Preview

The Wife's Lament

Good Essays
Open Document
Open Document
667 Words
Grammar
Grammar
Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Writing
Writing
Score
Score
The Wife's Lament
In the poem "The Wife's Lament" the reader is taken though a complex journey into the life of a women in the Old English times, a time in which the wife is full of struggling frustration by the separation of her lover and inability to rectify her situation. The specular lament in introduced in first persona, the wife, stating a life "full of sorrows" and distress; resulting in her own exile. Never has the wife experienced such sorrow, she tortures herself through isolation. To begin with the poem is a lyric in which expresses the personal concern of the wife's emotion with an overall focus on pain, misery, and dependency. Throughout the first stanza, there is a vast description for the wife's anguish, the departure of her husband, "... …show more content…
She thinks of happy lovers who lie together in bed on summer days, while she lives alone in the earth cave under the oak tree. She describes the caverns as very old and the leaves filled with longing, the landscape around her empty, gloomy, a place with no joy anywhere to be found; unable to quiet her mind or anything to relieve her misery. Throughout the stanza she describes her lonesomeness and anguish no other could bear feeling. The author’s use of imagery impact the reader in a way they are able to connect with the wife and her sorrows. The description throughout the stanza is so strong it is able to create a bond between the wife and the reader to better
Continue Reading
View Writing Issues

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • Good Essays

    A Poetry Analysis on Modern Love, by George Meredith
    • 563 Words
    • 3 Pages

    A Poetry Analysis on Modern Love, by George Meredith

    The first line of the poem begins the dark theme (By this he knew she wept with waking eyes), showing how the husband has seen his wife's suffering; as well as painting a memorable picture through the use of alteration. The alteration serves another purpose as well. It's smooth deliverance shows just how used to the situation the husband is to his wife's tears. In line 2 we see just how helpless the husband is to help, his hand “quivers” out of nervousness, and in line 3 we see the extent of the wife's sobs (Shook their common bed). The dark selection of diction continues as metaphors are employed in lines 5&6 (And strangled mute, like little gaping snakes, dreadfully venomous to him). The truly telling word in these lines is “Strangled,” this extremely active verb implies force. This describes the situation of any willfully married wife during the time the poem was written. They had little choice in not only their husband, but also in the lifestyle handed to the by that husband, not to mention that divorce during this time period was early unheard of. The next lines hint at the wife's feeling of death, (“Stone-still”) showing her complete hopelessness at the situation imposed on her. Lines 8-12 have the same dark imagery (“Pale drug of silence”, “Sleep's heavy measure”, “move-less”, “Dead black years”), but those same images fit into another, larger image. The author uses them to describe her “Giant heart of memories and tears.” Meredith clearly shows the long lasting nature of the wife's pain,…

    • 563 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
    Read More
  • Good Essays

    Gwen Harwood Essay
    • 975 Words
    • 4 Pages

    Gwen Harwood Essay

    The poems transition from an absolute experience to the abstract is mirrored by the tone, beginning wistful and moving toward resignation. Harwood utilizes imagery of imprisonment and personification of the heart “when the heart mourns in its prison” to establish a confrontation between the heart and the spirit. The line “In the space between love and sleep” is repeated and inverted in the third stanza “darkness between sleep and love”; foregrounding the struggle between sensuality and spirituality (QUESTION).…

    • 975 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
    Read More
  • Good Essays

    The Violets Gwen Harwood Analysis
    • 1701 Words
    • 7 Pages

    The Violets Gwen Harwood Analysis

    Literally, the persona of the poem is outside when some aspects of the nature around her, like violets and a blackbird, trigger a memory from her childhood. The poem then flashbacks to a childhood memory of the persona as a young girl, which is shown through the indentation of the stanzas, where the girl wakes up in the afternoon thinking it is morning and becomes upset when she wonders ‘Where’s morning gone?’. This continues until she falls asleep in the memory, and we are brought back to the present. The last stanza sums up some of her most valued childhood memories which continue to ‘drift in the air’ and remain with her.…

    • 1701 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Good Essays
    Read More
  • Good Essays

    Analysis of Rita Dove’s, “Daystar”
    • 917 Words
    • 4 Pages

    Analysis of Rita Dove’s, “Daystar”

