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Show Renascence at the University 61 The mountains were too calm, their misty light Too unobtrusive. And the fields below, Brown after reaping, stub bled row on row Held too much of the past-tear-veiled the sight My heart was still a-thrill with Spring's delight, Still panting with the throb of Summer's glow. But now when evening comes, I understand. The stars are far away and sparkling cold, The flowers in the garden have grown old, There is a twang of frost, and from the hill A bleak wind flings a wild, relentless hand To clutch my heart with fingers piercing, chill." There is a melancholy tone. The temperature image, "a twang of frost," combines musical sound with weather condi tions, suggesting the resistance of formerly supple leaves and branches now stiffening in the lower temperatures. The "f" alliteration of flowers, fling, frost, fingers stutter with the sug gestion of cold. The last two lines melodramatically intensify the emotional suffering the speaker feels with the sweep of a synesthesia-figurative language that describes one sensory experience as if it were another, like "a cool blue" or "a twang of frost." A fourth poem, beginning with trochaic feet (two syllable cold wind. This is units, in which the first syllable is stressed), dramatizes a spirit of eagerness as the poet takes a hurried walk to exchange love notes with a friend. She does not need to meet her correspon dent to be joyful; instead she is romantically full of anticipation. She personifies the path-one she knew well from her summers at the ranch-as itself moving in order to express her own happy progress along it past familiar landmarks in the woods. A WOODNOTE Hurry ahead, little path, I am coming Through the break in the wire fence, Under the bush Where wild roses blush, Then over the brook stones with mossy scents! |
