Louis MacNeice: Poems Literary Elements

Louis MacNeice: Poems Literary Elements

Speaker or Narrator, and Point of View

The poem “Prayer Before Birth” is told from the perspective of a first person subjective narrator.

Form and Meter

The poem “Snow” is written in an iambic pentameter.

Metaphors and Similes

In the fourth stanza of the poem “Prayer Before Birth” the narrator asks an unseen God to be given a “light bird” to guide him through life. The bird is used here in the poem as a metaphor symbolizing religion and how only religion has the power and capability to guide a person towards the truth.

Alliteration and Assonance

We have an alliteration in the lines “We cannot cage the minute/ Within its nets of gold” in the poem “The Sunlight On The Garden”.

Irony

N/A

Genre

The poem “Prayer Before Birth” is a meditative poem on the nature of pain and life.

Setting

The action described in “The Sunlight On The Garden” takes place at twilight in the narrator’s garden.

Tone

The tone in “Prayer Before Birth” is a pleading one.

Protagonist and Antagonist

The protagonist in “The Sunlight On The Garden” is the narrator and the antagonist is the impossibility of escaping death.

Major Conflict

The major conflict in the poem “Prayer Before Birth” is between the truth and the lies told to a person.

Climax

The poem “Snow” reaches its climax when the narrator becomes intoxicated.

Foreshadowing

The feelings of despair at the end of the poem “Snow” is foreshadowed by the melancholic state described in the first stanza of the poem.

Understatement

In the first stanza of “The Sunlight On The Garden” the narrator claims time cannot be caged or stopped, not even for a moment. This is an understatement as the narrator later described various ways through which he feels as if he can stop time.

Allusions

In the second stanza of the poem “Prayer Before Birth” the narrator alludes the idea that humans do not know what the truth really is. According to him, humans are lied to even before they are born and they continue to be lied to until the moment they die, thus never knowing the truth.

Metonymy and Synecdoche

The term “snow” in the poem with the same name is used as a general term to make reference to pain and death.

Personification

In the poem “Snow” in the line “the room was suddenly rich” contains a personification.

Hyperbole

We have a hyperbole in the lines “And the fire flames with a bubbling sound for world /Is more spiteful and gay than one supposes” in the poem “Snow”.

Onomatopoeia

We have onomatopoeia in the line “sky to sing to me” in the poem “Prayer Before Birth”.

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