In the second stanza, he is reminiscing about his childhood and how he felt imprisoned in school (gazed upon the bars). He speaks of a fluttering stranger (line 26), which seems to indicate that not that person is fluttering, but his eyelids are. His eyes are unclosed, because he is daydreaming, but soon he actually falls asleep and thinks about his teacher, who he detests. He describes the anticipation of being able to go outside again only by hearing the bells of the old church-tower, since he is only looking out the window and waiting for the doors to open for anybody to pick him up and take him outside.…
As the narrator remembers past scenes, he writes, “Brushstrokes flash, a red bird’s/wings cutting across my stare” (22-23). The author recalls memories from the battles, and he retells them as if they are a beautiful piece of art, although the reality is brutal. By envisioning traumatic scenes in a different light, the narrator infers that even the darkest scenes can be viewed with warm energy. When the persona glances into the reflective wall, he explains, “My clouded reflection eyes me/like a bird of prey, the profile of the night/slanted against the morning” (6-8). The author compares night and morning, which puts light against darkness. Although the narrator came with sorrow for all of the lives lost in the Vietnam War, he still sees the hopeful aspect among the grief. No matter what the situation is, hope is always present within one’s darkest…
The true beauty of this poem for me, and what makes it so enigmatic, is the mutual recognition in a person, between two moments past and future, of one's frame of mind at the other moment. We are so long in time, that such connections are very, very rare, and to have a moment of empathy with one's future or past self is both to gain a momentary insight into the nature of life and aging, and to momentarily gain a new internal context to how we perceive the aging of others, and what it really means to…
“Night” focuses on how evil is born when darkness rises. In the first stanza the speaker reveals that the day is ending and night is beginning. The moon and the sun are personified when the speaker says “the sun descending in the west” and “sits and smiles on the night.” Throughout the beginning of the poem the speaker’s tone is comforting. For example, he mentions “warm, sleep, and bed”; then towards the end of the poem the tone changes drastically. William Blake is famous for mentioning a guardian angel in his poems, and he does so in the second stanza.…
Upon a "certain hour", or sleep, the speaker beckons his soul to fly free, escape the day, and ponder its own themes. The speaker's soul does not necessarily appreciate the day's happenings and thoughts, so it drifts in dreaming to a place where it can think about "night, sleep, death, and the stars." The daytime mind of the speaker, most likely representing a restricted or bound form, thinks about things it is perhaps not naturally inclined to do. This poem is like a snap-shot of the human soul between consciousness and…
The poem is a self reflection of the narrator, as he walks through the city streets between the hours of midnight and four. In the opening stanza, the time is established as midnight; a time associated with beauty, spirituality and mystery. The moon is personified as being in control of the streets, and “whispering lunar incantations”. The effect Elliot creates with this is that the moon’s supernatural powers come into effect, helping the narrator collect his thoughts. The mechanical nature of his walk (“Every street lamp that I pass/ Beats like a fatalistic drum”) hints at the narrators thoughts being jumbled and rearranged as he walks. Finally, the last section of the first stanza (“Midnight shakes the memory/ Like a madman shakes a dead Geranium”) implies that the narrators journey is somewhat nightmarish and irrational, with a disturbing image of a “madman shaking a flower”. The repeated personification of the street lamps, (The street-lamp sputtered/ The street-lamp muttered) additionally adds another layer of nightmarish depth to the narrators walk.…
The speaker of this poem is explaining of what the night consist of in his opinion. In the first line, the speaker right away tells the readers that he well acquainted to the night. The speaker seems to have good knowledge of the night and also enjoys it, as what the reader can capture from the first line. In line 2 and 3 the speaker begins to explain about a journey him/her in a rainy night while leaving a city. The speaker is explaining of what a night consist of trough a walk through a rainy night leaving a particular city. It seems that he enjoys walking regularly in the night, a reason to belief that the speaker is well acquainted to the night, because walk and observe the night regularly. In the next stanza, line 4 to 6, the speaker says that he/she leave the city through the saddest lane of the city where he encounters a watchman, which he completely ignores. It is to say that the speaker is making a statement he/she does not care about a time…
The diction in this poem is very interesting. Anne Sexton uses a lot of adjectives to describe the night and the objects that have to do with it. She uses the word “silent” to…
The author incorporates oodles of metaphors into the poem to depict the speaker’s thoughts and feelings. “Night” is an extended metaphor for the depression the speaker is inflicted with because it is the subject of the rest of the poem. The speaker has “outwalked the furthest city light” which is also a metaphor for depression and loneliness; the speaker is the cause of his solitariness because he walks into a distance himself, and the further he gets, the less light, or felicity he acquires. The metaphor for distance is also present when the speaker hears a “cry” from “far away.” The cry he heard from a horizon was not for him, and that brings about even more alienation and dejection. The “luminary clock” is a metaphor that compares a clock to the moon; the moon is not only the most distal thing in the poem to the speaker but also the radiant thing that reaches him when he is in duskiness.…
spirit, and an ultimate fear of failure that seems to reflect something personal. Set in a…
The imagery brought forth by the environment described evokes feelings of loneliness and sorrow, and the use of bright colors in the vanishing sunset and cardinal show the fading away of a source of comfort or happiness. The speaker of the poem is lonely because his father has died, most likely too soon, due to an illness. He misses the time he spent with his father, because he was a source of excitement in a dull world, much like the rice and peas brought flavor to the plain white rice. It is a bittersweet poem, the speaker fondly remembers his father, but there is also anger present, either towards the father for abandoning him by dying, or the speaker himself for not cherishing his father while he had the chance, or more likely,…
The poem is arranged into five stanzas, each with its own setting and time of day to unify the whole literary piece into one length of time; a day. It starts from one midnight to the next, taking the reader through a journey that could possibly be compared to the length of one’s lifetime. The first stanza starts its time during the late night. This is evident because the speaker addresses the way light works in the dark. The first two lines could be understood as two lovers are trying to find each other in the dark but there is enough light from them to ‘bless’ them with a ‘meaningless O’ which could represent a kiss between the two lovers. A kiss itself is meaningless but because the lovers were able to find each other, the light allowed them to “[teach…
The poem explores the emotions of a young man who has lost his lover to death and who tries to distract himself from his sadness through books. Books, however, are little help, as his night becomes a nightmare from the raven interrupting his concentration. Throughout this poem, he uses different figurative language to show the grief and sorrow for the one he loves. “On the morrow he will leave me, as my hopes have flown before”(Poe). This depicts that Poe has had his hopes up with love but then they faded away because the one he loved…
At the beginning of the poem the poet takes us back to the past to tell…
The story of Slavomir Rawicz has Luckily enough his story has been told through his rightfully named memoir, The Long Walk. The Long Walk is an amazing book documenting and retelling the story of a former Polish soldier as he fights his way through Russian mistreatment and to a place of solitude and freedom. An unforgettable story like his could only come with admiration from the reader for the resilience and bravery Slavomir had during his fight for freedom. With many people dying along the way, Slavomir went many thousands of miles with a goal of freedom in mind. The Long Walk is a true first person narration of Slavomir Rawicz's journey and escape from a Serbian work camp. This journey describes the hardships and the will power to survive.…