The Morning Devours the Human Spirit

Barry Dempster’s, “ The Morning Devours,” is a poem that is based on the life that surrounds him. His description of the setting is a key part in the poem, because he is explaining what events take place around him, and how eventually everything that happens in life gets “devoured” in the end, so we should escape our dreaded lives while we can and do something we love. We are scared to go against the system, and so we end up conforming to society. The poem creates a feeling of despair as the main theme centralizes on a universal event that occurs in each of our lives; a cycle of the same routines and rituals that we experience each day trapping us in a feeling of helplessness. It is evident from the first stanza the tone in which the poem will take as Dempster uses similes and figurative language to create a mood of hopelessness. For instance, Dempster compares the movement of the wind outside the house to a predatory bird (Dempster, 1. 1-2). This simile creates the illusion of an aggressive noise and an unpleasant atmosphere to awake to. Furthermore, the poet uses figurative language to depict the rays of sunlight streaming through the room by describing “the sun leaping through windows like a tiger” (1. 5-6). In most cases sunlight symbolizes hope and warmth, however, by comparing the rays of light to the fierceness of a tiger, the reader gets the impression that the sunlight does not signal the hope of another morning and a fresh start but the dullness of a monotonous routine. Throughout the second stanza, the writer paints a portrait of a dreary old city, one settled in its daily rituals. This nameless city can be compared to many iconic cities of today, where you can walk down the crowded sidewalks and see a clothesline hung up on every other building, and you can smell the aroma of freshly brewed coffee filling the