An Echo Sonnet To An Empty Page Poem Analysis

Poetry in literature is often marked significantly by a literary device or a special characteristic of the structure. In Robert Pack’s poem “An Echo Sonnet, To an Empty Page,” echoes throughout the poem create a tone of awe-solemn wonder, revealing the poet’s confused attitude towards the relationship between form and meaning and the inner conflict formed within oneself, dealing with the “voice” and the “echo.” A conversation then begins.

The “echo” in this poem acts as the subconscious of the speaker, as opposed to a simple reproduction of the previous sounds. The speaker employs the “voice” as a confusing soul, who is deliberately seeking a response to its questions, and the “echo,” with its one word responses, provides the “voice”

In Derek Walcott’s poem “XIV,” the uses of personification, imagery and metaphor convey a mesmerized feeling in both the audience and the speaker. Through using a poem to narrate his childhood experience of listening to an old woman telling tales, Walcott successfully passes on this wonderful and great experience to the readers. The poem is not just about an experience with the old story teller, but a memory that holds the speaker and the speaker’s brother together in Caribbean.

By using personification in the poem, the speaker presents himself as a child by imagining the inanimate objects with human like characteristics. As the speaker travels around to find the story teller, he sees the sun as it was “threatening us as we climb closer.” In a child’s mind, everything is fascinating and they tend to see through the physical and literal appearances of ordinary objects. The same concept applies to the moving “shadows” that “stood up and walked.” Children believe everything in the world to be fantasy-like, and as they listen to the stories, their minds indeed direct its attention everywhere. These personifications are used to give a childish and immature point of view on the experience, which draws the audience in step by step into