... England. Mad Girl’s Love Song is a poem, Sylvia Plath wrote while she was a student at Smith College. The poem has a theme of suicide as an escape. There are many places where the theme of suicide appears in the poem. The poem is about a girl who spent her whole life waiting for a man she gave herself to, against her beliefs, who was never to return. There is one phrase in the poem that which has a big importance. I think I made you up inside my head This phrase is repeated a few times and that makes us thinks that the girl is wishing that this man is made up, and she is trying to convince herself of it. The phrase is kind of a quote which signifies that these are thoughts to her, and not out loud, which can means that she is trying to convince herself it is true. Sylvia wished that she would overcome her depression and grow out of the despair she was living in. I fancied you’d return the way you said, but I grow old and I forget your name But in fact, her wishes and search for her happiness had driven her insane. She had been lost for so long that she didn't remember what it was like to truly be happy so therefore she would never be able to identify it if she were to regain control of her life. I think I made you up inside my head Once again the line is referring to the state of insanity that Sylvia Plath had driven her into. I should have loved a Thunderbird instead; At least when spring comes they roar back again Sylvia is making the Thunderbird to a...
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...My earliest memory of poetry in school tastes yucky in my mouth. As a loud, somewhat, okay, real, defiant teen, my middle school English teacher and I did not enjoy each other’s company. Her idea of analyzing, memorizing, and presenting Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” was annoying, embarrassing, and dumb. No way was I going to get up in front of 25 friends, enemies, acquaintances, and unknowns to recite the same poem those 25 other people were going to say. Needless to say, my mother found a way to adjust my attitude: dish soap. Mrs. Gruhn must have enjoyed her discussion with my mother because the next time I sat in English class, I eagerly, yet secretly seething with hate, worked with my group memoring Frost’s famous words. Luckily,...
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...The daffodil, like many other flowers, is thought to bring happiness into one's life. Looking at this flower in a more symbolic manner, the daffodil represents the life that Trethewey and her mother has had to endure. Although the daffodil is only mentioned in one poem, many poems throughout Native Guard illustrate how the life of the daffodil is directly related and compared to Natasha Trethewey and her mother. The order in which the poems are mentioned is also significant; they demonstrate the progression stages of the two lives mentioned and the devastation that is brought when a life is lost. At the beginning of the book in the poem “Genus Narcissus” the daffodil is being compared to Trethewey as a child, because they are both in the beginning stages of life. Comparable to the flower Trethewey would be considered a new bloom sprouting in the early spring. “The road I walked home from school was dense with trees and shadows, creek-side, and lit by yellow daffodils, early blossom” (1-3).They are both innocent beings beginning life and Natasha is awaiting the chance to endure the happiness that life has to bring. Both Natasha and the flowers are considered gifts to her mother, therefore she sees herself as being one with the flower, “Childish vanity. I must have seen in them some measure of myself- the slender stems, each blossom a head lifted up” (13-15). Being a young child Natasha did not know that the flowers given to her mother as a small gift would one day represent...
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...windows. One of them is Minerva, who writes poems, a teenager trapped in an abusive relationship, with kids and her own guilt stopping her from fighting back. She writes poems to provide a semblance of freedom to herself, but never actually believes in her ability to leave. Because Minerva’s only escape from her abusive husband is inside her head, she lacks the self-efficacy she needs to break free. Minerva has only one...
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...Making a Fist In Naomi Shihab Nye’s poem “Making a Fist”, she looks back on her childhood memories and her obstacles in life. She asks her mom how you know when you are going to die, and her mom says when you can’t make a fist anymore. Later in life, she continues to make a fist just as a reminder that everything is okay. In the poem, Naomi uses figurative language, different points of view, and an interesting title all to tie in the story. The speaker in this poem is a woman reflecting back on her life when she was seven, and reminiscing the moment. The poem starts off in the perspective of a seven year old girl in the back seat of her mom’s car, when she discovers that you are dying when you can no longer make a fist. The poem continues on and develops to be in the perspective of the same girl, but much older. She reflects on the times when things were much simpler. The woman has matured, and to that day she remembers what her mom told her. When she says, “I, who did not die, who am still living,” she is saying that she has overcome obstacles since she was young, and that she will continue to overcome them. I think that the girl in this story is Naomi, the author of the poem. I think this because Naomi is such a personal writer, and the way she is with words just makes it seem so realistic. I think that the only way she could get across such an amazing message is that if it happened to her. Although, this message that she is getting across can be perceived in many different...
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...Riasad Chowdhury ENG 112 Prof: Stephen Clark 12/17/2015 Daily Working Life Poems are short or long paragraphs written by poets to impact largely on people's way of thinking. Claude McKay is a poet whose most of the poems are not always happy poems but they do give a nudge to people to think about normal daily stuffs in a very different perspective. I have read his poem called "Enslaved" and I have never felt so sympathy about the slavery that the African American people had to go through and how they felt about it. Then it was his another poem "If We Must Die" and it was so much filled with sorrow. I am writing about Claude McKay's poem "The Tired Worker" which actually touched me greatly though it was nothing related to my life style but still I could relate my daily life style to it and that is how Claude McKay's poems can really affect people. The poet in the poem "The Tired Worker" kept a lack of details which allows the readers to reflect themselves in a focus way, he also used a developing tone and imagery to guide the readers to think of their own life. The poet kept a convinient lack of details in the poem to help the readers fit themselves anywhere in the poem. "O whisper, O my soul! The afternoon. Is waning into evening, whisper soft! Peace, O my rebel heart! for soon the moon. From out its misty veil will swing aloft!", these are the first four lines of the poem and it is about a persom who is eagerly comforting himself or herself that it will soon be...
