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. Both poets introduce speakers who have different views on death. In Larkin’s poem ‘Ambulances’ the ambulance is a literal and metaphorical symbol of death. The speaker believes that death is inevitable and will eventually capture us all; Larkin’s speaker uses a specific declarative sentence ‘all streets in time are visited’ which suggests the random nature of death, accidents, sickness and how death is unavoidable. Larkin’s speaker also used the ambulance to symbolise that the common fear of death is always just around the corner for us all.
How Does Duffy reveal her attitude to war and soldiers? In The Falling Soldier, Duffy takes the opportunity to use the photograph of the man’s ‘last breath’ to try and rewrite history, creating several different pleasant images of what the photo could of been representing, compared to the harsh reality. Duffy in both The Falling Soldier and Last Post shows the same theme of her trying to show what she wished, could have happened to the innocent soldiers. ‘If poetry could truly tell it backwards, then it would’ this is Duffy basically telling us that if she could rewrite history with her poems then she would. In the poem The Falling Soldier, which is in relation to the photograph by Robert Capa, Duffy begins the poem by using colloquial language such as ‘flop’ and ‘kip’ to create a very casual everyday image about how the photo could be interoperated.
For example, Burden who earlier saw the warm, peaceful soil now sees a change in the weather: "After the sun sank, a cold wind sprang up and moaned over the prairie. If this turn in the weather had come sooner, I should not have got away. Antonia and I Watson 2 burrowed down in the straw and curled up close together, watching the angry red die out of the west" (76). Cather use weather to intensify the grief that Burden is feeling about the death of Pavel and his parents. Cather made the seasons the biggest connection with the life of Burden.
In this poem “Loveliest of trees” written by A.E. Housman, the poem’s theme is that life is shorter than one thinks, and that life should be taken control of. Housman employs rhetorical devices and interesting words to set the mood of his captivating
Sonnet 73 Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73 is a great example of how imagery and figurative language can be used in one overall theme of the stages of old age up until death. He uses metaphors that have a gloomy tone to symbolize a death approaching of the narrator. This sonnet has three quatrains, which focus on the coming of age and negative aspects of death forthcoming. However, like all couplets, the tone of the narrator changes; the focus switches from negative to positive. The couplet focuses on appreciating the love in life, especially during the time of death.
Her poem “Because I could not stop for death,” is the story of a woman making her way from life to death, and then to the afterlife. In this work, Dickinson uses various literary strategies to argue that death is not to be feared, but accepted. Because Dickinson’s idea of dying is different than expected, the metaphor for death is the most important throughout the poem. This is the first use of symbolism in the poem, which sets the tone for the following stanzas. Emily Dickinson depicts death as a man who picks up the speaker of the poem for a carriage ride.
Country in the tile connotes the serenity and peaceful beauty found in it that soothes the viewer. In this poem, the physical journey – a drive in the country, is a catalyst for reflection first on the calmness and sureness of the natural world, and then, dramatically, on death and hopelessness. The poem probably reflects Skrzynecki’s experience of living and working in northern NSW and he appears to be unhappy in this environment. The poet takes a trip to the country and this trip denotes a physical journey as an escape from the reality of life. This physical journey in the country acts as a temporary escape from reality.
If a reader who’s facing death would like to read a death poem, than the reader would have to decide how they would want to feel. The reason for this, both writers Emily Dickinson and Robert Frost use different tones of death among their poetry. The tone usage that Emily Dickinson and Robert Frost use also allow the reader to discover the attitude Emily Dickinson and Robert Frost had towards death. For instance, according to Ester Lambardi, About. Com Classic Literature, “Death was a theme or thread through Emily Dickenson Poetry.” Ester Lamabardi also states, “Death was always surrounding Emily Dickinson, especially at the end of her times when she lost her parents, nephews, and several other relatives.
According to Knowles and Moon (2006) metaphor is used to “make a connection between […] two things” as there are some things we might “not understand […] except with the help of metaphorical models.” This may be evident in the war poems that use nature as a metaphor. For example, in The Falling Leaves, Margaret Postgate Cole uses the metaphor of “brown leaves” and “snowflakes” to portray the deaths of the soldiers in World War I. Cole compares the soldiers to “brown leaves dropping from their tree/In a still afternoon”. The leaves fell in a very unnatural manner as there was “no wind” to make them fall. This compares to the soldiers’ unnatural deaths as war is man-made so does not occur in nature. This is also shown when Cole says that they were “Slain by no wind of age or pestilence” as she is saying what killed the soldiers was not natural.
Acceptance The theme of the poem acceptance is accepting thing that you cannot control such as the sky becoming dark or knowing that everyone in the world is going to die eventually. The poet uses nature as an example which is in comparison to human or his life. Ghost House The poem ghost house written by Robert Frost conveys us the theme of a persona reuniting with a house he use to know, but is now gone. This is trying to represent the personas family or loved ones that once lived here and in which they no longer do. Stopping by the wood in a snowy evening.