Acquainted with the Night

Robert Frost's Acquainted with the Night was another deeply depressing poem. Frost presents an extended metaphor over the entire poem. He parallel's the speaker's misery and loneliness with the night time. There is obviously a strong resemblance there with that emotion. "I have looked down the saddest city lane" (Frost, 976). The speaker has hit rock bottom in terms of depression. "dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain" (Frost, 976). The speaker has done something that he is ashamed of that quite possibly could have led to his solitude. Although he is unable to interact with others, the poem offers a sense that the speaker wanted to escape this terrible lonely life he was in. He felt almost jealous that no one called out to him.The poem has a lot of repetition. Many of the lines start with "I have." The poem even ends with the same line as it began with. This fact expresses a sort of cyclical pattern in the speaker's life. The speaker seems to have forced himself into a lonely, miserable cycle that he can't get out of. The poem is written without any symbols of hope or redemption.

Dover Beach

Matthew Arnold's Dover Beach is another poem in which the speaker is deep in thought. As the speaker and his love are standing and adoring the English Channel, the speaker begins to come to a realization. He determines that although the water (and all of the world) may look beautiful and calm, it is actually sad and miserable. He ponders even deeper by expressing that there is this same emotion all over the world to all humanity. The speaker himself has lost all faith in humanity. He exemplifies this when he proclaims that there is a dwindling amount of faith in the world itself! "the world, which seems to lie before us like a land of dreams, so various, so beautiful, so new, hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain" (Arnold, 893). The speaker's list of the miseries of life goes on and on. It's length and detail show his position on the quality of the world. He even acknowledges that he has lost faith. To compensate for not having any faith, he exclaims to his love that they must stick together forever. Without this woman, I feel he would become a deeply disturbed man. The terms he uses to describe the world and humanity are pessimistic and depressing enough. Without the speaker's only joy in life, I believe he would crumble without faith.

Sorting Laundry

I feel like so many people can relate to Elisavietta Ritchie's poem Sorting Laundry. I know I, as well as so many others, over-think certain aspects of our lives. The structure and content of this poem show that the speaker does this as well. She starts off talking about sheets and pillow cases then gradually gets more specific. She ends up talking about the smallest details of what she finds in the pockets of the laundry she is folding. One can tell that she is in deep thought as she does this. The consistent structure of the poem also symbolizes the consistency of what she is doing. She folds laundry over and over again, day after day. This time of the day when she folds laundry doesn't do her much good, however. She begins to over-think parts of her life. Specifically, she starts doubting the strength of her relationship. One can infer that the speaker is in deep thought when it says, "you brought from Kuwait, the strangely tailored shirt left by a former lover..." (Ritchie, 842). This ellipsis causes a natural pause in the poem. This pause stands for when the speaker is deep in thought and lost in her own worries in her mind. In the whole poem, the speaker seems to be in a very strong relationship with her current lover. Whatever she began to doubt in it can only cause harm. Sometimes, over-thinking can lead to destruction.

The Convergence of the Twain

Thomas Hardy's poem The Convergence of the Twain was structurally written in a unique way. The eleven different stanzas coordinated well with the formation of the ship and with its lead up to the destruction of it. There was one section of this poem that really stood out to me. "Alien they seemed to be: No mortal eye could see/The intimate welding of their later history" (Hardy, 779). The quote has a lot of deep meaning to me. This quote stresses that the ice berg that sunk the ship and the great Titanic were growing at the same time. That is just so awesome to think about. Everything has a reason. I believe that it was fate that the two collided. This poem exemplifies this because the speaker says expresses that although the two objects seemed to be completely unrelated, they would one day be joined together forever.

The concept of fate in this poem is significant. Hardy was writing this to prove a point. I believe this point to be that there was an ultimate and greater reason for the Titanic to sink. Hardy wanted to show that the Titanic sunk to discourage the mindset of those that the ship was built for. Beauty and wealth isn't so important when you look at the big picture. All of the parts of the ship that were made for only the very well off are pretty insignificant rotting away at the bottom of the ocean.