The Poetic Appreciation of the poem "The Inchcape Rock"

Robert Southey

Read the extract carefully and write an appreciation of the poem considering the following points.

✳️About the poet and the title

✳️The theme

✳️ Poetic style, Language, poetic devices.

✳️ Special feature 

✳️Values 

✳️Your opinion about the poem

The famous ballad “The Inchcape Rock” is written by the renowned English poet Robert Southey. The basic theme of the poem is that those who do bad things will ultimately be punished accordingly and poetic justice was done.
This is the ballad of seventeen stanzas of four lines each with the regular rhyming couplet with the rhyme scheme, AABB. As the poem has four lines of stanzas which are also known as quatrains. The present poem is about an attempt by the Abbot of Aberbrothok to install the warning bell 🔔 on Inchcape which was removed by a pirate, Ralph. The pirates met with an accident on the same rock on his return journey.  Poet tells the above story in the narrative style. Though the language looks simple, it has many old English words. The poet has used various images and symbols to create a live beautiful mental picture before the eyes of the readers. The poet also enriched the beauty of the poem with various figures of speech.  Prominent figures of speech in the poem are personification, alliteration, repetition, Inversion, simile, metaphor apostrophe, and Onomatopoeia.
The poem, The Inchcape Rock, teaches a moral lesson- “As you sow, so shall you reap.” The poem proves the principle that crime gets its punishment. I like the poem very much as it depicts the phenomenal picture before our eyes at the same time it conveyed the ultimate truth of life, "If we have done something bad with someone we have to face the same bad situation” it's rightly said, "As you sow so shall you reap.”

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