Speaker for the Dead

lover’s body, placing his “arm about her waist”. This mirrors the way the lover rearranges and almost plays with Porphyria 's body when he kills her, “propped her head up as before”. It seems as though the lover is so unreceptive he may as well be dead, and as if the two swap roles. There is also a subversion of gender roles with the woman doting on the man, and their relationship is more reminiscent of one between a doctor and a patient than a romantic one. Porphyria makes “the cheerless grate…

“Neutral Tones”: The Sinister Similarities of the Speakers The loss of a loved one is perhaps the most difficult experience that humans ever come up against. The poem “Porphyria’s Lover”, written by Robert Browning, adds a sense of irony to this. At the most superficial layer, the speakers in both “Porphyria’s Lover” and “Neutral Tones”, written by Thomas Hardy, both deal with loss. The tones in “Neutral Tones” seem to be indifferent, or Neutral. The speaker of “Porphyria’s Lover” ends up…

with a description of darkness through the of antithesis. This allows the speaker to draw a clear contrast between its role in both life and death. Biblical allusions are also used to create an underlying message of religion and its role in both life and death, a key theme throughout Thomas’ poem. The idea of death as a rebirth is hinted at in implications to baptism. Rhetorical question is also used, allowing the speaker to contemplate the process of mourning in itself. The conclusion is drawn…

young African American girl named Myop who finds a dead African American man lying under a bush. This story focus on the loss of the girls’ innocence in humanity because discovering the dead man was victim of a lynching or murder made her understand the world is not how she perceives it to be. The injustice in this story is that Myop did not believe her world could be filled with horrible things such as what she just saw but her discovering the dead man made her not be able to believe the world…

poem. The speaker of the poem is talking about their experience in war. This poem mainly focuses on the negative effects of war. The writing structure and the diction being used in this poem has a big impact on the main meaning of the poem. Thomas Hardy writes, “ Had he and I but met By some old ancient inn, We should have sat us down to wet Right many a nipperkin!” The speaker’s language is informal throughout this stanza to demonstrate the kind of person the speaker is. The speaker is just…

written as dialogue between police and the speaker, who are discussing the death of a young boy. Lynda Koolish sees Brooks’ poem not only as an account of the boy’s death, but also as a source of insight into “the issue of individual transformation” when one is exposed to such violence (citation). Koolish believes the boy’s death, like that of other African American boys, was a “secondary [cause] to racism, poverty, powerlessness, and despair” (citation). The speaker, as recognized by Koolish,…

has died, so should everything else in the world. The article "Don 't be Averse to Setting Aside Time for some Verse," states that these lines in the poem are the most insightful, because they display the emotional state and “thudding rage” of the speaker in a way no other line does…

1.) This poem by Emily Dickinson describes the scene and atmosphere when someone is dying. The speaker’s final moments of life are portrayed as somber and quiet, so quiet that the speaker can evidently hear a “fly buzz,” which is a type of onomatopoeia and helps to emphasize the silence of the room. Another figurative devise that is employed to further establish the overwhelming silence is the use of a simile when comparing the stillness between the “heaves of storm” which would be relatively…

hand of a parental figure; in a sense, this poem portrays one's actions as self deprecating compared to another's actions. In this poem, the speaker views his actions as not good enough compared to his deceased mother. The reader can assume that the speaker’s mother is dead because of the way he describes how his mother “would” season the pork. The speaker degrades his self confidence when he describes the way he prepares the ingredients saying, “I’ve seasoned the pork like I imagine/my…

The figurative language so artfully embedded in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” furthers the at times almost tangible sense of the passing of time as the speaker lays out his story as if he were setting the table for a meal. One such instance presents itself when, in the first stanza, the speaker unceremoniously lays out the initial setting, saying, “When the evening is spread out against the sky / Like a patient etherized upon a table” (2-3). This simile places the poem in a peaceful…