What Is The Theme Of The Ruins Of A Great House

Along with the death of a loved one or the loss of a significant piece in one’s life comes a time of mourning. How gradually one heals and recuperates from sorrow is personal and cannot be dictated by another’s schedule. In “Snowbanks North of the House,” one significant component is how Bly uses the natural world to represent the continuation of life after death. “And the sea lifts and falls all night, the moon goes on / through the unattached heavens alone” (Bly 19-20). Nature continues on despite someone’s personal anguish. This poem encourages people to relinquish their agony and to return to normal life because the universe pays no attention to you. Sometimes this is easier said than done, as Gonzalez writes in “1999.” The alleviation of despair is not immediate following loss. As shown in this poem, even years after a tragedy, there are lasting effects on people. The speaker tells of the years that have passed since the sibling’s death. “Then the year / my stomach hurt all year, & then / the year no one spoke of you” (Gonzalez 15-17). The speaker explains that as the years pass, people begin to accept the reality of the death and recover. However, the speaker has a sorrowful tone about him or her. After all the years that have gone by, the speaker continues to feel grief and is heartbroken over the death. The speaker is frustrated that no one else seems to reciprocate the

The objects people keep in their homes can tell a story about who they are or were. Each item possessed by the residents of a house is evidence of how these people may have lived. Ted Kooser’s poem “Abandoned Farmhouse” takes the reader on a walkthrough of the remains of a farmhouse where a poor family once lived. In “Abandoned Farmhouse,” Kooser selects seemingly insignificant relics left behind by each family member to illustrate who these people were and how they lived. The picture he paints is a bleak one and reflects the impoverished life which the residents lived within this now lonely and desolate building.

Death is something that at some point will come to each of us and has been explored in many forms of literature. “The Raven” and “Incident in a Rose Garden” are two poems that explore common beliefs and misconceptions about death. Though both poems differ in setting, tone, and mood there are surprising similarities in the literary tools they use and in the messages they attempt to convey. The setting and mood establish the tone and feel of a poem. In “The Raven” we are launched into a bleak and dreary winters night where a depressed narrator pines for his dead girlfriend.

In the poem, “Which Plant Is Not Faded” it is a depressing poem that talks about the hardships that the people went through throughout that time period. It explains in (line 1-4) that everyone is to fight. It doesn’t matter what they are doing or even if they have a family but they are taken out of their homes to fight and to create

In the beginning of the short story, as Brother reflects on Doodle’s life, the author uses personification and foreshadowing to create a mood of remorse. As he gazes out of the window into his backyard, Brother states that “the graveyard flowers were blooming. ...speaking softly the names of our dead” (Hurst 1). The flowers provide flashbacks of the past, and foreshadow a loss of life. The loneliness felt by Brother causes readers to consider how they would feel if their loved one was gone. As Brother observes the seasons, it is noted that “summer was dead but autumn had not yet been born” (Hurst 1). The personifications of the seasons as stages in the cycle of life and death creates an unsure and uncertain mood. The shift between seasons creates an idea of change and uncertainty of events to come. Hurst creates a mood of remorse through

An excerpt from the poem says, "Yet not to thy eternal resting-place/Shalt thou retire alone, …Thou shalt lie down/With patriarchs of the infant world --with kings, …"(31-37). This quote explains that when people die they are not alone; they lie down to rest with the people of the past. Later in the poem Bryant states, "All that breathe/Will share thy destiny. The gay will laugh/When thou art gone, the solemn brood of care/Plod on, and each one as before will chase/His favorite phantom;" (60-64). He explains that all living things die and that life will continue after they die. In a following selection of the poem he says, "Yet these shall leave…And make their bed with thee…. matron and maid, /The speechless babe, and the gray-headed man-/Shall one by one be gathered to thy side, /By those, who in their turn shall follow them."(64-72). He states that one by one everyone will die. Eventually, everyone dies, and they live on through Nature in another form.

In the second stanza, I see that the speaker wonders about what his horse is “thinking” which shows his interests are also in the outside world too, like his horse. He also takes certain pleasure seeing the scene from what he imagines to be his horse’s perspective. I think his horse is practical in nature, he thinks, while the speaker sits there dreaming, watching the snow fill up the woods. He just stands there dreaming, and thinking about his horse's feelings is the one thing that brings him back to reality. Death comes again in the typical image of night, as we’re told this is the “darkest evening of the year.” Also, it can either be taken literally as the most lightless night, or it can be taken as the night of the darkest emotions. I think that it is a combination of the two, a dark moonless winter night in which the speaker experiences some form of depression or loneliness.

