Their head can feel so clogged because this news can be shocking and overwhelming. Furthermore, the spacing of the poem goes from spaced out to close together. That pattern is repeated twice. The more spaced out lines refer to more calm observations. For example, “Weeds near the bank” (8) creates a visual to the reader of a peaceful water bank with some weeds on the side. The image of water creates a calming effect on the reader. The spacing helps the reader read that part of the poem slowly and really take in all the meaning behind the lines.

Her entire world crumbles, so much; she feels the world mourning with her. The actions of mourners resonate with those of her mind, she thinks that she is about to die, but then she is the dead in the event. The woman is the body beneath the casket lid (Dickinson 2-2). Her life is as miserable as death and the worst part her entire brain is dysfunctional from the numbness of thought. The beating of drums is hammering her head down. This setting is her new world; she describes it as a desolate place with solace. The woman in this poem breaks with every attempt to move on with her life until she finally breaks out of her situation. In this case, it means that she attempts to make peace with her plight. After a long time alienating herself from the public, she somehow finds a way to move on. This poem is much complicated than the former, a characteristic that renders it unfriendly to a number of users as it leaves the reader in

The first two lines of her poem puts an image into our heads the moment we read it. “Do not stand by my grave and weep. I am not there. I did not sleep.” The speaker points this out in the opening of the poem to tell everyone not to stand by her grave for she is not dead, she is not there.

Although the tone is revealed and supported throughout the whole poem it is already solidified in the first stanza. The first stanza opens up what is going on and what the poem is going to be about. Just by reading the first line it explains how busy she is that even she could not stop for death. After reading that she was too busy for death we learn that death stopped for her in which she gladly joined him on his carriage. The tone is then reassured in the last stanza of this poem. Despite throughout the passage it is discovered in many ways that the speaker was satisfied with the way things went. In the last passage it says that she can remember the day like it was yesterday.

The poem moves onto “The Eyes around-“as Emily paints a picture for her readers to feel the sad eyes of all the people piercing their eyes at her cold body. For the second time Emily references movement and life around death. We can feel the “Breathe gathering firm” from the surrounding people seeing their loved ones dead, lying there. Emily explains the surroundings of a dead person here, how life around stops as the people breathes are held firm. For one moment, everything stops and all life is focused on death.

The repetition of the words rise and sink in lines three and four symbolize the rise and fall of ocean waves. She also uses imaginary in the same line and in lines two and five when she describes the ‘’roof against the rain’’ and the ‘’thickened lung’’. The poem continues into its next section being lines seven and eight. Here Millay addresses what many of us know to be true. She says that ‘’yet many a man is making friends with death even a I speak, for lack of love alone.’’ The tone of this section is questioning all people. Millay almost says how can people still be so willing to die knowing all that she stated earlier to be true. This questioning takes readers into the next section which is from line nine to line fourteen. Here Millay shifts the focus of others to herself. She opens the section by providing readers with vivid imagery. She states that ‘’pinned down by pain and moaning for release, or nagged by want past resolution’s power, I might be driven to sell your love for peace or trade the memory of this night for food.’’ She intendeds to have readers feel her imagined pain through words like moaning and pinned. This quote also reveals to readers the setting of the

Stanza four introduces the "Bell" as a metaphor for the heavens, and goes on to say that "Being (is), but an Ear". The bell is representative of a church bell, and all the mourners (Beings) are listening to its ring. The use of the word bell in the poem’s context forms a vision of a slow ringing church bell, characteristic to a funeral. The next line, of the fourth stanza, pairs up the poet and silence as castaways. They are strangers in a foreign place, and are all alone. One could infer from the poem that "here" represents purgatory. This

This line, throughout the poem, has a gentler effect to the surrounding tone, pointing to the speaker’s own introspection by use of parenthesis. For instance, in the third stanza following the speaker’s “bewitch[ing]” and “dreams.” she wonders if her situation is as horrible as she first thought, but the third line sneaks in and stops that train of thought in its tracks(6). Inversely, the fifth stanza, which alludes to deterioration of her own memory and how she “forgets your name”(15), which is a very scary thought and the line is interjected into the stanza as if to brush off that idea and change the subject. The job of brushing off the negative aspects seems to be the role of the repetition of the third line. The speaker is faced with a problem: “insane”(8), passionate love in the third stanza, the deterioration of the mind in fifth stanza, and a lost love in the final stanza, and she merely sweeps her concern under the rug and moves on to a new topic. In the metaphor of creating walls around herself to control her emotions, once she builds her walls she denies they’re there and tends to some other thought in her

Edouard Glissant described “When we love words, words catch fire.”, which really expresses how this poem makes the reader feel. The words are soothing, they relax the reader as one practices a destressing technique. The poem “Meditation on Breathing” by Ruth Ellen Keller is a poem that expresses desire for a purpose, and finding that purpose. Ruth inquired “I have finally learned to speak to God through my hunger for air, asthmatic searching...” represents a desire to communicate with God (I 1-3). Finding a purpose is an abstract approach by pronouncing the purpose of an interment as Ruth states “Remember the gift of music. How flute gives breath a body, undulates the chord between A and C...”, also highlights