1. Reader Reaction: It’s sad that an older woman seldom ever marries. Oftentimes, they are more beautiful. That’s not to say that every unmarried woman is beautiful or pleasant; simply, oftentimes they were too good for men. That is unfair.

2. Plot: A narrator tells virgins to enjoy their youth and marry, for they shall not be forever young.

3. Character: Narrator – implied age. Virgins – young, beautiful, unmarried.

4. Setting: An older narrator sees that these young women are being coy and spending their little time unwisely.

5. Point of View: Third-person imperative.

6. Objects/Events:

* Each of the verses is a sentence individually.

*Poem is structured around metaphors. v3-4 – flower as compared to time. s2 – the sun as compared to life. Both metaphors are used to signify the passing of time. Both are Biblical metaphors.

*Reference to Father time in v2.

*Repetition v11 – ‘worse, and worst’

*Personification: ‘old time’ (v2) ‘flower that smiles’ (v3) ‘[sun’s] race will be run’ (v7) ‘use your time’ (v13)  ‘having lost…your prime’ (v15)

*Poem builds to an epiphany in final verse, informing them of the dullness of life if one never marries.

7. Mood: It delivers sadness for lost time and lost youth. It delivers frustration at the young women who waste that precious time that is youth.

8. Ideas: Importance of marriageable age: Women should marry. Furthermore, women should marry early. Time: it is short. Life gets ‘worse, and worst Times succeed the former.’

9. Style: The sentences are long and uniform. The first line is broken by the second line. The second line is broken by a semicolon. The final line is an explanation of the previous. The language is bitter and simple, though archaic in our own merits. He used common terminology but grand metaphors.

10. Metre: Though the poem begins in more of an anapest, it finishes off in a rather straightforward iamb. The first and third line average nine syllables, while the alternate lines average seven.

11. Sound: A fair amount of alliteration is used (‘today Tomorrow’, ‘heaven…higher’, ‘race be run’, etc). The only true rhyme used is the end rhyme (scheming ABAB CDCD EFEF, etc). The language he uses is the equivalent of an open chord in music. The absence of a third to accompany the fifth and octave (in a majour of minor) creates a hollow ring that the note makes with its fifth. The ‘Virgins’ is not a poem of tight rhymes. It is a more stately, sombre poem.
12. Worldview: Existential: Though the author was likely Christian, the poem is existential in the fact that life is experience and there is nothing beyond the grave. Reality is made up of our own feelings, and those feelings rot with time. For that sense of rot, it is vaguely nihilistic, but it remains existential.