Ferlinghetti's The World Is A Beautiful Place

Ferlinghetti’s The World is a Beautiful Place is a literary work with a sense of great sarcasm and satire. While the title suggests that the author holds a rather optimistic and positive view about society and its underlying allure, the actual poem is about the disguised charms of the world through the lens of cynicism. A quick glance at this poem is enough for readers to notice the author’s unique structural choice, and combined with a distinctive poetic pattern, alongside the use of contrasting paradoxes, Ferlinghetti’s The World is a Beautiful Place demonstrates his ironic, sarcastic and stylistic approach, as well as his use of symbolism and figurative language, and deals with the inherent coexistence of the good and the bad, of light and darkness in the world. Imagery plays an important and extensive role in the development of the overall theme; the charming beauty of the …show more content…
As if that there is always a Yin to a Yang, there always seems to be a “but” that lies in the midst of happiness, a touch of negativity in the positivity, and vice versa. For some, finding happiness is something that takes a lifetime, yet Ferlinghetti uses cynicism to its fullest extent, claiming that it would be too late to enjoy life fully and wholeheartedly, because we human beings die sooner or later. “Mortician”, a word related to the cruelest and harshest thing in life – death, is placed next to “smiling” – an action that results directly from joy and delight, furthering corroborating the concept of light and darkness coexisting with one another. Ferlinghetti, with the few last lines of the poem, is telling readers once again that the world is indeed a beautiful place, but there will always be darkness that underlies it, and that perhaps the wisest thing to do is to “just generally living it up”