Personal Helicon Literary Elements

The speaker is an adult narrating in the first person, veering between remembering his distant childhood and describing his current state.

Five quatrains with a loose ABAB rhyme scheme

Metaphors include "the trapped sky," a description of the wells' reflective surface, and "big-eyed Narcissus," a self-deprecating description of the speaker himself. Similes include "fructified like an aquarium," a description of an overgrown, plant-filled well.

Alliteration includes the D sounds of "the dark drop," and the F sounds of "ferns and tall/Foxgloves." Assonance, frequently used throughout the poem, appears in phrases such as "old pumps with buckets," "a bucket/plummeted," both of which use assonant U sounds, and "a rat slapped," which uses assonant A sounds.

Ironically, the speaker's adult peers would find his habit of staring into wells vain or narcissistic. This is ironic because, in fact, the opposite is true: he enjoys wells because they reveal him to himself in a new light, without the burden of ego and self-consciousness. The reader's expectation of a link between self-examination and vanity is elegantly upended.

lyric poetry, nature poetry

A countryside area, implied to be twentieth-century Ireland

contemplative, playful

The speaker is the protagonist. The poem's antagonist is the outside world, which consistently tries to keep him from wells and from the exploration he loves.

The speaker's desire to explore wells, which conflicts with the expectations he faces as an adult.

The poem's climax is the speaker's declaration that carefree exploration would be beneath "adult dignity."

The poem's opening line, in which the speaker implies that adults tried to keep him from wells as a child, foreshadows the conflict he will later face between exploration and social expectations.

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The "Helicon" in the title is an allusion to a mountain which, in Greek myth, is said to be home to streams that are themselves sources of poetic inspiration. "Narcissus," another allusion to Greek myth, is a figure said to have fallen in love with his own reflection in a body of water.

In "a white face hovered over the bottom," the face is a metonymic representation of the speaker's reflection. The phrase "I rhyme" uses rhyme as a metonymic representation of the practice of writing poetry more generally.

Wells are personified in the description "Others had echoes, gave back your own call."

The opening line's phrase "they could not keep me from wells" hyperbolically describes the young speaker's desire to visit wells against others' wishes.

The word "crash" is onomatopoetic.