All Souls Morning Poem Analysis

All Souls’ Morning
All Souls’ Morning by Eamon Grennan is a melancholy poem, reflecting on love and the bonds of different relationships such as man and his wife, or a person and their dog, but tempering that by exploring the themes through the bitter sweet memory of deceased loved ones. The poem encompasses ideas about the routine nature of life, using the cyclical structure of the poem as a physical representation of the many cycles of life, the poem beginning in a warmer, domestic scene before extending outward to the cold surroundings of a winters day in Dublin, reflections on death, and the eventual return to the house in which the Speaker resides. The tone is observational and there is no rhyme scheme, which reflects the mundane, repetitive …show more content…
The father and his dog are heading home to where his wife “fusses tea together”. Again, the Speaker uses a typical, uneventful routine such as making tea for her husband walking the dog to highlight the depth of their relationship, instead of a more romantic or fantastical situation. This style of mundane observations is also reflected in the lack of rhyme scheme, which could be used to make the poem feel too lyrical or surreal for Grennan’s intended effect about the humdrum reality of everyday life. It becomes more and more apparent as a result of these memories that the Speaker see’s the world as a combination of routines, from one day to the next, but it is also in these routines that Grennan writes about the beauty of love. The image of a man struggling in the cold with his companion, hurrying to return home to his wife who represents a warm house with tea waiting is a contrast that also adds to Grennan’s interpretation of love. When they are together, the man is out of the cold and he is sheltered. When the father “leave [his wife] behind him”, she dies of grief because she is “no one in the world”. This image of a loss of identity that comes from the death of a loved one shows the nature of love according to Grennan, that we are so integrated with our loved ones that they become part of who we are. The speaker’s memories of past loved ones and their relationships with each other leads him to acknowledge the beauty of love that can be found in everyday life, despite circumstances such as the cold setting he is