Away Melancholy

Question 1

Away Melancholy

Answer 1

-Demanding tone
-Enhances poet’s certainty

Question 2

structure

Answer 2

-9 stanzas: description and themes surrounding human beings came up at stanza 4
-start and end with “Away, melancholy,
Away with it, let it go.” -> emphasis on the poet’s annoyance with melancholic feelings when there is hope in human beings & human nature

Question 3

form

Answer 3

• a nursery rhyme-like poem: rhythmic repetition of “away melancholy” and the use of simple vocabulary -> as if singing to a child, to emphasize and plant hope in them instead of despair
  -use of enjambment & caesura: creates a mysterious atmosphere almost like an oracle mumbling the prophecy in pieces of sentences & a priest performing rituals -> gives an archaic feeling to emphasize the simple nature of humans and criticize the overthinking and despair of the overromantic generation.
  -free verse: covering a grave and profound life topic with a light-hearted free verse - juxtaposition

Question 4

poet’s context

Answer 4

-criticizing the historical view of melancholic feelings as profound, especially among the romantic poets and autors

Question 5

Themes

Answer 5

The relationship between religion and humanity, romanticism, the importance and significance of human beings, human nature

“stone of man’s good, growing,/ By man’s called God.”

Question 6

“Away, melancholy,
Away with it, let it go.”

Answer 6

-The use of anaphora in stanza one reinforces the phrase “away melancholy” and the certainty of the speaker
-The use of the word “it” suggests the speaker is lowering the status of melancholy

Question 7

“Does not the wind blow,
Fire leap and the rivers flow?”

Answer 7

-Rhetorical question is used to request the reader to join the scene and feeling like being in the poem with the speaker
-The rhyme highlights the elements of the world are aligned and working as how they are supposed to be

Question 8

“Man, too, hurries,
Eats, couples, buries,
He is an animal also
With a hey ho melancholy,
Away with it, let it go.”

Answer 8

-The use of asyndeton creats faster pace for the poem and devides life into many staes
-These words create a tone. In addition the rhyme with the lines before and after help to lift the whole tone of poem
-Line 2 of the refrain is repeated here to show the feeling of inchantation