Analysis Of Miss Gee By W H Auden

Loneliness is a feeling we all experience and which can make us have a specific perspective on ourselves. Sometimes it can take a sudden situation for us to get the attention we are looking for. How would you feel about having the attention you have always dreamed of, but just as an anatomic subject? This is the irony expressed in the poem Miss Gee in 1938, written by W.H Auden . Auden is a famous writer thanks to his writing skills seen in his poems, which are known because of their black humor, relative accessibility and fusing social and psychological elements . His poetry style went from obscure twentieth-century modernism to the lucid traditional forms, being these dark and ironic ballads about individual failure, while the tone and content …show more content…
The story starts with the familiar opening 'Let me tell you a little story' seen in the blues music genre. Were it is revealed how usual and nonspecial is Miss Gee's life, living in one of the so many houses and seeming anything but attractive, letting us know that she is an unmarried woman. Later on, we hear through Miss Gee´s voice, wishing that her life was more than it is while questioning the meaning of her existence in the light of the stars. She continues to dream herself as the queen of France, but then her dreams are destroyed, starting with the palace destroyed at the hand of a storm and the bull with the Vicar´s face overtaking her. The story continues as sad as this until we reach the climax on her death, when she finally gets the attention wanted. The only thing is that it is not in a flattering way, laying in the Anatomy department at Oxford University, here is where we get the irony imposed by the author . Regarding the rhythm, rhyme, and style of the poem, we get to observe a ballad composed of twenty-five ABCB rhyming quatrains (a famous rhyme in the ballads) giving the feeling of a more ironic/ comic …show more content…
The language used is plain, like a conversation written in a way that the narrator is in the omniscient third person form, but there was a time when a first-person narrator took place, being Miss Gee . During the poem, we see some techniques, as a foreshadowing of her death, as when she was dreaming and her palace gets´ destroyed by a storm, being this her illness, cancer, destroying her. There is use of alliteration on 'slight squint ,' making her sound even more unattractive. We detect a simile with visual effect , 'Like waves round a Cornish wreck', making the comparison that Miss Gee is like a wrecked ship with the waves crashing in over the years and in "cancer…. is like some hidden assassin..", meaning that it is a serious illness that nobody knows when or why it comes. A pathetic fallacy is used with 'a storm blew down the