Symbol Analysis
The speaker uses a lot of personification in this poem. That is he gives his "song" or "poem" human characteristics. So, what's that all about? Well, it allows us readers to get a better sense of what he's trying to say: too much ornamentation (poetic ornamentation) is bad. It gets in the way of us connecting with the divine. How can we connect with the divine if we spend our time obsessing over fancy-schmancy things like alliteration or chiasmus in our poem?
- Line 1: This first line immediately works to personify the "song" or poem. For one thing, the speaker gives his song a gender: it's a she. And in describing her "put[ting] off" her adornments, the speaker evokes the image of a woman taking off her fancy things.
- Line 2: Here, again, the speaker refers to the poem as a "she." What's more, she's a girl who "has no pride of dress and decoration." The poem is humble, in other words. By giving the poem a quality like humility, the speaker gives his poem human characteristics.
- Line 6: The speaker also engages in personification when he says that his "vanity dies in shame" before the sight of the divine. Vanity is a quality of character, and yet here the speaker treats it as though it were a separate person: it "dies in shame." It's as if the speaker's vanity were its own person, capable of living or dying independently of the speaker.