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Analysis Of November By Lorna Davis

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Allow me to present to you the poem “November” by Lorna Davis. This beautiful piece uses vivid imagery to describe the desolate and melancholy turn of seasons between October and November. It is a classic Shakespearean sonnet, made up of three quatrains with perfect ABAB rhyme schemes, a volta, and a couplet. The author has really taken advantage of this structure to amplify the messaging by grouping together lines with similar meanings to create poetic rhythm as well as isolating certain parts to allow them to stand out more. If you look at lines 3-6, there is a motif of things deteriorating; the trees “have grayed”, the sunlight is “cold and tired”, and the “fruitful time’s approaching end”. Using words like “gray”, “cold”, and tired” in …show more content…

Take a look at lines 5 and 6, in which sunlight is personified as “lean[ing] against the south walls, cold and tired”. While reading this, you can practically imagine a figure slumped heavily against a wall for support because of their exhaustion; their posture is slouched and no longer proud, and it seems impossible that they will ever regain their energy. This is an excellent example of how only a couple, well chosen words can create a whole narrative in the reader's mind. Another instance of this is the simile that equates “tresses” to “leaden clouds,” in line 3. “Tresses”, meaning a lock of a woman’s hair, is most commonly used with a positive connotation that implies the woman's hair is beautiful, lucious, and curled. By comparing the tresses to leaden clouds, Davis shows that not only has the hair grayed, but it has become stagnant and less joyful, less full of life. Time has taken much more than color out of the hair, just as it has caused more significant changes between October and November than simply less sunlight. In fact, the meaning of this poem transcends the rudimentary transition of weather in many

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