POEM ANLAYSIS

Poem Analysis



White Heliotrope

Introduction

Symons undoes his verse “White Heliotrope” with the clinical images of a “feverish room” and “that white bed”. The personification of the room proposes an shameful way of life has been led. White is commonly affiliated with purity although its juxtaposition with feverish weakens the colour; furthermore, the monosyllabic “and that white bed” groups a menacing air and could show the bed as being the source of this decadent lifestyle. The normal 'abba' rhyme design which sprints all through the verse shows that this way of life will not change.

 

Analysis

The images of the “hair-pins, puffs and paints” supply a sense of the materialistic and, when attached with the likeness of the “tumbled skirt”, the promiscuous character of the protagonist. The detail that the plosives are located at the end of the first stanza assists to focus their significance in the protagonist's lifestyle. The personification extends into the second stanza where the “mirror that has imbibed your face”. On one hand the reflector could contemplate the how the protagonist has rebelled against the conferences of society; the onomatopoeic “sucked” proposes a more rapid and fast change (jkalb.freeshell.org). However, the sibilance glimpsed in the sayings “mysteriously keeps” and the “secret deep of deeps” suggests how these recollections still live in the backdrop and could show that the previous character of the protagonist is easily underlying and could return (jkalb.freeshell.org).

Here the air of illicitness about the connection is more powerful than it was in "Pastel," and the dark and darkness of that verse has granted way to jittery disorder, a kind of neurasthenic view, which the verse endeavours to draw into a unified and unifying state. Again, power and worth are attached with spontaneity: here, the scent "White Heliotrope" has, or so the speaker yearns, the power to ...