(Albom pg 1). The quote is expressing hibiscus plant slowly dying. The hibiscus slowly dying symbolizes Morrie’s body slowly deteriorating and getting closer to the stage of his last moments. Every Tuesday that Mitch and Morrie spend together they spend it having their last classes until the end comes. The hibiscus plant is not just something Morrie likes to look at it is Morrie metaphorically speaking.
Suddenly, at this particular moment he becomes wiser, just as Housman himself, who was only five or so years older than twenty when he wrote this poem. In other words, this is what makes this poem so appealing to the audience – it speaks from the perspective of an ageless poet. The narrator anticipates aging. Only being twenty, he looks forward to seventy. What gives rise to speculation is what he will come to age seventy with.
Even in such a small poem, Frost describes what would seem to be an entire lifetime in only eight lines. Frost conveys these meanings by using vivid imagery, alliteration, and other types of literary devices. The literal meaning of Robert Frost's "Nothing Gold Can Stay" is the changing seasons of nature. The first line, "Nature's first green is gold", is literally describing springtime and the beauty of nature. The second line, "Her hardest hue to hold", describes how fast springtime and all the beauty is over so quickly.
The employment of these poetic devices allows the responder to gain an understanding of Yeats’s perspective of the world and one’s place in it. Central to “The Wild Swans at Coole” is Yeats’s personal concerns about ageing and the inevitability of change. The opening stanza of the poem depicts Yeats in the autumnal years of his life reflecting on the contrast between his foreseeable demise “trod with a lighter tread” and the swans immortality “unwearied still”. Yeats’s unease is contrasted with the immutability of the swans he sees; “their hearts have no grown old” in comparison to his that has aged year, by year. From this one can assert that unlike the swans he depicts, Yeats feels burdened by his life and concerned with the vitality he loses with his growing age.
I will be giving my own ideal argument on the way the theme relates with my reading literary experience and personal insight. In the short eight lined poem, “Nothing Gold Can Stay,” written by Robert Frost, he starts out by painting a picture theme of spring by using symbols of green and gold.“Nature’s first green is gold.” (Clugston, 2010). Here the point is to take in the beauty and feeling of nature and beautiful spring. According to Clugston, (2010) the color green is nature symbolizing birth-new beginning and gold in relation with perfection. For those that have experienced all four seasons and when Spring comes it can be related to a new birth of life.
However, the structure of the poem divided into four five-line stanzas using generally octosyllabic lines and an alternate line rhyming scheme of ABAAB creates the notion of human will existing within the broader context of natural forces. This is symbolised by the four stanzas representing the cycle of the four seasons and the way in which the poem return to the first two lines with an altered syntax. It begins in “a yellow wood” and a reference to the season of autumn tells the reader that choice implies the kind of death since fitting in to one’s self into a path means one cannot follow any other path. However, in Kesey’s novel, until the arrival of McMurphy, there is little choice and the dead like state of chief Bromden symbolises this. Thus, both texts deal with the concept of fitting in to one’s own choice or an institution in terms that signify two different types of death.
The scene and time where this is set is used as a representation of the narrator’s inner feelings, and creates a mood that allows the reader to think deeply about their own life experiences/relationships. ‘Those Winter Sundays’ is presented in 3 stanzas, presented in groups of five, four and five lines again, contrary to the traditional sonnet structure. This poem also has no rhyming pattern and no meter, but some lines do use iambic pentameter.
Following that, he travelled restlessly across Europe whilst recovering. In 1914, at the outbreak of war, he returned to England and joined the army, but only saw very minor action in the defence of Antwerp during early October of the same year. Later, he sailed with the British Mediterranean Expeditionary Force, during which time he suffered from ill-health and finally developed septicaemia from an insect bite. Rupert Brooke died peacefully in April 1915 on board a French medical ship moored off the Greek island of Skyros, where he is buried. He was 27 years old.
Already, Dickinson has readers reevaluating death and personifies it as a friend rather than a feared enemy. The last two lines of the stanza set the poem in motion. The two begin their leisurely stroll through the narrator’s life, but there is one more passenger, immortality. Immortality standing alone in the stanza is a syntactical move to emphasize its importance to death and significance in the poem. Death never travels without immortality.
Sonnet 73 - "That time of year thou mayst in me behold" What's he saying? "That time of year thou mayst in me behold / When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang" You may see in me the autumn of my life, like the time when yellow leaves, or no leaves, or a few leaves still hang "Upon those boughs which shake against the cold / Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang." (The leaves hang on) branches, which shiver in anticipation of the cold; the branches are like empty, ruined church choir pews, and sweet birds used to sing on the branches. "In me thou seest the twilight of such day / As after sunset fadeth in the west," You see in me the twilight of my life, like when the sunset has faded to darkness in the west, "Which by and by black night doth take away / Death's second self, that seals up all in rest." Which before long is replaced by the black night, Death's second self, which covers everything in a deathly sleep.