Analysis Of This Moment By Eavan Boland

Decent Essays
In a world where more and more people are beginning to take for granted all that life has to offer, the significance of the poem “This Moment” by Eavan Boland is highlighted. It is a poem where the narrator is depicting a single night and certain aspects of that night. She created a piece of work with a message that is able to reach each age group and ethnicity. The poem was written in 1994 and the message is still relevant over ten years later. This timeless aspect of the poem is due to the poetry techniques that she wove throughout the work. Eavan Boland uses simple and relatable imagery, word choice, symbolism, and structure in order to express the importance of cherishing life’s small moments in the poem “This Moment.” The poem begins …show more content…
When writing poetry it is important to choose the correct words because poems are not as long as novels where authors can take an entire book to get the message across. The two words that stand out are “stars and moths” (6). Both words are used repeatedly throughout the poem. Boland uses them again near the end of the poem, but in a different form: “Stars rise // Moths flutter” (14-15). They also have another quality in common which is the fact that they both come out at night. A way to interpret the purpose of using both words multiple times is to show their importance. Stars and moths are symbols for those moments in life that are important, but do not get enough attention. Had Boland chosen any other words, the same feeling may not have been expressed. Another word that is used in the last line of the poem is “sweeten” (16). Sweeten is a word that basically means to make something better. The importance of Boland choosing to use this word instead of another is to show how life can be made better when it is not expected. The entire line reads, “apples sweeten in the darkness” (16). In other words it is saying that life gets better when a person least expects it. In “This Moment,” the words that were chosen go beyond the simplicity of what they are in order to convey the importance of the small moments in a person’s

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