Stop All The Clocks By. Auden

Mourning and mortality is a constant concern that transcends time. Slessor’s poetic treatment of these ideas continue to engage readers as it evokes a sense of awareness. This is evident in Kenneth Slessor 's poem Five Bells as the persona 's grief for his deceased friend, Joe Lynch causes him to realise the significance of time and the strength of spiritual attachments. This further leads him to question the purpose of human life.

This can be seen in the first stanza as the mood is peaceful and the tone is relaxing.as it says the words such as ‘the steady drip of rain’ and ‘silently the drops flow down the glassy plane’. The tone and mood then change again in the early part of the second stanza to restless and fast paced as some of the lines are ‘whip-flashes of lightning crack threw the sky and rumbling thunder tears through the clouds. The tone stays like this for the rest of this stanza before becoming happy and exiting in the third stanza. This is because in the third stanza it says shrieks and splashes follow cheerful yellow

The speaker's life before war is left far below and even feels like an illusion. Like a "dream," it is gone. When the speaker “woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters”, he woke up to his worst nightmare, enemy fighters approaching the bomber. If we take a close look at lines three and four together, there is a stark contrast. Line three is very peaceful and serene, the words “dream”, “life”, and “earth” usually have positive connotations; while line four is certain death, with words like “nightmare” and “black flak”. The last line of the poem is very straightforward, and is almost prose. It tells us exactly what we need to know. When the bomber got back to the base, they cleaned the speakers remains out of the turret with a hose. If we continue the metaphor of the bomber being the mother, we can conclude that the speaker is being born into death through the womb of “the State”.

Similarly, as “Stop all of the Clocks” develops the narrator metaphorically and onomatopoeically highlights that everything in life must acknowledge the death and experience it with him. Outward signs of cotton gloves and bows with doves is a metaphor for the person’s acknowledgement of death. The importance of the deceased love extends to every facet of the narrator’s life because they belonged in every moment that the narrator lived. In this moment of grief, the narrator feels betrayed because they invested in a love which was not eternal.

The writer makes use of diction to express his feelings towards the literary work and to set the dramatic tone of the poem. Throughout the poem, there is repetition of the word “I”, which shows the narrator’s individual feeling of change in the heart, as he experiences the sight of hundreds of birds fly across the October sky. As the speaker effortlessly recounts the story, it is revealed how deeply personal it is to him. Updike applies the words “flock” and “bird” repetitively to the poem, considering the whole poem is about the sight of seeing so many birds and the effect this has on a person. When the speaker first sees the flock of birds in lines 8-10, alliteration is applied to draw attention to what the narrator is witnessing. In line 29, Updike

Diction affects the tone of the passage. Starting from line 14, the diction evolves into a more negative view. He uses biblical reference towards the beginning of the stanza. He begins to analyze his surroundings more rigorously, and sees the differences in how they look from a distance, to how they appear close by. Once this negative connotation has begun, the flock is said to be “paled, pulsed, compressed, distended, yet held an identity firm” (Lines 20-21). The author’s choice of words as in “less marvelous” (line 25) indicates his intention for making his lines definite, giving it a solid state of meaning. It symbolizes that the feeling of someone longing for something, and once they receive it are not as impressed by it. The diction plays a critical role when the tone of the qualities of nature are exposed. The author conveys the “trumpeting” of the geese as an exaltation to the beauty and simplicity of nature. “A cloud appeared, a cloud of dots like iron filings which a magnet underneath the paper undulates” (Lines 16-18). The iron filings in this phrase symbolize the issues the man faces. Once he looks closely at the flock, he realizes that these issues are only miniscule and do not add up to life in general. This elates him, thus concluding him to lift his heart.

However, the poem has fluidity despite its apparent scarcity of rhyme. After examining the alteration of syllables in each line, a pattern is revealed in this poem concerning darkness. The first nine lines alternate between 8 and 6 syllables. These lines are concerned, as any narrative is, with exposition. These lines set up darkness as an internal conflict to come. The conflict intensifies in lines 10 and 11 as we are bombarded by an explosion of 8 syllables in each line. These lines present the conflict within one's own mind at its most desperate. After this climax, the syllables in the last nine lines resolve the conflict presented. In these lines, Dickinson presents us with an archetypal figure that is faced with a conflict: the “bravest” hero. These lines present the resolution in lines that alternate between 6 and 7 syllables. Just as the syllables decrease, the falling action presents us with a final insight. This insight discusses how darkness is an insurmountable entity that, like the hero, we must face to continue “straight” through “Life” (line 20).

