Write about the major themes of the poem. How does this poem revolves around those themes and what message does the poet want to convey through it? chapter break break break
Answers
Explanation:
The speaker addresses the waves of the sea, telling them to crash against the rocky shore again and again. Watching this happen, the speaker yearns for the ability to express troubling thoughts that won't go away.
Looking out onto the water, the speaker watches a fisherman's son yelling out while playing with his sister, as well as a young sailor who sings while sailing through the cove.
There are also impressive boats sailing through the bay, and the speaker envisions them passing into ideal, somewhat heavenly destinations. But watching these ships doesn't distract the speaker from the memory of touching the hand of an acquaintance who no longer exists, whose voice has gone silent forever.
Again, the speaker calls out to the waves as they smash against cliffs along the shoreline again and again, feeling that the easy happiness of previous days will never return.
“Break, Break, Break” Themes
Theme Loss and Impermanence
Loss and Impermanence
For the speaker of “Break, Break, Break,” the fleeting nature of life is deeply troubling. The poem implies that the speaker is mourning someone’s death and being forced to face the fact that this person will never return. Although the poem doesn’t clarify the circumstances of the speaker’s loss, it’s clear that it has thoroughly unsettled the speaker, who can’t even stare out at the ocean without feeling tormented by the knowledge that everything in life eventually comes to an end.
Everything around the speaker serves as a reminder that life is fleeting. Even the waves crashing against the shoreline represent this idea of impermanence, since these waves no longer exist in their original form once they’ve broken over the rocks. This reinforces the idea that nothing in the natural world lasts forever. And because people obviously exist in the natural world, this also holds true for everyone who has ever lived.
With this in mind, the speaker watches two children playing happily together and knows that someday their youth will be a thing of the past. Similarly, the young sailor singing nearby will someday be an old man, and the speaker will soon lose sight of the grand boats in the bay as they disappear from the horizon on their way to some unknown destination. Affronted by all of these ideas of change and transition, the speaker is unable to deny the impermanence of all things. This thought process is made evident by the fact that the speaker goes from considering the retreating ships to wistfully remembering the “touch of a vanish’d hand”—a phrase that underscores the speaker’s dismay that humans effectively “vanish” through death. In the same way that the ships fade into the distance, humans also drift away from life.
Of course, most people are well aware that nothing lasts, but not everyone finds this so troubling. It is, after all, a fact of existence, something many people simply accept. The speaker, however, is particularly unnerved by this because a close acquaintance has recently died, making it difficult for the speaker to stop thinking about the relentless passage of time—there is, the speaker knows, no way to revisit the past to spend more time with this friend, and this greatly upsets the speaker. In this way, loss changes the way the speaker sees the world, suddenly making it harder to accept the reality that all things come to an end.
Ironically enough, though, the only kind of permanence in the speaker’s life is loss itself, since nothing will ever reverse the death of this friend. No matter what happens, this person will “never come back” to the speaker. In turn, loss actually emerges as the only dependable thing in life, even if it forces people like the speaker to recognize that everything else about existence is impermanent.