sarah+full+moon+anaylsis

//Full Moon //was written by Elinor Wylie. It expresses the author’s feelings of being trapped and being unable to do the things that she wishes to in life because of her gender and social status. It also shows that although she is wealthy, that makes her neither happy nor free. She uses symbolism and rich languages to convey her feelings in the poem so that after reading the poem the reader can almost feel the trapped and hopeless feelings of the author. The poem, //Full Moon//, is about how although the author is surrounded by luxuries she still cannot do the things that she wishes to because of her gender. The poem also shows how she is trapped inside of others’ expectations of her. She expresses these feelings by saying that she’s trapped by the fact that she is a woman and that she is not given a choice other than conforming to ideas that she neither supports or agrees with. In the first stanza she talks mainly about her clothing. She uses it to convey the feeling of being trapped. In the second line the author says that her clothing “grew heavier.” This gives the image of her wealth being a burden on her. Later in the stanza the author says “The ermine muffled mouth and chin; I could not suck the moonlight in.” The first of these two lines conveys the idea that she is unable to speak her mind, and the second reinforces that and builds on it by showing that she can’t take in anything from outside her world, which in this poem refers to her social class. The second stanza moves away from the trapped and hopeless feeling and it focuses more on the journey of the author, and how it isn’t what she wanted her life to be. One of the images that conveys the idea of the second stanza is “[Walking] Along the pavement my footsoles; Trod warily on living coals.” This image helps the reader to envision what the author thinks about where she is going in life and what the journey has been like for her thus far. In the third stanza the author expresses to the reader that she has to conform to ideas that she doesn’t agree with. This idea is very prominent in the first and second lines of the stanza, “Shouldering the thoughts I loathed; In their corrupt disguises clothed.” Using the word ‘shouldering’ stresses the idea that she’s carrying these thoughts like a burden. She also describes the thoughts as being in corrupt disguises, this demonstrates to the reader that these may not be unpopular ideas and it isn’t easy to tell for all to the true implications of the ideas but, just because they aren’t obviously bad they aren’t necessarily good. In the fourth and final stanza of the poem the author pulls together all the ideas from the previous three stanzas, to help give the reader both a feeling of finality and also an even better understanding of the internal suffering that she feels from having to live her life against her beliefs. The first line of the stanza “There I walked, and there I raged” uses two contrasting images to illustrate the side of the author that the outside world sees and how that’s different from who she really is and what she really feels. To emphasize this idea even more she goes on to say “The spiritual savage caged, Within my skeleton” which just builds on the image of her frustration of not being able to be who she wants to be. In the poem //Full Moon// the author is able to use rich language and powerful images as evidence for her feelings of being trapped inside someone else’s idea of how she should both think and act. The poem shows that although you may have money you may not have happiness, because some things, in this case gender, can hold you back from living the life that you wish for. 