The Vanity of Human Wishes Analysis

The form of this poem, as we've already mentioned, is indicated in its title. It's a satire. A satirical poem is one that makes fun of someone or something, and does so in a way that reveals their...

The speaker of this poem is a wise guy. He knows the world. He's surveying it all—and we do mean all—from "China to Peru." What's more, he doesn't like what he sees, because everywhere he finds...

The setting of this poem is… well, the entire world. Yup, the speaker says it in the first couple of lines of the poem: "Let observation, with extensive view/ Survey mankind from China to Peru" (...

Reading "The Vanity of Human Wishes" out loud is a little like swinging on a swing. The rhythm is very regular, and it kind of lulls us into this nice back-and-forth movement. Let's take the first...

The full title of Johnson's poem is—wait for it—"The Vanity of Human Wishes: The Tenth Satire of Juvenal Imitated." That's quite a title, and it's telling us several things. First of all, the f...

Although Johnson is better known as a prose writer than a poet, we can distinguish his famous poems quite easily. His two most famous poems—"London" and "The Vanity of Human Wishes"— are both i...

The historical allusions that litter this poem make it a difficult one to get through (thank goodness we're here to point them all out to you). That's not to mention Samuel Johnson's elaborate poet...

Samuel Johnson compiled and wrote the first modern English dictionary, A Dictionary of the English Language (also known as "Johnson's Dictionary"). And he did it in only nine years. It was publishe...

Besides a couple of references to the scandalous goings-on of pretty young ladies, there isn't must explicit sex happening in this poem. Whatever sex is happening is very vaguely mentioned by the s...

Juvenal, "The Tenth Satire" (Title): "The Tenth Satire" is a poem by the Latin poet Juvenal. It's part of a series of satirical poems that were written in the late first century CE-early second cen...