Speaker for the Dead

themselves; via suicide in both “The awakening” and “The collected works of Sylvia Plath” and insanity in “The Yellow Wallpaper”. Arguably it is not the restraints of society which lead to their demise but the intrinsic flaw within the characters and speakers. The matter of female liberation and individualism is brought to attention in…

In the poem ‘Remember’ by Christina Rossetti, the speaker feels that as their death is inevitable, they must focus on the loved one that they are leaving behind and ensure that they will not waste their lives grieving. Likewise, in the poem ‘Song’, the speaker feels similarly to that of ‘Remember’, as they try to ensure that their loved on will not be afraid or distraught once they have died. Rossetti expresses these feelings in both poems by her use of language features such as sibilance, as…

from Kimberly Lutz and an article from Poetry for Students this message of the war never truly leaving the soldier can be shown. In Wilfred Owen's "Dulce et Decorum Est", the speaker talks of seeing "him" in their dreams. Even though the speaker has left the war at this point in the poem, the war has yet to leave the speaker. "In all my dreams before my helpless sight, / He plunges at me, guttering,…

As the speaker follows behind the wagon—painfully aware of his friend’s suffering—the reader begins to truly see the human toll of war, and the speaker continues to decry Horace’s words. The speaker employs graphic imagery to describe a young man, the victim of a mustard gas attack, after he is throw into a wagon when the group of soldiers in marching. The dying or dead soldier is grotesque to behold, and it is not enough to wake the speaker from his nightmare of war. The speaker describes the…

they are writing about at that time. The poems “Here Dead Lie We Because We Did Not Choose” by Housman and “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death” by Yeats are too such poems that compare different perspectives of death during war time poetry. These two authors show in their poems that they have many different ideas on what death and war mean when they wrote these poems. In the poem “Here Dead Lie We Because We Did Not Choose” by Housman the speaker of the poem is deceased and talking to the…

In “The Vacuum” by Howard Nemerov, the speaker of this poem highlights the grief and sorrow he feels. The reader understands that his wife left him a widow and the implications behind this. The narrator discusses the vacuum she leaves behind and the effect it has on him and the atmosphere. Moreover, the speaker uses the vacuum as a symbol to represent the absence of his dead wife. Through the figurative language the narrator implements, the reader can assume that the vacuum symbolizes his…

In this section, the speaker talks about how everything that the father has being taken away. The “office” and his “secretary” and not to mention his “lunches with three double bourbons”, all of these can be had by anyone (line 10). A secretary can always be hired, most people…

The seafarer is an old Anglo Saxon poem. This poem is told through the perspective of a man who is constantly traveling. The speaker seems to be in despair whenever he travels because he’d rather find a place for himself. He then goes on tangent about Fate and Faith. The tone of this poem is somber. His imagery is used to express his loneliness. For example, he foretells his experience by, “How the sea took me, swept me back, and forth in sorrow and fear and pain, showed me suffering in a…

reader the idea that people are often viewed as being no different than objects, used until they seem unimportant or without purpose. The theme of the poem is enhanced through the use of a speaker, imagery, and metaphors. One literary element Lindsay uses to demonstrate the theme is the utilization of a speaker to provide…

The speaker of the poem is a child whose friend makes a black gravedigger think that he is about to spit on him. The gravedigger finds the children’s joke amusing and the speaker leaves embarrassed. Then later the two children find a black man that has been lynched. This poem is one of the few poems that touches on race, until the end of the…