Poem Analysis

Alfred Tennyson was a Victorian times English poet who wrote poetry for the queen that made him very popular at his time. His poems are still relevant nowadays and for my poem analysis I was assigned to Annalise one of his poems. This poem is called " Fatima", the title already give us a glympse about what the poem may be about , Fatima is a woman's name originated in Arabian countries and very popular among Muslims and Catholics also because of the myth of the Fatima Virgin, Fatima in Arabic means Unique, so now we can predict that the poem may involve a woman or an Arabian country. The poem itself tells the monologue of a grieving woman suffering and seeking for her lover.

It starts with the word LOVE repeated three times with an exclamation mark so we know now the poems main theme is love, then the withering might ,the powerful pain the woman is feeling that makes her feel like a rottening flower dying slowly, with Emotional language Tennyson expresses the heat the woman feels may be for her pain or because she is really dehydrated. Poetic devices are present in this first stanza, an alliteration when the "thro" sound is repeated in the fourth verse, and a simile in the last verse

" I whirl like leaves in roaring wind"

Such a strong line that contains so much and depicts the woman's impotence as she feels so weak that she cannot fight the wind but let's herself go like the lifeless leaves that fall from trees.In the second stanza by the use of imagery the poem takes us to the night before  as the woman wonders through a city with "eastern towers" another clue that sets us in an Middle East country. Now is when the figurative language comes and the speaker expresses her desire for love as a necessity for water " I thirsted for the brooks the showers". A hyperbole is found in the following verses  and a enjambement.

" I looked athwart the burning drouth

 Of that long desert to the south"

 the woman is laying in a bed of flowers that can surely be just her imagination when she sees the  desert vertically and feels the drouth of her heart, the sentence it's not finished instead it continues in the following verse so it's an enjambement and the hyperbole is the exaggeration when the speaker refers to the burning drouth of the desert and a desert full of sand cannot burn. In the third stanza the speaker takes us again to that night but know she s not alone as someone speaks the name of her love one and swaps her off her feet, " a thousand little shafts of flame " this metaphor portraits how she feels when she hears his name as if her blood was so hot it would burn her edges and veins as little flames, this metaphor is easy to understand as it symbolizes when a person blushes or sweats because of their emotions of love , fear, that have an effect in the body thats not easy to control.

  "O love, o fire once he drew 

with one long kiss my whole soul thro' "

Here an emjambement takes place connecting the nineteenth verse with the twentieth and in the last a hyper baton is found when the poet changes the order of the sentence in order to give more emphasis to the sentence that depicts how the speaker feels when she is kissed by her lover she feels the love and the heat and she feels he touches her soul and get to know it. On the last verse of the third stanza there's another simile when the speaker puts the kiss they shared and their wet lips in contrast with the morning dew. In the fourth stanza the poem takes a shift as a possibility of reunion is shown, the

speaker feels her lover coming towards her even if she can't see him and a beautiful simile
symbolises again the love with nature elements.

" Sweet gales as from deep gardens, blow ".

 She feels the love as an appeasement that cools her as wind from leafy forests, when she realises her lover is coming she " Faints like a daled morning moon" in this simile she falls to the ground like the moon when the earth rotates and leaves it invisible to the human eye. In the last stanza a last simile takes place as she in on the ground she looks to the sunset and feels the wind in her ears sound like a tense wire and in the sunset a fire that represents the sun that is a ball of fire.

The poem is compose of five stanzas with thirty verses in total, the first four are septets which means they have seven verses but the last one is composed of only two which makes it a couplet a heroic couplet I think the poet made this so that the last stanza has more power than the others this finale
with the speaker swooned in the ground gives us an open ending as she looks to the sun that it's in a
twilight so the night will come soon and with it shadow and hope. As I said the theme of the poem is
clearly live but not only love but the pain of being in love, the pain of not being with the one you love
the dryness and emptiness. The poem has rhymes at the end of all its verses so the whole poem rhymes it's not a sonnet because it's long but could be a ballad aldo it doesn't have an abcb pattern of rhyme the rhymes go aaaabbb. The meter foot used in "Fatima" is  pattern of iambic verses going unstressed and stressed syllables.

As a conclusion i thought this poem is a good work by mister Tennyson and gets to convey the feelings the speaker is felling to the reader, you get to feel sorry for the speaker and that its an accomplishment.