Ae Fond Kiss Essay Questions

How is personification used in this poem to describe the speaker's emotions?

Paradoxically, Burns uses personification to convey just how lonely the speaker feels. As he anticipates the loss of his lover, his own lonely reality and internal life begin to feel more real and lively than the person he loves. Thus, he personifies the abstract idea of fortune—which, in his case, means ill fortune. He even personifies his own crying, referring to his "warring sighs and groans," as if his own body has turned against itself. While this personification means that the speaker is surrounded by a busy cast of (figurative) beings, it also means that the speaker is isolated, ensconced in a world of his own imagination and without the real, literal company of his lover. Thus, rather than portraying the speaker's loneliness as a state of quiet solitude, Burns portrays it as busy, conflict-ridden, and overwhelming.

Discuss the poem's structure, rhyme scheme, and meter. What effects do these elements have on the poem as a whole?

"Ae Fond Kiss" is a highly structured, repetitive poem. It never strays from its meter of trochaic tetrameter, nor from its AABBCCDD rhyme scheme. Its eight stanzas, as a result, are essentially each constructed out of four sets of rhymed couplets. The regularity of these patterns makes the poem musical and easy to follow, but the poem's unrelenting repetition also evokes the speaker's feelings of doom and hopelessness. Meanwhile, Burns's decision to rhyme each line only with the one beneath it, sometimes so closely that two lines of a rhymed couplet end with the same word, further emphasizes those feelings of sameness and claustrophobia.