Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Poems Literary Elements

The poems are narrated from a first-person subjective point of view.

The poems are written in an iambic pentameter.

An important similarity appears in the poem entitled "To the Indifferent Women’’ when the narrator compares the home and the people loved and cherished by a woman living in that home with a small farm. The comparison has the purpose of highlighting how divisive society really is and how much we ignore those around us simply because we do not see them as being a part of our "farm’’.

We find alliteration in the lines "Drearily walks the narrow floor/ Sullenly sits, blank walls before’’.

The narrator mentions, ironically in the poem "To the Indifferent Woman’’ that the people who are most qualified to solve the problems in the world are the ones who decide not to get involved and those who chose to remain separate from the rest of the world.

The poems in the collection are narrative poems.

The poem entitled "Locked Inside’’ take place inside a room.

The tone used in the poems is a worried one and also an accusatory one.

In the poem "To the Indifferent Women’’, the protagonists are the women who chose to get involved in political and social maters and the antagonists are the women who decide to keep themselves separated from the society and who refuse to get involved.

The major conflict in most of the poems appears to be between the female protagonists and the rest of the world.

The poem "Locked Inside’’ reaches its climax when the female out the poem figures out a way to escape.

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In the poem entitled "To the Indifferent Women’’, the narrator describes a group of women, locked inside the house and who apparently do not know anything about the world outside. This is however an understatement as the narrator later reveals those women refuse to acknowledge the problems that exist in the world.

Through her poems, the narrator alludes towards the fact that women are trapped by the modern society and suppressed by it. The women in the poems are presented as suffering or as being locked in places they can’t escape, further highlighting this idea.

The term farm is used in a general way in the poem "To the Indifferent women’’ to make reference to the close families that existed in the society where the narrator lived.

We find personification in the line "With faint week hands’’ in the poem "Locked Inside’’.

We find a hyperbole in the line "But the blank daylights wax and wane’’ in the poem "Locked Inside’’.

We find onomatopoeia in the line "She beats upon her bolted door’’ in the poem entitled "Locked Inside’’.