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Have you ever lost your family or a loved one? If you have, you would feel like as if you had lost the world. This poem, Forever, gives a consolation to people who lost a loved one because of the war. According to the poet, losing people surrounding you are always hard, but he wants to encourage people who left to live optimistic life. The poet attempts to empathize with them by writing an ode

about somebody that he lost and utilize literary devices. 

The ode is written from the perspective of a soldier seeing his loved one from heaven. The poet describes a scene where his loved one is looking up to the sky with tears “trickling” down her face. This imagery gives the poem of a mourning feeling to it. The kind of depression we can identify here is a sadness carried out over time. The author is not focusing on the moment she found out her loved one is dead. Instead, he is focusing on the moment when she is thinking about how she must live out the rest of her life without her loved one. That is the feeling of the slow “trickling” tears give. However, the solider does not want his loved one to mourn the rest of her life because they would be together in heaven. He wants her to take the sadness in her heart and put happiness in its place. That’s a metaphor because you cannot physically take sadness and replace it with happiness. This happens when he stops talking about the present and talks more about the future.

In the next section of the poem, the poet starts to use a lot more metaphors to describe what was going to happen in the future. This might be because the poet is not entirely sure what exactly will happen when they die. The poet uses a metaphor of a captain and her ship to express life when they are in heaven together. He uses this metaphor because captains can decide to go wherever their hearts desire. In this way, his loved one can do whatever they want with their destiny. He also uses another metaphor, when he says “lifted from the land” he tries to encourage those people who lost their love. This phrase is used when somebody dies and their spirit “floats” to heaven. He probably used this phrase to help the audience to understand about the emotion.

In addition, the poet uses pauses and rhymes to express his opinion. He uses the periods after certain words such as "hand"(11) and "land" (12) which gives a break to the readers when they read. The poet did not make any stanzas; however, the periods naturally create the same effect as stanzas. Moreover, those words are rhyming which enhances the tension and understanding of the poem. This method of writing supports the communication of the theme. This is because he tries to express the feeling and emotion about loss of a loved one, but if he uses stanzas the mood will be disrupted. He made the periods to stop in between the poem which intensifies the depressing mood. Hence, this different mechanism of writing poem exaggerates the sorrow he has and as a result, the readers can easily sympathize with the poem because it is closely connected to their reality.

In a nutshell, the poet, John Leroy Maxwell, tries to sympathize with people who lost their family and loved ones in the war through the perspective of a soldier, literary devices, and intentional pauses. These are critical ways to indicate the author’s theme of grief, because they are effectively making a deep connection between the author and his readers.

“Forever-Poem by John Leroy Maxwell”, PoemHunter.  2019 https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/forever-78/ April 23.2019