The Sounds and the Images in ‘My Last Afternoon with Uncle Devereux Winslow’ Seda Dalgec College

Robert Lowell’s poem ‘My Last Afternoon with Uncle Devereux Winslow’ narrates retrospectively a specific time from the poet’s childhood, an afternoon in 1922 in his grandfather's summer house. The most striking qualities of the poem are sound plays and the utilization of imagery. These features are what make this text a poem rather than a short, simple narrative story as they support the central theme of life and death in their use.

First of all, the repetition of the sounds is the most obvious poetic element in this poem. We observe the repetition of the same consonants and vowels not only in consequent lines but throughout the whole poem in various shapes. There are four consonants that stand out as the most frequently repeated in the poem: /s/, /p/, /f/, and /k/. The fricatives /s/ and /f/ give the reader a sense of continuity as their manner of articulation depends upon the releasing of continuous air. On the other hand, the plosives /p/ and /k/ are stop sounds in whose articulation the air needs to be blocked. The fact that these sounds are juxtaposed with one another in a continuous manner manifest itself in the feeling of an interchanging flow and obstruction. A simple attempt to read the poem out loud with all due...