Speaker for the Dead

Part of him lies dead with his fellow soldiers in the jungle of Vietnam, but as a survivor he must live on with the rest of himself that still remains in “flesh” (5). The war is so ingrained in the speaker's life that he can not escape it. At the monument “a red bird's / wings cutting across my stare. / The sky. A plane in the sky.” (22-24) At every moment the threat of an enemy plane dropping bombs from the sky may invade his consciousness, replacing otherwise harmless sights with a living…

The poets apparent loss of memory throughout the poem implicitely alludes to the speakers decomposing body.In the first line,the speaker refers to himself as “me” but by the second quatrain he refers to himself as merely “the hand that writ” this poem.The speakers memory is reduced further in the third quatrain to “this verse” and by line ten resolves to “when I am perhaps compounded in clay”.The state of the speakers memory as he refers to himself definitively as only a “poor name” who to which…

out the story is told within the speaker’s memories of afterlife, for the speaker has been dead for centuries. To analyze the poem even farther, it is important to learn more about the author and what might have influenced her to write this piece of work. Within this poem, death is personified to take the speaker on a journey from life to afterlife. Death is portrayed as a nice gentleman that transports the speaker to settings that she could not visit. I found it interesting that…

if both parents are deceased but I believe only her mother is dead, “My mother’s hand opens in her early grave” (Clifton, 6), shows that her mother has passed away early. The speaker in the poem, the daughter of the two parents, displays her emotional detachment from her father. Lucille Clifton let’s the reader know the speaker is the daughter of the family on line seven, “and I hold it out like a good daughter.” (Clifton, 7) The speaker informs us that she is haunted by the memories of…

Emily Dickinson was living and writing, the cultural views of death were strict. The expectation was to be respectful and glorify the dead in order to mourn them correctly. Further, one was supposed to not pine over their loss of opportunity, but learn from it and use their loss to better oneself. They also vied to assign value and life to those things that the dead left behind. Some of these values reflect clearly in Emily Dickinson’s poem, including the personification of death. In the obit,…

The poem “Tears, Idle Tears” by Alfred Tennyson was written in 1847, during the beginning of the Victorian era. Tennyson was born in Somersby, Lincolnshire, United Kingdom in 1809 and died in Lurgashall, United Kingdom in 1892. He had seven brothers and four sisters, none of which were as recognized for their work as Alfred Tennyson was. His father, a church rector, became melancholy when he realized his family had started to lose money due to disinheritance. This is what started his heavy…

conflicts. In the poem by Blake, the speaker of the poem is angry with its “Foe” but the foe doesn’t know of the feelings of the speaker. In the short story by Poe the main character Montresor was furious with Fortunato, the other main character, for reasons that Fortunato is not aware of and same with the reader. The poem and short story are similar because along with the character conflict, the reader isn’t aware of the reasons for the anger of both the speaker of the poem and of the main…

attract the mind and feelings through their components of poetry such as persona and theme, tone, diction and structure and denotation/connotation. The persona, or the speaker, is the voice that speaks to the readers. Understanding the background of…

One of the themes during the Modern era for many writers was a lack of connecting or a lack of communication. “The Dead” by James Joyce and “The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock” by T.S. Eliot are great examples of exemplifying the theme. In Eliot’s poem Prufrock shows a lack of communication in that he is insecure, and he truly thinks everyone is talking about him and his looks. In Joyce’s poem, Gabriel shows how socially insecure he is. The authors realized the importance of being social among…

metaphor, imagery, personification and rhetorical question in a way that leaves the readers shocked by the end of reading it. Throughout the poem, Adcock demonstrates the stages of decay of a bird or in other words, the development of heartbreak the speaker experiences by each stanza. In the first line, “Think, now” the narrator puts on an authoritative tone, which commands and immediately captures the reader’s attention. The use of intrusive language continues on through the first stanza, in…