E. L. Masters

Masters’ look into small town life isn’t the typical sunny side up, lackadaisical, happy go lucky view that most people tend to take when writing. Masters delves into the dirty laundry of the small town life. Showing to the reader what everyone knows through hushed whisper, yet refuses to admit as more than just gossip. In Elsa Wertman Masters introduces the readers to an immigrant woman working in a house for a man and his wife. When the wife is away, the man can’t keep his hands off of her, the end result is a child. Hiding her husband’s infidelity, the wife decides to adopt the child, since they have none of their own due to what I assume is because she may be barren, and say that it is her own. By the end of the poem Elsa admits that when seeing the child rally in politics as an adult she weeps, not from the power in his speeches, but because she wants so badly to scream out that he is her child. Masters only takes this story a step farther with the dramatic irony in Hamilton Greene having the now grown child talk about how much he is honored to have come from the family he did. That he inherited the very best of his mother and father, and do everything to honor them, as they have honored him.

Yeats-When You Are Old

Yeats tends to sneak religion into his poems. Here is no different. While I don’t feel Yeats actively cared about his reader’s lifestyles, or the condemnation of such. He wanted readers to be able to take a look back on their lives, and realize that of everyone they’ve ever known, the only person whose love was never fleeting was God. Yeats is hoping that being close to death will help encourage those who have strayed in their youth, to open the good book, and look upon it with the same wonder they may have as a child before straying. Yeats wants the reader to remember all the good times they’ve had with loved ones, be they friends, family, or lovers of both romantic and lustful variety. Yeats wants the reader to remember these times, think on them, and how only one person has every loved the reader for who they are, from day one, and will always love the reader, even after death.

Thomas Hardy- The Darkling Thrush

In The Darkling Thrush Hardy spends the majority of the poem setting a tone of gloom, surrounding a man whom I feel is falling into despair. The man has sought a walk through a wooded area one winter evening, as the sun is setting. Finding nothing in nature to cheer himself up, the man stops for a rest at the edge of the area. It can be believed that during his walk the woods had remained quiet, further reminding the man of death. As he stands there, taking in the winter world as a cold dead place Hardy introduces a splash of color into his grey spectrum. The man hears a thrush start singing. By the looks of the bird, its existence wasn’t the greatest as it looked small and underfed. The bird however continues to sing cheerfully, the source of the birds happiness the man could not determine. The poem ends with the man’s spirits somewhat lifted to the thought of a hope he could not conceive, yet the bird was apparently aware of.