Analysis of Brother and Sisters

DIDLS: Brother and Sisters

Diction
Lost, dubious, lost, out of date, distrait, haunted, leaked, mocking, wavers, wrinkled, snatch, shallow, shrivels, deserted, cracked, old, awry, moths
Images
grew like grass and leaves half-erased and dubious track, polished parlor grew distrait and haunted wound the guilt clock that leaked the year away. wrinkled ewes snatch pansies through the fence/and stare with shallow eyes into the garden
Millie’s cameos loosen round her throat.
The bush comes near, the ranges grow immense.
Their thoughts go fluttering/from room to room like moths
Details
The siblings are traveling but run into a cul-de-sac that does not take them where they need to go; they give up and don’t continue
They stay so long that all exits they had become impossible and they are stuck
The years continue to pass and the siblings are aging alone on their land without fulfilling their dreams
Nature and time are working against the siblings and they are losing their land to the bush
The siblings realize their situation and the girls, Millie and Lucy, are afraid, their brother, John, comforts them
Language
Formal language makes the problem more applicable to those who are educated and believe that they are above problems like this. Because they have the guilt clock and the parlor we can tell that the siblings are not extremely poor, and their dialog at the end of the poem suggests at least some education. A wealthy and educated family being stopped by something as simple as a cul-de-sac says more than an uneducated group of poor siblings being stopped in the same way. The poem now comments on the simplicity of some obstacles and the fact that often people have the tools to get through them, like the blue prints in the poem, but they do not see that path because it is not necessarily the easiest and end up stuck, like Millie, Lucy, and John with the blue prints that get out dated and the land that is slowly being taken over by the bush.
Sentence Structure and never crossed the mountains to the coast./But they stayed on.
The wrinkled ewes snatch pansies through the fence/and stare with shallow eyes into the garden/where Lucy shrivels waiting for a word,/and Millie’s cameos loosen round her throat. telling her she was cracked and old. The wall
Groans in the night and settles more awry.