Personification: Bright Star

"No--yet still steadfast, still unchangeable,
Pillowed upon my fair love's ripening breast,
To feel forever its soft fall and swell,
Awake forever in sweet unrest..."

Keats uses a lot of comparative figurative language in this poem. The speaker talks about the star as if it has human qualities because he wants to be like it: always constant and undying, watching the world move "like nature's patient, sleepless Eremite." At first the speaker admires the star's consistency because it gets to observe the beauty of the world. However, in line nine, he switches focus and says "Now--yet still steadfast, still unchangeable, pillowed upon my fair love's ripening breast..." The speaker still desires to be constant like the star, but for a different reason now. He attributes the stars' form of observation to a more human-like desire. He wants to be always with his love. He wants to hear her breathe constantly and forever in the same way that a star observes the sort of breathing and movement of the world constantly and forever. He wants to be the "sleepless Eremite" that lies against his love's chest just to hear her breathe instead of hanging aloft in the sky. His love is more beautiful to him than the nature that the star watches over.

Mood: London

"I wander through each  chartered street
Near where the chartered Thames does flow,
And mark in every face I meet
Marks of weakness, marks of woe."

The diction and syntax of this poem creates an obvious atmosphere of distress and hopelessness. Whether through anastrophe like that found in the line "The mind-forged manacles I hear", or in words like "cry of fear", " mind-forged manacles", "black'ning Church", and "hapless Soldier's sigh", Blake successfully achieves a mood of serious chaos and danger inside the reader's mind. The reader wants to help but can't. It seems that these people whom are burdened with terrible fates are just poor innocent souls undeserving of this punishment. Even the Harlot is portrayed as "youthful" and along with that quality comes assumptions of innocence and feelings of sorrow for the woman. And because she is confined to such a path in life, she too leads to the destruction of the values of marriage and the good ways to raise children, whether they're her own or those of her partners. The Church and hierarchy are made out to be the villains here. The line "Every black'ning Church apalls" shows the Church's lack of compassion for those who express their anguish. They rather expect the suffering people to bear it in silence. The hierarchy in the same apathetic way send the soldiers off to die without considering twice the value of their lives. Readers feel sympathy for the suffering who exist in this world of corruption.

Relevance!:To Autumn

"Then in a wailful choir the smal gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, bourne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;"

I am ecstatic that this was one of the poems assigned to us because lately I've been thinking about how much I love Autumn and how unappreciated it is. It seems that in the poem, the season has just arrived as it has in the real world as well. By the end of summer, everything seems dried up and dusty, almost dead. But when fall comes around, things gain new life. The rain comes back around. The leaves, although in the process of dying, transform into an array of colors. Fruits and vegetables like apples and gourds become plump and ready to consume. Autumn fills these life-forms with "ripeness to the core." Even the air of Autumn lets one know that the world is alive through its "winnowing wind". Like Keats points out, spring is often the celebrated season of life. He asks "Where are the songs of spring?". However, this is followed by "Think not of them, thou has thy music too..". People don't appreciate the new life of fall because they are so focused on the coming winter that they fail to recognize it. The main purpose of Keats's poem is to emphasize the beauty and life of Autumn that is never really recognized. It is praise to the Autumn which is so frequently overlooked.

Tone: The Convergence of the Twain

"In a solitude of the sea
Deep from human vanity,
And the Pride of Life that planned her, stilly couches she."

The diction and details used in this poem set an obvious tone for its reading. It creates a feeling of sadness and sympathy. This ship that was so innocent and unknowing, standing for the people of the time, became to proud and boastful. It was too big and splendid, planned by the "Pride of Life". This was her downfall. People at the time of the Titanic (which this poem is written about) had begun moving quickly in the ways of technological advancement. They no longer stopped to consider the consequences. It was innocent pride, but pride nonetheless. As people's pride grew, so did the danger that accompanies pride, symbolized by the iceberg. "No mortal eye could see" the damage that the iceberg would do to the Titanic or the way the ship's sinking would affect civilization. Everyone was rooting for this new piece of technology, even the reader, regardless of whether it was overflowing with pride. And when the reader realizes that this beautiful ship so full of life now lies with "sea-worms" and "dim moon-eyed fishes" he or she is overcome with sadness and a feeling of discouragement, inspired by the beginning but only resounded by the rest of the poem.

