W.D. Snodgrass wrote many love poems. His breaking of three marriages did not make for a very good love story though. This is why there seems to be a bit of personal experience in “Leaving the Motel” (Rosenheim). This poem is the actions of two people at a motel after an afternoon of sexual encounters. These two people are trying to keep their affair a secret and the use of tone, symbolism, and rhyme help express the way they go about it. The love between the two is portrayed as businesslike without showing emotion. Even the audience is detached from the lovers. We never learn their names, how they met or any other personal information about the two lovers.
First, tone is heavily relied on in this poem to show how these two feel so detached from the situation, which makes the tone direct. Tone is how the poem has emotion toward its topic, which is the intended effect of the speaker. The speaker in “Leaving …show more content…
A symbolic poem becomes so involved in its symbols that the world outside is almost left behind (Mays, p.1008). There are symbols used to represent the two lovers meeting. The lovers try to keep the flowers alive by using aspirin. The flowers are a symbol for the love between the two. They wish they could stay together for a longer amount of time, even though they know this cannot happen. So they leave the flowers along with the love they shared to die in this motel. Since after this evening together they know they cannot show that they have feeling for each other in their everyday lives. Another symbol between the lovers would be the keepsakes. The keepsakes are a symbol of the secret of the affair between the two. They are a memory of the afternoon but also could jeopardize the secret of the two lovers. A third symbol is the hollering kids. The kids screaming represent that the lovers need to get back to their regular lives before someone sees them and suspects
First, tone is heavily relied on in this poem to show how these two feel so detached from the situation, which makes the tone direct. Tone is how the poem has emotion toward its topic, which is the intended effect of the speaker. The speaker in “Leaving …show more content…
A symbolic poem becomes so involved in its symbols that the world outside is almost left behind (Mays, p.1008). There are symbols used to represent the two lovers meeting. The lovers try to keep the flowers alive by using aspirin. The flowers are a symbol for the love between the two. They wish they could stay together for a longer amount of time, even though they know this cannot happen. So they leave the flowers along with the love they shared to die in this motel. Since after this evening together they know they cannot show that they have feeling for each other in their everyday lives. Another symbol between the lovers would be the keepsakes. The keepsakes are a symbol of the secret of the affair between the two. They are a memory of the afternoon but also could jeopardize the secret of the two lovers. A third symbol is the hollering kids. The kids screaming represent that the lovers need to get back to their regular lives before someone sees them and suspects