FIGURATIVE EXPRESSIONS MOSTLY USED IN WILLIAM WORDSWORTH’S POEM OF NATURE
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FIGURATIVE EXPRESSIONS MOSTLY USED IN WILLIAM WORDSWORTH’S POEM OF NATURE
Dewa Made Wiadnyana
Jurusan Non-Reguler Sastra Inggris Fakultas Sastra Unud
Abstrak:
Makalah ini menganalisa tentang kecenderungan penggunaan majas yang muncul dalam tiga puisi William Wordsworth yang masing-masing berjudul “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud”, “The World Is Too Much With Us”, “A Whirl-Blast from Behind the Hill”. Teori yang digunakan adalah teori Interpreting Literature oleh K.L Knickerbocker dan Willaiard Reninger (1963), NTC’s Dictionary of Literary Term oleh Katheen Morner dan Ralph Rausch (1991), dan terakhir dari buku yang berjudul Meaning-Based Translation oleh Mildred Larson. Data diklasifikasikan dan dianalisa sesuai dengan jenis majas yang ditemukan dalam puisi, yaitu personifikasi, hiperbola, paradoks, simile, kiasan, metafora dan metonimi. Dan majas yang paling banyak muncul adalah personifikasi. Penggunaan personifikasi dalam hal ini memperkaya dan memperindah puisi-puisi William Wordsworth yang kebanyakan mengambil tema alam.
Kata kunci: Literature, Poetry, Figurative Language
Literature is created based on human consciousness and imagination. It is a form of human creation that departs from reality of life; it can take form of a story, a play, or a poem. And language is the medium for the writer to create his imagination and can also be the medium of the literature.
Poetry is one of the literary works. Poetry is an imaginative awareness of experience expressed through meaning, sound, and rhythmic language choice so as to evoke an emotional response. According to Knickerbocker & Reninger (1963: 307), poetry is the hymns of praise, and the essays on the nature of poetry would cram the selves of any modest public library and overflow onto the floor as well. Good talk about poetry is nevertheless rare, and even the best of it will rest lightly on fallow
ground until we ourselves have learned how to penetrate the inner life of a few poems. And Emily Dickinson in Smith’s (1985: 5) states that if I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.
William Wordsworth is a famous poet in the world. William Wordsworth was an early leader of romanticism (a literary movement that celebrated nature and concentrated on human emotions) in English poetry and ranks as one of the greatest lyric poets in the history of English literature. William Wordsworth was born on April 7, 1770, in Cooker mouth, Cumberland, England, the second child of an attorney. When many poets still wrote about ancient heroes in grandiloquent style, Wordsworth focused on the nature, children, the poor, common people, and used ordinary words to express his personal feelings. His definition of poetry as "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings arising from "emotion recollected in tranquility" was shared by a number of his followers.
The writer focuses the research to analyze figure of speech of poetry. Most of poetry use figure of speech to make poetry more beautiful. It is difficult for the reader to get the meaning of the poetry. A figure of speech is an expression that is designed to evoke emotion or create deeper meaning. The words in a figure of speech are not literal. The writer interests to analyze figure of speech in poetry because figure of speech does not have literal meaning.
The problem of this research is “What figurative language tends to be mostly used in William Wordsworth’s poem of nature?”
The aim of this research is to know the tendency of using the most frequently figurative language in William Wordsworth’s poem of nature.
The data in this research was taken from William Wordsworth’s poems which describe his love to nature, and this study is limited only to those poems as a case. The data covered poemhunter.com and those poems are: “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud”, “The World Is To Much With Us”, “A Whirl-Blast from Behind the Hill”.
The method that was used in this study is documentation through closely reading it as many times as needed in order to understand and get the main idea of the poem. The reading mainly focused on identifying of the various figurative languages in William Wordsworth’s poems of nature. These data are classified based on the types of figurative language, their functions, and the tendency of using the same figurative language.
All of collected data were descriptively analyzed based on the theory of figurative language proposed by K.L Knickerbocker and H. Willard Reninger (1963), and were supported by other theories which are related to this topic in order to get detailed information about the data.
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5. Figurative Language Tends to be Used in William Wordsworth’ s Poem of Nature
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- The leaves in myriads jump and spring,
It seems like the poet wants the readers to use their imagination to make this poem livelier and has a wonderful impression. The leaves are said to have been jumping and springing to draw a picture for the reader how the winter is coming. It actually jump and spring because of the hailstones storm, not by the own will of the leaves.
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- The waves beside them dance;
A personification is used here to give a sense of a living situation. Waves here is said to have an ability to dance. In fact that wave is a rise line of water that moves across the surface of the sea. It is a movement but not in literally dance like a dancer does.
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- Beside the lake, beneath the trees, Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.
The last sentence in this stanza of the second poem is using personification. The poet wants to describe how the wind blowing the daffodils so that it is said as if they were dancing. The feeling of joy is mixed with the magnificent view that the person see, makes the flower here seem to dancing as they are alive.
