Trochee

unknown person’s beauty by comparing him/her to the descriptions of past beauties, but, in the end, the speaker concludes that neither the past nor the present writers are able to do this beauty justice. Sonnet 106 criticizes itself for its failure to properly immortalizes the extent of this beauty through poetry, but it is ultimately through this critic that the beauty of the subject is conveyed. Shakespeare achieves his usual themes of beauty, time, and beauty over time through the repetition of both sound and structure; the repetition both mimics the cyclical nature of time and continuously highlights the beauty of the subject. Shakespeare begins Sonnet 106 by breaking his traditional iambic meter; he begins this sonnet with a trochee. A trochee reverses the unstressed, stressed pattern of an iambic meter, and in this case, the stress is placed on the first word in the line “When in the chronicle of wasted time” (1). Shakespeare…

the iambic pentameter does not continue. The first line follows a trochaic pentameter with each foot consisting of trochees. The second line is also a trochaic pentameter; however the last foot is an iamb to punctuate the word stride. The third line is an iambic pentameter broken into five feet with the third and fifth feet diverging from the sequence. The third foot changes into a trochee while the last two words of the fifth foot is a spondee to articulate the hard blow that the child…

A Swinger of Birches Hardened by the daily toils and responsibilities, the soft innocence of youth is easily forgotten with age. Walking through the woods in solitude, a man lets his busy mind wander for a moment. With the sight of trees swaying in the wind, his mind understands that the heavy ice and snow is what bends the thin trees. But his heart wonders if it was a boy’s doing – climbing to the top of the trees just to bend them enough so he can let go and fall safely to the ground – that…

He Loves Me In the poem "My Papa 's Waltz" written by Theodore Roethke, most readers believe that it is about abuse. Is it possible? Of course it is, it depends on who’s reading the poem and their interpretation of the poem. The use of language, diction, imagery, and symbols, along with the tone helps to influence how readers come to their own conclusion on what the poem is really about. I choose to look at the poem in a brighter light. With so much negativity in the world and with so many…

Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “To George Sand: A Desire” serves to explicate Browning’s admiration for George Sand, a successful female writer, by underscoring that which makes Sand powerful. “To George Sand: A Recognition,” a companion piece to “A Desire,” concerns itself not only with Sand’s character traits but also with evidencing the actual challenges Sand faced to become the writer she was. Because of this, my primary inspiration and the poem I chose to imitate was “A Recognition.” “To…

devices that Hardy employs, the metaphor found in line one (“the junction of lane and highway”) refers to an impasse or turning point in his life where he must leave one “road” and travel on another. Consonance is found in in line two with the words “drizzle bedrenches.” While looking for any sense of rhythm or pattern within the meter, it seems that there is none to be found. The beginning line is in dactylic tetrameter, followed sequentially by a line of trochee/trochee/dactyl/iamb/iamb…

that of a gray witch. A gray witch is one that does not harm nor benefit anyone. She comes ‘toward him’ in an act of defiance, and finally stands up for herself. The ‘bullets’ are a symbol for the mental abuse that once inflicted her, but now they ‘enter and dissolve’ as she moves through them. A ‘doe’ would easily have been taken out by bullets, but as the speaker transitions from a weak, unassuming doe, to a stronger, more powerful gray witch, these ‘bullets’ no longer have any effect. She is…

two groups: the octave (first 8 lines) who introduces the problem and the sestet (last 6 lines) where the problem gets solved. We also have a “Volta” of the “turn” in de begin of the sextet shift gears. In the octave the poem discuss how it would be if he dies and what was the role of England in his development, he mainly talks about life on earth. In the sestet the speaker changes the direction of the poem away from the earth to the afterlife in the heaven. The poem is written in a metrical…

forgotten. Such a fate is clairvoyantly reflected in “Ozymandias”, wherein Shelley combines an atypical rhyme scheme and structure with a disembodied, fundamentally ironic tone that questions its own reliability – and emphasizes the underlying theme of power’s futility when exposed to the sands of time. “Ozymandias” is a sonnet, yet not in a precisely traditional sense; there is no clear delineation between octet and sestet, as is typical for English sonnets (Janowitz). Furthermore, the rhyme…

longing for her dreams to bring her closer to her lover. The meter of “Echo” follows the structure set up in the specific stanza form, while still allowing for variance, emphasizing parts of the experience of longing. While the first three, and final sixth, lines of each stanza follow iambic pentameter, the fourth line in each stanza is iambic trimeter, and the fifth line in each stanza is iambic dimeter. However, the very first line of the poem contains a metrical variance in the iambic…