Shut Out Flashcards
shut
The door was shut. I looked between
The poem opens abruptly, the first sentence unequivocal in meaning and made up of monosyllables so the reader is drawn in. The full stop creates a break, a caesura, to emphasise the poet’s alienation.
iron
Its iron bars; and saw it lie,
The description of ‘iron bars’ is suggestive of confinement, hardness and permanence.
song-birds
From bough to bough the song-birds crossed,
From flower to flower the moths and bees;
The song-bird, like the lark in the final stanza, signifies joy and freedom. There is no explanation as to why this has been lost to the speaker.
The first two lines of this stanza are beautifully crafted. Note the gentle rhythm, imitating perhaps the comforting, soothing balance of a life once happy. They are also syntactic parallels, which reinforce this feeling of content. Note the assonant rhyme of ‘flower’ and ‘bough’.
lost
It had been mine, and it was lost.
The last line is again in balance, a device known as chiasmus. The two clauses relate to each other, but as inverted parallels, conveying loss instead of possession.
shadowless
A shadowless spirit kept the gate,
Blank and unchanging like the grave.
I peering through said: “Let me have
Some buds to cheer my outcast state.”
The sibilant ’s’s and ‘sh’ in ‘shadowless spirit’ perhaps suggest an ethereal, whispering ghost. The nature of this spirit, who s/he is, remains a mystery. The speaker, it emerges, is an ‘outcast’, but there is no further explanation.
After the softness of the first line, the remaining three lines are characterised by hard, plosive percussive consonants, in ‘Blank’, ‘peering’ and buds’. These harsh sounds represent the speaker’s despair.
delightful
So now I sit here quite alone
Blinded with tears; nor grieve for that,
For naught is left worth looking at
Since my delightful land is gone.
very ADH
The penultimate stanza constitutes a dramatic climax — or perhaps trough. The sadness depicted is overwhelming.
The Bible contains many references to blindness. These can mean literal physical lack of sight (Luke 14:13) or a spiritual inability to perceive either the truth or God
nest
Wherein a lark has made her nest:
The speaker notices that close by where s/he sits in a state of depression, ‘a lark has made her nest’ in the violet bed. A lark is a bird often associated with energy, hope and life. Its appearance to the speaker can therefore be seen to bring hope and comfort to his/her situation
And good they are, but not the best;
And dear they are, but not so dear.
In terms of structure and craft, Rossetti repeats the device, chiasmus used in stanza two, the rhythmic balance of two related but structurally inverted clauses set side by side. So we have ‘good they are, but not the best …’ and ‘dear they are, but not so dear.’ The technique of using different forms of a root word, as in ‘good’ and ‘best’ is known as polyptoton.
