Frederick Goddard Tuckerman: Poems Literary Elements

The poem ‘’Under the Mountain…’’ is related from the perspective of a first person subjective point of view. This gives the poem a sense of authenticity and intimacy.

The sonnet “Roll on, sad world! not Mercury or Mars” has fourteen lines and it is written in an iambic pentameter.

In the poem "Roll on, sad world! not Mercury or Mars’’, the narrator compares the pain he feels with the pain a war may produce in the lives of the people. This comparison has the purpose of showing just how much the narrator was suffering and how he lost all his hope.

We find an alliteration in the lines "And I have stood beneath Canadian sky,/ In utter solitudes, where the cricket’s cry’’ in the sonnet “Yet, even ’mid merry boyhood’s tricks and scapes”.

An ironic element appears in the sonnet “Yet, even ’mid merry boyhood’s tricks and scapes” where the narrator claims to feel caged even though he is outside, walking through nature and enjoying it without any limitations.

The poem ‘’Under the Mountain…’’ is a meditative poem through which the narrator meditates on the purpose of life and passing of time.

The action of the poem “Thin little leaves of wood fern, ribbed and toothed” takes place inside a wooden area, in the middle of autumn. The time when the action takes place is implied by the change in color of the leaves in the trees above the narrator.

The tone in the sonnet “Roll on, sad world! not Mercury or Mars” is a tragic and depressing one.

In the poem "Roll on, sad world! not Mercury or Mars’’, the narrator is the protagonist and the antagonist is the unknown character who inflicted pain upon the narrator.

The major conflict in the sonnet “Yet, even ’mid merry boyhood’s tricks and scapes” is between the power of nature and the weak nature of humans.

The poem “Thin little leaves of wood fern, ribbed and toothed” reaches its climax when the narrator lays down and looks at the sky, image which makes him think about his childhood.

In the poem “Yet, even ’mid merry boyhood’s tricks and scapes”, in the first lines, the narrator talks about the grandeur of nature and how humans can’t be compared with it. This foreshadows the line when the narrator admits he was afraid when he heard the sound of the insects around him in the woods.

In the poem ‘’Under the Mountain…’’ the narrator claims he only learned to appreciate nature in his adult years. In the poem “Yet, even ’mid merry boyhood’s tricks and scapes”, the narrator claims the opposite, writing about how he learned valuable lessons from nature from an early age. This thus makes the first statement an understatement because the opposite is proven in the later poems.

In the poem entitled ‘’Gertrude and Gulielma, sister-twins,’’ it is implies that the two sisters came from a noble family or at least a family which had a high social status. This is alluded when the narrator mentions their skin and describes it as being white, a trait considered as belonging to those who could afford to not work in the fields.

None can be found in the poems.

We find a personification in the line "Thin little leaves of wood fern, ribbed and toothed,’’ in the poem “Thin little leaves of wood fern, ribbed and toothed”.

We find a hyperbole in the line "The swift sun hastens, and the night debars /The day’’ in the sonnet “Roll on, sad world! not Mercury or Mars”.

We find an onomatopoeia in the line "the sunset wind/Sighs in the chambers’’ in the poem ‘’Under the Mountain…’’.