Comments on the "Lighthouse" poem

Author’s Comments

“Lighthouse” is indeed an inspirational poem written in the form of an Acrostic with iambic pentameter verses. The speaker exhibits a tone of serious contentment well wrapped in an air of exuberance. This tone is reinforced by the speaker’s use of the lighthouse a universal image, as a metaphor to share insight into the audacity of hope. This is done through a careful balance of negative and positive symbols mixed with buoyancy seeping from the imagery.

Poetic wisdom dictates that tone is the attitudes of the speaker toward the subject and toward the audience, and as such, is manifested through inferences from the poem’s structure and in all the other elements of poetry such as: meter, diction, images, imagery, cadence, rhythm, rhyme, figurative language, literal meaning and symbolism. These elements are carefully extrapolated and the effects of these parts must be considered in relation to each other; bearing in mind that each verse line may set up a strong vibratory tone. However, in order to judge fairly the tone the speaker exhibits, the wisest thing to do is to consider the poem as a whole.