The Prelude: William Wordsworth’s The Prelude, written in blank verse is an autobiographical poem written from 1798 to 1799. Throughout the excerpt the speaker has changing responses to his experience and conveys his responses with varying diction, imagery, and tone style. There are three changes in the speaker's response to his surroundings, which portray his changing emotion throughout the piece. The transitions occur on lines 11, 24, and 34. Tones of adventure, decisiveness, obstruction, and darkness are used throughout the work. The speaker changes his tone during the transition from the first to second section. He starts in the first with an awe filled and adventurous tone. He then transitions to a tone of pride and decisiveness …show more content…
The change occurs at line 24a where a period and a capital letter is placed in the middle of the line. A previously unseen peak raises and disturbs the speaker in his prideful nature. He is rowing his newly found boat with apt skill, when suddenly something that he could not predict appears unexpectedly. His word choice demonstrates this change “ the horizon's bound, a huge peak, black and huge, as if with voluntary power instinct upreared its head”. The speaker uses the word huge twice within a span of 5 words (line 22) to emphasize the massiveness of this mountain. He felt as if he was on top of the world, but then it is yanked out from under him by an inanimate object. He then says “I struck and struck again, and growing still in stature the grim shape towered up between me and the stars,”. He uses this word choice to say that he had felt as if he had been growing in size every second of his journey, but as soon as he saw that mountain and its size, he stops growing. His imagery that the mountain is the “horizon's bound” and that it “towered up between me and the stars” shows that he understood that this mountain was the thing that would keep him from his goals and …show more content…
The speaker's tone goes from nervous and scared to dim and dark. The man has had to turn around and go back because of his fear for the humongous mountain that seemed to be encroaching upon his every move. The word choice of “and through the meadows homeward went, in grave and serious mood;” shows how he left his boat with a feeling of sadness, but had not yet been robbed of his joy. But, in the next section his starting word choice of “but after I had seen that spectacle, for many days, my brain worked with a dim and undetermined sense of unknown modes of being” shows that he doesn't even know how to feel anymore in light of recent events. This marks the change in him from sadness to dim apathy. His imagery of “there hung a darkness” and “no familiar shapes remained” parallels the complete emptiness he feels in his soul. The speaker once again refers back to the environment when he uses “no pleasant images of trees”, “of sea and sky”, and “no colours of green fields”. He uses this environmental imagery to show that his life is now devoid of all color. He closes this excerpt with “like living men, moved slowly through the mind by day, and were a trouble to my
Interpret (tell me why you think the poet wants to use such images)As such, a sense of gloom permeates the writing.
Thus the first part, devoted to the landscape, is richly descriptive, replete with qualifying epithets that, toward the end (in line 75 and in line 81), come in by threes, like beads on a string. In the second part, dealing with the passengers"'" plight, learned, latinate words such as '"'divagation,'"' '"'auditory,'"' '"'hallucination,'"' '"'eternity,'"' and '"'acceptance'"' signal the presence of the narrator-commentator. In the third partthe one reserved for the mooseepithets return. In the climactic twenty-fourth stanza, the most distinctly poetic devicesexplicit comparisonsare bestowed on the protagonist: '"'high as a church,/ homely as a house.'"' Moreover, the four additional epithets lavished on the moose contribute to the grandeur of its appearance: '"'towering, antlerless,'"' and '"'grand, otherworldly.'"'
It again reinforces the thematic concern of the overall theme. The tone does not change throughout the poem suggesting the constant constraint the poet felt. This is created by words such as "rage", "smouldering" and "furious". Which again highlights the irritation the poet herself felt due to the lack of freedom on the poetic inspirations. Therefore, the tone creates a sense of "life as bleak".
"I felt a little lost between the blue and white of the sky and the monotony of the colors around me—the sticky black of the tar, the dull black of all the clothes, and the shiny black of the hearse. All of it—the sun, the smell of leather and horse dung from the hearse, the smell of varnish and incense, and my fatigue after a night without sleep—was making it hard for me to see or think straight." –Albert Camus, The Stranger
In this apocalyptic world there is neither hope nor light. The man’s perception on prospect is shattered by the ash covered setting the novel portrays. From the very start the narrator describes the road as “Nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each one than what had gone before.” (2 McCarthy). This cycle that’s taking place in the sky causes the man to become numb to the drive of finding a better tomorrow. The numbness and loss of hope from the man can be seen in the dreams he has in the very beginning of the novel. “In the dream from which he'd wakened he had wandered in a cave where the child led him by the hand. Their light playing over the wet flowstone walls.” (2 McCarthy). The event happening in the dream is an allusion to Plato’s cave allegory, specifically when the prisoners are released from
The movement begins quite solidly in C major as the first component of the theme (figure 2), which we will call component A, is a repeating eight note C major chord which hammers the tonic tonality into the listeners’ minds. This component ends with an ascending three-note step-wise motion in the right hand into the dominant of the key, with the second note being a sharpened-F, temporarily tonalicizing the dominant, suggesting the idea to the listeners that the beginning C major chords may instead be serving a subdominant function to G. In measure 3 and 4, the left descends into B, serving as a bridge to the upcoming flat-VII to smooth out the jarring key shift. We will call the right hand motif in measure 3 as component B and the one in measure 4 as component C. All three motifs would come back later as important building blocks of the movement.
