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English A1 Poem Help


eel7x6

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[b]Night Wind[/b]
by Christopher Dewdney

Tonight the wind blows through
all the worlds I have known and
through all the lives I have led.
The wind blows in the trees,
deeper into each.
The wind blows forever,
strains like something
endlessly departing.
Restless, impatient,
it races without burden.

The night wind implores me through walls,
claims me inside buildings.
The night wind is an empire
in exodus, a deliverance
beside the dark shape of trees. Oaks
that wrestle the gusty twilight
under starry skies.

The wind takes
me in its giddy rush and
gathers me into a storm of longing,
rising on wings of darkness.
There is a music in the wind.
The thrum of guy wires
of a thousand branches.
Muffled percussion
of banging doors, the
sibilous clamour of rushing leaves.

Above me the Milky Way
and leaping, striding, I am the
bloodrun of the atmosphere.
Racing with leaves and newspapers
down deserted streets,
over fields and playgrounds.

I pace the wind
through forests and beside highways.
Along oceans and rivers
the gale’s mysterious, unspoken imperative
is a joyous delirium with
nothing at its end.



I have no idea what this poem is talking about, it seems to me that the poet is only intending to describe the wind. Can someone tell me what the main idea of this poem is and how can i analyse this?

Thank You

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I'll give you a few hints of how you can interpret this.

Wind = life. Where it blows, the things it impacts is the different stages/happenings in life.

It's a blank verse. Tie that to the above and to the fact that the poem is about wind.

Enjambment can also be commented on

[quote]sibilous clamour of rushing leaves.[/quote]
Oh nice line.

My advice on how to analysise it is to go through the poem line by line, look for lit devices, metaphors, imagery (visual, aural) etc that you can pick up. Write them down as you go. Look for any pattern throughout the whole poem. There should be things in every couple of lines, if not every line. It might be hard to pick up all these at first but you can get better at it with practice (trust me, it's true).

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that's lovely Bandev :D I'm sure it'll be useful wiping people's asses now :hug:

adding to what Hien said, look at patterns in the poem that may indicate that it is like the wind (I remember Lord Byron doing that in his poem about the sea- making the structure like the movement of the waves) so might be the same here (I'd do it myself, but this is your work :) )

and discuss the difference in the representation of the wind, firstly as a giver of life (going in the trees blah blah) and then as a destructor- the wind at night blah blah...

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