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...This poem by Sylvia Plath was written in 1959 and gave name to her first collection of poems The Colossus and Other Poems in which it is already included. This collection was published in 1960 and since this moment she was recognized as a young new talent because of her poetry techniques. Regarding some biographical data, we should take into account that Otto Plath, that is Sylvia’s father, died after a long period of untreated diabetes when she had just eight years old. Facing the death of someone you love is not something easy to deal with for an eight-year-old girl; she was strongly affected by the loss of her father. Many of her poems were influenced by her father’s death. For instance, this poem seems to make a tribute to the legacy and memory of Plath’s deceased father, a poem dealing with the loss of someone who was important for the speaker. The poem is divided into six stanzas, five lines each. It recounts a current day in the life of a person who takes care of a statue, for instance, she describes many cleaning and repairing processes. From the beginning of the poem up to the first half of the poem (until the fifth stanza) there is a long extended metaphor for a woman who is suffering the loss of someone she really loved, in this case her father, symbolized by the colossus, a statue which represented a deceased person in the ancient era and was meant to evoke the individual's presence as well as his absence. In this first part of the poem, she attempted to reconstruct...
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...“The Broken Heart” Analysis In John Donne’s poem, “The Broken Heart”, Donne shows the predacious nature of love and the true faintness of the heart through the use of metaphors. This poem sets a mood of despair and sorrow; moods that reveal the regret of love. It opens the reader’s eyes to realize just how vulnerable the heart can be when dealing with love. Donne associates love with the negative; he portrays it as some evil entity that overtakes people without warning and, if not careful, destroys them from the inside, out. In the first stanza of Donne’s poem, he describes how long the oh-so-terrible phenomenon of love lasts. He compares it to the plague and claims it has stuck with him for an entire year. He states that anyone who claims to have only been in love an hour, or a short duration at all, “is stark mad.” Donne makes a clear point that love simply cannot decay so soon. He compares the duration of love to a flask of powder burning in one day. I assume that it would take quite some time to use an entire flask of powder given the context of the text [small amounts of gun powder was used in the 1700’s and 1800’s for guns each time they were to be fired, and unless one of the soldiers chambered every round as fast as a sub-machine gun, it is very unlikely that they would have gone through an entire flask in one day]. Stanza two reveals Donne’s ideas about the characteristics of love and the heart. He says that once the heart has fallen into the hands of love, it...
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...Did you ever felt alone and sad in a moment of your life? Edgar Allan Poe reflects on his poem “The Raven” this two major feelings. In his poem he talked about the loss of his love, but in reality she was already death. He stood at the door watching the darkness and emptiness when he opened it, he was trying to figure what the tapping meant. Suddenly when he goes back to his chamber the tapping happened again and it was on his window, when he opened a raven got inside and perched on the bust of Pallas, the goddess of wisdom in Greek mythology, while speaking non-sense words he understood because it meant something for him whenever he asked a question to the raven. The raven symbolizes death, so in his mind he thought that it was time for him to go. Sadness, loneliness, and death are the main feelings of this poem which makes this poem one of the darkest poems I ever read. Sadness is a deep feeling of losing somebody or retain memories to a tragic moment in life. I have felt sad before, when I was young my mother was in danger of dying but I was there the whole time so she felt strong and made it out alive. In this case the feeling of sadness is because the protagonist has lost his true love and he is wondering when she is coming back, the truth is Lenore, the name of the woman he loves, is not coming back. Loneliness is one of the biggest fears of any human that’s why the protagonist felt comfortable when the raven replies “nevermore” to his question, are you going to leave...
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...suggests that it should be read to people. This is again because it is aimed at lower class and uneducated people who would have to have someone read it to them rather than reading it for themselves. It is written in the tradition of the street or broadside ballads, printed stories in verse that were sold cheaply and passed around for pleasure, often dealing with popular scandals and murder stories. In a time before the popular press and television chat shows, these ballads satisfied a need for entertaining stories, a tradition that has deep roots in oral traditions of storytelling and wandering minstrels.At the beginning of this poem, there is a description of a gentleman out hunting, which is an upper class activity, as they are the only people who could afford to take part in such an expensive activity, also by the fact he is described as a 'Gentleman' suggests he belongs to the upper class or 'Gentry'. The 'Gentleman gets separated from his group and spots the 'Beggar Woman'. He then propositions her for sex. She obliges and they wander off into the nearby wood. She is described as 'game', because really to the man that is all she is. The poem tells a traditional tale of a poor but attractive beggar woman, accosted by a local squire who intends to use her for his own sexual pleasure and then abandon her to her fate - something which the beggar woman has clearly experienced before, judging by the child strapped to her back. Appearing to go along with his wishes, she leads...