This poem is written in ballad form which is odd because one would think of a ballad and think a love story or an author gushing on about nature not an allegory about personified Death. Dickinson both unites and contrasts love/courtship with death, experimenting with both reader’s expectations and the poetic convention dictating specific poem form. This is why Dickinson is widely hailed because of her unconventional writing methods.

Then Swinburne writes, “But in the full face of the fire of day” (22) which changes the direction and again leads back to during the daytime that there is nothing he enjoys. In the fifth and six lines, Swinburne writes, “What place shall be for any starry light, What part of heaven in all the wide sun’s way?” (23-24) asking a very important rhetorical question. Again, he is reemphasizing that he enjoys nighttime but day time has nothing for him to enjoy. This question helps understand the rest of the poem. This question is not answered within the poem but what it asks is the main tone throughout the entire poem. The thought of heaven and sun is brought into the reader’s perspective. Throughout the poem, the tone is that of living life to its fullest and concentrating on enjoying life while on earth and not concentrating your time on what may happen in heaven after your time on earth. The idea of death is also brought into one’s mind, at some point in everyone’s life the thought of dying does come to mind but should not be the focus of your life, and for this reason enjoying both nighttime and day time is

The first funeral in the poem is of Scyld Scefing (translated in some versions as

Winter is a time of cold, when forests die and animals hide from the shrieking winds and biting cold. Winter is a time for survival against the odds. How apt that the speaker is struggling against the "lovely, dark and deep" woods to remember that he has "miles to go before [he] sleep[s]." The "easy wind" calls to him, and the "downy flake" beckons him to a comfortable sleep. If the speaker had paused on a bright summer day, the sleep might be just a short rest, but the poem is set on the "darkest evening of the year" while the "woods fill up with snow," and any rest taken in the "lovely, dark and deep" woods would result in the eternal sleep of death (474).

This is significant because it emphasizes the melancholy and mournfulness that he depicts with imagery in the first stanza. Later on in the second stanza, he author describes the tree the narrator would have planted as a “green sapling rising among the twisted apple boughs”. The author uses visual color imagery of the color green to describe the sapling in order to emphasize just how young the newborn was when he died. Later on in the poem, the narrator speaks of himself and his brothers kneeling in front of the newly plated tree. The fact that they are kneeling represents respect for the deceased. When the narrator mentions that the weather is cold it is a reference back to the first stanza when he says “of an old year coming to an end”. Later on in the third stanza the author writes “all that remains above earth of a first born son” which means that the deceased child has been buried. They also compare the child to the size of “a few stray atoms” to emphasize that he was an infant. All of these symbols and comparisons to are significant because they are tied to the central assertion of remembrance and honoring of the dead with the family and rebirth.

Coleridge’s ‘This Lime Tree Bower My Prison’, is a poem describing a man’s changing views as he contemplates the natural word which he has been prevented from seeing. Coleridge’s poem demonstrates the ability of individuals to modify their morals and values upon receiving a cathartic release from their relationship with nature, as predicated almost entirely on the imagination. Through allowing the persona to visualise the encounters his friends are making with nature along their journey, Coleridge first demonstrates the capabilities of the imagination in allowing us to picture things in certain detail, as shown through “now my friends emerge,” which in all exemplifies the presence of imagination in our relationship with nature. Furthermore, the description of their journey demonstrates the liberation received from engaging with nature, as shown where they “wander in gladness,” which relates to the cathartic release obtained from viewing nature that pushes us to reassess our ideas and perceptions. By showing his gradual change in tone, the influence of the persona’s imagination is shown, which when in conjunction with his exclamation of “yes!” reveals our emotional capabilities if becoming engulfed in our imaginations of nature. Also, by choosing to allow the persona to speak in a melodramatic tone, the poet is able to again explicitly demonstrate his

The first line of stanza four “Or rather-- He passed Us—“ (l. 13) demonstrates that the speaker is uncertain about her existence in the world. Now she feels that her life symbolized by the sun is passing by. She becomes chilled by the “dews” (l. 14). Lines three and four in this stanza illustrate the reason for her coldness. The speaker is attired in a light “Gown” (l. 15) and cape or “Tippet” made of “Tulle” (l. 16), which is a kind of thin, transparent, open meterial. When people die,

     The reason for the speaker’s sudden surge of regret seems to be looming death, for he states in the very first line, “My long two-pointed ladder’s sticking through a tree toward heaven still” (1-2). This reference to heaven is the first evidence that the speaker thinks he is going to die. At this point in the poem the references to death or the end of life are rather peaceful, as exemplified by the statement. “But I am done with apple-picking now. Essence of winter sleep is on the night” (6-7). Though the words, “winter”, “sleep”, and “night” typically represent death, they do not necessarily invoke a