Regarding the rhythm, rhyme, and style of the poem, we get to observe a ballad composed of twenty-five ABCB rhyming quatrains (a famous rhyme in the ballads) giving the feeling of a more ironic/ comic story. The rhythm is musical as it is a ballad having an iambic meter (unstressed/stressed), as it is a ballad, one would expect to observe a romantic tale in the poem, but as figured above, it is completely the contrary, being represented a woman that lacks love from others. The language used is plain, kind of like a conversation written in a way that the narrator is in the omniscient third person form, but there was a time whenre a first-person narrator took place, being Miss Gee.
During the poem, we obtain see some techniques, as a foreshadowing of her death, as when she was dreaming and her palace gets´ destroyed by a storm, being this her illness, cancer, destroying her. There is a use of alliteration on ‘slight squint,’ making her sound even more unattractive. We detect a simile with visual effect, ‘Like waves round a Cornish wreck’, making the comparison that Miss Gee is like a wrecked ship with the waves crashing in over the years and in “cancer…. is like some hidden assassin..”, meaning that it is a serious illness that nobody knows when or why it comes. A pathetic fallacy is used with ‘a storm blew down the palace’.
The bull represents her sexual desire, as we know that she was attracted to the face the bull was carrying, the Vicars face. “Summer made the trees a picture, Winter made them a wreck”, a metaphor on how in summer the trees were so beautiful, picture-worthy, while in winter they were ruined. There areis other metaphors, where the bicycle is like her personality, “a harsh back-pedal brake”. when anyexcitement comes into her life, she puts the brakes on and when she goes fast with excitement, she breaks. Even though there is irony showed in the end of the poem, we canalso observe also irony in the 12th stanza, with the line “make me a good girl, please” when in fact she is an extremely “good girl”.Like most of the poems in this era, it is a pessimistic one, it deals with thwarted hopes and the inevitability of death in the most ironic way. In this case, the cause of death was cancer, caused by her sexual repression (according to the doctor’s opinion) ‘It’s as if there had to be some outlet / for their foiled creative fire’.
Which makes sense, as in the time the author wrote the poem he read Sigmund Freud’s book ‘A textbook of psychology in
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