Appearances
Appearances can be quite superficial. Just because someone seems nice, or looks beautiful, doesn't mean that they actually are. Johnson's poem focuses on the way that appearances can mislead us. If...
Fate
Fate is not very kind to us, according to the speaker of this poem. It has a way of making things really hard for us. Fate doesn't give us what we want, but what we don't want. It raises us up, onl...
Wealth and Gold
As another poet once said: mo' money, mo' problems. Apparently, back in the eighteenth century the speaker of Johnson's poem thought so too. There's a lot of imagery focusing on wealth and gold in...