    As the poem opens, Dove begins with a metaphor that entertains the idea of exhaustion from motherhood and managing the household. “But she saw diapers steaming on the line, a doll slumped behind the door” (Dove 896), the author offers this line to serve as a mirror image of the main character herself. To regain her composure, she finds a relaxing place behind the garage and the littlest objects such as “the pinched armor of a vanished cricket” or “a floating maple leaf” (Dove 896) serve as a simple pleasure and peace. “When she closed her eyes she’d see only her own vivid blood” in other words, she feels alive and free when she is in complete silence and isolation. The very location of her “safe-place” shows the loyalty to her family because she is close enough in case of need; however, she is still cherishing her time alone.…

    • 917 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
    Read More
  • Good Essays

    The Drifters Poem Analysis
    • 347 Words
    • 2 Pages

    The Drifters Poem Analysis

    The poem begins without indicating who these people are or what has happened to them in the past, references to “he” and “her”. Throughout the poem the central character is never given a name. The significance of this is the wife is an anonymous woman due to the lack of a permanent place to live. No one knows her name. She could perhaps represent others.…

    • 347 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
    Read More
  • Good Essays

    A Poem from 'Aeon Entelechy Evangelion' by Earthscorpion
    • 849 Words
    • 4 Pages

    A Poem from 'Aeon Entelechy Evangelion' by Earthscorpion

    Not Angels: not men, and the resourceful creatures see clearly that we are not really at home in the interpreted world. Perhaps there remains some tree on a slope, that we can see again each day: there remains to us yesterday's street, and the thinned-out loyalty of a habit that liked us, and so stayed, and never departed. Oh, and the night, the night, when the wind full of space wears out our faces – whom would she not stay for, the longed-for, gentle, disappointing one, whom the solitary heart with difficulty stands before.…

    • 849 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
    Read More
  • Good Essays

    Jane Kenyon Let Evening Come Analysis
    • 1567 Words
    • 7 Pages

    Jane Kenyon Let Evening Come Analysis

    Coping with the difficulty of her challenging illness, Kenyon allows herself to experience “brief moments of release” through nature, which sustains her throughout her life (Covintree). As Kenyon observes the light at the end of the day “shin[ing] through chinks in the barn”(2) she realizes the beauty of insignificant moments (Harris). Listening to the sound of a cricket's voice and a women knitting in the evening, Kenyon acknowledges the importance and role of the “animate and inanimate” in the natural cycle (Milne, 126). When “the fox go[es] back to its sandy den”(10), he awaits “the miracle of restoration that is sleep” (Peseroff 189), which can comfort and offer solace after a busy day (Milne, 118). Frequently opening stanzas with the word “Let”, Kenyon instructs the reader that at the end of an active day “all must let go” (Milne, 115). Through the beauty of seemingly insignificant moments in nature, Kenyon learns not only to acknowledge the elegance around her but also to accept the idea of letting…

    • 1567 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Good Essays
    Read More
  • Good Essays

    The Wife's Wife Monologue
    • 447 Words
    • 2 Pages

    The Wife's Wife Monologue

    The Queen’s wrath he kept saying as we flew from the Queen’s grim, dismal, displeasurable for anyone who enters with bad notice, unwelcoming castle. Why he kept saying that repetitively I don’t know while flying the Queen’s black dragon. That could almost represent a black hole that light couldn’t go through, and the dragon's scales every time it took a breath would open up a glow of green as like if it was irritated blood. I asked the man his name he says with a murmur voice “The Queen’s wrath”. Since he said it so many times it repetitions in my mind as if I’m studying for a grammar test constantly. I then demanded him say where were we heading in a instance we divebomb to the ground with a swift, headlong straight into a rebel camp. With…

    • 447 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
    Read More
  • Good Essays

    Summary Of Loneliness By Laura Cortes
    • 344 Words
    • 2 Pages

    Summary Of Loneliness By Laura Cortes

    In "Loneliness", Laura Cortes describes the feelings of the old man that lives alone. The narrator takes the readers through the life of a man who has many hopes that he wishes to become fulfilled in the future. In the poem, it tells us how the old man reminisces over things that happened in his past and how he continues to have hope for his future. When the narrator describes the house, she says, "Inside a stone house in the mountains"(1) she is informing us that the home is secluded.…

    • 344 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
    Read More
  • Good Essays

