hold fires.8Imagery: Through the use of personification, symbols, metaphors, alliteration (this last element may also refer to the poems structure) and a selected sort of words, he produces images in the readers mind, when all he really does is just speak from his inner state of mind, as modernists are soon to do. To show the use of imagery in this poem, Ive taken its 2nd stanza as an example. Here he uses personification on the landscape, thereby referring to an inanimate object as if it were human. He compares the landscape to a dead body lying all around him, and the clouds becoming the coffins top, and the wind his death lament. The poet also makes use of alliteration in this poem. An example from this stanza is corpse, crypt, cloudy, canopy etc, where you easily notice the same sounds repeated several times. This has mostly a decorative effect, but it also makes you focus on these words, thereby revealing parts of the poems nature and temperament. The lands sharp features seemed to be1 The Centurys corpse outleant, 2His crypt the cloudy canopy,3 The wind his death-lament. 4The ancient pulse of germ and birth5 Was shrunken hard and dry, 6And every spirit upon earth7 Seemed fervourless as I. 8Diction:The choice of words in this poem has been carefully selected, leaving little to coincidence. If you look carefully, you notice him using lots of negatively loaded words such as grey, desolate, broken, haunted etc. He himself is all alone out in the cold with all his negatively loaded words. But this changes further on in the poem.In stanza number 3 you will notice a change in the poets use of diction. In stead of keeping mainly to negatively loaded words, he suddenly makes use of positively loaded words too. Words like frail, aged, gaunt and small still remains, but you also get words like evensong, full-hearted and joy illimited. This change in diction shows the reader that something new has occurred in the poem. A song-bird has entere...
