In The Scarlet Letter, the character feeling the most despair is Dimmesdale. Towards the middle of the book when his health starts failing you can see his despair show more and more in his thoughts and in his sermons. Both of these characters feel despair because of the guilt from something that they or happened to them. The difference is while Dimmesdale let his guilt and despair eat him
Annabel Lee is a work that expresses great loss and sadness. The speaker laments that he has lost the one true love of his life. The loneliness and sadness that permeate the lines of the poem result in an obsession of sorts over the love that the two shared. Every thought and all the dreams he has -- everything has to do with this love that was lost. In modern day thought, such an obsession that results in the speaker going to the grave to lay by her side could be viewed as a form of necrophilism, or morbidity.
At any rate, the fact that he is not with her has driven her to insanity and forced her to keep him alive in her mind to escape the pain of unfulfilled desire. This poem is a villanelle which uses a number of metaphors, rhythms, and vivid imagery to express deep emotion, depression and a sense of hopelessness. The title could be taken literally to mean madness as in anger or it could be taken figuratively to mean madness as in obsession. The words of the poem suggest madness as in insanity. The author uses alliteration in only two lines of the poem.
For example “You ring, quick draw, your voice like a pellet in my ear, and hear me groan”. The use of listing and constant commas makes the lines read like pellets are being fired, as if the sections of the sentence are individual stabs of pain being fired at her. The structure is not mirrored the whole way through the poem, and the poet has used enjambment throughout; i.e. “you choose your spot then blast me…” continues into the next stanza as “through the heart”. This disjointed structure is reflecting how her thoughts rush at her quickly like pellets, but then stop, and she begins thinking about another aspect of her situation.
T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song Of J Alfred Prufrock” depicts the speaker’s life of alienation and depression. Eliot focuses on Prufrock’s life as being depressed and separate from the world in which he lives in. Eliot’s use of metaphors and vivid imagery illustrates Prufrock’s alienation from the world as well as his depressed state of mind. T.S.
The first refrain, “I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead”, both contrasts and shares parallel structure with the second line, “I lift my lids and all is born again” (1, 2). By purposefully creating a structural contradiction, Plath draws focus to both a theme in the poem and a view of her own: people see things not as they are, but as the people themselves are, the world is a reflection of the person observing it (Buckley). This obscurity in reality is what creates the conflict for the speaker. The second refrain, “I think I made you up inside my head”, brings instability and self-doubt into the poem as the speaker questions if the one she loved so much, the one who still gives her so much pain, ever existed to begin with. The fact that this line was chosen as the second refrain, reappearing at the end of many stanzas including the first, and is always surrounded by parentheses seems to indicate that it is meant as a second thought for the speaker, a doubt of sanity always present and something thought only to herself, not to the “you” she is addressing, who is likely the one she
Medusa is told in the first person as a dramatic monologue by a woman who is insecure and worried that her husband is cheating on her. The poem begins: ‘A suspicion, a doubt, a jealousy’ and it is this jealousy which has turned the woman into a gorgon and now everything she looks at turns to stone. This feeling of doubt resonates throughout the poem, exemplified in the line, ‘but I know you’ll go, betray me, stray from home’. Unlike our feelings towards the traditional monstrous character, this poem evokes empathy for the character as she is clearly distressed and suffering. Especially when she reminisces in the final stanza about the time she was young and beautiful, illustrating her complete lack of confidence.
Furthermore, orphans were also often treated with disdain and distrust, due to their reputation as “criminally prone” individuals, and were frequent targets of classic “Victorian contradictions”, that characterized the social conventions of Victorian society. Bessie repeatedly refers to Jane as ‘poor orphan child’ in her hymn early on at Gateshead. The development of Jane’s character is central to the novel. She learns to control her passions, as her integrity is put to the test when she faces so much injustice: ‘why was I always suffering, always browbeaten, always accused, forever condemned?’. The bildungs roman of the protagonist, contrasts the attitudes of the mature Jane to her younger self initially shouting: ‘unjust, unjust’, nonetheless coming of age made her reactions and opinions more subtle, ‘what consternation of a soul was mine that dreary afternoon’.
Throughout the whole poem, the readers are able to know his disapproval, dislike and displeasure over the place that he lives in, by creating a moody and sullen tone which enhances the eerily seriousness of the atmosphere. The content, aim and the theme help to reinforce the writer’s intentions and message of the poem. Through the four quatrains, iambic tetrameter poem, it shows a society that is portrayed as being devastated and grim. Using the basic rhyme scheme of abab, it shows how the people and the places are infected and affected. The rhyme is able to give a flow to the events, making it on-going showing how the society keeps on worsening day by day.
In the first stanza it describes her in denial, the second, exemplifying her sadness and regret of the whole situation and the third, where she faces her feelings and copes with them. Another very famous sonnet poet is Sir Edmund Spenser.