The Day Is Done

The Day Is Done Literary Elements

Speaker or Narrator, and Point of View

Speaker (Longfellow)

Form and Meter

ABCB; trimeter

Metaphors and Similes

Similes:
-"A feeling of sadness and longing, / That is not akin to pain / And resembles sorrow only / As the mist resembles the rain"
-"The day is done, and the darkness falls from the wings of Night, / As a feather is wafted downward / From an eagle in his flight"

Metaphor:
-Longfellow uses the metaphor of desert Arabs quietly packing up their tents to suggest the soft way in which his cares will melt away after hearing the poem
-A corridor is a metaphor for time, and footsteps are a metaphor for the work poets produce as they navigate time.

Alliteration and Assonance

Alliteration:
-"strains of martial music"
-"silently steal away"
-"the day is done"

Irony

n/a

Genre

Poetry

Setting

19th century New England; private home

Tone

Weary, melancholy, quiet

Protagonist and Antagonist

None

Major Conflict

Whether the narrator will be able to alleviate his daily cares through the recitation of a simple poem.

Climax

n/a

Foreshadowing

-The evocation of night and rain and mist foreshadows the melancholy of the poet, which he explains not long after setting the stage

Understatement

n/a

Allusions

n/a

Metonymy and Synecdoche

n/a

Personification

-"the darkness / Falls from the wings of Night"

Hyperbole

-"songs gushed from his heart"

Onomatopoeia

"wafted"