Christina Rossetti And Echo By Audre Lorde Analysis

Both Christina Rossetti and Audre Lorde have written each a poem in which the central theme is of a recurring memory of a time past. Their poems use a variety of literary devices that involves the reader in experiencing the occurring memory of a past time with the speaker of the poem. Through this involvement, between the reader and the voice, the poems misleads the reader into being captured by their dream like state that makes the reader misread the inconsistencies within them. This essay will proceed to define these inconsistencies in Echo by Christina Rossetti and Echoes by Audre Lorde and reveal how they seduce the reader with their sensory components into having an interaction with them. To do this, this essay will compare both these poems alongside each other to reveal which one has a greater impact on the …show more content…
The word ‘sweet’ is repeated three times in line seven and here it is used to intensify the speaker’s feeling towards the lover. However in this same line the reader finds one of the inconsistencies within the poem, the line ends by describing the dream as ‘too bitter sweet’. This inconsistency is also known as an oxymoron and here the speaker shows their uncertainty of the experience they are going through. This gives the poem a sense of conscious awareness but also disorientation that the speaker may be experiencing within the dream.
There is also a feeling of disorientation in Lorde’s Echoes. The poem is divided into three stanzas but it is debatable that the stanza in between the first and the last one is in fact two stanzas divided by two lines, twelve and thirteen that are indented. This indentation not only expresses the disorientation of the structure of the poem, but it also affects the reader’s flow of reading which in turn may cause them to stumble in their eye movement as they gaze at the