The narrator in Matthew Zapruder’s “Schwinn,” has a very bleak and empty perspective of his childhood, along with how it shapes him into the person he is today. At the very beginning of the poem, an inner struggle presents itself. To put differently, the narrator is undoubtedly unhappy with his life and identity: “I hate the phrase ‘inner life’ My attic hurts, / and I’d like to quit the committee / for naming tornadoes” (1-3). The symbolism in this section is essential for the understanding of the poem. Terms the narrator uses have a purpose, such as “attic” and “committee for naming tornadoes”.
Author, Robert Penn Warren, in his poem Evening Hawk, he portrays how mankind is ignorant of their life being. Warren’s purpose is to illustrate the means of life. He does so by adopting a melancholic tone in order to obtain the readers attention of humanity’s mistakes. Warren expresses the ideas of how time is never ending, that our days are judged upon, and the ignorance of humanity can have. Time is continuous and so are human mistakes, but at the end of the day everybody will be judged.
As life persists, humans continue to make the same mistakes that we have been making for many years. The poem “Evening Hawk” by Robert Penn Warren is about the continuous errors of humanity, which is forgotten in the past, as death keeps approaching and society progresses. The poet uses imagery, diction, symbolism, and other figurative language devices throughout the poem to convey the dark mood and deeper meaning of history and death in the poem. The poem begins with a beautiful scene of the vast mountains and a hawk flying through it.
“The Raven” by Edgar Poe is written with the analogy of the mind, especially the conscious and subconscious attitude of the mind. The poem is interesting in the sense that the readers could argue over the events in the poem are not happening to the narrator himself, but by preference, within him, and especially within is mind. The poem begins with a dark emphasis “…midnight dreary...” (Poe), which postures the famous stage of Edgar Poe in The Raven.
seems as if it is a mad man who keeps on repeating the same thing over and over again. This adds to the dark and madness that seems to be taking place within the narrator’s mind. He seems to be completely crazy by this moment in time. This accompanies the dark and depressive tone of the poem.
In his poem “an Echo Sonnet, To an Empty Page” poet Robert Pack introduces a narrator and his alter ego who exchange questions and answers that subsequently reveals the poet’s prospects and attitudes toward life. The narrator, or “the voice,” seems like a timid man who is afraid to plunge into his own life, because he fears the future and inevitable consequences of his mortality. The “echo,” which is the narrator’s alter ego, or a persona, answers the the voice’s questions in a way that drive the voice to take a certain prospect in life. Pack designed the poem masterfully in a way that it utilizes the traditional form of a shakespearean sonnet and an addendum of on “echo,” which communicates a cleaner and more direct message to the readers. Furthermore various literary techniques such as symbols, extraposition, and imagery add to the meaning of the poem Through form and literary techniques, Robert Pack emphasizes, through the answers of the “echo,” that no matter how frightening life seems to be, it is important to take a “leap.”
The imagery of the first poem greatly contrasts from the overall tone. In “A Barred Owl,” Richard Wilbur describes an owl frightening a child and waking her from her slumber. Wilbur sets the scene with dark imagery: “The warping night air brought the boom/ Of an owl’s voice into her darkened
Freedom is a right that every human should have. Without freedom, the world is a dim and dull place. The poem,“Hurt Hawks” by Robinson Jeffers is about injured hawks that face the issue of no longer having freedom and feeling defeated. Throughout this poem, Jeffers uses symbolism, exposition, conflict, tone, as well as falling and rising action to deliver a poem with character. The second piece of literature, “Silent Protest” by Shadi Eskandani is about the fight for women’s rights in the Muslim religion and culture. The women are protesting for freedom of choice, they want to be able to make their own decisions on what they can do and wear without being scolded for their actions by the men. The author uses symbolism, stereotypes, exposition, irony, and conflict in the short story to develop a well-rounded approach to the issue. The two works of literature are connected by the common theme of freedom and the want for all creatures to have it. Freedom should not be a privilege, freedom should be a right.
