The Vacuum by Howard Nemerov Essay

In “The Vacuum” by Howard Nemerov, the speaker of this poem highlights the grief and sorrow he feels. The reader understands that his wife left him a widow and the implications behind this. The narrator discusses the vacuum she leaves behind and the effect it has on him and the atmosphere. Moreover, the speaker uses the vacuum as a symbol to represent the absence of his dead wife. Through the figurative language the narrator implements, the reader can assume that the vacuum symbolizes his deceased wife since women are stereotypically associated with cleanliness and homemaking. When the narrator discusses the vacuum “ginning into the floor, maybe at my slovenly life, my dog-dead youth,” it is safe to correlate this to the loss of a womanly figure…

Howard Nemerov was born into a wealthy family on March 1, 1920. Due to his parent’s fortune, he was able to receive excellent education in exclusive private schools such as Fieldston Preparatory School. Later in his educational journey, Nemerov attended Harvard University. While Nemerov attended the prestigious university, he started writing his poems. When he was sixty-eight years old, Nemerov was named the United States poet laureate from 1988 to 1990. One of the factors that enabled him to…

One example is in the second line of the poem, “The vacuum cleaner sulks in the corner closet,” (2). The verb sulks, gives that human-like quality to the vacuum, which is an inanimate object. Although this is an inanimate object using that personification makes the reader feel as if it is gloomy and dreary to start. As the poem continues on there is more personification to give the reader more imagery in their mind of what the poem is talking about. This is in lines 3-5, “Its bag limp as a…