Poetry Explication- The Fountain Sara Teasdale's "The Fountain" is a 3rd person reflective narrative that presents to the reader, through personifying a voice-less object, a new perception of reality. The main conflict in the poem is rooted from the new insight that the reader acquires. This conflict is the human struggle to determine the difference between appearance and reality. Each line in the poem is either trimeter, tetrameter, or hexameter. The poet uses every form of meter including the iamb, trochee, dactyl, anapest, and spondee, and they are not organized in any particular order except to add emphasis to certain phrases and words. The rime scheme is abcbddeeff.The first stanza ...view middle of the document...
The second stanza, with rime scheme ddeeff , expands the conflict as the speaker begins to question the fountain. The first couplet connects the rhyming words "be"(5) and "sea"(6). These connections help stress the question of whether or not the fountain is content to be so close to "freedom"(6). The mere statement, "freedom and rush of the sea"(6) shows the stereotype that our human perception gives to it. By attributing freedom and rush to the sea, we define the sea as an ideal place for a fountain and its water to be. This is shown to be quite contrary to the fountain's point of view. The fountain's reply attributes the sea as "laboring"(7) versus the speaker's assertion of its freedom; the sea becomes characterized by heavily accented "heaves and sags"(8). In this way, the fountain suggests that the sea's waters may be described as an image of labor, work, and fatigue; governed by the moon. These waters are not free at all. The "as"(8) becomes a key word, illustrating that the sea's waters are not free at all, but are commanded by the moon, which is itself governed by gravity in its orbit around Earth. Since the moon, an object far away in the heavens, controls the sea, it cannot be free as the speaker asserts.The poet reveals the fountain's intelligence in two rhyming couplets that present short, concise statements. These couplets, lines 7 through 10, draw attention to the contained nature of the all objects in the poem, and they draw attention to the lesson presented in the final line. On line 9, the poet choses to repeat the two related elements from previously in the poem, "Ocean and fountain"(9), but then adds another relationship: "shadow and tree"(9). The poet adds these two objects to s...
