Analysis Of The Poem I Knew A Man By Sight

In the poem “I Knew a Man by Sight”, the author Henry David Thoreau describes how two strangers that never talked before met in their life and became best friends. The speaker of this poem might be the author Thoreau himself since it’s written in first person point view, however, the event that Thoreau describes is two strangers meeting in multiple places such as the speaker’s house and a lane 3 miles away from his house and how they became best friend. The poem has a rhyme scheme pattern of A, A, B, B, C, moreover, it contains 6 stanzas with 5 lines in each stanza also known as quintain. Literary devices or poetry strategies such as imageries appear in the poem makes the poem a more realistic. “I met him in a lane, / Him and his cane, / about three miles from home, / Where I had chanced to roam, / and volumes stared at him, and he at me.” These lines used an imagery of sight to create an effect of giving the reader a better understanding and an image in their mind of what’s happening, and how these two mans had become best friend from strangers. By employing the images to the poem, the author also conveys the tone of helpfulness and optimism, “about this thing and that, / as I had known him well a thousand years.” “And I a wanderer been; / he was my bosom friend, and I was his.” These two lines shows the …show more content…
By first describing how the speaker meets the man, Thoreau establishes the relationship between them with which the audience may feel weird about how you can know a man by sight and that you never talked to them before in your life. Then, Thoreau enhances the importance by describing the places that they meet at and the activities that they did. This poem may be relevant to modern society by teaching you a lesson of making good and consistent choices that will last in your life, it may seem like it’s a small decision, but it may affect your life in the future that you’ll