“We cannot command Nature except by obeying her.” said by philosopher Francis Bacon. The meaning behind this famous quote is that human and no such things can fully control or overcome the nature. We need to follow and accept the consequences of nature. Furthermore, this idea could influence William Carlos Williams about the power of nature. An American poet, Williams Carlos Williams was born on September 17, 1883, in his hometown, New Jersey. His first exposure to the literature was when his father reveals the poems written by Shakespeare to him. However, he decided to take the medical degree in the medical school at Pennsylvania regard to his parent's intention. Fortunately, at the University of Pennsylvania, he met his friend called Ezra …show more content…
In short, “Willow Poem” is about the willow tree that is persisting despite the change of the season. It is the period of changing the season between the summer to autumn and it is almost the end of the year because winter is getting closer. In comparison, the “Complete Destruction” is describing the situation where the narrator buried the cat and set the fire. Later, the escaped fleas were died by the cold. As stated in the beginning of the poem “It is a willow when summer is over,…from which no leaf has fallen nor / bitten by the sun” (1-4), the willow tree is trying its best to hold their leaves and not changing the color as summer is passing. However, due to the “oblivious winter” (12) the willow tree was defeated by nature because the leaves have fallen as “the last to let go and fall / into the water and on the ground.” (13-14). The endeavour of trying to live of the willow tree were defeated by nature because the willow tree does not willing to let the leaves fall as stated “as if loath to let go,” (9). Similarly, in “Complete Destruction”, even though the fleas were escaped from “earth and fire” (7) they were still “died by the cold.” (8). The escaped fleas are trying to escape from nature which is the earth and fire, however, the destructive power of nature is inevitable and finally killed those …show more content…
As a modernist poets, Williams breaks from the traditional writing style and writes the poem without any rhyme pattern. A short, descriptive poem consisting of two equal stanzas, “Complete Destruction” contains no such words that could possibly rhyme with each other. Since the beginning of the poem, Williams writes, “It was an icy day, / We buried the cat,” (1-2) neither the word “day” nor “cat” rhyme with each other. In addition, Williams continues to maintain the poem without any rhyme word at the end of each line. This continuation illustrates several purposes. First, it creates no interesting sound which reveals the sense of sadness. This finally refers that through the powerful destructive nature death is inescapable. Second, it shows the discontinuation of sound which reveals the reduction of life that was created by the immense power of nature. Likewise, Williams also reveals the destruction and elimination of the rhyme in last two lines in “Willow Poem”. As presented in the poem, “It is a willow when summer is over, / a willow by the river” (1-2) the last word of each line is rhyme with the next line and continue to rhyme with each other throughout the poem. Nevertheless, this rhyme pattern is destroyed at the end as stated “the last to let go and fall / into the water and on the ground.” (13-14). The last word of each line
The poem “The Widow’s Lament in Springtime” is a poem about a women who has lost her husband of thirty five years. Williams writes in the voice of a grieving woman instead of in his own voice. Now that her husband has died, the widow cannot find joy in her yard that she used to love. The widow may even be considering suicide. Williams, writing in free verse, writes a metaphor comparing the grief of a widow to her blooming yard in the springtime setting a tone of great sadness for the widow.
The last few lines in the poem are sentience that have been chopped up into different lines, to help
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 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.
