For a writer whose work was included in the collection, ‘The Stuffed Owl: An Anthology of Bad Verse and Very Bad Poetry’, American poet Ella Wheeler Wilcox has attracted a surprisingly large share of literary attention for her poem ‘Solitude’. Published in her book Poems of Passion in 1883, it is a popular rather than a literary poem, with the broad base of its subject matter, dealing with life’s vicissitudes, perhaps having something to do with this.
Inspired by an encounter by a woman dealing with grief, ‘Solitude’ is a meditation on the human condition and is not in itself funny. Expressing as it does the common experiences of humanity, parts of the poem, in particular the first two lines, have now reached the status of aphorisms:
Laugh, and the world laughs with you;
Weep, and you weep alone;
The two lines set the scene for what is to follow. Constructed using a standard metre, ‘Solitude’ consists of three eight-line stanzas encompassing the rhyming of even-numbered lines. The poem is easy to read and straightforward to analyse, partly because Wilcox anthropomorphises earth in the first stanza and follows this with the conception that the world and its component parts act in unison, whether in joy or sorrow, giving a solid structure to the poem.
Joining the line rhyming scheme is the expression of light and shade in human experience, and happiness is followed by sadness in its different manifestations throughout the poem. The role of laughter takes pole position, emphasised as the desirable state of being, and is contrasted with the difficult state of dealing with hardship.
The alternating scheme continues, with one line celebrating happiness while the next illustrates sadness, one line emphasises the presence of other people when it comes to enjoyment, the next is a comment on the solitary nature of difficulty. Friends are only there for the good times with no one there to help in the bad, success is for crowds with its opposite to be endured alone, and death takes its place after life.
The poem seems to equate laughter and the positive things life with being part of a group, while solitude is always paired with loneliness. Whether or not this is an accurate reflection of reality depends upon the reader and their own experiences. Despite the poem not being in itself funny, the reader is free to read what they like into the lines and come to their own conclusions.
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