    Comparing The Amish World And The Modern World
    • 969 Words
    • 4 Pages

    Comparing The Amish World And The Modern World

    She has no family but nature. She lives out of doors on the moors of Scotland in a wide world and in a wide nature. Her brothers were the “craggy hills, and her sisters larchen trees” (Found in Poem). Her bath was the river, and she had no food, “an old red cloak” she wore that the weather was cold. “A chip hat she had on” and she would at least she would stare at the moon when there is nothing to do. She made her garlanding (flowers etc.), plaited mats and gave them to cottagers she met she met along the bush. She wove and she would sing (Stanza 5). She does not talk to anyone but her book is a church-yard tomb. Her environment is unclean because she sleeps under trees in a brown heath turf bed that is not comfortable and a place where people hardly seen very emotional and inspiring that helped me to understand the main fact of the poem and I felt mournful about the life that others out there is living. Her world is her life of challenge, she has No rule, No expectations but lived as she did…

    • 969 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
    Read More
  • Better Essays

    The Loss of a Loved One
    • 1374 Words
    • 6 Pages

    The Loss of a Loved One

    The poem creates the theme of eternal love by using words drawn from fairytales, and multisyllabic words with a religious meaning. Additionally, images evoke loss and sadness. For example, “night” is the time when most of the events occur; the narrator gives the reader sense of a sad world. The repetition and rhyme of “Annabel Lee,” “me,” and “sea” also reinforce the tight link between the narrator, his lost love, and the sea. Finally, the ballad’s peaceful and pleasing rhythm created by anapests and iambs, “It was ma/ny and…

    • 1374 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Better Essays
    Read More
  • Better Essays

    Poetry Essay
    • 982 Words
    • 4 Pages

    Poetry Essay

    The tone, at the beginning of this poem is wistful and heavy hearted. She looks out over her yard “where the new grass flames as it has flamed often before” (2-4). A metaphor of her life as it has been in the past when her husband lived; alive and colorful. The seasons where life was blooming, starting each season new and fresh. But this time it is different, like “the cold fire…

    • 982 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Better Essays
    Read More
  • Good Essays

    The wife's story
    • 470 Words
    • 2 Pages

    The wife's story

    A very surprising science fiction story that reverses the werewolf idea. A wolf turns into a man and scares the living daylights out of his wolf wife and wolf children. What makes this story amazing is that LeGuin tricks us, throughout much of the story, into believing that the tale is about humans. She teases us with issues of child abuse, male-female relationships, life in a small town, and sisterly devotion, but she upsets our expectations, forces us to ask questions, re-read the story, and come to see that man is just as frightening as beast.I have to admit I had to read this story 2 times before I could really understand the meaning of it but when it finally came to me I was just amazed. This story is great.…

    • 470 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
    Read More
  • Good Essays

    Anne Bradstreet
    • 872 Words
    • 4 Pages

    Anne Bradstreet

    In Anne’s poem, “A Letter to her Husband, Absent upon Public Employment” Anne used metaphors to display how much she missed her husband. In her poem she wrote, “I like the earth this season, mourn in black, My Sun is gone so far in’s Zodiack, Whom whilst I ’joy’d, nor storms, nor frosts I felt, His warmth such frigid colds did cause to melt.” (Bradstreet 1)To show how much her husband’s presence meant to her, Bradstreet compared him to the sun. Her use of imagery and metaphors shows the audience that when her husband is around, her days are bright and cheery, but when he isn’t around, she feels a sense of darkness and loneliness. This poem showcases how much having their entire family together at once meant to the women of her time. It also shows how much she valued being a wife to her husband and how invested she was in their relationship.…

    • 872 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
    Read More
  • Good Essays

    The Oppression Of Husbands In My Last Duchess By Robert Browning
    • 691 Words
    • 3 Pages

    The Oppression Of Husbands In My Last Duchess By Robert Browning

    In human society, every couple married has different opinions and circumstances. For some people, husbands are ruled by their wives instead of men. However in people`s opinions and minds, wives have a lesser value than husbands in everywhere. Of course in the poem “My Last Duchess” by Robert Browning, the speaker also considers his wife is just a woman whom needs to be quiet all the time. The poem begins with him drawing the attention of the person whom he is talking to, who, asks about the smile of the last duchess in the portrait, is silent during the entire poem.…

    • 691 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
    Read More

Related Topics