It creates a mood that readers can understand. Williams does a wonderful job contrasting death and life; his use of “attiring” and “disattiring” basically narrates how trees lose their leaves, leaving them “clothless”, but then the branches are preparing for what’s to come--their rebirth in the coming season. The liquid moon makes me think that he’s trying to create irony; the moon is liquid, as if melted, even though it’s winter time and everything is supposed to be frozen. The irony is subtle, yet very impactful when you notice it. Perhaps the long branches represent the strength of the trees despite the harsh environment around them. The buds can be seen as children being prepared by their parents for what’s to come, possible teaching them what to do and what not to do so that they can survive the winter and bloom in the spring. Like letting a child go off to college after years of care so that they can become their own person. The “wise trees” have experience, an experience that they have to share with their “buds”. The wise stand sleeping in the cold to take their last breath and let their children take their places. This poem is very meaningful because Williams creates a very important similarity between the trees and humans. Readers can relate because most parents go through the stage of letting their children go and letting them continue what they
The poem suddenly becomes much darker in the last stanza and a Billy Collins explains how teachers, students or general readers of poetry ‘torture’ a poem by being what he believes is cruelly analytical. He says, “all they want to do is tie the poem to a chair with rope and torture a confession out of it”. Here, the poem is being personified yet again and this brings about an almost human connection between the reader and the poem. This use of personification is effective as it makes the
Once more, the poet anticipates his own death when he composes this poem. But in each of these quatrains, the speaker fails to confront the full scope of his problem: winter, in fact, is a part of a cycle; winter follows spring, and spring returns after winter just as surely. Age, on the other hand, is not a cycle; youth will not come again for the speaker. In the third quatrain, the speaker resigns himself to this fact.]
Born September 17, 1883 to Williams George Williams and Raquel Helene Hoheb, William Carlos Williams was destined to become one of the most influential poets of the 20th Century. Williams was greatly influenced by his family. Although he lived in a house full of men, the two women in his life, mother and grandmother, were the most important adults to him (Baym
The poem highlights the beauty and sensuality of nature. He uses the theme of nature to explore the pleasure he feels whilst taking in the sights and smells of nature. Montague uses broad vowel sounds to create assonance in the first stanza. This creates euphony and a sort of verbal music, possibly representing the noise of the river and the theme of nature.
The rhyme scheme in the second stanza ddeefg brings us to an end in the texts' relation to the Earth's cool breeze just as the rhyme pattern discontinues from its previous flow, aabbcc.
Lockward’s use of sound was incredible. Readers can hear her anger in the beginning, her humor as she talks about writing and hiding her poem, and her husbands emotional break down at the end. The stanzas in this poem aren’t traditional, they aren’t set to a fixed pattern but each vary in the amount of lines they contain. One stanza contains five lines, while another contains eight.
The theme of the poem, Complete Destruction by William Carlos Williams, is somber vengeance. The family mourns for the cat that died due to fleas. They show their love for the deceased pet by burying her on a day that was icy cold, devoid of any warmth, even though the ground would be extremely difficult to dig in. When they buried the cat, the fleas on her were buried, too, and would meet their deserved fate by the cold underground. Any fleas that dared to escape death were set afire in the backyard, leaving the family at peace with the knowledge that the fleas that took the life of their beloved pet have now been destroyed.
William Carlos Williams and Robert Frost are known as two of the greatest poets of their time and still highly regarded as two of the best poets of all time. Robert Frost was born in 1874 in San Francisco, California according to The Associated Press. William Carlos Williams was born in 1883 in Rutherford, New Jersey, according to the poetryfoundation.org. Both men died just two months apart in 1963. Williams is the author of the poem “Spring and All” and Frost is the author of “Dust of Snow”. These two poems
Because the poem is long, it won’t be quoted extensively here, but it is attached at the end of the paper for ease of reference. Instead, the paper will analyze the poetic elements in the work, stanza by stanza. First, because the poem is being read on-line, it’s not possible to say for certain that each stanza is a particular number of lines long. Each of several versions looks different on the screen; that is, there is no pattern to the number of lines in each stanza. However, the stanzas are more like paragraphs in a letter than
By examining the poetic devices and how Whitman uses them to heighten the sense of death and different facets of grief it becomes obvious that while both poems intimately explore death, grief, and morbidity, When Lilacs last in the Dooryard Bloom'd presents a more generalized, transcendental, mournful representation of grief, the poem Out of the Cradle Endlessly rocking confronts the reader with the stark pain and reality of death