In “Preludes” the motif of decay, such as ‘newpaper’, reminds the persona of a changing society, where the rapid changes are having an impact on his ability to adapt. The symbolism and juxtaposition of “withered leaves” and “newspapers from vacant lots” emphasises the decaying nature of tradition, compared to the pervasive modern society, because of this Elliot’s difficulties lie within his inability to understand the changing situational environment. This is supported by Montogoner .M “How can one play any reasoned confidence in that “feeling of pastness” which suggests that there is difficulties between the present moment of awareness and past moment of awareness” Implying that decay is omniscient, and its affect on the past have an impact on the way we feel about history and social change. Elliot repeatedly implies this idea throughout the poem, demonstrating his battle with social change. The allusion in “with other masquerades/ That time resumes,/ One thinks of the hands” draws upon the changing societal expectation and the decay of old expectations. In order for Elliot to see the changing world he needed a window, ultimately it was language. This is emphasised by the shorter strophe length of “That time resumes” In comparison to other strophes in the stanza, indicating that change is already happening.The idea of decay prevailing in social change is reflected through the use of visual imagery and personification in “His soul stretched tight across the skies/ The fade behind a city block/ or trampled by insistent feet”, as the “trampled by insisted feet” being tradition, it is seen as being devalued and forgotten show that social change is happening. Elliot’ s acute senses forces him to accept the social change and this is what torments him. Hence, Elliot concludes to a hight extent that
Are there other features of the passage (parts of a narrative; meaning of a law, metaphor, or line, etc.) that are unclear to you? “I sank down to the very roots of the mountains”, “Snatched me from the jaws of death”, “my earnest prayer went out to you”.
In this essay, I will explore the context, purpose, structure, tone and stylistics features of the extract from p.104 to p.106.
Within stanza six the narrator is returning home and the imagery and word choice convey a feeling of emptiness and a dark, depressing atmosphere.
The poem goes from light and optimistic to a more harsh tone when the individual looks away from the telescope and is back in his own world “At night, on a cold hill” (12). This part of the poem emphasizes on the fact that his escape from reality was only temporary and he is once again back in the real world where he continues to face his own personal dilemmas. After the poem tells us that the individual is back in his own reality it goes on to tell us of a revelation the individual experiences: You realize afterward not that the image is false but the relation is false. (14-16) This stanza tells us that the individual’s view of the stars as an escape from reality is one that is unnecessary.
In “The Prelude”, the tone starts as calm and mellow as he discovers this new boat then takes it out to sea leaving his boat behind. Towards the ending of the poem, however, the tone changes to something that is sad and melancholy. After Wordsworth had seen some kind of unknown entity behind him, he hurried back to the willow tree then afterward returning home. For a few nights after he had came in counter with this entity he persistently kept having
Many times throughout The Prelude, and especially in his musings on the imagination and the One Mind in Book VI, Wordsworth contrasts his earlier use of the picturesque with his later use of the sublime, which itself
Part Four: What does this quotation mean? Why is it significant? How does it connect to an emerging theme of the novel? What is the impact of this passage on the reader?
Wordsworth is known for his introspection, often writing about feelings, emotions, mortality, and nature. Wordsworth’s The Prelude is a seminal work and a prime example of the romantic revision of epic tradition. The poem is about the growth of the poet’s mind. It is autobiographical and deals with different periods of Wordsworth’s life, such as his childhood, his time at Cambridge and his residence in France. The poem features Wordsworth reflecting on his experiences and feelings, and the poem acts as a look into how he views himself as a poet. In The Politics of the Epic: Wordsworth, Byron, and the Romantic Redefinition of Heroism, author Paul Cantor contends that despite the use of epic writing, the poem itself is vastly different from the epic. “It is written in an elevated blank verse that often has a Miltonic ring, it contains epic diction and epic similes, and it shows many other signs of Wordsworth 's attempt to work within the established epic tradition. But if one looks at the beginning of the poem, where the epic poet traditionally invokes his Muse, one can see how radically Wordsworth differs from his predecessor” (Cantor, 377). The poem seems to mimic the Miltonic epic in its style and diction. This does not mean, however, that Wordsworth intended to follow the conventions of the epic, as The Prelude breaks several of the conventions of classical epic poetry. For instance, the poem does not deal