Discuss how the poet develops the idea throughout the poem and makes the poem interesting for the reader in the poem "Night Sweat"?

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Q: Discuss how the poet develops the idea throughout the poem and makes the poem interesting for the reader?

The pain of aging, of slowly feeling the fire and passion flickering out is portrayed in “Night Sweat” by Robert Lowell. Simply put it is of a man with an illness and his disorganised thought and feelings but deeper, there is his fear and his agony as he feels his youth and its hopes and dreams burn away and how he cannot meet the standards expected of him to write. But also there is his joy as in his wife he finds new inspiration and hope.

The beginning of the poem plays some significance in developing the idea as it gives an insight of what the state of mind the poet is in. In his room there are said to be “plain things, my stalled equipment, the old broom” all three containing words: “plain…stalled…old,” all giving connotations of lack of vigour and passion, which may be reflecting upon what the poet feel about what had happened to his present life. But it seems sure that it has not always been like this. He is “living in a tidied room” suggests that his life is orderly, without the great disorganised tumults of thoughts or ideas, but now that colour, that passion and vigour had “wilted white.”

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The reason why Lowell believes to be the reason of his lack of creativity for writing is that he had been wrung dry by the “bias of existing” expectations; expectations he had been able to meet in his youth but now he has to strain himself. He tells of how from his early youth he had wanted to write something great but failed; “always inside me is the child who died”, the child referring to his dreams he had made for his future, however its will to live and give his life for poetry has not ended in him; ...

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