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Literature: Essay writing Leila Maestri

• Explore the ways in which the Wordsworth presents Lucy in


She Dwelt Among the Untrodden Ways.

In his poem, William Wordsworth presents us Lucy in a very special way.


From the title itself, we can notice his use of formal words from ancient
languages used to describe her: “she dwelt among the untrodden ways”, where
we become aware that he talks about a woman who seems to have lived in a
place where no one has stepped; a different or deserted place.
Along the poem, and through different images and metaphors, we
discover that she was a single and lonely woman, who is dead at his present
time, “a maid whom there was none to praise”. Wordsworth portrays her as a
lovely and delicate lady by means of a yearning appositive, where visual images
and metaphors overrun. “A violet by a mossy stone”, he says, and makes us
think of such a special being that makes contrast with the rest; she is portrayed
as the one, compared not just with a fair star, but “fair as a star, when only one
is shining in the sky”. However, people cannot see her, because she is “hidden
from the eye”; there is something next to her that does not allow her beauty and
delicacy to be perceived by the rest, which could perhaps be another man, as
much cold and hostile as a “mossy stone”.
It is not until the last stanza, that we find out her name, Lucy, and that
she is currently dead “few could know when Lucy ceased to be” and away from
the only one that could have valued her for who she was, and how she
deserved: “(…) oh, the difference to me!”
In conclusion, although he does not mention Lucy until reaching the end
of the poem, the author, helped by quite amatory similes, metaphors and visual
images, gets to move the reader by recreating a fragile, unique and desolated
female being.

• Good poems have a way of encouraging readers to see things


they have not seen before. Explore one poem from this section
which has this effect on you, bringing out the words that
encourage you to see the subject in a new way.

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Literature: Essay writing Leila Maestri

Poetry expresses a vision of the world from a completely different


perspective to the usual one.
In the poem “Muliebrity”, by Suhata Bhat, this characteristic is clearly
present and shown by the selection of mages the author present us from her
past. She denotes her nostalgia for her childhood by describing her memory of
a young girl while she is collecting excrements for the organic. Usually we
would not take this action as something poetic, but the author manages to let us
see how important the girl was for her as she reflected her culture and reminds
her about childhood days.
To show this importance, the author uses anaphora and parallelism from
the beginning: “I have thought so much about the girl (…) I have thought so
much”. Moreover, she makes use of several sensory memories, which play an
important part in making the poem special, because of their nature: sensory
images as “smell of cow dung and road dust” and “monkey breath”, which are
contrasted with “canna lilies” and “freshly washed clothes”. Through this
continuous juxtaposition of images she achieves to make a charming effect on
the reader, as if situating us into that distant place.
The words “greatness and power” confirm that, actually, the young
woman had an outstanding importance for her, which she is not able to put into
words: “(I) have been unwilling to use her for a metaphor”, denoting that her
feelings towards those past memories go beyond the visible beauty she could
have described.
In conclusion, helped by this new point of view, the author manages to
transmit us something really moving; a feeling of beauty and greatness through
the descriptions of a task that in another context would usually be related to a
disqualifying task.

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