How do you think the speaker sailed the seven seas? In the poem imagination
Writer George Bernard show
Answers
Answer:
George Bernard Shaw was a man whose work was compared to humorous and clever authors who were well-known at the time:
But by the turn of the century, Shaw’s smart, funny voice had emerged—a unique intersection of styles typified by writers like Oscar Wilde and Anton Chekhov.
It is for this reason that Shaw's "Imagination" is something of an oddity. It is almost trite or juvenile. Since Shaw was an author who was not known for constructing anything so inconsequential, it might be assumed the simplistic nature of the poem has a deeper meaning—much more than the words imply.
Throughout the poem, the speaker notes that (as a youngster) he had an active imagination and alludes to childhood images of adventure similar to those of Mark Twain's character Tom Sawyer and Harper Lee's Jem, Scout and Dill in To Kill a Mockingbird. Pretending was a daily staple of these characters' young lives.
The things the speaker pretended to be are clichés—the games little boys have played throughout numerous generations (during Shaw's time and still today), including a pirate and a cowboy. These roles were not sophisticated in nature, but the speaker says, "These simple things did please me."
In the second stanza, the speaker describes an abundance of time spent in magical worlds that he imagined; he then discovered reading, and in these ways he "escaped the daily grind." The use of daily grind is interesting because it is very different than the lifestyle and imaginings of a child.
In the next stanza, the speaker describes living with Eskimos in northern climates; the following stanza reports that he "went off to the moon" after reading Jules Verne (a popular science fiction writer of the day). The voice the speaker adopts is child-like, as seen in Shaw's use of a bare-bones, simplistic style.
And went off to the moon,
It was just to take a look,
Then it was time to return.
Consider the definition of voice:
[Voice] is a convention in poetry that the speaker is not the same individual as the historical [actual] author of the poem. . . Many students (and literary critics) attempt to decipher clues about the author’s own attitudes, beliefs, feelings, or biographical details through the words in a poem.
The voice Shaw adopts is important to the poem's theme, especially in that such simplistic ideas and style of writing contrast with Shaw's superior stylistic capabilities in his other literary works.
In the fifth stanza, the speaker alludes to the famous explorer, Dr. Livingstone , and also speaks of Twain's character Huck Finn—the epitome of an adventuresome boy. The speaker is out of touch with reality as he becomes caught up in...
Explanation: