Rising Five Poem Analysis

Kenneth Wong
G10L
15 November, 2014

Rising Five
Norman Nicholson Poem Analysis
In Norman Nicholson’s poem – Rising Five, it described how human always are worried about their future, yet to live in the moment. The poem is about the human nature, human’s obsession with the future, and the cycle of life.

The first stanza started off with a little boy claiming that he’s “Rising five, not four”. The author describes the little boy’s appearance in detail, “little coils of hair”, “brimful eyes to stare”, “toffee-buckled cheeks”, which suggested the sweetness, tenderness of the boy and that how young and how short of a time the he has lived. The poem then pointed out exactly for how long has the kid lived, “Fifty-six months or perhaps a week

There is a strong rhyme between the lines ‘bubbled and doubled’ ‘buds unbuttoned’ and ‘creases from their frills’. These lines created the image of flowers blossoming. At the end, he stated the season of the year, “It was the season after blossoming, Before the forming of the fruit” bring out that it is not May but rising June.

In the third stanza, the author described the change of the sky as the day fades and the night rises. The line “in the sky the dust dissected tangential light” showed the change in time and the mood of the poem. The term “rising soon” indicated the change to a certain degree of seriousness of the last stanza of the poem.

In the fourth stanza, the writer showed a degree of negativity by describing more about the human nature and the phenomenons we see in our society.
He talked about people abandoning their past as if “a boy throwing away his toffee-wrappers” and how people always see the future rather than the present like how parents plan everything for their child even before their child is born. He ended the stanza and the poem by pointing out which death is the human nature and the cycle of