“To an Athlete Dying Young” by A.E. Housman provides commentary on how the achievements of an athlete invoke the ardor and honor of an entire social setting, and then quickly wane from public consciousness as the athlete declines in skill and the novel excitement he created dissipates. The poem suggests that the young athlete may be “smart” if he contrives to die at the peak of his glory, so no other individual can ever beat him or exceed his accomplishments. While this notion serves only as a small compensation for the early death of a promising young individual, the poem does reveal to the everlasting fame imparted upon the deceased “Townsman of a stiller town”.

      In “To an Athlete Dying Young”, a literary device that emphasizes the poem’s central theme of eternal glory conceived from premature death is metonymy. Lines 11-12, “And early though the laurel grows / It withers quicker than the rose”, present the word “rose” as an efflorescent symbol of death, which serves as a foil to the honor-symbolizing laurel; and as a verb that parodies the quick and imminent loss of fame.  With the proper capacities for talent and admiration, an athlete can attain a rapid ascent to the echelon atop the shoulders of his common peers of “men and boys”; and the laurel crown is bestowed upon his head. Where the laurel is used to represent fleeting exaltation and honor, the rose stands as a more permanent symbol of lasting admiration and grandeur conferred upon his death. Exceedingly, this “rose” is not given to all worthy of it; as their laurels have diminished more quickly than they had risen up. 

An additional device is paradox, found in the last stanza: “And round that early-laureled head / Will flock to gaze the strengthless dead”. The contradiction of flocks of people coming to celebrate a now “strengthless dead” person imparts to the legacy of the athlete who was never known to have anything but strength while he was alive.

     This poem particularly resonates with another runner, Steve Prefontaine, who is arguably more popular today than he was at the time of his death. Prefontaine perished in the prime of his career, leaving society to do nothing more than expand on his incredible strength, which was never evidenced to have any limits. This poem may also serve as an allegory for A-Roid, who may have had the sagacity to retire in 2005 before the momentum of his own stupidity could exceed his initial promise as a ballplayer. 

 
In “Wish You Were Here” by Robert Phillips, a prominent literary device is tone. Through the duration of the poem, it is evident that the speaker is emotionally perplexed by the unexplained absence of his wife or girlfriend, projecting a distracted, unobtrusive tone. In a setting where the rain and packed movie theaters impede him from partaking in a semi-productive preoccupation, the absence of his loved one leaves him to spend the day completing menial tasks. He shaves “again”, which implies it as being a compulsive, anxious method of passing trivial minutes; sorts hardware that he “doesn’t even own”, which imparts to his level of desperateness; and consumes cocktails at five that were “too much looked forward to”, which represent the disparity of meaning he feels without the person he wishes was with him.

Another literary device present is parallelism. As previously mentioned, the speaker infers in the middle stanza that he had been repeatedly and compulsively shaving as means of diverting time. In the final stanza, he awakes from the dream where he was fired “without warning” by his bearded boss. At a time where his life is bereft of meaning or serious occupation, constant shaving becomes a product of the speaker’s timidness and frivolity. His boss, who has a beard and is clearly not subject to the constant shaving, is shown to have control and prominence in his life. This parallel reinforces the disparaged and trivialized life of the speaker while the person he wishes to have with him is absent.