The tone of “O my soul” which was sighing with emotion to poet’s soul is some kind of encouraging and cheering up his mind. “The vacant vast surrounding” and “Measureless oceans of space” are corresponsive. Both of them mean the area the soul has to explore is too immense, just like expansive and broad space. The poet talked to his soul should be like the spider to connect his mind and outer environment, just like forming a bridge. “Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them” and “Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres” actually expressed the same idea in different words.
The Haunter Imaginatively, and most pathetically, Hardy writes this plaintive and moving poem from the point of view of Emma. It is written in the first person, with her as the imaginary narrator. It is almost as if, in putting these words in the mouth of Emma (who, in the poem, sees Hardy as oblivious of her presence) Hardy is trying to reassure himself that she forgives him and continues to love him. Detailed commentary Though Hardy does not know it, Emma's phantom follows him in his meanderings, hearing, but unable to respond to, the remarks he addresses to her in his grief. When Emma was able to answer Hardy did not address her so frankly; when she expressed a wish to accompany him Hardy would become reluctant to go anywhere - but now he does wish she were with him.
One way in which Thomas seems inspired by the natural world is through his contrast between the simplistic beauty of nature “sky and meadow and forest”, “untouched dew”, “new mown hay”, and the impossible complexity of expressing this beauty in words “I cannot bite the day to the core”. He does this throughout the poem, asking himself a set of questions. The first is whether he should look outside this physical world ‘as far as heaven, as hell’ to find ‘Wisdom or strength to match this beauty’. Or should he follow a path of ‘pale dust pitted with small dark drops’ (a contrast with ‘sublime vacancy’ and an image suggesting rain) and listen to ‘short-lived happy-seeming things//That we know naught of, in the hazel copse?’ The idea of step-by-step quest seems to be at odds with the idea of poetic inspiration. ‘Wisdom’ and ‘strength’ are posed as alternatives, as are heaven and hell, and refer, presumably, to creative or spiritual abilities.
The Cemetery in “The Ice Palace” “The Ice Palace” is a short story written by F. Scott Fitzgerald, one of the greatest American writers in the 1920s and a member of the “Lost Generation”. In the story, Sally Carrol, a southern girl who is bored with the unchanging environment, is going to marry a northern man and goes to the North. However, she feels uncomfortable and finds the North not as interesting as she thought because of the cultural and geographical difference. After the moment of her epiphany in the Ice Palace, Sally Carrol returns to the South. Fitzgerald uses many symbols to indicate the characters’ personalities in the story, among which the cemetery is a representative one.
Shelley takes this idea into her novel in several places, and means it as a breeze of discovery, not just as a breeze of inspiration. Walton references this in his first letter to his sister: “I feel a cold northern breeze play upon my cheeks, which braces my nerves and fills me with delight” (M. Shelley 15). The creature then says of his first encounter with fire, “It was morning when I awoke, and my first care was to visit the fire. I uncovered it, and a gentle breeze quickly fanned it into flame” (M. Shelley 100). In both cases, the breeze—although apparently mentioned innocently—is a very deliberate maneuver on Shelley’s part to represent the same idea that Coleridge presented in “The Eolian Harp.” In Walton’s case it stands for both his inspiration to travel north, as well as providing the physical motivation to keep him pressing on.
The poet tends to use informal diction throughout the poem which demonstrates how the speaker seems to still be in that childish stage and is not admitting to his mistake. He refers to his “butterfingered way…of asking [her if she would marry him]”, and the word choice shows that he is reminiscing and inserting himself in that situation again. The word “butterfingered” is not only childish, but butter is used to soothe pain from burns, so it connects with the incident he described. The poet informs the readers that love is difficult to express, and this is perceptible because the poet has an irrational way of expressing his emotions to the girl he loves. He uses specific words that have buried meanings in them.
Just as she used time of day in The Violets, she uses seasons to symbolise a time in her life. Autumn symbolises her middle age. In this stanza she paints a grim picture of her innocence lost as she has become aware of age and death by saying “we stand, two friends of middle age by your parents’ grave in silence among the avenues of the dead.” The reason she has chosen to set this part of the poem at the grave of her friend’s parents because of her love for her own parents, and she deeply empathises with her friend’s loss. It is typical in her poetry that, when the present becomes too miserable, Harwood will transcend the current time and return to a happier memory. However in this poem she cannot find a happier memory and recalls a dream instead, “I dreamed once long ago, that we walked among day-bright flowers.” Her use of positive imagery such as the “day-bright flowers” lightens the mood and achieves the same effect of the memories in The Violets, as she stops thinking of death and causes the reader to forget the unhappy nature of the initial memory and be emotionally moved by the warmth of the following memory where she is “secure in my father’s arms.” In her poems The Violets, Father and Child and At Mornington Gwen Harwood demonstrates through her use of memories, her loss of innocence, the love for her parents and how quickly time moves.
Even the hardest of people need somebody to talk to every once in a while. Over the next few paragraphs of the letter, the writer indirectly indicates her loneliness; personifying her cat and going over her day and her work routine and her daily surroundings with extraordinary details. “I, too, walk to work, through the fudgy air and over clumps of moss. The first month we were here I couldn't walk without stopping to touch the fallen clumps. They looked like wig hair, damaged and knotted, but felt like duck feathers.” It is typical for a fiction story to describe surroundings with such detail, but since this was written as a letter to someone, the use of detail is used to emphasize the loneliness of the writer, since she probably has nobody else to listen to what she has to say.
Throughout the poem the child portrayed in the poem seems to be awkward and indifferent towards her mother. However, the child ends up fascinated with her mother even exclaiming the fact that her mother is actually hers and no one else’s. The mechanics of the poem are not very structured as Olds seems to almost always use a free verse style of writing. The poem “I Go Back to May 1937” is a poem of thirty lines that uses imagery to describe the scene of her parents as they depart into college together. The first nine lines beginning with an exploration of two adults signified by the terms "gates" and "colleges."
Reading this poem, however, we do not experience it as a display of cold or abstract mechanics. Instead, it is raw and deeply emotional, for all that the empirical details of the underlying sorrow (what it is actually "about") are concealed from the reader. We "understand" the sadness without "knowing" its source. Stanza 1 begins in a domestic scene as a grandmother reads jokes from an almanac to her granddaughter. However, grief is suggested by the Autumnal atmosphere and the “failing light “.