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Stop All the Clocks Essay Example

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Stop All the Clocks Essay Example
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Read the poem “Stop all the Clocks” attached to this pack carefully and write a criticism in essay form. In general, the poem “Stop all the Clocks” written by W. H. Auden is about death of a dear person. When analyzing this poem in details, we see that the subject matter of first stanza is concerned with shutting out every sound apart from drums, which will accompany the entering coffin. As for the second stanza, the subject matter deals with the fact that every single thing such as airplanes, doves and policemen should express sadness and sorrow. The subject matter of third stanza is concerned with showing the reader importance of dead person to the poet. Together with that we see that no matter how strong love is, death has the power to destroy anything, no matter how strong or powerful an emotion might be.
Finally, in the forth stanza we learn how poet lost interest in the beauty of nature, such as stars, sun, moon, and oceans. This is so because the dead person took with him the poet’s ability to enjoy and to appreciate the beauty provided by nature. After analyzing the subject matter of the poem it is easy for us to see its themes, which would be death, sadness, sorrow, love, darkness, desperation, loneliness and power of death upon love. So far we have learned that this poem is full of negativity. As a result we may say that poet uses negative diction. In the first stanza we see list of verbs such as “stop”, “prevent”, “silence”. Yet all these verbs indicate an end of something representing the end of one’s life together with their love. We do encounter verbs such as “bring out” and “let…come” which would normally indicate beginning of something new. Yet in this poem these verbs have a negative meaning since the nouns attached to them are “coffin” and “mourners”. As for another aspect of diction, poet uses sensuous diction referring to the sense of hearing. Once again we see negativity

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