Parting at Morning

Just like the speaker sounds as if he's bouncing us along, the overall sound of "Parting at Morning" is upbeat and fresh. The short syllables and upbeat end rhymes (sea/me; rim/him) give the poem that energetic sound, moving us quickly from the sea, to the sun, and straight toward the "world of men." We're not lingering too much over the speaker's memories of his "Meeting at Night." In "Parting at Morning," he's left all that behind for now and is ready for a new day that's centered on the speaker as an individual rather than a lover.

The parallelism we see in lines 2-4 in those repeated "And the" clauses helps to make the poem sound uniform and direct in regard to the speaker's feelings that surround this new day. He's focused now on what he has to do in that world of men, so those direct and purposeful sounding clauses help to accent his focus.

Think of how you might sound if you had a list of things to do one day and kept running those errands through your mind: and then I have to go to school, and then I need to go to soccer practice, and then I need to at least give my homework a shot. You get the idea. So it sounds kind of like your ordinary morning here, only we've got the added bonus of knowing that the speaker had a particularly awesome night before.