Five A.M
William Stafford, in his poem “Five A.M” uses literary devices such as personification tone amplify the gentle caressing tone, while also using alliteration with phrases like soft sound or tone and lead past lawns to create a paced rhythm which alludes to the speakers comfortableness with his surroundings. All the devices show us the speakers attitude towards life and his community. All these thoughts and feelings of a man whose jogging on an early morning. And observes everything in his surroundings while jogging.
Stafford, creates a picture using imagery ad details in his poem to show how calm and peaceful the runners life is at the moment. He changes his tone to emphasize different images the runner sees ad how they affect him while he is running. The runners feeling are portrayed at is train of thought when running and how one’s mind tends to think about deep ideas when it is most peaceful. The image of a man casually jogging through his neighborhood in this case Stafford’s, exposes a sense of peace that humans reflect on at times. The carefree tone and shifts from action to thoughts further reveal how at ease this jogging man is, and is specially emphasized by the end of the first stanza, “where are my troubles?”. The jogger is cleansed by the rain touching his face in the end of the poem an this illuminates the idea of how far away the worlds troubles can seem to be.
The narrator in his poem show the contrasting attitude of the jogger with the attitude of society and the world. The images that become visible to the audience show a calm and peaceful neighborhood. These images that would appear elsewhere in places where there are“ troubles”. As the narrator is running/jogging he notices the relaxing ways of life and it over ruling the real world. The jogger and or runner ends up with the conclusion that the small problems he deals with mount up to things in the real world. Tats as he runs perhaps trying to escape from such problems that are bugging him he realizes the life style of his neighbors and begins to observe things that he might had not realize before. Such things as for example “the house of the couple who have the baby, the yard with the little dog” gives a sense of feeling as he had not put too much importance to the dog and while his thoughts continued to play in his head. He later realizes how the problems he once felt before starting to jog now he had left them behind and as felt almost as if he never had them before.
William Stafford in the poem continues writing about the strange or unrecognizable feeling of peace that sometimes descends on a person at rare times. In this case or his case he’s out wondering early in the morning and has a moment of stillness and peace within himself. Leading this to a reflection on how the world and history is full of goodness, full of mysterious ending of bad things “conquerors have quit and gone home” as shown in this preview line. The last stanza “ rain touches my face” as in the lit biz one tends to suggest that water imagery almost always calls for a symbolic reading. Therefore the reader can read the rain as grace descending a cleansing of the world of his spirit. Is as if the poem suggests a moment of clarity that comes during an early morning jog, the world is sleeping and everything he sees is peaceful and full of nature.
The speaker while jogging states of mind changes in two different ways at first he experience the peace and beautiful nature that surrounds him also observing his neighbors and noticing things he had perhaps not noticed before and then the speaker realizes how his problems that he once felt or was going through had for a moment were gone and had forgotten about it. Therefore, the narrator gives the reader two different states of mind. An illusion of nature of what he was experiencing at a moment and then again at the same time also showing how one can get distracted for completely over insignificant things but that help one forget about problems end up forgetting about their problems.