A Song of Despair Symbolism, Imagery & Wordplay

This poem plays a lot with night and day, light and dark. Pretty much anything that has to do with the present is going to be dark, depressing, and related to the night. But when the speaker thinks...

The sea looms large in this poem, and shows up in almost every couplet. The lover is closely related to the sea. In fact, she seems to be powerful, terrifying, and beautiful—just like a stormy se...

"A Song of Despair" is sung to a woman, and her old lover calls her a lot of things. She's beautiful, raging, a pit, the sea, the list goes on (really, it does… just read below). The way that the...