Poetry Journal #2 week two

Title: “I am accused of tending to the past”
Style: Literary Critic

The tone of the poem is responsive and it sounds defensive as well. The Speaker is someone who is very fond of history and who believes that it is here for a reason. The speaker is vehemently speaking on behalf of history; he or she even personifies history to make his argument more valid and compelling. The purpose of the poem is to explain the importance of history, the fact that it was here long before humanity. It would be like a rhetorical question, “what happened first? The egg or the chicken?” History could not exist without humans and for humans to exist there has to be some type of history behind it. It seems as if the speaker was confronted with a problem regarding the importance of history and he/she is responding with this poem. The occasion could be a confrontation he/she had with someone who disagreed with him or did not necessarily understand where he was coming from with his argument. As mentioned before the subject of the poem is history and its different aspects. The author wants History to be appreciated by others just as much as he appreciates it. After his justification seems to be as clear as it gets, the author chooses to expand on history’s greatness and how it continues to expand day by day. The author of the poem is very successful at utilizing different poetic devices. He uses repetition and end rhyme. The repetition adds power to the poem, it sounds more convincing because the speaker sounds very confident. The author explains what he is being accused of and then he follows with a justification. It is a very efficient way to persuade someone because he mentions the problem just briefly and later utilizes many lines to justify his way of thinking and why he sees History as a factual journal recording the life of humanity as a whole.