Sense of Loneliness in American Poetry

 Although America claims to be the most democratic country in the world, the capitalistic economy dominates. Second, extramarital sex and the gay system had been decriminalized. This caused the total breakdown of the family. And because of this, everyone has become lonely. Many people committed suicide after the 1970s, including Sylvia Plath. They even did not care about their wealth and did not know what to do with the wealth they had earned. When the children reach adulthood, they leave their parents. This has made everybody lonely. The only relationship is economic. Loneliness was very much there in Sylvia Plath's poems.
In the poem "Daddy" by Sylvia Plath She combines the personal with the mythical. She represents the father as a black shoe, a giant statue, a swastika, and a vampire, while the girl is a victim, ending up in some strange places—in a black shoe, in a sack, and, in a sense, in the train as it chugs along.
This poem represents Sylvia Plath's inner pain by being masterfully spruced up in lyrical form, which gives the reader an impact of black myth that combines the lighter echoes of Mother Goose with the much darker plangency of World War 2.
Daddy is full of distressing imagery. A poem of 16 stanzas, each of five lines, making a total of 80 lines. The metre is roughly tetrameter (four beats), but contains pentameter with a mix of stresses.
The language of the poem is like the rhyme and the song lyrics. Its imagery is like the scenes of the poet’s childhood and uses a kind of dark cinematic language. There’s also the sound of the stream train throughout: "choo choo-oo-oo," "glue," "you," "do," "du," "shoe," "two," "screw," "through," "gobbledygook," "Jew," "blue," and "Achoo." The repeated refrain gives the song energy and conjures up the image of the train chuffing its way to its final destination.
The tone of this poem is quite depressing, as the poet's father was suffering from diabetes and had lost one of his legs. She took his father along with her family to the holy place, where the prayer was used in an attempt to get the father back and restore his health. She feels like she was on a death train taking her off to a concentration camp, one of the Nazi death factories where millions of Jews were cruelly gassed and cremated during World War II. The narrator now identifies fully with the Jews, even becoming a Jew.
"Daddy" delves into not only the speaker's relationship with her father and husband, but also into women's relationships with men in general. This poem is a powerful statement from a female against males. It’s not limited to addressing one male, but any male who has suppressed, betrayed, or, perhaps worst of all, died and left behind their daughters and wives.
Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird, by Wallace Stevens The poem seems to be thematically structured to bring about a complete understanding of our own thought processes and to enable us to realize shortcomings in our self-centered thoughts. By using the expression "blackbird," repeated in each of the thirteen stanzas, Stevens escorts us through a process of self-questioning. Separately, the verses are similar to Zen koans, designed to shatter your way of thinking and bring about enlightenment. Yet as a whole, this piece seems to gently poke you into the author's way of thinking rather than propel you as Zen propounds.
The first stanza is an introduction to the entire poem and a preliminary exercise for your intellect. Stevens conjures an image of a lone blackbird among twenty snow-capped mountains; the only thing moving is the eye of the bird. Here, the black bird is signifying the thought, which shows the feeling of universal power and isolation. In the second stanza, we are asked to consider three blackbirds as three minds within a tree. The tree represents the framework of our mind, i.e., the physical body, our brain, and perhaps even knowledge. Then, the blackbird signifies singular thoughts on a particular subject.
The third sketch is more disruptive than the first two. an image of a blackbird being "whirled in the autumn which suggests a loss of control and an overwhelming force acting on the blackbird. Not only that, the blackbird is said to be "a small part of the pantomime," suggestive of the adherent concept of the "dance of life," the interplay of all living things; the blackbird is a microscopic example of all of life. This allows us to compare the role of a thought in the mind to the role of a blackbird in the life cycle.
A more concrete example of the style of thought Stevens wishes us to explore is in the fourth stanza. The incorporeal that the Tao Te Ching speaks of is the universal unconscious, the base spiritual kinship we have to each other and, indeed, to every object in the universe. Therefore, a man and a woman at base are the same if we add a blackbird; they are all part of the "oneness."
Stevens, in the fifth stanza, seems to be alluding to the importance of grasping the difference between implicit and implied work. It gives everyone a picture of their own mind.
The sixth stanza demonstrates the complexity of language and ideas. However, since Stevens urged us in the last stanza to read deeper within the text in order to draw out the meanings, we are prepared for it. The first two lines, "Icicles fill the long window with barbaric glass," have images of looking out of an ice-encrusted window, but they also convey the feeling of temptation or invasion. The "shadow of the blackbird" then passes through the window, drawing our attention away from the window and to the flitting shadow, where we are told, "The mood traced in the shadow... an indistinguishable cause." The appearance of the shadow seems to provoke in the author a sudden flash of initiation, which unfortunately turns out to be unsearchable or unclear to himself and to the reader also.
