Rueben Bright's Dark Days

As Wendy Martin says “the poem leaves the reader with painful impression of a woman in her mid-fifties, who having lost her domestic comforts is left to struggle with despair. Although her loss is mitigated by the promise of the greater rewards of heaven, the experience is deeply tragic.” (75)

Edward Hirsch starts off the elegy by writing about when they were at the funeral home, and shocked by the sight of recently deceased son. Hirsch says, “And for a moment I was taken aback/Because it was not Gabriel/ It was some poor kid/ Whose face looked like a room/ That had been vacated”. He uses these descriptive words to set the emotion and sensitivity for the rest of the poem, which is bitter and disheartening.

Dunbar and Randall both use interesting imagery in their poems to display how the character truly feels. In the “Ballad of Birmingham,” stanzas

The last two lines of the poem possess an extremely powerful sense of defeat and sorrow.

A distinguished sense of hollowness, and darkness is discernable in George Elliot Clarke’s poem “Blank Sonnet”. This poem expresses, the author’s difficult and awkward communication with a lover through a broken relationship. word choice and imagery is imperative to the overall effect and tone of the poem. The usage of an atypical sonnet stylization, broken sentences, forms of metaphors, symbolism, sensory language, and alliteration form strong imagery, and a sense of disconnect. The overall effect leaves the reader with a resonating feeling of emptiness.

Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “Sonnet IV” is a sonnet spoken from the point of view of a woman who is permitting herself to remember an old lover over the duration of her cigarette. The poem is set up through the classical structure of a Petrarchan sonnet and shares the topic of a lost lover. The octave follows the course of the dream, which takes the form of smoke and shadows. The volta marks the end of the cigarette and the dream, but the speaker still continues her memories in the sestet to follow. Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “Sonnet IV” is similar to other Petrarchan sonnets in both structure and topic. Upon closer inspection, however, Millay’s poem challenges the classical topic of love seen in Italian sonnets by reversing the typical attempt at immortalization of the lover’s beauty and greatness through memory. This is creates a tension which aids to divide the poem into two parts, the octave and sestet. Through these lines of the poem, Millay employs enjambment throughout both the octave and sestet and end stop in only the volta. This aids in drawing attention to the change in diction from long, euphonious, and elevated words in the opening portion of the poem, to shorter, more cacophonous words in the final six lines. In the final two lines of her sonnet, Millay utilizes a metaphor of a setting sun to compare the speaker’s moment of memory to the sun setting behind a hill. St. Vincent Millay makes use of this contrast and these literary devices to emphasize her critique,

Though in stark contrast to the first stanza in form, the two-part second stanza continues with this disconnect of death from the subject in the poem. Each part begins with an emotionally-charged direct address to a male subject using expletive language. The speaking voice is conceivably appealing to both the functional presence of the dead man and every other man who fits into the category of the “executive type.” This stanza uses a type of call-and-response form as a rhetorical commentary on the nature of chance, a continuation of the stock market theme from

The soldiers who had attended the war were shown to have died brutally, like “cattle”, yet when reaching the home front, it is seen that they are laid to rest in a much more civil and dignified manner. The concept of this can be seen as an extended metaphor throughout the entire poem, with the battle front seen as a world filled with violence, fear and destruction, where as the home front is perceived as a place marked by order and ritual, a civilized world. The second sonnet opens with “What candles may be held to speed them all?”, invoking a more softer and compassionate tone towards the audience, more specifically through Owen’s use of a rhetorical question. It captures the readers’ attention, engaging them to feel empathetic and notice the shift of energy from anger and bitterness to a sadder and more somber tone. Owen’s use of descriptive language, as simple as it seems, such as ‘boys’ and ‘girls’ provokes the audience to view the horrors of the war as if they had been placed onto children, because in reality the ‘men; who had signed themselves into war to fight in glory for their country had really only just been boys themselves.

The first stanza is addressed to ‘old men’ and how they should not simply slip away and die quietly, they should fight death until the end. Poetic techniques

The speaker then leaves the voices behind, ignoring the “melancholy.” This is tragic but realistic as life is filled with problems, making it futile to try and help everyone who asks. The second stanza marks the beginning of the speaker’s journey. The beginning line, “it was already late enough,” means the speaker wishes that they had decided to lead their desired life sooner. “The road full of fallen branches and stones” signify hardships one faces while on the path to personal growth, proving that life presents challenges along the way that must be overcome. Line 21 marks a tonal shift in the poem in which the speaker gradually finds their “voice” or individuality after years of following the crowd. Imagery like “the stars began to burn through the sheets of clouds” once again ties in nature and connects stars to hope. Oliver uses an anaphora for the last four lines, to emphasize that the only life one can save is their own. Her use of the word “you” instead of “I” interestingly connects the speaker to the reader, spreading the message to live authentically and for oneself. Oliver’s transcendentalist beliefs are hard to miss in this poem, as she herself is known to be a private person

Many songs have deep and emotional messages throughout them, but few can match the aptitude portrayed in “The Dead Heart” This is depicted with the help of the text structure. “The Dead Heart” was made up of 8 stanzas. The rhyme pattern is ABCC, and changes throughout different stanzas this is to show the displeasure of the Indigenous people, when white men came and took their land. Indigenous people felt many things during this time period, happy and satisfied weren’t what they felt, instead they felt: hopeless, depressed, unfortunate and miserable. There are constant slant rhymes in the song, an example includes: Know your custom don't speak your tongue, white man came took everyone” The pure reason why “Midnight Oil” made these two sentences slant rhyme opposed to normal rhyme is to show the discomfort and distress when the British took their land, their most prized possession and their home. The structure used throughout “The Dead Heart” is phenomenal and truly captivates the true emotion the artist’s intended. Not only is the structure used extraordinary, but the poetic devices used truly entice the audience and elicit an emotional response.

Repetition at the end of each stanza is effectively used to reinforce the message to fight back against death. The son implores his father to hang on any way he can and begs him to use joy or tears or anger to remain in this life. Other men, be they wise or frivolous, serious or

The second stanza is almost like the first in the fact that it appeals to the same senses. It talks about the actions and the feelings of the child. It describes how the child would wake and wait for his father to call him. The second stanza also describes the mood of the house in the line, "fearing the chronic angers of that house." Perhaps that line is

without warning”. Then in the third stanza, where he illuminates the allure of letting go of

The first stanza begins with a strong statement: "Abortions will not let you forget." It shows the sorrow