While Samuel Johnson's The Vanity of Human Wishes was considerably difficult for me to entirely trudge through while capturing most of its main points, I am going to interpret it as best I can. It seems that Johnson is making a critisism on people as a whole, and their different opinions on happiness and how to achieve it. He walks through many different types of people, from war heros to mythical gods. One of the mains themes throughout these critisims is war Johnson continually brings up different people who have fought and died in wars or were caught in the middle of them as kings or other important rulers. Many of these people died for what they believed, whether it was fighting in a war for their cause or in an uprising against rulers. Supposedly these things were worth the death and destruction of families and cities to these people, which is where they found their happiness. In line 191, Johnson asks, "On what foundation stand the warrior's pride?" I think he's suggesting that some "war heros" die in an act of hoping to be remembered throughout history, though many are no longer even heard of. After all, how can one be happy if they are too dead to see it? It seems like Johnson is critisizing some of the illusions of happiness these people have throughout time, and enjoys pointing out why a lot of them don't really work.

Another one of the themes Johnson brings up near the end of the poem is of beauty. He talks about how mothers are so anxious to produce offspring with "the fortune of a face," which also happens to be alliterated to pick up on the emphasis of this desire for beauty. He also brings up the downfall in this, as in beauty there is a lack of virtue, which is obviously an important thing to have as a human being. All in all, this is yet another illusion of happiness, which has no beneficial purpose in life.

I liked how Johnson wrote this poem in the form of a heroic couplet. Though at first I felt that the catchy sounds of the rhyming were a little distracting and made it more difficult to understand, I thought it added an over all sound effect. The heroic couplet almost seems more demanding, as you must take in everything be written from line to line, while keeping up with its fast pace. It also felt more traditional, which seemed appropriate because Johnson brings up many allusions to the past where this type of poem structure might have occured. At least that's the feeling I got from it.