Blog 3: Essay 2: Tone and symbolism

To make a vivid and interesting poem, a poet must have certain ingredients that are very important in all poems. These things are theme, motif, tone, symbolism, rhythm etc. I choose the poem “In His Arm” because I like the story “Vampire Diaries” very much. The storyline is very hot and interesting for many teenagers. This poem is talking about the heroine, Elena found that his boyfriend, Stefan is acting weird and mysterious. She is very curious about his boyfriend. As a result, she secretly follows him. When she follows him to his house, she got very shocked when she saw he is sucking the blood of doves. She realizes that he is a Vampire. He is feeding animal blood. Stefan realizes that she knew everything and he wants to explain to her about what he just did. She is extremely shocked. The hidden meaning in this poem is also easy for me to understand. I can imagine those images in my mind when I look at the poem. This is one of the reasons why I chose this poem to post on my blog. After I post it in the blog, I hope that more people in my class will consider watching this show or reading the whole series of “Vampire Diaries”. I also hope that people who watch this show or read the novel can share their opinions with me.

Every poem will have at least one tone in it. Tone in a poem is the author’s attitude towards the poem. The reason a poem must have a tone is because it is a way that poet expresses his feeling, mood, and emotion toward the story of the poem. This will create an atmosphere related to the story and make the poem be more interesting. This can also make readers have more images about the poem when they read it. Some of the examples of tones in poems are humorous, romantic, fear, cynical, and upbeat. In the poem “In his arm”, the tones that the author try to maintain are dread and fear. What you think or feel after reading the poem is the tone of the poem. In the entire poem, the poet creates a very scary atmosphere when the heroine finds out that her boyfriend is a vampire and when he describes the whole process of the vampire feeding on the animal’s blood. "A heavenly face masked by blood" in this poem describes the vampire's face is full with blood. The author also uses some words such as thunder, blood, scream, darkness and others to create a scary atmosphere.

In this poem, I also found some symbolism the author uses to represent something using words. Symbolism is a word that an author may use in his poem to represent some meanings other than the original meaning of the word. As a result, every poem will have many hidden meaning based on the use of symbolism. For example, the word “death” means the end of life. Yet the author uses this word in the poem to represent vampire, which scare people a lot. Besides, the use of word “thunder” in the poem is not really means the loud noise produced during a storm. The real hidden meaning is to represent the heroine’s inner feeling which is extreme terror and does not know what to do. Another example is the word “tissues.” It does not actually mean the real tissue that we use. It is used to describe the dead body of doves.

This poem makes me feel very curious about vampires. Even though I do not hope to see one, I really like to know more about them. Can vampire be in love with human? Can they restrain their thirst without drinking human’s blood? I hope this poem can elicit more readers about vampire’s lives.

This is the link for the poem I used: http://poem.mibba.com/156892/In-His-Arms