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- This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
It is clearly that personification is used in this line. If we think objectively; the sea does not have a bosom, the poet describes the wave of water surface as its bosom which is always rolling up facing the moon. And the moon is over the sky while the sea is in the land. This sentence is included as personification because the poet wants to describe the sea is not just a sea but a sea which has characteristic like human.
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- When all at once I saw a crowd, A host, of golden daffodils;
Daffodil is a kind of flower which the most common type of color is yellow; they can also occur in various combinations of yellow, white, cream, orange and pink but never gold. Golden was used to give exaggeration to the Daffodils, to express the feeling of the poet. It was just ordinary yellow but when he saw the Daffodils, he imagine of the beauty of the spring that will come very soon. Here hyperbole is used
to give a sense of a magnificent view that the person saw. How lovely a flower can be if there is something beautiful comes with it.
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- We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
The above sentence shows hyperbole. Special effect in given our hearts away which means that human take too much from the nature without thinking the effect that will happen if they run out of natural resources. It is just like giving our hearts away, wasting the most important element of our life. The poet wants to remind us how dangerous it can be if we keep wasting our natural source. As we know, we can live in this world because of what nature provides us. If we cannot conserve the natural wealth, then it will be the end of our lives.
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- Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.
The phrase of “hear old Triton” seems to be an exaggerated. Because actually we are not able to hear the voice of God, in this case is the Triton, God of the sea. In real life, we mankind consider God as an invisible creature that cannot be touched or heard, but we believe that He show His existence by showing His mighty powers. The poet wants to make his poem to have a soul, by giving special effect that the impossible things sometimes could turn out be possible.
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-I wandered lonely as a cloud
The writer uses simile to make a picture how he wants to wander around like the cloud. How he can move around without any obstacle. Floats over the valleys and hills where he can see all the nature below. Cloud here is said here to have a slow movement and feels like it is in peace.
-Continuous as the stars that shine
The first sentence in this stanza of the second poem is using simile to describe the previous feeling. Here the person in the poem is continuing his joy as he sees a host of daffodils that stretched along the bay. Just like the stars that have no end in the sky and at the end we only can see it twinkle in the edge of the Milky Way. The writer slightly exaggerates in describing the flower he sees. As it is like million stars 5
over the sky, throughout the eye can see. This may be because he fascinated by the beauty of what he sees.
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-And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
There are two figures of speech that are found in this line, simile and personification. Simile can be seen from the word like that is used by the poet. It is related to the previous line, where it is said that the wind that will be howling at all hours. By using this comparison, the poet wants to convey the idea that there is no use enjoying the attractive of the nature if the destructiveness of natural is already happens. It is like flowers going to die as a result of having no exciting parts. Simile is used to give a special image.
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-The winds that will be howling at all hours
On the above line, the writer compares the winds to a wolf or any other animals that howls. The sound of the winds that blows hard is said howling by the writer to describe how scary the sound is. The forces of nature which can be very harmful for the mankind if we still exploit the nature without conserve it. Again, an important message is conveyed by the poet to the readers about how important nature is for us.
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-Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea
Instead of saying have sight like Proteus rising from the sea. The writer wants to us his imagination to have the power like Proteus. The powers that able to change everything, placing the cycle of life back in balance. Save the nature that the world has, but it is just his imagination.
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-Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea; Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.
The two words above, Proteus and Triton are the names of God that are used in the poem. Proteus is an early sea-God that able to change the liquid quality of 6
water in the sea. Meanwhile Triton is the messenger of the big sea. He is Proteus’ brother and His special attribute was a twisted conch shell, on which he blew like a trumpet to calm or raise the waves. It means that the writer wants to have sight of Proteus and blow wreathed horn of Triton. Allusion is used to give a symbol in the poem, as the writer wants to have the power like Proteus or Triton.
Based on the analysis and discussion in the previous chapter, the following points can be drawn as conclusion:
There are seven kinds of figurative expressions found in those three poems; including personification, hyperbole, paradox, simile, allusion, metaphor and metonymy. Among the kinds of figurative expressions presented in this study, personification is the most frequently to appear in the three poems that are chosen as the data. It is proved by the fact that this kind is founded in nine usages. William Wordsworth wants to give more human characteristics of what he sees in the nature. His idea is telling the readers that the nature is a power and able to describe how its feeling and that make those three poems more imaginative and livelier.
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Knickerbocker, K.L & Willard Reninger, H. 1963. Interpreting Literature. New
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Larson, Mildred. 1998. Meaning–Based Translation. New York: University Press of America.
Morner, Kathleen & Ralph Rausch. 1991. NTC’s Dictionary of Literary Terms. New York: NTC Publishing Group.
Steen, Gerard. 1999. Analyzing Metaphor in Literature: With Examples from William Wordsworth’s “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud”. www.jstor.org
Wordsworth, William. http://www.poemhunter.com/
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