Line Breaks

The use of line breaks in poetry can have many meaning and intensions. A line break can indicate a change in mood or emotion, as well as the attitude change of a character. A line break can also indicate the passing of time such as night to day, or a change in time period. I think that this gives the characters, as well as the author, a chance to “rest” and gather their thoughts. T. S. Eliot uses two line breaks in the poem, "Journey of the Magi". The line breaks in this poem were used to indicate a passing of time. Before the first break Eliot writes, “At the end we preferred to travel all night, Sleeping in snatches, With the voices singing in our ears, saying That this was all folly.” The line break follows, Eliot then writes, “Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley”. This is clearly a line break that indicates the passing of time. The second line break is used to indicate a passing of time on a more broad scale. Before the second line break Eliot writes, “Finding the place; it was (you may say) satisfactory.” Then the line break occurs, followed by the line, “All this was a long time ago, I remember.” These are two clear examples of how line breaks indicate a passing of time or a change in the scene. These are important in that they put the story being told into perspective and you can better understand the whole message from the author.

The More Things Change . . . Or Stay the Same

I think that the changing of the times is very prominent is some of the poems that were read this week. The poems seem to depart from the traditionally tragic love stories to a more uncertain romantic story. I think the changing of the times was responsible for this uncertain message of love. Instead of somebody heroically dieing or killing themselves over a lost love there is a message of “moving on” so to speak. In Edwin Arlington Robinson’s poem, “The Mill”, There seems to be a message of waiting and wondering. In the first two lines this uncertainty is stated quite clearly, “The miller's wife had waited long, The tea was cold, the fire was dead”. With the rise of industrialization it becomes more common for a man to “leave” his wife and then return at an unknown time. The wife still feels the abandonment but has to wonder if that is necessary, this is shown in the third line, “And there might yet be nothing wrong”. The changing times also brought on a new threat of war. Countries were developing new technology that could be used to devastate another land with little effort when compared to centuries before. The new technology could be used for good as well as evil and people were caught in the middle of it. In Yeats’, “An Irish Airman Forsees his Own Death”, the idea of global vulnerability is very obvious. If you do not take the airman literal it can be used to describe countries as well as groups of people. I think that in the changing times people began to trivialize death and shift there allegiance to others such as there country, this can be seen in the third and fourth lines of Yeats’ poem, “Those that I fight I do not hate, Those that I guard I do not love”. People that were caught up in the changing of times were more uncertain and began to question their own beliefs.

"To Autumn"

John Keats was a romantic poet who lived from 1795 to 1821. He was said to have been drawn to lyric poetry and was inspired by internals conflicts. After reading a few of Keats’s works, I think that he is more reliable. In 1819 he wrote a poem entitled “To Autumn”. I think that the audience is very general. I do not think that this is a particularly deep poem in that it uses very obvious descriptions of a scene. The poem starts off with a description of nature during the autumn months. It is very easy to visualize what is being described and I could easily relate to similar sights and sounds of the season. The description of the vegetation is vivid and gives the poem some movement that gives you a sense of a fast paced scene with specific movements of the surroundings. The sentences in this poem are relatively short and are not hard to recognize. I think that this allows the reader to easily interpret the meaning and understand the description. There is punctuation throughout the poem that break down the ideas, which I believe also allows the reader to put the ideas in his or her head. I do not think that the punctuation contributes to the meaning, but it does allow for the meaning to be more successfully conveyed, even more so to and inexperienced interpreter of poetry. My initial reaction to the poem was a positive visualization of a nice time of the year. It sounded almost regretful in the fact that the season that was so beautifully described had to come to an inevitable end. Although, this was not directly stated.