e. e. cumming’s poem “anyone lived in a pretty how town” and Thornton Wilder’s play “Our Town” share many similarities. Throughout both the poem and the play, each set their focus on time and how it passes without notice with the changing of seasons and weather until death. In an article about the poem the line “Used to tell time long before the invention of clocks and calendars, the seasons, heavenly bodies, and weather are ancient signifiers of time as it passes” (Poetry for Students) helps bring both the poem and play together and shows the common theme of time. The recurring lines in the poem that talks about weather and seasons is closely reflected when in every section of the play the towns folk always seem to have an obsession with the
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At the beginning of the play the narrator explains that the bell in Grover’s Corners rings for weddings, school, and church which. This helps the audience understand the passage of time in both towns and how reliable on the bells the citizens are. Throughout the poem the line ‘spring summer autumn winter” (cummings line 3, 11, 34) helps show that the ringing of the church bells is continued throughout the year without stop. The play also utilizes the seasons by using different techniques to help show each, for example during Emily’s birthday the characters are seen shivering and tromping around in the snow so the audience knows that it is winter or during the first scene the kids were in school and parents were picking vegetables so we know that it was in the …show more content…
In the last scene when Emily is dead she asks the other residents of the cemetery if she can relive days from her past, Mrs. Gibbs tells her that it is a bad idea. Against the advice of the others, she decides to relive her 12th birthday and after viewing the morning with the narrator she breaks down crying and says she can’t handle it. By her reaction to living days over again when she was dead the fact that time ends after death becomes more visible. This relates to the poem by the use of death and how
At the beginning of the play the narrator explains that the bell in Grover’s Corners rings for weddings, school, and church which. This helps the audience understand the passage of time in both towns and how reliable on the bells the citizens are. Throughout the poem the line ‘spring summer autumn winter” (cummings line 3, 11, 34) helps show that the ringing of the church bells is continued throughout the year without stop. The play also utilizes the seasons by using different techniques to help show each, for example during Emily’s birthday the characters are seen shivering and tromping around in the snow so the audience knows that it is winter or during the first scene the kids were in school and parents were picking vegetables so we know that it was in the …show more content…
In the last scene when Emily is dead she asks the other residents of the cemetery if she can relive days from her past, Mrs. Gibbs tells her that it is a bad idea. Against the advice of the others, she decides to relive her 12th birthday and after viewing the morning with the narrator she breaks down crying and says she can’t handle it. By her reaction to living days over again when she was dead the fact that time ends after death becomes more visible. This relates to the poem by the use of death and how