The text we are going to talk about is called “Shell” and this lyrical poem was written
by Richard Burns. It belongs to a book called “Black Light” published in 1983 and, in
this poem, the author expresses his feelings and memories on his time in Greece. We
can say that the theme of this poem is the passing of time, how the author remembers
his past time with sadness. It is written in a lyrical poetic simple language but it talks
about complex things. And its literary context would be modern poetry, with free verse
and no stuck to a template.
The external structure of the poem is one stanza with 13 lines, but, if we look at the
rhyme, it turns out to be a sonnet. About the internal structure, we can say that it has
three parts. The first part, from line 1 to 4, or the first stanza in the sonnet, it talks about
the description of a shell. The second part, from line 4 to 8 or the second stanza in the
sonnet, it is a reification,, the author uses a shell to speak about the summer. And the
last part, from line 8 to 13 or the two last stanzas in the sonnet, is where the past and
present meet together through the mirror.
The lexical categories present in this poem that we can stand out are nouns, verbs,
adjectives and pronouns. About the nouns we can observe that they are common and
related to summer and things about summer, for example “shell” in line 1, “summer” in
line 4, “medusas”, ”starfish”, ”seagreens” in lines 9 and 10, “sea” in line 12 … But also
we can see that the author uses, in the first paragraph, nouns related to fixing things, for
example “glue” in line 2, “holes” in line 3 …
About the adjectives, it uses both positive and negative adjectives, for example
“golden” in line 1, “cracked” in line 2, “tarnished” in line 6, “delicate” in line 10,
“secret” in line 13 … And all of them are attributive because they go before the noun.
And the verbs present in the poem are dynamic and stative. In the first paragraph, they
are recalling DIY images, for example “hangs” in line 1, “mended” and ”drilled” in line
2, “shrunk” in line 4 … In the second paragraph, they are emotive and it uses second
person singular, for example “thought” and “knew” in line 6, “shows” in line 7 … And
in the third paragraph the verbs speak about the present, for example “move” in line 11
and “hail” and ”forgotten” in line 12.
And finally the pronouns that are most used are the second person singular, for example
“your” in lines 1, 7, and 8, and “you” in lines 2, 5, 6, 11 and 12. This is because the
author addresses to himself and to the people of the poem.
We can also observe some literary devices present in the poem. We have an objective
correlative, that is, it focuses in an object all the ideas he wants to convey to the reader.
In this case, the object is a shell. We also have an alliteration, in line 13 “sea’s secret
speech” where it repeats the “s” sound. And, because we said it is a sonnet, we have
internal rhyme (abba, abba, cdc, dcd)
To sum up, we can say that the purpose of the author is to make us know how he feels
about the passing of time and how he misses the time he spent by the sea, which we
know it was when he was in Greece.