Analyzing Jordan Matthews's 'Emerging'

'In Cardigan Market' and 'A Peasant' both present characters in their own environment. After examining the poems in detail, compare the ways in which the two poets present these characters.

Poets and other writers often express life through their works and characters. Some poems convey a depressing, gloomy attitude towards life, while others show the world as a joyful and simple place. Two skilled creative writers, Edgar Lee Masters and Edwin Arlington Robinson, wrote detailed poems describing the lives of characters with extremely different perspectives on life. Many obvious differences can be identified between the lives of Robinson’s Miniver Cheevy and Masters’s Lucinda Matlock.

In “Marigolds” by Eugenia Collier the coming of age short story where a now grown up Lizabeth reminisce her childhood especially going into Ms.Lottie’s garden. Ms. Lottie, who did not like children but treated her precious marigolds gets them destroyed by Lizabeth. After destroying them, Lizabeth realizes her errors believing she became a women in that moment. This short story has several literary device that are used in it to help deepen the meaning. The use of imagery, symbolism and metaphors in “Marigolds” helps the reader that it is important to not lose

Life experiences play a major role in the way that people view everyday activities and the world around them. The Japanese culture places an emphasis on respect and peace, but it also strongly encourages valuing nature. In the novel, The Samurai’s Garden, by Gail Tsukiyama, the gardens of Sachi and Matsu are similar in the way that they represent their gardener’s lives by exposing their creator’s personality through its ambience and past experiences through its design.

Lee Maracle’s “Charlie” goes through multiple shifts in mood over the course of the story. These mood are ones of hope and excitement as Charlie and his classmates escape the residential school to fear of the unknown and melancholy as Charlie sets off alone for home ending with despair and insidiousness when Charlie finally succumbs to the elements . Lee highlights these shifts in mood with the use of imagery and symbolism in her descriptions of nature.

In her poem, “Crossing the Swamp,” Mary Oliver uses vivid diction, symbolism, and a tonal shift to illustrate the speaker’s struggle and triumph while trekking through the swamp; by demonstrating the speaker’s endeavors and eventual victory over nature, Oliver conveys the beauty of the triumph over life’s obstacles, developing the theme of the necessity of struggle to experience success.

In Ann Petry’s The Street, the urban setting is portrayed as harsh and unforgiving to most. Lutie Johnson, however, finds the setting agreeable and rises to challenges posed by the city in order to achieve her goals. Petry portrays this relationship through personification, extended metaphor, and imagery.

Budge Wilson, in “The Metaphor,” writes about Ms. Hancock, a beloved teacher. Charlotte writes a metaphor in seventh grade relating her mother to a cold, grey building. When Wilson writes about Ms. Hancock, she describes her as being colorful and warm. Charlotte saw Ms. Hancock more as a mother figure than her own mother. However, when Ms. Hancock stops being her teacher, Charlotte starts to become more like her mother. Although, when Ms. Hancock dies, she breaks free of the hold of her mother and is “born” a new person. In the end, Charlotte realizes that adults can not see the beauty in people like Ms.Hancock, yet children can. Through juxtaposition, symbolism, and irony, Wilson describes Charlotte’s self-realization of life.

The book Touching Spirit Bear is a breath-taking book that is full of healing and change. Cole’s journey of healing and forgiveness starts out slow, but picks up the pace. This journey will show the reader how one can change so much.

Elisa is experiencing conflict with each person she encounters on several levels, as well as with nature itself as she tends the garden and lives life. The garden itself is changing Elisa’s physical characteristics as the story unfolds. The internal conflict Elisa works through is the most prevalent, allowing for a round character. Steinbeck exposes this in multiple dialogs throughout the short story that reveal a character full of inner turmoil about who she is and what she wants out of life. Steinbeck reveals a sense of lostness and need for something more in Elisa here “Elisa Brought him a fifty-cent piece from the house and dropped it in his hand. “you might be surprised to have a rival some time,. I can sharpen scissors. Too. And I can beat the dents out of little pots. I could show you what a woman might do.”” (851), as the reader see’s she tries to find herself in letting the traveler know she is capable of the same things he

By creating a world for herself within nature, Pearl mocks the institutionalized society surrounding her, proving how she is the most transcendental character. Nathaniel Hawthorne chooses to describe Pearl Hester as “material of [the] earth” and “a lovely and immortal flower” to show how she possesses natural qualities, something characteristic of a transcendentalist (61, 62). In addition to possessing “beautiful and brilliant…[natural] elements,” Pearl develops an individualistic relationship with nature (62). While in “seclusion from human society,” Pearl creates “her [own] inner world,” using “a stick, a bunch of rags, [and] a flower” to depict a variety of “imaginary personages” (65). By using the “black and solemn…pine-trees” to represent

Have you ever felt that your view of things change when you get older? Well, that’s how Jacqueline Woodson felt. As we grow and change, so do our perspectives on a variety of things that we experience in life. In the beginning, Woodson introduces that since she got older, her perspective of her once beloved home has changed as a central idea of the story. By observing how her character changes over the course of the plot, it seems evident that Woodson is trying to convey to the reader that a person’s view of things change as one gets older.

The Other Wes Moore is a novel about two men named Wes Moore, who were both born in Baltimore City, Maryland with similar childhoods. The author, Wes Moore, describes the path the two took in order to determine their fates today. Moore, the author, is a successful scholar, decorated veteran, and a political and business leader, while the other, who will be differentiated as Wes, ended up serving a life sentence for murder. Within both of their life stories, the novel’s sensory, description, and metaphors, can be analyzed into a deeper meaning. Wes had been living his whole life in the streets of Baltimore, grew up fatherless and was left with a brother named Tony who was involved in drugs, crime, and other illegal activity. Starting in the

Ernest Hemingway’s characters are frequently tested in their faith, beliefs, and ideas. To Hemingway’s characters, things that appear to be grounded in reality and unmovable facts frequently are not, revealing themselves to be hollow, personal mythologies. Hemingway shakes his characters out of their comfortable ignorance through traumatic events that usually cause a certain sense of disillusionment with characters mythologies, moving them to change their way of life. His characters usually, after becoming disillusioned, respond with depression, suicide, and nihilism. However, this is not always the case. Some characters break the mold and, instead of treating disillusionment with hostility, step back into the illusion in which they once lived

Simply, a flower can often be thought of as a personality. Shrivelling, blooming, decaying, and growing, inside out and back again through times of peace, danger, and war. The main character of Inside Out and Back Again, Ha, along with real-life refugees, had been living in Vietnam, and other countries, their whole life. As Communist soldiers came to demolish townships and a way of life during the Vietnam War, Ha is left with no hope, and became a refugee, fleeing to America, a country filled with challenges for all. Through the times from Vietnam to America, Ha has advanced and changed, as though a flower, taking the role of a parent, rather than the child she once was.