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... Talking Dirty to My God! My paper will be on 2 different poems and there from the book “Talking Dirty to the Gods”. The first poem is called Silkworm and the second poem is called Janus. Both the poems focus on the culture, beauty of life and history. My paper will in tell about the art of poetry and the art of how to tell a story inside of a story. When slaves were to tell stories, they couldn’t write down there dreams or there life and what they went through, so they were to say it in a story form. So they, meaning the kids would never forget there heritage. Therefore, when they became slaves they would sing songs and they would also make other things to remember there past to show there future. The first poem I chose was Silkworm on page.53 when reading the poem it made me think about love and how it was taken away from a lot of African Americans. In the first line it says “they made a fancy catch for a nightgown out of me”. When I first read this poem I, at first didn’t understand what the book was insinuating, but after reading that line about three times it made me think about the slaves and there body being taken advantage of and body being sold as if we were animals to be bought and used for pleasure. To look at this in a different way would be, were you are made to be someone else’s toy and to also not have a real purpose to have a say in anything. The second line of the poem that I would like to go more in depth is: “against her skin eager fingers...
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...Ha and the Universal Refugee Experience Refugees have to cross seas on rickety boats or airplanes, wait for help to come in freezing cold or boiling hot weather in order escape their country, but is it really all worth it. Is it really worth risking it all leaving their home country to go “inside out and back again” to find “home.” The book “Inside Out and Back Again” and Ha’s life is a mirror reflection of the Universal Refugee Experience, because refugees sometimes have to learn new languages and culture, refugees go through hard times escaping their country and getting to a safe one, and refugees have to stay in refugee camps. When refugees leave their country they sometimes have to go to a country where a different language is spoken,...
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...The children all stepped back as Margot slowly came out of the closet. With their heads down in shame, the cold not see the clear expression of pain of Margot’s small features. “The sun,” she whispered quietly, barely audible and without emotion.”The sun.” Suddenly and without warning, all the frustration and pain that had been welling up inside Margot exploded, like a balloon popped by a needle. As these emotions turned into tears, a new emotion began to seep into her soul. This emotion was new to Margot; it was deep, pure, and longing. Every tear that escaped Margot’s eyes reminded her of all the things she wanted. Every tear also took a small shard of pain away from Margot, until there was no more pain and no more tears to be shed. After the last desolated tear rolled down her face, she silently looked up. Sixteen pairs of concerned eyes met her. One by one, the children wrapped their arms around Margot’s body. She soon realized that these were the people who had taken her chance to see the sun. Yet, she felt no resentment or hate, just coldness inside of her. A girl with thin black hair walked over to Margot. She cleared her throat nervously. “It was beautiful,” stammered the girl. “It was just like you said it would be.” Margot could only nod; her voice seemed to have slipped away. “Excuse me,” Margot said meekly, forcing out the words.”I have to go home now.” The children nodded. They let her pass without argument. Marot walked over to the door, and then was...
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...along with analyzing their poems “Jabberwocky” and “The Idea of Ancestry”. One of my jobs as a member of this group was to research the author background for Lewis Carroll. When looking for information, I looked for specific things like where he worked, his life as a child, his family life, if he had run into any legal problems, and if there were any authors who influenced his writing. I searched for these because I thought that depending on the answers to those, I could find the deeper meaning within his poem. Being able to understand the author and relating the poem back to his life so I could interpret why he wrote it was difficult. Before I started my research on Carroll, I read both poems and tried to understand at least the surface level meaning. After getting the surface level meaning of these poems, I read the deeper meanings that the other people in my group provided so that I could have a base. I felt that this was important because maybe I picked up information that they didn’t and relate things that they couldn’t. The more people in our group that had a base and understanding, the better....
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...Is Miss Gee Ultimately A Comical Poem? In many ways, Miss Gee can be interpreted as a comical poem. Auden sustains a light hearted tone throughout, the traditional ABCB rhyming scheme imitates the format of a nursery rhyme providing a childish and facetious feel. The reader may also find Miss Gee’s inappropriate dream, implying her squalid, sexual encounters with the vicar comical. However, it could be argued Auden has used this light hearted, humorous tone to emphasise the harshness of the judgemental and uncaring society and make the audience question themselves for cruelly laughing at her unfortunate demise. At first glance, when reading the poem, the reader would not suspect it to lead to her death, with almost horrific details of the surgeon’s butchering dissections. This is due to the light hearted, nursery rhyme like tone through Auden’s use of short rhyming lines with heavy description of Miss Gee’s appearance. ‘She had a squint in her left eye / Her lips they were thin and small’. The descriptions give Miss Gee a ‘cartoon-esque’ impression and again make her and the overall poem appear quite comical. The fifteenth stanza, on line 59, ‘O, doctor, I’ve a pain inside of me’ although not a humorous line in itself, imitates the structure of the infamous ‘doctor, doctor’ jokes, making Miss Gee’s illness almost laughable. Many would argue and say that the blunt lines do not make the poem come across as funny, but uncomfortable and give the reader a sense of unease. Miss...
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