“Hurt Hawks”, by Robinson Jeffers, tells the story of a hawk whose wing is hurt and a man who makes the decision to take the hawk out of its misery by killing it. Jeffers describes the hawk in the first stanza of the poem by stating, “The broken pillar of the wing jags from the clotted shoulder, / The wing trails like a banner in defeat, / No more to use the sky forever but live with famine” (Lines 1-3). Jeffers is describing the hawk’s broken wing as the bone protrudes from the skin and blood has clotted on its wing. He describes the wing as white like a flag of surrendering to his fait. Additionally, he implies that the bird will never fly again, which means that it will be in agonizing pain and die of starvation. Jeffers goes on to state, “The wild God of the world is sometimes merciful to those/ that ask for mercy, not often to the arrogant” (13-14). Jeffers could be referring to the Christian God who shows mercy to those who believe in him and do his work while on earth. Jesus Christ rewards those who are not arrogant and do not sin against him, rather live in fellowship with him. The hawk is depicted as arrogant and humble in his last moments before death and had he asked for mercy he might have had an easier passing.
By setting a standard through the innocent, “little black dog” and the content bird, the poet makes the harsh man stand out and really fail to be an ideal person. The bird and the dog live life without a care, knowing that “everything is answered, all taken care of”, although the speaker has worries about life and cannot escape the ideas of yesterday. Instead of being okay with the present moment, the speaker is stuck in a time that he can’t change, rendering him unable to focus on the positives that the morning has to offer. The poems “Five A.M.” and “Five Flights Up” have contrasting ideas.
Under such a silver-lined sky I hurry, small under it, head bent in deep concern for this park’s walk, hellish and pulled ahead by my hell-bent beagle Sergeant. With my wind-filled black collar blown back, with a brown-and-white Sergeant ear wind-turned inside out, the pup pulls me on by empty park bench after empty park bench, empty benches without an old man to catch his hat from blowing off, empty benches without an old woman to rest her inflamed feet, empty benches into which lovers’ names remain engraved. We rush past the melancholic burnt oranges and rusts and deep purples of the fall trees along this walk only to overhear our vanquished futures spoken by the river’s dark water trickling over black rocks. And so we travel from the depths
When I first opened my book to start reading Easter Wings, I was taken of guard by its shape as well as the fact that it was side ways. I did not understand why this poem, reading, was different form all the other ones we had read in the past. However, once I finished reading it became a bit clearer as to why this one was different from all the rest. Easter Wings is a two-stanza poem's built on a back-and-forth between hopelessness and optimism. First comes the disappointment; in the first half of each stanza, Herbert describes the downward spiral of human life.
“I Was Sleeping Where the Black Oaks Move” written by Louise Erdrich focuses on a child and a grandfather horrifically observing a flood consuming their entire village and the surrounding trees, obliterating the nests of the herons that had lived there. In the future they remember back to the day when they started cleaning up after the flood, when they notice the herons without their habitat “dancing” in the sky. According to the poet’s biographical context, many of the poems the poet had wrote themselves were a metaphor. There could be many viable explanations and themes to this fascinating poem, and the main literary devices that constitute this poem are imagery, personification, and a metaphor.
Let’s start by looking at the protagonist of the poem who illustrates a lot of psychoanalytical issues in his ordeal with the raven. From the start of the poem to the end, the reader can recognize and identify many defenses. Some of them include selective memory, selective deception, selective perception, denial and displacement especially towards the end. The most significant issue presented in the poem is the fear of being abandoned. Let me delve deeper into the subject.
One of the aspects of “Wild Geese” that truly struck my fifth-grade self was its use of imagery—I was drawn in particular to the extensive visual imagery in lines 8-13 (“Meanwhile the sun…heading home again”) and awed by the ability of text to evoke images of such clarity. Moreover, in addition to the intrigue of its use of literary devices and the complexity of its recitation, interpreting “Wild Geese” and finding meaning within it was a process that continued well beyond the end of my fifth-grade year, and the connotations of that poem continue to resonate with me. While the entirety of this story is too personal to share herein, “Wild Geese” was a poem that spoke to me on a very personal level. As I sometimes have a tendency to hold myself to unrealistic standards, “Wild Geese” was to me a reminder of the relative insignificance of the trivial matters with which I would preoccupy myself; nature became a symbol of that which existed beyond my narrow fixations and the wild geese a reflection of the inexorable passage of time—in essence, a reminder that “this too shall