Comparison Of The Wave And Macbeth

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Commentary: “I sit and look out” and “Polphyria’s lover”

Words, lines, sentences, meter. These are the basics of poetry. However these characteristics alone are not enough to make a poem. A poem’s magic lies in the intensity of feeling, the emotions of the writer toward his subject. It is this aspect that that sparks the fuse of a poem and uncoils hidden meanings and entrapping ideas. Every poet wants to convey his message in such a way so the reader will empathize with them. Here we look at the two poems: Robert Browning’s “Polphyria’s lover” and Walt Whitman’s “I sit and look out”.

With these two poems two different styles and techniques are shown. Browning’s poem follows a strict structure. He uses rhyme scheme ABABB which puts a spin on the tradition rhyme of ABAB. This seems to reflect the madness brewing in the mind of the main character and speaker in the poem. He also uses a meter of 8 beats to the line, helping the reader through the poem at a systematic pace. The first 5 lines in Browning poem are very different from the rest. Every line is complete in itself “The rain set in early tonight” and “It tore the elm-tops down for spite”. This is in order to beckon the reader into the setting and set the mood for the terrible events about to happen. After this, the poem gets more dysfunctional, the poet goes around the lines to complete thoughts, reflecting the increasing lunacy in the mind of the narrator. Words like “tore” “vex” “struggling” and “scorned” set a mysterious theatrical mood. Despite the conventional rhyme and meter of the poem, “Polphyria’s lover” mimics natural speech becoming a monologue. This gives the poem a dramatic quality.

However with Whitman, the poem has no structure. It has no rhyme scheme, and no meter. Yet the poem is not completely free verse to the repetitive I at the beginning of every line aside from the last two, and the repetition...