Skunk Hour “Skunk Hour” by Robert Lowell is a poem that is about reflection of nature and the personal self. The overall tone of this poem is gloomy, glum, and grim. There is really no instance of happiness in nature like previous poems. The poem takes place in Maine. Maine is a very cold state with lots of open land and not a large population. At times Maine can be very lonely and depressed, like the speaker states. The speaker describes the top of a hill on line 26 as the “hills skull”. The word skull does not do any justice to this figure of the land. The word skull is a creepy word not usually used to describe nature. Shortly after this line the speaker states there is a graveyard on the hill as well. The eerie feeling continues
The song “Day ‘N’ Nite” by Kid Cudi from his album Man on the Moon talks about the lonely stoner that is in search of finding peace in his life and trying to discover the life he imagined. The slow tempo of the song shows that the artists wants the listener to pay attention to the words.
The text is very descriptive and loaded with symbols. The author takes the opportunity to relate elements of setting with symbols with meanings beyond the first reading’s impressions. The house that the characters rent for the summer as well as the surrounding scenery are introduced right from the beginning. It is an isolated house, situated "quite three miles from the village"(947); this location suggests an isolated environment. Because of its "colonial mansion"(946) look, and its age and state of degradation, of the house, a supernatural hypothesis is implied: the place is haunted by ghosts. This description also suggests stability, strength, power and control. It symbolizes the patriarchal oriented society of the author’s time. The image of a haunted house is curiously superimposed with light color elements of setting: a "delicious garden"(947), "velvet meadows"(950), "old-fashioned flowers, and bushes and gnarly trees"(948) suggest bright green. The room has "air and sunshine galore"(947), the garden is "large and shady"(947) and has "deep-shaded arbors"(948). The unclean yellow of the wallpaper is
Just like any other collection of poems, the “Nursery Furniture” takes as its motivation certain routine daily act of upper-middle-class privilege, consumerism, domesticity, or homeownership. In this section of the poem, the orator is expecting the arrival of a new chair from a nursery furniture store referred to as “Land of Nod.” The anticipation leads the orator into the extremely associative hypotactic sentence quoted above. Through the quotation, a reader is able to follow Schiff’s mind’s movement from the “Nod” word to the killing of Abel and the somewhat equally violent “industrial rattle” of the orator’s flawed rocking chair. This leads the reader to Alison who is depicted as the Land of Nod’s manager to whom some sections of the poem are
Olds starts off the poem by saying: “That winter, the dead could not be buried.”’(1) This creates a sad tone for when the rest of the poem. She then talks about the
Having to find a place to cremate his friend’s corpse, and at the same time trying to stay alive, proved to be quite the challenge. His hardships on his way to find a suitable place to cremate Sam McGee is described in stanzas 34 - 39, “In the days to come, though my lips were dumb, in my heart how I cursed that load. In the long, long night, by the firelight, while the huskies, round in a ring, howled out their woes to the homeless snows - O God! How I loathed the thing And every day that quiet clay seemed to heavy and heavier grow; and on I went, though the grub was getting low; the trail was bad and I felt half mad, but I swore I would not give in.” The goings get so tough along his trip that the narrator begins to feel jealous of Sam McGee’s corpse, thinking death is better than what he is going
While reviewing “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”, it should be noted that the key is the rhythm of the language. The first, second, and fourth sentence rime while the third sentence of each rimes with the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd sentence of the next stanza. In relation with the cryptic language draws the question, there is a more sinister back drop of loneliness and depression in this poem much deeper than the level of nature orated by the Narator.
In the second and third stanzas of the poem, Wood goes into detail about her morning routine as a child which seems to have impacted her greatly. She mentions how her father forced her to eat eggs every morning as she left the house still “hungry” everyday after she “cried” and “gagged” and refused to eat them. Such words deepen the meaning of the poem as they connect to her general attitude toward mornings. As she states how morning “broke like an egg,” she is essentially showing her dread for each coming morning because she associates morning with being force-fed eggs.
In this poem, we see the tone light and free, also much imagery. We see this immediately with the first line saying, the “afternoon was the colour of water falling through sunlight” (1). We immediately get a sense of a beautiful day, maybe even fall with the trees descriptions in the following line, “trees glittered with the tumbling of leaves” (2). Lowell shows such beautiful imagery throughout her poem especially in her first two stanzas, that when we read that they are in the middle of war in the third stanza, that it is slightly shocking. That there are “two little boys, lying flat on their faces” (7) and that they are, “carefully gathering red berries” (8). Here Lowell shows that it is still a beautiful day but the darker reality is that they are currently in a war. Then we start to see the poem more in a melancholy light. That these two little boys are picking berries to save for later, instead of enjoying it right now. However one day the boys wish that “there will be no more war” (10), and that then, they could in fact enjoy their berries, their afternoon and “turn it in my fingers”. In this poem, we clearly see the different tones throughout. Lowell shows us the light tone, then a more melancholy tone and then finally a hopeful tone.
In Robert Frost's poem. “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” the speaker uses literary devices to show the reader the poem's meaning. Symbolism plays an important role in this poem. Robert Frost uses symbolism to show the correlation between the woods and village with heaven. Mythological symbolism is also found in this poem. when the speaker talks about the lake. it is a reference to Hel in Norse Mythology. The tone of the poem, and Robert Frost's syntax. portray a tranquil yet dark feeling throughout the poem. The observations made exhibit how the speaker views life and death. The personification of the horse shows how the horse is important
The speaker also chooses her diction precisely, so that there is clear contribution to the overall idea that the poem is indeed about the quest for change and longing from escape from the swamp. Two very different forms of description are used to represent this source of dread: once by the simple name, swamp, and
The organization of the poem is interesting. Each line is either an incomplete sentence or it finishes a sentence. The stanzas are each about three or four lines long which contain some arduous words. An example is the word “weir”. Lowell writes, “...the sea lapped/ the raw little match-stick/ mazes of a weir” (ll. 9-11). After research on it, the word means, a fence or enclosure set in a waterway for taking fish (Merriam Webster). This word is important to know because of the imagery it represents. The raw little match-sticks mean that it’s burnt out and so is their love for eachother. The weir is where the rock would be next to. They’d see the fish being trapped. This shows how the speaker the was fish. They were emotionally trapped in the town and the relationship.
The setting is in a graveyard, as it mentions in the story ‘’bleak place overgrown with nettles was the churchyard’’. This negative language creates a barren and colourless setting and nettles in particular are seen as unfavourable objects. ‘’overgrown with nettles’’ states that it was deceived and not looked after. In addition ‘’the dark flat wilderness’’ is used to describe the marshes part of the setting, this shows that it is dark there and it states that there is nobody
Maxine Kumin used imagery throughout the poem to describe in-depth how the woodchucks died. The fourth stanza stated, “She flip-flopped in the air and fell, her needle teeth still hooked in a leaf of early Swiss chard”. In this line, Maxine Kumin was describing when the gardener killed the mother woodchuck.
In the third stanza a box is introduced. It can be assumed that this box is a coffin. The box is being lifted into the ground and the "Boots of Lead" "creaking" across the poets soul symbolize the mourners walking on the fresh grave. The "tolling" of space mimics the church bell that is introduced in the following stanza.
The night symbolized death, and the walk was the person's journey to find their lost life. This poem was somewhat disturbing to me. I thought of a lost soul, thirsting to finish a mission that was not completed in life. Frost depicts death in a frightening manner with the contents of this piece of work.