A Formalist Analysis of "Prayers of Steel"

Literary Meaning: A Formalist Reading of Prayers of firebrand Le Huy Loc Prayers of firebrand Carl Sandburg (1878-1967) Lay me on an anvil, O God. rhythm me and falsify me into a crowbar. permit me pry loose old walls. Let me empty and loosen old foundations Lay me on an anvil, Oh God. Beat me and hammer me into a steel spike. Drive me into the girders that hold a skyscraper together. adjourn red-hot rivets and fasten me into the central girders. Let me be the peachy nail holding a skyscraper together through mordant nights into white stars. A formalist reading of the poem Prayers of Steel is a concisely poem composed of 9 lines, the ninth being the longest. The viscous devices in the poem will be analyzed on three levels: lexical, grammatical, and phonological. The analysis will be made get-go of the various(prenominal) stanzas, then of the overall structure of the firm poem. Leechs sentiment of viscidness will be referred to where necessary. General observations The gloss Prayers of Steel is an example of foregrounding: steel is a course of metal, indeed it is inanimate and cannot perform the follow up of saying prayers, an action performed merely by a human being.

Obviously, the poet has deviated from the generally detect rules of the language, and it is world-shaking that these ar prayers of steel, not of rubber. The inference is that whatever the vocaliser wishes to achieve will require a great compensate of metier and determination. From the title, foregrounding then extends into the poem so that we take aim cohesion of foregrounding, in which the foregrounded features identified in cl osing off are cogitate to one another, and ! to the poem as a whole, as can be commentd below. Cohesion in the individual stanzas Stanza 1 Lexical cohesion: First we observe that among all the images utilize in the first stanza, there is semantic association, whereby words of related meanings are grouped together. Steel -- in the title-- is one of the materials...If you fatality to get a full essay, battle array it on our website: OrderEssay.net

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