The desperation and destruction continues to escalate throughout part I of the poem until it reaches a close at,

In stanza two, ambiguity is more prevalent. Although there are some elements of abstruse, Ammons uses specific words in repetition to create a degree of complexity for the poem. Ammons uses words such as “summary”, “deeper”, “longer”, and “length” to convey the point. I question why Ammons used these words, in particular, “summary” and “deeper” because the overall second stanza conveys a message of an idea or item of great importance. “Summary” and “deeper” contradicts that message because both words contrast each other. Summary generally means a short version on main points of an idea or event while deeper is a term people use to compare two objects or items. Although Ammons does not in any

The most chaotic element of the poem not actually found in the quite disordered first stanza, but right at the beginning of the second stanza lies the revelation of the reason for the overwhelming chaos. The speaker had a dream, a desire, to leave this chaotic world. The speaker experiences being told that “it didn’t matter.” The speaker must have perceived all the past images to be chaotic because of his depressing experience. However, even if this is the climax of chaos, it is in a way a turning point toward are more ordered and peaceful world.

     The structure of the last three stanzas leaves us hanging from each one. If there was a song to this as music would rise in volume and pitch at each of the final stanza lines. If you read the poem right, the lines seem to echo in your head and slow your progress to the next stanza.

Often at times there are many voices in one poem. These voices represent the different views that come from the same material that are portrayed by the buzz that the bee elicit in the hive. The proposal that Collins is trying to exude is that there is never one way to read a poem. The type of approach will vary with reader and who they are, but by having a radical approach it will help to enhance our understanding of what the poem means. Collins wants the reader to feel free when analyzing a poem: “I want them to waterski across the surface of the poem waving at the author’s name on the shore.” As a teacher you try to pummel depth into your students’ minds and push them into the direction of understanding. The speaker declares that the grapple to illuminating meaning and the amount of time where the reader does not understand adds to the worth of the poem. The parallel to the surface of water, where you have not attained the depth even though you know it’s there is important to how much it takes to find the true meaning of a poem. While reading this poem it have the outlook on how poetry places more of aln emphasis on us to be able to pick apart the undisclosed meaning and essentially to be able to pull apart the poem without a fixed structure. By doing it this way it is able to help the audience to build upon skills to help interpret and understand, which substantially is important throughout any source of literature. We

In “Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone” by W.H. Auden the author uses different literary devices to portray the theme of overwhelming grief and loss. In the poem, the speaker is someone who has recently lost a loved one. The person is so distraught that they start issuing harsh demands. The speaker wants everything to stop and all noise to seize. He or she then starts revealing more personal details by telling how much the loved one meant to them. This poem is dramatic and successfully uses literary devices to show how the speaker is feeling in their time of grief. W.H. Auden uses metaphors, personification, and overstatements to reveal the effects of overwhelming grief.

Again, the author selects a new set of imagery, such as stars, moon, sun, ocean, and wood to remind of the heaven in which the speaker used to live, and then to sweep it off right away. The last statement “For nothing now can ever come to any good” (16) finally reinforces the speaker’s loss and unhappiness. In loneliness, the speaker’s love becomes fiercer and more truthful. It is the fierceness and truthfulness that lead the speaker to the last stair of hopelessness. The end of the poem is also the hopeless end of the speaker’s life because of “nothing …good.”

According to Hut (2011), the expression, “untrimmed” in line eight, could be taken two courses: First, in the feeling of misfortune of enhancement and ornaments, and second, in the feeling of untrimmed cruises on a boat. In the first translation, the lyric peruses que lovely things characteristically lose Their extravagance about whether. The “Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May.” In the second, it peruses que nature is a boat with sails not conformed to wind changes keeping in mind the end goal to revise course. This, in consolidation with the words “nature’s evolving course,” makes an interesting expression: the constant nature of progress, or collegues que just thing does not change will be change. This line in the lyric makes a movement from the impermanence of the initial eight lines, into the unfathomable length of time of the last six. Both change and forever are Acknowledged and afterward tested by the end line (Kennedy & Gioia, 2010).