The poet says that men try hard to attain power and success without looking around them. Actually, he wants to reach for loftier heights that are impossible to attain, but he did not see them at his own feet. The poet is looking for a blackbird, but the blackbird is actually in his own feet.
Here Stevens speaks of written texts, saying, "I know noble accents and lucid, inescapable rhythms." This at first seems very egotistical, telling the reader that he has extraordinary skills. Then he admits that "the blackbird is involved in what I know." I draw two conclusions from this admission: that he hails the blackbird as an equal or even an influence on his writing, and that this sentence is a tribute to the blackbird (nature). Also, all of his rhythms and accents can be easily traced back to a natural source; for instance, the whistling of a blackbird has rhythms and accents, just as poetry does; therefore, Stevens is not doing anything new; the blackbird already does it all.
On the surface, stanza nine appears to refer to the horizon, or man's own line of sight, with which we can trace a circle and point with us as the focal point."... one of many circles." What are these circles? It shows the circle in nature and in life—everything revolves in a circular fashion, the planet, the food chain, life, and death.
The concept of fear and guilt in our thoughts has been introduced in verse eleven. "At the sight of blackbirds flying in a green light," suggests the idea that something is wrong with the light that the blackbirds are flying in, which signifies the carrier of the thoughts (blackbirds). Therefore, it means that when something is amiss within one's thoughts, even those who are devout followers of mellifluousness may exclaim sharply or simply be adversely affected by the disquieting effect the blackbirds have in that light.
The theme of guilt is apparent in verse eleven, when we are told that a man is riding "in a glass coach," which would suggest extreme fragility coupled with an illusion of transparency, which are two things a guilty person may feel. Also, it is told that "Once, a fear pierced him, in that he mistook the shadow of his armour for blackbirds." Who but a guilty and fearful man would be pierced by fear at an illusion of blackbirds? Blackbirds in this case could mean many things, for example, the law, a party bent on revenge, an ex-wife or girlfriend, etc. The cause-and-effect principle states that if the water flows, nature lives, and the blackbird flies. In the context of nature, it refers to the immutability of all things and the resistance to change that coexists with the process of change. The black bird also symbolizes human beings. The water symbolizes life, and the blackbird represents intellect or consciousness. As long as we live, our intellect flies. This is a natural segue to the last verse, having both the effect of calming our fears and restoring our faith in life.
The final verse in my reading deals with aging and death. "It was evening all afternoon..." suggests a person in his declining years, death being night, with the evening nearing night. "It was snowing, and it was going to snow." suggests the foresight of experienced eyes—someone who has seen many winters and has been granted a limited prescience over the effects of nature. For the first time in the piece, the blackbird we see is immobile, sitting in the cedar limbs. Going back to the second stanza and the idea of a tree as our physical body, with blackbirds representing our intellect or thoughts, we see the slowing down and eventual stopping of creative thought as night comes nearer.
Wallace Stevens is a man deeply involved with philosophical problems as they relate to man and his universe. He seems to be asking us to open our minds to the magic of everyday life, i.e., the blackbird and nature, but also to re-evaluate our mindset in relation to living in an ordinary, mundane world. I believe he is advising us to keep an open mind and use creative visualization to create a conscious bond between the causal and seemingly causal relationships shared by every object and living being in the dance of life.
"Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" is a lonely poem, in which we find the speaker far away from any other human being. The Speaker is alone in the woods; however, he is happy that nobody is seeing him. We get the feeling that he'd rather be all by himself in the freezing cold than back in the village. Nature helps make things even lonelier, too, for it happens to be freezing cold, snowing, and dark out there.
The words "the darkest evening of the year" and "between the woods and frozen lake" have added to the sense of gloom, mystery, and isolation. And finally, the speaker mentions that there were only three sounds: the sound of the harness bells of his horse, the easy wind, and the downy flake. This confirms that silence prevailed all around.
The poet has probably created this atmosphere of isolation and silence to give the impression that we are all alone in this world. This is a lonely journey. Sometimes we stop on the way to see and enjoy life’s beauty, but in the broader range, we have to fulfil the tasks we are assigned to before we go to sleep, i.e., die.
Robert Frost's poem "Fire and Ice" has a strong theme of isolation. This poem revolves around the lonely speaker who is endlessly taking a walk beyond the city where he lives but is not able to locate anything or anyone that would comfort the speaker in his stage of depression. Loneliness and isolation are the main themes of this poem. The speaker is being "acquainted with the night," the objects the speaker encounters in "waiting," and the sense of abandonment and death in "Ghost House."
Sadness and loneliness are the most prevalent themes in "One Art" by Elizabeth Bishop. In "One Art," Bishop never comes right out and says she’s sad about the many losses mentioned in this poem—in fact, she insists upon the opposite: rather than dwell upon the moment of loss or its aftermath, the poem consciously pushes sadness off to the sidelines of the reader’s mind. However, by summoning up our own memories of lost things and people, the poet reminds us that sadness plays a very significant but unarticulated role here.