Both poets present different attitudes towards death. Larkin has a more reflective view on death; death seems to be intimidating in his poems however he reflects on the ways in which it affects us all. In Ambulances he uses a vehicle as a subject matter in order to symbolise death metaphorically. Similarly to this Plath uses the subject matter of tulips in her poem ‘Tulips’ to represent the monotony of life and how they are disturbing her death. Plath’s ironic view on death helps her to explore how death has affected her personally, she does this by using a 3rd person point of view in her poem ‘Edge’ which describes her state and appearance after death.
Out of the supplementary of works Poe had written, I personally had found his poem “The Raven” uniquely interesting because it closely expresses the devastation that Poe went through throughout his life. In the poem, the narrator who we never are told a name, is obviously troubled. The narrator, sitting alone, is greeted by a raven that he sees not just as a measly bird, but more than that. He feels that he has just come in contact with a higher power, another entity trying to contact him. The narrator, who was suffering from the loss of Lenore, seemed to manifest this bird into a spiritual being.
Poe chose a raven as the central symbol in the poem because the creature is "non-reasoning" and capable of speech. In the poem the narrator transforms the bird into both an instrument of self-torture and a symbol of his personal mourning. Poe gives the raven human characteristics of speech. This is an example of personification. The bird’s darkness matches the morbid and depressing tone of the poem and represents lost love and death and symbolizes "Mournful and Never-ending Remembrance.
Unless you have experienced it yourself you cannot understand it. Updike and his poetry, and Rhys with her short story they describe death and impermanence in their own ways. When Rhys describes life after death in I Used to Live Here Once and Updike describes not everything is permanent like in Dog’s Death by John Updike I see that both are talking about forms of death. While they both talk about it, one tells what it would be like after you die and the other describes the pain, and sadness leading to it. Through out the short story and poem I realized that the authors used tone, and symbolism in their literary work as described in our textbooks.
Flies, as most people know, are an annoyance. They feast on dead flesh, which is what the speaker will soon be. The presence of the fly is a harsh reminder of the fate of the dead (“I Heard a Fly Buzz—When I Died—”139). Romanticism is defined as emotional and written works include emotional intensity. In this poem, Emily Dickinson creates just that in lines five and six, “The Eyes around—had wrung them dry— / And Breaths were gathering firm” (Dickinson 5-6).
Possibly the most significant use of personification instituted in "The Raven" comes from the communication between a raven and the speaker. He, the speaker, is mourning the loss of his love, Lenore. The raven, black in color, signifying death and grief, serves as a never-ending remembrance of the loss of his love Lenore. Throughout the raven's presence, the speaker is asking where Lenore is and if he will see her again. Again and again, the bird replies monotonously, "Nevermore".
Elizabeth Jennings’s ‘One Flesh’ presents the relationship through a daughter looking back at her parents’ behaviour towards each other. Ian McMillan’s ‘04/01/07’ presents the reaction to his mother’s death. In this essay, I will analyse and compare how the poets present their attitudes to relationship by looking at the structure, imagery and the use of senses in the poems. Looking at the structure of the poems, Jennings and McMillan use different techniques to present their attitudes to relationships. McMillan uses the form of a sonnet, where the iambic pentameter rhythm imitates the regularity of the heartbeat, which shows the love towards his mother and the physical intensity of his reaction to her death.
In the poem, “My Picture”, Abraham Cowley’s figurative language and melancholy diction emphasize the pain and loss that the speaker will soon experience when his beloved leaves him. Cowley uses two significant types of figurative language - imagery and hyperbole. His diction alters depending on whether the speaker refers to himself or to his beloved. Through the use of figurative language and shifting diction, Cowley effectively captures the speaker’s mournful state of mind. The imagery and hyperbole that Cowley uses to convey the speaker’s condition the day after his loved one leaves him suggests that the speaker is incapable of living without his beloved.
Throughout the poem, the speaker discusses things about nature and death that gives off a depressing or gloomy mood to the poem. The speaker begins to set the mood and says, “Her early leaf’s a flower./But only so an hour (3-4). Frost’s poem is in no way a happy poem. It has a strong message but it leaves people feeling depressed and fearing death. Making the mood of the poem depressing, Frost is able to get his point across that eventually everything will die.
Since he had so many deaths in his life he wrote this poem to express how he sees death taking over locations that were once spectacular and are now in grieve and the absence of the liveliness. This poem shows an image of how death rises and becomes a higher power and taking away the light. The outcome of all the pain and horror that follows in deaths footprints in a city isolated by water is seen as a putrid