ipl-logo

Analysis Of W. H. Auden's Lullaby

1362 Words6 Pages
bulb-icon

Recommended: Loss and disparity of Auden's poetry

This essay will be a commentary on the language of love used in Lullaby by W. H. Auden. Through analysis of images such as time, childhood, mortality, the grave and the cost of love it will be seen that the language used by Auden in Lullaby is pessimistic as well as depressing. It will be seen that the language used by Auden is vastly different to the stereotypical language used in love poems. Lullaby veers from the stereotypical approach to love and instead displays the speakers individual impression of love in the language used and the images described.
Lullaby by W. H. Auden consists of 4 stanzas of 10 lines each. There is no particular rhyme pattern although each stanzas line 3 and line 7 rhyme. The poem is a trochaic tetrameter poem.
The poem begins with the image of time and sickness detracting from the image of the beauty of childhood in the same stanza. It is due to age (“time”( line 3)) and sickness (“fever”( line 3)) that childhood is “ephemeral”(line 6), lasting only for a short time. This image sets the tone of the poem. The poet uses childhood as a metaphor for his relationship leading the reader to believe that the relationship is young, new and still holds the beauty of discovery. Although the speaker does not want his lover’s beauty to be diminished through time nor sickness, he realizes it is inevitable as age cannot be stopped nor sickness completely avoided.
Time is used throughout the poem to display the coming to the end of something. “Certainty,
Show More
Related
362 Words | 2 Pages

" This opening sets the tone for the rest of the poem, conveying a sense of melancholy and nostalgia. The poet observes the tree as a symbol of natural beauty and simplicity in contrast

Read More
904 Words | 4 Pages

This is an example of astonishing imagery where the detail overflows the imagination. You feel immersed as you read the poem. The imagery portrayed in this poem adds a depth that you wouldn't be able to feel if you didn't get the provided

Read More
786 Words | 4 Pages

For the entire duration of the poem, the reader is able to infer how the complexity of the relationship changes and how the father feels about his son through the techniques and methods stated above. Within A Story, Lee uses point of view from both characters to convey the idea that the father’s relationship with his son is indeed, increasingly complex. The reader also learns from this point of view technique that the time of thought within the poem constantly changes. The boy’s young age is shown clearly in the beginning of the poem as: “His five-year-old son waits in his lap.”

Read More
929 Words | 4 Pages

She uses her importance and connection to music to show that even while things change and she grows up, the one thing that remains constant is the melody. She recalls her mother leaving and it is a long, painful experience, she knows she is actively forgetting the good in her childhood. The speaker is aware of her childhood memories “fading like the words of a lullaby”, but there is a sense of comfort in knowing that no matter the circumstances, they will remain. The personal relationship in the jazz albums and small nuances add up together to create something that blooms from the

Read More
602 Words | 3 Pages

Imagery and tone plays a huge role for the author in this poem. It’s in every stanza and line in this poem. The tone is very passionate, joyful and tranquil.

Read More
885 Words | 4 Pages

Prophecy in the Sands From its sweeping bigness, vigor and hatred, McKay personifies America as a woman who is treating him, the citizen, terribly, but he still loves her in spite of the abuse. Claude McKay's "America" uses similes, rhythm, and violent imagery to illustrate how there is no hope for the future that is better than the abuse we have in the present. The narrator that McKay created is one that greatly mirrors that of an African American in the Harlem Renaissance that is being torn in two directions: love and hate for America. “America” acts as a magnifying glass for that time, but also is a prophecy for the times to come.

Read More
708 Words | 3 Pages

Can people be fully mature? Many teeangers and adults think they are mature and can control many things. Here are two literary works that show how people are not fully mature as they thought. A short story “Crystal Stars Have Begun to Shine” by Martha Brooks and a poem “12 years old” by Kim Stockwood deal with the maturity of people.

