May Swenson: Poems Literary Elements

The poem October is written from a first person perspective and it seems the speaker may be Swenson herself reflecting on her past, for example, she uses the first person pronoun 'I' and evokes a personal memory in 'I remember my daddy's hand,' a simple sentence, carrying much sentimental meaning and value.

October is written in seven numbered stanzas.

In stanza 5 of the poem October, Swenson uses both a metaphor and a simile, both evoking similar images, to describe a scene in which her father brings home some honey. She starts this stanza with the metaphor, 'Dark wild honey, the lion's eye colour,' which is very descriptive in nature, whilst the simile 'My brain's electric circuit glows, like the lion's iris that, concentrated, vibrates while seeming not to move,' later in the poem, presents an image of the lion's eye, but for a different purpose. This time the focus is not on the honey, but the speaker's reaction to it, being like a lion in their attentive desire for the 'sweet' honey.

In October, Swenson uses the alliteration in 'A dark hole in gray cloud twirls, widens, while white rips multiply on the water far out. Wet tousled yellow leaves...' to evoke the image of the waves flowing and crashing. It gives a vivid, sensory image both presenting the sound of the waves and their splashing movement, with wisps of water almost splashing the reader's face in their imagination.

In the last stanza, the speaker describes 'an old redwing [that] has decided to stay, this year, not join the strenuous migration.' She evaluates this decision in 'Better here, in the familiar, to fade,' which makes it seem like a positive step in the bird's life. However, the irony comes in the fact that the bird needs to fly to warmer climates for the winter in order to survive and the fact it does not do so is more likely because it can't than it simply has chosen not to leave.

Nature and Memory poem

The poem is set in October, as is shown by the title 'October' and the description of nature in this season, such as the 'wind,' 'storm' and 'gray cloud.' The poem flits between episodes in the speaker's life, so the temporal setting and the location change throughout the stanzas, sometimes in the past when she remembers her family and sometimes closer to the present time.

the tone of this poem is reminiscent and almost melancholic, as the speaker reflects on her father and also speaks of the world and nature around her in the present day.

The protagonist is the speaker, most likely Swenson herself, and also her father.

The conflict seems to be in the speaker's own thought. They quote Bible verse '"The very hairs of your head are numbered,"' in Stanza 6 and reflects on its meaning whilst having her hair cut. She questions 'how can those numbers remain all the way through, and all along the length of every hair, and even before each one is grown, apparently, through my scalp?' and reflects 'For, if the hairs of my head are numbered, it means no more and no less of them have ever, or will ever be.'
This conflict between what she has read as truth and her logical thought process develops over the course of this stanza.

The poem does not have pinnacle or climax , but more of a flowing recollection of different aspects of October. The description of 'the storm inflating' and the verbs 'widens' and 'multiply,' suggest a culmination of the storm is coming, but the poem focuses more on its development than its climax.

The predominately monosyllabic sentence in stanza one, 'You can see the storm inflating out of the west,' foreshadows and predicts a storm, the features of which appear in the later stanzas.

When speaking of their father's death, the speaker puts more emphasis on 'the mar that [...] in his coffin distinguished his skilled hand,' than the loss portrayed. The father's death is understated, mentioned simply in the setting 'in his coffin,' which suggests to the reader that he has died.

The writer alludes to 'the lion's eye color' and 'the lion's iris,' to describe the honey and their reaction to it.

In the first stanza the natural imagery of 'the jay's hoarse cry,' whilst it is 'stumbling in the air, too soaked to fly,' represents the situation as a whole, most likely for all birds and all nature in the area: the reality of a storm and bad weather.

The speaker describes the sky with personification in 'its gray face bedraggled by its tears,' which gives not only a physical description of the weather but also some insight into the metaphorical emotion of the sky, creating a paradox between how people normally react to the weather and how the writer describes the weather behaving itself.

The description of the speaker's father cutting his thumb is somewhat hyperbolic in the second instance, describing 'the whirling blade that sliced my daddy's thumb,' than the less dramatic description describing the thumb 'that got nipped by the saw' and 'lacked a nail.' The hyperbole comes from the tone and implications of the verbs when compared to one another, especially since they are in close proximity, in the same stanza.

When describing the redwing, the speaker quotes him as saying '"Chuck,"' which is an onomatopoeic evaluation of his call as a bird, which the reader can hear through this quotation.