Poem Rising Five

        The first stanza describes the boy’s appearance and how his spectacles consist of thick lenses  making him look like a serious little boy with brimful eyes staring like he knows everything about everything as if his life is already completed, there is nothing else left for him to learn in this world. I guess he is trying to look mature. There are end rhymes in this stanza (e.g.- said and head, hair and stare)

The 2nd stanza has assonance and alliteration right on the second line: ‘bubbled and doubled; buds unbuttoned; shoot’. Again, more emphasize is put to the fact that the past and future shove the present by leaving no importance to it on the 5th line: ‘It was the season AFTER blossoming. BEFORE the forming of the fruit (…)’ he uses words such as after and before, giving no value to the state of now. The 2nd stanza represents the best phase of the human life and there are a lot of positive words present in this stanza. The word ‘and’ is repeated several times in a row, giving the sense of addition constantly. The ‘blossoming’ illustrates the freshness of new life.  

        There is the repetition of sounds all over the 3rd stanza. The poet wants to highlight the fact that the boy is ‘not four, but rising five (…)’ to show that he wants more than anything to live the future and is only thinking about it. The repetition of sounds in this stanza is to enforce the idea that people don’t live the present like they should. I believe that when the poet said ‘And in the sky the dust dissected the tangential light’ he wants to make it more scientific to criticize the fact that we analyze things too much without stopping to appreciate the beauty of certain things just as it is. The mood of the poem is already getting another dimension here. The dust dissecting the tangential light is also a personification and alliteration. The 3rd stanza can be seen as the revolution time of the process when all the transformation is occurring. It is the transition between both times.  

        The 4th stanza is when the mood totally changes. A simile is spotted on the first line: ‘We drop our youth behind us like a boy throwing away his toffee-wrappers’ He refers back to the toffee-candy: ‘Throwing away his toffee-wrappers.’ This shows the transformation has occurred and that the toffee-buckled cheeks of his childhood no longer exist and he doesn’t give more importance to it either, he just throw them away. He once again shows how aging happens so quickly that we don’t even observe: ‘We never see the flower, but only the fruit in the flower; never the fruit, But only the rot in the fruit’. The 4th stanza consists mostly of negative words and the word ‘but’ repeats itself showing negation. There are a few end rhymes such as end and dead. In the end of the poem he shows that life went by and when it is already too late we notice that the only thing on our minds that mattered was the past and the future, when we should have given a much bigger magnitude to what came in between, the present.  

In conclusion we can see that as the poem advances, the mood of the poem alters, as it gets more severe and profound, as well as more dark and close to reality; as it starts with a little boy just wanting to grow up, approximating the terrible and unavoidable death. To sum up, the poet is eager to show how people should care about their lives living like there should be no tomorrow since life flies by.