Personification: I felt a Funeral, in my Brain

"And then a Plank in Reason, broke,
And I dropped down, and down--
And hit a World, at every plunge,
And Finished knowing--then--"

From what I've read of Dickinson's work, it seems that one style tool frequently used by her is personification. The funeral in her brain does not center on the death of a person, but rather her mind and sense. Though they are portrayed as a person, they are not actually. Dickinson's use of personification enables her to compare the event of losing her mind to a funeral, which in turn allows the reader to comprehend the seriousness and eventfulness of it. The rest of her brain stood by and watched it go. It appeared that "Sense was breaking through", but it was really just her lack of realism and admittance of the actual circumstances. Like we want to deny the death of loved ones, Dickinson tries to deny the death of her own sanity. The beating of the drum tells her that their is no going back. The death of her sanity becomes more and more assured with every thought and the drum assures the death of the personified mind. Dickinson frantically tries to save her mind before it is buried. But once the deed is done, she stands silent and solitary, knowing it is finally over. Her mind is dead. Her sanity is gone. With the breaking of the last straw of sanity or rather "a Plank in Reason", she plunges into insanity.

Symbolism: The Widow's Lament in Springtime

"I feel that I would like
to go there
and fall into those flowers
and sink into the marsh near them."

This poem inspires a feeling of sympathy in the reader. A woman who spent a long happy life with her husband has just lost him. He died, and now everything is receiving new life. It's a reminder of what she has lost and how her husband receives new life in the beyond. Like the cherry blossoms that the woman sees weigh down on the branches of the trees, so does her grief weigh on her heart and in an even stronger way. The beauty of these flowers that "color some bushes yellow and some red" that used to bring her joy is now trivial and unimportant. The yellow symbolized the friendship with her husband while the red symbolized love, and now that he is gone, she does not have either. They too have become trivial and unimportant. In the end, the woman talks of falling into the white flowers and sinking into them. White is the color of purity, and purity comes with death and Heaven. She wants only to sink into these beautiful flowers that make her happy, to be taken from the earth and made pure, and to be taken to Heaven, where she can join her husband once again.

The Nature of Proof in the Interpretation of Poetry...How I See It

The first sentence of the poem made me think that I would agree with a majority of the information that Perrine supplies: "That a poem may have varying interpretations is a critical commonplace."

However, the sentence immediately following that changed my mind: "That all interpretations of a poem are equally valid is a critical heresy."

There were some things in the essay that I disagreed with, but once I got through the entirety of it, I ended up understanding Perrine's perspective and actually thinking the same way. I was initially surprised when he suggested that an author is the worst interpreter of his own work. Though it seems paradoxical at first, when Perrine explains his backing, it comes to make more sense. Though it is true that an author knows best what he means, what he reveals publicly is not the extent of his true feeling. Therefore, a reader may stop midway in his descent into what the poem truly means and specifically what it means for the reader himself. If the author says that his poems mean one thing, the reader won't look for anything else. Like Yeats once said, "If an author interprets a poem of his own, he limits its suggestibility."

But, it is also true that, like Perrine states, not all interpretations, even if it is how the reader sees it, are correct. The connections made between the interpretation and the actual words have to be logical and without flaw. Perrine's first example of his claim using the Dickinson poem were somewhat weak, I felt. He based it on just very basic and general happenings that contradicted the interpretation of the poem, but the world isn't always as general as he makes it out to be. In his second example, he provides much more reasonable and effective proof for this theory. He points out the words like "beaming", "bright", "gleam", "twinkling", and "shining" that make it much more clear and visible that Melville's poem addresses the stars, not an army corps, and he also uses the contradictory elements of the poem such as the fact that the soldiers marched without a chief in order to make the original idea about the poem (that it was literally about an army corps) seem illogical. Even in his paragraphs about symbolism, he shows that interpretations have boundaries. Certain details set the limits for how our minds can perceive a certain image. In one example, he says a horse without the word "roan" can be interpreted as many different types of horses (i.e. a "workhorse", a "clotheshorse", etc.), but with that one word added it can only be viewed as a real horse. Even just the word "horse" limits the reader's interpretation because a horse cannot be a cow. 

Like the details in a poem limit the poem's meaning, so do details surrounding a symbol limit the things it can symbolize. I guess this essay just proves the point that readers must go deeper than just the surface or hovering right underneath it when interpreting literature.