"Shut Out" and "Winter: My Secret"

Shut Out:- mournful, depressing, desperate, full of grief, powerless, nostalgic, regretful, isolated.
Winter: My Secret:- Playful, sadistic, powerful, coy, perky, slightly flirtacious, conversational, teasing.

Tone is different in each of the poems which may be due to the narrator's status change. In "Winter: My Secret", the narrator is the one in control, where as in "Shut Out" the 1st person persona is the one being denied access and therefore is powerless.

Shut out notes:-

• 2nd stanza: list, complec, repetition, imperative, dialogue.
• Juxtaposition between the lexical choices in stanza 2 & 3.
• Complex sentance- complex feelings - form reflects content.
• 3rd stanza: spirit described as "shadowless" (fear of spirit). "Blank and unchanging like the grave"- choice of similie shows fear and hatred towards the spirit.
• "peering" - specific word choice and the connotations the verb has, ie. looking at something you can't have.
• 4th stanza: pleading tone of imperative, simple sentance, "small twig" -feeling of desperation.

Winter: My Secret notes:- (Language Analysis)

• Perhaps (Adverb and playful tone)
• Over-confidence (To hide the fact she doesn't have a secret, an insecurity)
• Rhetorical question ( High frequency, reinforce flirtacious tone, recreate the speaker's voice)
• Internal rhyme (Playful)
• "Fie!" (Playful disgust, pretend outrage)
• Ambiguous title (Is winter her secret? Is winter her listener? Is winter a metaphor?)

Symbolic nature: society, relationships, afterlife. Ie. Narrative used as a 'vehicle' for...

Rossetti has common stylistic techniques:

• 1st person narrative.
• Recreation of a spoken voice.
• Self-obssessed narrators