Long Neglect Has Worn Away

Long Neglect Has Worn Away Literary Elements

Speaker or Narrator, and Point of View

The poem is told from a third-person perspective; the speaker never appears as a character in the poem.

Form and Meter

The poem is composed of three quatrains with an ABAB rhyme scheme.

Metaphors and Similes

The speaker compares the woman's lost allure to a wilted flower in the line "Time has turned the bloom to gray."

Alliteration and Assonance

There is alliteration in the F sounds of the line "Swiftly flew the fingers fine." There is assonance in the E sounds of the line "Dearest, ever deem me true."

Irony

The quoted line of the love letter is ironic because the woman loses both things she expects to hold onto for "ever."

Genre

Victorian poetry

Setting

Unspecified location; the poem ends with a description of letter writing which likely occurs at a desk

Tone

Tragic, regretful

Protagonist and Antagonist

The protagonist of the poem is an unnamed woman. The antagonist is time and neglect.

Major Conflict

The main conflict of the poem is the woman's loss of her beauty and happiness as a result of years of loneliness.

Climax

The climax of the poem occurs in the last line when the source of the woman's sadness, a broken love affair, is partially revealed.

Foreshadowing

The first line foreshadows the fact that the woman has lost something.

Understatement

N/A

Allusions

N/A

Metonymy and Synecdoche

N/A

Personification

N/A

Hyperbole

The line "Time has turned the bloom to gray" is a hyperbolic description of the woman's diminished physical appearance.

Onomatopoeia

N/A

Buy Study Guide Cite this page