Figurative Language In The Tide Rises Tide Falls

The poem “The Tide Rises, the Tide Falls,” by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, was very interesting to me. I really enjoyed reading because it made met think about life and it’s purpose. This poem is interesting because it seems like it’s just about a person on vacation, but it has a deeper meaning and conveys a larger message. The poem is really relatable to life because it talks about the start to end of life. Death is everywhere in "The Tide Rises, the Tide Falls." The poem is about a person who is a traveler and is seen leaving shore for the last time and he is dead by the end of the poem. The person represents the ending of a life as they move on to the next part of the human life cycle .The message in this poem is depressing but it’s also the truth about life. People will always come and go because no one lives forever, but everything around us typically stays the same. Unlike the traveler, who dies, the tides keep on going. The physical world that we know is permanent, while human life is only temporary. …show more content…
Personification is used heavily in the poem. For example, in stanza 1, line 2, “The twilight darkens, the curlew calls;” is giving a nonhuman object human action. In stanza 2, lines 7 and 8, “But the sea, the sea in darkness calls;/The little waves, with their soft, white hands,” are both uses of personification once again. Line 8 uses the sense of touch with the description of hands. Lastly, in stanza 3 line 12, “Stamp and neigh, as the hostler calls;” is another use of personification. In stanza 1, line 1 “The tide rises, the tide falls,” it could be a metaphor depending how you look at it. What comes up, must come down. It’s like saying sometimes people may rise up and be huge, and then they will eventually fall, it is an eventuality, like the