Read More
1219 Words | 5 Pages

The author effectively broke up the poem into stanzas, each stanza discussed a different scene. It represented a condensed timeline of a love diminishing. Each stanza is creating a different scene and the change in meter helps transition from each stanza. She starts off talking about a perfect rose, but then moves on to talk about how maybe something beside a rose should represent love. Maybe the author has fallen in love in the past, but then slowly fell out of it and was no

Read More
1215 Words | 5 Pages

The poem begins with the speaker looking at a photograph of herself on a beach where the “sun cuts the rippling Gulf in flashes with each tidal rush” (Trethewey l. 5-7). The beach is an area where two separate elements meet, earth and water, which can represent the separation of the different races that is described during the time that her grandmother was alive and it can also represent the two races that are able to live in harmony in the present day. The clothing that the two women wear not only represent how people dressed during the different time periods, but in both the photographs of the speaker and her grandmother, they are seen standing in a superman-like pose with their hands on “flowered hips” (Trethewey l. 3,16). The flowers on the “bright bikini” (Trethewey l. 4) are used to represent the death of segregation, similar to how one would put flowers on a loved one’s grave, and on the “cotton meal sack dress” (Trethewey l. 17) it is used to symbolize love and peace in a troubled society.

Read More
800 Words | 4 Pages

The poem 's content points not to just a single memory, but an entire sexual affair from the speaker’s youth—chronicling the erotic encounters that would eventually lead to his lover’s “footfall light” and both of them “silent as a stone”. Thus the memory is also clouded by the nature of erotic

Read More
729 Words | 3 Pages

It has an iambic metre and the rhyme scheme is a cross rhyme throughout the poem. The first stanza offers a good insight into the theme of the poem. It is built up on statements which contradict each other. '[Thick] ' (l. 1) and '[thin] (l. 2), for example, are attributes used to illustrate love in comparison to forgetfulness. However, as

Read More
542 Words | 3 Pages

Throughout the story, the narrator hints towards smaller instances that symbolize the central theme of the story—absence or the loss of love. The recollection of painting over the wallpaper in which the narrator says, “I thought of the bits of grapes that remained underneath and imagined the vine popping through, the way some plants can tenaciously push through anything” (Beattie 108) symbolizes how their love was unable to

Read More
1056 Words | 5 Pages

This image seems at first cold, but it is a realistic judgment of her ideas of parenthood. The feeling of distance is also shown in: “I’m not more your mother than the cloud that distils as mirror to reflect its own slow effacement at the wind’s hoard.” The final lines of the poem present the reassuring vision of a loving mother attending to her baby's needs. Plath’s self-image – ‘cow-heavy and floral in my Victorian nightgown’ – is self-deprecating and realistic. The final image is an optimistic one.

Read More
1326 Words | 6 Pages

Love and romance are a common genre found in poetry, where one is able to express their true emotions toward a particular person or thing. Love itself has come to represent both the emotional and personal connection between two lovers. Pablo Neruda, a renowned Chilean poet, explores the concept of love and separation in the form of the poem, “I can write the saddest verses.” In this poem, Neruda communicated his longing for his past love, whom he still loved at the time. While the words of the poem create an effect and feeling in the reader, which is related to the sad aspects of losing relationships, more can be uncovered about Neruda.

Read More
1918 Words | 8 Pages

Love can exist as affection, infatuation, obsession, pleasure and in many other ways, as love is abstract. Hence, there is no one single interpretation of love. Love is a theme that has been embedded into language and literature over the centuries, yet due to the ever changing perception of love people continue to search for a universal definition of love. Poems are able to showcase the inner feelings and desires of a poet as well as their own unique views on love. Nevertheless, through poems “La Belle Dame sans Merci” by John Keats, “My Last Duchess” by Robert Browning, “Mother in a Refugee Camp” by Chinua Achebe, “The day is gone, and all its sweets are gone!”

Read More

More about Analysis Of W. H. Auden's Lullaby

Related Topics

Open Document