The Kiss Poem Analysis

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Explication “The Kiss” By Sara Teasdale The poem “The Kiss” by Sara Teasdale suggests that the fantasy of the first kiss with someone is not always as magical as one makes it out to be. It is written in the poetic form of a lyric and the rhyme scheme is ABCB in the first stanza and ADED in the second stanza. The first stanza of this poem is simply one sentence, broken up into four lines. The first two lines of this poem introduce the speaker’s fantasies of a man. The speaker, like many girls, “hope[s] that he (her crush) would love [her]” and dreams of her magical first kiss with this man. These first two lines are written in a very dreamy and hopeful tone but this quickly shifts in the third line. In the third line of the first stanza, the speaker begins the line with the word “but”, evidently making a turn in the poem with a more negative tone. The speaker uses a simile, “But I am like a stricken bird”, comparing herself to a bird that has been shot down. This “stricken bird” can not seem to fly to where it wants to go implying the speaker can not seem to fly emotionally with where she wants to go with this kiss. This simile connotes that her much anticipated first kiss was a disappointment, already suggesting the theme…show more content…
In this stanza, the speaker explicitly explains that the kiss simply did not live up to her expectations. The first two lines of this stanza illustrate that even though she knows that this man does love her, the kiss was such a disappointment that she is still devastated – her “heart is sad”. The speaker uses a semicolon at the end of the second line because it pauses and prepares the readers for the disappointment. The last line “As all the dreams I had” is the most significant line of the poem because the speaker states that her much anticipated first kiss with this man was not as amazing as she had hoped
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