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Speaker's Relationship With The Swamp: Analysis Of The Poem

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The journey of the speaker brings about a progression in her relationship with the swamp, changing its dynamic—alongside the tone—from negative and struggling to heartening and peaceful. This trek seems to serve as a metaphor for the speaker’s life and her transition from pessimism to contentment in her circumstances. Tone is closely related to the condition of the relationship between the speaker and the swamp and is creatively developed through the use of structure, sound devices, and imagery. The structure has great influence on the poem’s rhythm, which is complementary to the progress of tone. While there seems to be no grammatical coherence in the stanza structure, meaningful patterns of rhythm are still present. The initially negative …show more content…
One significant instrument used in the expression of tone is alliteration; the repetition of b’s and d’s towards the beginning of the poem is clumsy on the tongue, each word slowing the speaker as she spits them out in frustration: “dense sap, branding vines, the dark burred faintly belching bogs” (5-8). The imagery she creates through this word choice is unsightly (“belching bogs”), and it seems that she is insulting the swamp in a display of hostility in the midst of her struggle to cross it. At this point, the relationship between the speaker and the swamp is not a positive one; it is a scuffle full of resentment on the speaker’s part. This scuffle seems to be wearing her down, however, as she addresses the physical tax that her journey has had: “My bones knock together at the pale joints” (13-15) demonstrates a profound exhaustion that eats at her very core, as well as creating a rather macabre image suggesting her awareness of the fragility of her physical form in the scheme of existence. She seems to be fighting desperately for control over the decaying organic matter around her, “trying for a foothold, fingerhold, mindhold over such slick crossings” (15-18), and showing that behind her earlier hostility lies a fear of helplessness in the face of the swamp’s power. When she sees “hummocks sink silently into the black, slack earthsoup” (19-22), however,

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