Philip Freneau was born on January 2, 1752, in New York, of French Huguenot and

Scottish stock. He went into Princeton University in 1768. His life was long and bumpy. He was a writer and editor, but also at once a political journalist and sea captain, those rich experiences made a great contribution to his literary production. As a editor, he had a chance to published a number of ironic and humor poetry to express his pursuit of democracy and independence, then he was famous . However, as a sea captain, he had gone to many countries and explored a lot of tropical islands. Since he had those experiences, he could wrote plenty poems to show his love of nature and spoke highly of the tropical scenery. Freneau was neoclassical by training and taste yet romantic in essential spirit. He was also at once a satirist and a sentimentalist, a humanitarian but also a bitter polemicist, a poet of Reason yet the celebrant of \Fancy\and a deistic optimist inspired by themes of death and transience. He was regarded as a poet of American Revolution, the father of American poetry, the pioneer of the new romanticism and a gifted and versatile lyric poet.

the wild honey suckle is Philip Freneau's most famous natural poem with the theme of

transience.The short lyric was written in 1786. Freneau was inspired by the beauty of the wild honey suckle when he was walking at Chaeleston, South Carolina. The central image is a wild flower,which makes a drastic difference from elite flower images of traditional English poems. The poem showed strong feelings for the natural beauty,which was the characteristic of romantic poets.

In this poem, the poet expressed a keen awareness of the loveliness and transience of

nature. He not only meditated on mortality but also celebrated nature. It implies that life and death are inevitable law of nature.

The poem was written in regular 6-line tetrameter stanzas,rhyming:ababcc. Alliteration, assonance, masculine rhyme used in the poem also produce melody and harmony, which match the beauty of the flower. The poem contains iambics trochaics and spondee. The arrangement of stressed and unstressed syllables suggests the transience of the life of the flower and the poet's emotional change. The poem is full of sensuous images such as fair flower visual image,comely grow kinesthetic image and honeyed blossoms olfactory image.All these images make us feel pity for the beautiful flower which has only a short life. Obviously the poet is sentimental,deistic optimist. The line the space between, is but an hour contains a hyperbole stressing and transience of life. The tone of the poem is both sentimental and optimistic.

Fair flower, that dost so comely grow, Hid in this silent,dull retreat, Untouched thy honeyed blossoms blow, Unseen thy little branches greet: No roving foot shall crush thee here, No busy hand provoke a tear.

All those lines not only make us exclaim over the spirit of obscurity and loneliness of the flower, but also exclaim over for her short life. What the most important is that Freneau related himself and the human beings in the poem, he combined the mankind with the nature, attracted readers by implying the regulation of nature. He described the flower's transcendent situation between the lines. To flowers, life is short, it is the same with human's life.

In this poem, the poet wanted to express that just like the wild suckle that do not refuse to blossom though it will fade after a short time, human should cherish their life though they will die finally. Cherishing life is enjoying life indeed.