Hello, my name is Liam, and I'm a 16 year old high school junior from Massachusetts.  The revolutionary war has always been a fascinating historical topic for me.  I wanted to combine that interest with my interest in writing poetry.  After reading Romantic poets such as Keats, Shelley, and Wordsworth, I was inspired to write in the style of the Romantic period.  In this poem, I wrote about a solitary oak tree watching over the battle of Lexington, the catalyst of the Revolutionary War.  The first quatrain talks about the cycle of seasons, and winter becoming spring. The next quatrain mentions the rebel soldiers resting under the tree and has nature as a place of refuge.  Once the battle begins, there is a clear contrast between the solitary, calming nature of the oak and the bloody battlefield.  I used oppositional language, such as gore and grace, to illustrate this contrast.  I also alliterated the second stanza with words such as grace, gray, and green to point the reader to this contrast.  I mimicked the Romantic style by beginning each line with a one-syllable pronoun or conjunction, as seen in the style of the Romantic poets.  I chose to put the first quatrain in the present tense to represent the longevity and immortality of the tree, whereas when I reference the battle, it is in the past tense because the battle happened at a specific time in the past.  In the turn, the final couplet, I expand from talking about the tree to a greater lesson about life.  The lesson is that, just like the tree changes throughout the seasons, life has a cyclical nature, and when one is hopeful, that hope may soon disappear.