Love in The Old Maid by Sara Teasdale :: essays research papers

The poem The Old Maid, by Sara Teasdale, takes place on a paving material on Broadway. The loud loudspeaker in the poem is a woman walking with who you can infer to be her fiance and she is describing a brief encounter she had with some other woman in the car driving by her. The speaker describes the woman as The woman I might grow to be, She then notices how her hair intensity was as mine and how Her eyes were strangely like my eyes. However, despite all these similarities the womans hair compared to the speakers was dull and move no light. Her eyes also did not shine like the speakers. The speaker assumed that the reason for the womans frail appearing was because she had never had the opportunity to know what it was like to be in love. In the last stanza, the speaker no longer looks upon the anile maid but to her rooter and knows that even though they may look similar she will never be like her.In order to completely grasp exactly how the old maid appears to the woman on th e sidewalk and the love she feels for the man walking with her, Sara Teasdale uses avatar to describe the characters in the poem. One would be, Her soul was frozen in the isolated/ Unwarmed forever by loves flame. Obviously, a persons soul cannot be frozen, but the meaning is that the old maid had never felt a heated intensity between herself and someone special to her which could give her a cold outlook on life. Another time the poet uses personification is when the speaker states, His eyes were magic to defy. Eyes cannot be magic. By saying that his eyes were magic the reader can get the notion that when the speaker looks into the eyes of her lover she feels awed, happy, or even entranced. Sara Teasdale also uses a metaphor in her work, Her body was a thing growing thin, In that variant the speaker is comparing the old maids draining body to something that can get thinner. The poet uses a rhyme scheme of rhyming the second with the fourth line and there are four lines in every stanza. Finally, in this narrative poem there are eight syllables per line of the poem.