Poetry Precis #14: "The Meadow"


Kate Knapp Johnson’s “The Meadow” uses a tone of despair and a shift in mood to convey the outcome of getting too lost in thought. The speaker begins with an expression of despair in wasting half of a day just staring out of the window in search of some intangible feeling or thing. By leaving “thinking for thought,” he did not realize that he was so absorbed in his mind that a long time had elapsed. A shift happens beginning with “two inches of snow have fallen,” showing that time has progressed significantly, and the speaker is now not just in their own deep thought, but it caused them to get so carried away that they didn’t notice all of the time they had wasted. The speaker ends the poem with another despairing statement saying, “Where did I go, how long was I out looking for you?,” since they finally realized that they had wasted away so much of their time self absorbing in their sorrows. Many times people get so carried away wallowing in their sorrows or searching for something that doesn’t exist that they forget to live in the present and end up wasting their whole lives. By use of this despairing shift, Johnson shows that getting too lost in thought ends up making them miss out on their life in the present.

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