Opposition

The central poetic device used in this poem is that of opposition. Opposition is the juxtaposition of two unlike things in order to create a sense of contrast. In this particular case, the form of opposition used is “antithesis,” a term taken from the school of philosophy called rhetoric. In formal rhetoric, a statement or argument is known as a “thesis,” and the opposite of that statement, as the “antithesis”. In poetry – as in this poem – antithesis is found when something and its direct opposite are compared. This can serve several purposes. It is often used to create a sense of complexity, to emphasize the vastness of something by suggesting it spans all the way between two opposite things, or to show a character’s state of ambivalence and confusion.

It is this last usage of antithesis that this poem centrally relies on. Whether the concept...