Analytical essay on the poem "A Winter Night"

In her poem "A Winter Night", Sara Teasdale (1884-1933) is expressing a fierce feeling of sadness, misery, loneliness and disappointment in addition to the pity for the homeless people. In the first stanza, Teasdale illustrates the coldness and harshness of the world outside her room's window through a sad and dark description of the night. In the second stanza, she shows the hopeless conditions of the homeless people in the streets during the cold harsh night. Finally in the third stanza, she comes to show how she feels lonely and sadly although her room is peaceful and well isolated from all the harshness of the world outside. The title of the poem is well chosen by the poet as it totally reflects the ideas and thoughts of hers. On hearing or reading that title one can immediately feel the sorrowful gloomy impression of the two words. The word "winter" conveys a cold and depressed effect while the word "night" has a scary effect. Teasdale adopts a sad and depressed tone reflected in words like "frost-bitter-cold-cruel-wind-sword-smite-pity-homeless-crying".

The poem is divided into three emotionally-connected quatrains, with Teasdale's following a very organized and controlled structure. Teasdale tackles her ideas through a process of comparison and contrast with three stages. The first stage discussed in the first and the second stanza is a cold and sorrowful description of the world and people outside the room's window. The last stanza includes the second stage: the peaceful, warm, and calm room of the poet, and the third stage: the sorrowful feelings inside her heart. Then she makes a comparison between the three stages to conclude with the fact that her inside feelings are similar to those of the homeless people despite the outside contrast between them. Teasdale tends to use long lines to express her miserable feelings in a stretch of language in hope that she may get rid of these feelings and thoughts for a while. Her feeling of loneliness makes her keep writing and writing. However, this way of tackling the issue of the poem seems very logical, the link here is completely emotional with Teasdale counting up her ideas and thoughts starting with least sad feeling till the most sad one which is surly her own inside feeling.

Teasdale makes an extensive use of the sound devices to convoy her emotions clearly. She uses a quit regular rhyme. The rhyme scheme of the first stanza is (abcb) with the second and fourth line rhyming together regularly. The end rhyme in the words "night-smite" implies a scary and harsh feeling. The assonance between "moon-cruel" shows the bitterness of her feeling and vision of the world. The slant rhyme in the words "cold-fold" shows the contrast and the comparison between the warm and secured room and the cold feeling inside her.

Sara Teasdale successfully employs patterns of imagery to build up a certain mode and atmosphere for the poem. Namely, imagery of the scenes is skillfully utilized by Teasdale to cast up a moving picture with living elements to get the readers completely involved in the world of the poem. Visual images, for instance, help the readers conjure up the complete scene by visual effects. One example, "like a homeless child my heart is crying in the cold" (11,12) is a visual image that makes the readers visualize the picture of the crying boy numbing with cold to imagine how sad she is. Teasdale employs auditory images to convey her feelings through sound effects such as "sword" (4) that heightens the emotions of fear of the shocking, sudden, and violent sound of sheathing the sword. Another example, "crying" (12) sounds like the sorrowful weep. "the world is bitter cold" (2) is a gustatory image conveys the bitterness and the cold unpleasant feelings of the poet. Organic images touch internal sensations such as "starred with frost"(1) that expresses the cold weather and the harsh feelings, "two-edged sword to smite" (4) that conveys inner pin and suffering, and "a bit of June"(9) showing warm and security. "pacing to and fro"(6) is an expressive kinesthetic image illustrating the wandering lost movement of homeless people all through the streets.