野金银花赏析

The Appreciation of the Wild Honey Suckle

In “The Wild Honey Suckle” Philip Freneau addresses a flower, writing to it, how beautiful it is. He wishes that it should not be damaged. In this poem the poet expressed a keen awareness of the loveliness and transience of nature. He not only meditated on mortality but also celebrated nature. It implies that life and death are inevitable law of nature, "the wild honey suckle" is Philip Freneau's most widely read natural lyric with the theme of transience.

The poem is divided into four stanzas. Each stanza consists of four lines, which are composed in cross rhymes. Then, after an insertion, comes a rhyming couplet. This is a lyric poem, written in iambic tetrameter, It’s rhyme scheme is ababcc and contains four sextette. The tone in this poem is sentimental and emotional. The arrangement of stressed and unstressed syllables suggests the transience of the life of the flower and the poet’s emotional change.

The name honey suckle comes from the sweet nectar that the flower produce to introxicate the greedy bee. Its powerful fragrance seduces the human senses as it pervades the air. The perfume of this passionate plant may turn a mainden’s head, hence wild honey suckle is a symbol of inconstancy is love.

The poem showed strong feelings for the natural beauty, which was the characteristic of romantic poets. The poem contains iambics trochaics and spondee. The arrangement of stressed and unstressed syllables suggests the transience of the life of the flower and the poet's emotional change. The poem is full of sensuous images such as fair flower visual image, comely grow kinasthetic image and honeyed blossoms olfactory image. All the images make us feel pity for the beautiful flower which has only a short life. Obviously, the poet is sentimental deistic optimist. The line "the space is but an hour" contains a hyperbole stressing and transience of life. Almost alone of his generation, he managed to peer through the pervasive atmosphere of imitativeness, to see life around directly, to appreciate the natural scenes on the new continent and the native Indian civilization. Some of his most famous works, with their lyric quality, sensuous images and their fresh perception of nature and “noble savagery” are directly America n.