17 pages • 34 minutes read
Edgar Allan PoeThe Lake
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1827A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Literary Devices
Form and Meter
“The Lake” has 23 lines arranged in 4 stanzas with a consistent rhyme scheme. The form is inspired by Romantic odes but is ultimately Poe’s own invention. Three of the four stanzas have six lines, while the penultimate (second-to-last) stanza has five lines. The six-line stanzas use rhyming couplets in the pattern AABBCC. The five-line stanza adds a triple rhyme: AABBB. All of these are end rhymes, appearing at the end of each line. One rhyme pair in Lines 9 and 10, “by” / “melody,” requires melody to be pronounced with a long Y (as in cry). This kind of rhyme is similar to song lyrics, giving it a musical quality.
The individual lines of “The Lake” tend to be around eight syllables long. Most lines fulfill the conditions of iambic tetrameter having four iambic feet, with eight syllables. Other lines can be read with spondees, or two long or stressed syllables following two short or unstressed syllables, such as, “Of a | wild | lake, with black | rock | bound” (Line 5). End rhymes have metrical impact as well. For instance, “loneliness” (Line 4) is conventionally a dactyl, a stressed syllable followed by two unstressed syllables, as shown in English dictionaries. However, because the final syllable occurs with a rhyme with “less—” (Line 3), the final syllable must be stressed to complete the rhyme. This results in the emphasis of the word being cretic, or having an unstressed syllable between two stressed syllables, which is far easier to place in an iambic line.
Repetition
Poe repeats sounds and words in “The Lake.” On the level of sound, Poe uses alliteration—the repetition of the first letter of words—and consonance—the repetition of a consonant sound. For instance, “The which I could not love the less— / So lovely was the loneliness” (Lines 3-4) contains both alliteration and consonance. The words love, less, lovely, and loneliness all begin with the letter L. The letter L also appears within lovely and loneliness—each of these words contains a second L. To expand into the rest of the first stanza, the alliteration of L continues in “lot” (Line 1) and “lake” (Line 5). The repetition of the letter L draws attention to the poem’s focus and title—the lake. The letter L also appears at the beginning of the word “Love,” which appears twice in Line 17.
Other letters are repeated in the poem. One example is the consonance of the letter K in “lake.” This highlights the poem’s central focus on a specific location (See: Background). In the phrase “Of a wild lake, with black rock bound” (Line 5), the letter K is repeated three times. The letter K also appears in “awake” (Line 11). This repetition is part of the rhyme awake/lake. Another example is the repetition of the letter M in “the mystic wind went by / Murmuring in melody” (Lines 9-10). Here, the repeated letter M sound reflects the content, giving the lines a murmuring sound like the wind.
The word “lake” is repeated three times, appearing in all of the six-line stanzas. It is omitted from the shorter, five-line penultimate stanza. However, that stanza is connected to the previous stanza with the repetition of the word “terror” in Lines 12 and 13. Other words that are doubled include “spot” in Line 2 and Line 8, and “lone” in Line 12 and Line 21. The word lone is contained within the word loneliness, which leads to it appearing three times total. This repetition highlights the isolated nature of the lake, which is reiterated in the synonym for lone: “solitary” (Line 22). This illustrates how concepts, as well as specific diction, are repeated in the poem. The isolation of the lake is emphasized to create a parallel with the isolation of the “grave” (Line 19).
Metaphor
The comparisons Poe uses in “The Lake” are metaphors. For example, rather than directly compare the lake’s waves with the concept of death and a gravesite using words such as “like” or “as,” Poe uses the preposition “in” in his metaphor: “Death was in that poisonous wave / And in its gulf a fitting grave” (Lines 18-19). Death is contained within the wave’s crest, and a gravesite is contained within the wave’s trough. This comparison is created by location.
Related Titles
By Edgar Allan Poe
