This poem is written from the perspective of a speaker who is, as the title implies, dead but still observing the world around "the bed on which [she] lay." There are several figures of speech of different types in the poem, all of which help create a sense that the speaker, while deceased, is not absent.
The word "slept" in this poem is used euphemistically. The unnamed "he" in the poem does not really think that the speaker is sleeping in a bodily sense. Rather, he thinks that her mind and soul are asleep in death. In fact, the speaker's death is a wakeful, watchful one. The poet uses repetition to emphasize the unnamed man's feelings of pity for the dead: "Poor child, poor child." We also see the use of anaphora—the repetition of a phrase—which lends cohesion to the poem in its descriptions of the man's action and inaction: "He did not touch the shroud. . . . He did not love me living."
Finally, in the last line of the poem, the speaker uses the words "warm and cold" in a dual sense. The fact that the speaker is as cold as the dead is in contrast to the man's living warmth, but given what comes before, we also understand that the speaker is pleased to detect an emotional, figurative warmth in the man who did not love her when she was alive but now pities her in death.
Friday, January 26, 2018
What are the figures of speech in Christina Rossetti's "After Death"?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Why is the fact that the Americans are helping the Russians important?
In the late author Tom Clancy’s first novel, The Hunt for Red October, the assistance rendered to the Russians by the United States is impor...
-
There are a plethora of rules that Jonas and the other citizens must follow. Again, page numbers will vary given the edition of the book tha...
-
The only example of simile in "The Lottery"—and a particularly weak one at that—is when Mrs. Hutchinson taps Mrs. Delacroix on the...
-
A good thesis statement presents a claim (an interpretive stance on a story that can be defended using textual evidence) and is a position w...
-
The given two points of the exponential function are (2,24) and (3,144). To determine the exponential function y=ab^x plug-in the given x an...
-
What does the hot air balloon symbolize? To the Assad son who buys the hot air balloon, it symbolizes a kind of whimsy that he can afford. B...
-
The play Duchess of Malfi is named after the character and real life historical tragic figure of Duchess of Malfi who was the regent of the ...
-
Allie’s baseball mitt is extremely important to Holden in The Catcher in the Rye. It is a symbol of Allie since it was important to his brot...
No comments:
Post a Comment