Five A.M

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.

          

      

     

To Paint Water Lily

To Paint Water Lily

      The poem “To paint a water Lily” depicts the theme of nature. Ted Hughes uses literary devices such as personification, visual imagery and the structure of the poem. To reveal the speakers attitude towards natures and the artists task.

      The poem evokes a part of nature, since the main subject is a water lily. Indeed, the construction of the poem shows an evolution the two first stanzas talk about the water lily. The poet introduces nature  as a manner to focus the attention on the warlike activity. The poet writes the poem as if it celebrates the beauty of the nature in its violence. Hughes uses some literary devices to create this ambiguity. He employs words by changing their first meaning and their traditional context “bullets by” is used as a verb and suggests the trajectory of the flies around the plant. Although “bullet” is used as a noun so also refers to the missile that is set from a firearm. This terms conveys an idea of war or violence. 

        The work of the poet is also to create some new words with the associations of expressions that gives more senses to the language the compound words like “battle shouts” and “death cries”. Ted Hughes poetic is based o emotion and no longer laid upon to the traditional conventions. The nature is considered as essential being. The poetic writes his poem in a consider way in two different dimensions. At first with a return to the elementary system. The nature is associated with human being the violence that man is able to create is included. The poet combines good and ban in order to solve a “problem”. Creation is a way t go beyond the opposition built between a good nature and the violence. The eye of the artist is the only way to see or to read the nature.

        Hughes used in his poem a symbolic use of hyphen in “long-necked lily flower” these two hyphens represent the neck of the water lily and suggest its fragility since it is “deep In both worlds”. Perhaps the poet may have in his poem a met textual reflection at the place oh his point of view. He is both a writer and a painter at this point the is in two different worlds. His role is to paint a scene, but without colors and images, and is just to convey the readers imagination which is a real difficulty. For the reason being that it is complicated to a narrator to transmit a vivid view through words and stay in a poetic mode. So that the reader can experience through reading the same image the poetic is trying to make him/her feel or imagine.

       The narrator Ted Hughes brings together or reunites man with his imagination, the senses and perhaps a bit of history. The nature is finally seen in its description movement. Structure of the poem and the short independent stanzas show that each thought is simply an idea in the speakers mind. His mission is to create a painted representation of a water lily in a pond. However as he observes his subject, he begins reflecting on aspects of the pond not on plain sight but yet real. 

Here

         The poem “Here” by Philip Larkin, in the first stanza itself, the word ‘swerving’ is used several times to amplify the movement. The things the poet sees are described vividly in the first until the last stanza. The poem is the poet’s physically journey to a place of ‘solitude’, where loneliness clarifies. Larking by using the right words and images concisely and incisively conveyed his thoughts and feeling in his poem.

        Larkin, expresses his experiences to these places and journey’s using a poetic language. He uses end rhyme often to provide lyrical tone as in the first stanza “Swerving east, from rich industrial shadows..” The rhyming scheme gives neat effect in the structure of the poem. Such as thus, ‘shadows’ is rhymed with ‘meadows’, ‘fields’ and ‘shields’ and so on. Larking in this instance retains the convention or romantic poets where the aspects of rhyme is given emphasis. His way of writing the poem is very real and one is attracted to read the poem further to discover what else the poet sees are described vividly. Larking makes his poem more visual and interesting so that the reader keeps reading the poem. Understanding every detail that he, as a poet, is trying to show him/her using such techniques that helps his poem portrait what he is looking for.

           As the poem continues, the poet keeps giving details about these places, the things in it, an the people. The things mentioned in the poem are mostly concrete. ‘Fields’, ‘meadows’, ‘skies’, ‘scarecrows’, ‘rivers’, and so on can all be mentally visualized as one read those words. The poet had swerved ‘from rich industrial shadows’ and ‘traffic all night’ when he came across the countryside. If lonely scarecrows and haystacks are symbols of a countryside, buildings, people and streets signify a large town, which the poet meets with surprise. The poet highlights the different atmosphere between the two landscapes using phrases like ’spires and cranes cluster’ and ’barge-crowded water’. The reader analyzes how the poet tries to be as detailed and specific as he can be so that the poem can be filled of imagination and delightful descriptions of such places that make the reader easily portrait itself as one was to be experiencing such moment.

          Although the poet mentions that ’loneliness clarifies’ in line 25 the poem itself is not about loneliness. It is more about being alone and finding solace in solitude other than being lonely. Larkin, feels highly liberated. The whole of the poet’s existence in concentrated at the place he has arrived at, which simply calls “here”. The juxtaposition of light and shadows brings out a contrasting effect which suggests a distinction between positive and negative. Somewhat at the end of the poem the sun seems to provide the positive element that the poet needs. He apparently has found solace at the end of his journey. He now enjoys feeling ‘untalkative’  and ‘out of reach’. Larking uses the word ‘unfenced’ to show liberty. In other words the poet suggest and or states how nature can provide freedom and comfort for those who want to escape the traffic and busy city life.

       Philip Larkin uses his thoughts that come from his images as he once presence these places to give the audience in this case the reader a more visual image of every place he describes. He does marvelous expressing in the poem his feels and thoughts.