Mary Oliver’s “Crossing the Swamp” describes a journey through a metaphorical swamp and uses it to demonstrate the potential for growth and change through overcoming hardships. Within the poem, the speaker’s relationship with this swamp is grueling, yet rewarding, revealing how difficult situations typically seen as unfortunate can actually be renewing. Through the use of personification and intimate imagery, the poet develops an affectionate relationship between the speaker and the swamp. Though imagery, used in nearly all pieces of literature, is always relevant, it is especially significant in “Crossing the Swamp.” The speaker shows their affection for this figurative swamp by using terms such as “succulent marrows” and “dark burred faintly belching bogs,” giving life to the otherwise dull images. Descriptions such as these effectively develop a personal connection between the reader and the swamp as well. Positive words such as “painted” and ”glittered” bring the more promising aspects of the speaker’s struggles to light and show that though there are difficulties in life, there is always beauty within them. …show more content…
Seemingly a simple, artistic description of a tree, these words also show the changed feelings of the speaker at the end of their journey through this swamp. After all their struggles that they once found difficult to even understand, the reader suddenly pictures this beautiful, inspirational tree, signifying a new life along a new journey. That newfound optimism also signifies closure for the speaker, and proves that they are capable of overcoming anything and nthat the resulting personal growth makes all struggles worth it in the
Hannah Taulealea Ms.Wilson Block 2: Night Essay rough draft 19 April 2017 Inhumanity to Humans In the heart-rending and powerful book Night by Eli Wiesel, inhumanity and great mistreatment toward the people of the Jewish religion during the times of the Holocaust are described throughout using stylistic elements such as: Imagery and figurative language. Eli Wiesel incorporates these elements often in his book which helps the readers to understand the idea of inhumanity quite clearly. Imagery is used strongly in this book and it’s especially shown at many points during. It helps to aid the reader’s thought process and imagination of what happened in the story by using specifics such as words and phrases to help one
Abound.” This passage uses pleasant diction to depict the environment of the swamp. The swamp seems to be filled with wildlife, flowers and
Poverty in the Rural South of America People in poverty aspire to live similar to a middle-class citizen or a person who lives a life with no stress. In the memoir, Change Me into Zeus’s Daughter Barbara Moss illustrates the difficult conditions of a common family living in poverty in rural Alabama. Moss suffers from an abusive father who is addicted to alcohol, a mother who tolerates the abusive relationship of her husband, and lack of the minimum essentials to maintain living. The lack of minimum essentials includes food, health, and housing. The hardships of being in poverty inspire Moss to change her future.
Mary Oliver in her poem, “Crossing the Swamp,” utilizes allegory, alliteration, metaphor, and tone to convey an intricate relationship between herself and the swamp, that being her struggles in her life. A relationship that starts out with fear and ends in acceptance, stagnation to triumph, darkness to light; a relationship that allows her to be reborn. The swamp is a metaphor, described as “struggle, closure,” “the center of everything;” the swamp represents the obstacles Oliver faces in her life. She enters the swamp that is “murky” with “dense sap” and “branching vines,” and Oliver must struggle in the swamp in order to move forward. But there is a lack of direction in life and no one struggles the same and no one travels the same path,
“An Entrance to the Woods” is an essay by Wendell Berry about the serenity and importance of nature in his life. In this essay, the author uses tone shifts from dark to light to convey his idea of finding rebirth and rejuvenation through nature. In the beginning of the essay, Berry has left civilization for the first time in a while, and finds himself missing human company and feeling “inexplicably sad” (671). This feeling of sadness is in part from the woods itself, and partly due to Berry leaving the hustle and bustle of normal life in the cities, and the violent change from constant noise to silence causes him to feel lonely in the woods. As a result of feeling alone in the woods, the tone of the essay is dark and brooding, as seen through Berry’s somber diction and mood, as seen on page 671: “And then a heavy feeling of melancholy and lonesomeness comes over me.
Mary Oliver’s poem “Wild Geese” was a text that had a profound, illuminating, and positive impact upon me due to its use of imagery, its relevant and meaningful message, and the insightful process of preparing the poem for verbal recitation. I first read “Wild Geese” in fifth grade as part of a year-long poetry project, and although I had been exposed to poetry prior to that project, I had never before analyzed a poem in such great depth. This process of becoming intimately familiar with the poem—I can still recite most of it to this day—allowed it to have the effect it did; the more one engulfs oneself in a text, the more of an impact that text will inevitably have. “Wild Geese” was both revealing and thought-provoking: reciting it gave me
The speaker does not dwell on the hardships he has just endured, but instead remarks that he feels “painted and glittered.” The diction used towards the end of the work conveys the new attitude of the speaker. He is overcome with his triumph over the swamp, and now indulges in the beauty of new life and rebirth after struggle. Oliver’s strong diction conveys the speaker’s transformation and personal growth over
This passage from “A white Heron”, by Sarah Orne Jewett, details a short yet epic journey of a young girl, and it is done in an entertaining way. Jewett immediately familiarizes us with our protagonist, Sylvia, in the first paragraph, and our antagonist: the tree. However, this is a bit more creative, as the tree stands not only as an opponent, but as a surmountable object that can strengthen and inspire Sylvia as she climbs it. This “old pine” is described as massive, to the point where it, “towered above them all and made a landmark for sea and shore miles and miles away.” (Line 8).
Jewett uses different literary techniques and ideas to convey a message of endurance and perseverance through the taxing and overwhelming environment that leads to victory and triumph for Sylvia. The tree is described using vivid imagery, first being an obstacle then becoming a marvel and beautiful after enduring pain and suffering.
Take a look at an apple tree, the tree lives in the perfect world, growing in a stable environment, compared to the struggling world that the Joshua tree undergoes. In the book “The Glass Castle” written by Jeannette Walls, the following quote took my interest and sparked great wisdom. “Mom frowned at me. “You’d be destroying what makes it special,” she said. “It’s the Joshua tree’s struggle that gives it its beauty.
Alice Walker uses imagery and diction throughout her short story to tell the reader the meaning of “The Flowers”. The meaning of innocence lost and people growing up being changed by the harshness of reality. The author is able to use the imagery to show the difference between innocence and the loss of it. The setting is also used to show this as well.
Washington Irving, an 18th century author, wrote a short story based on the legend of Faust which he named “The Devil and Tom Walker”. In “The Devil and Tom Walker” Washington Irving uses imagery to establish mood. First, when Tom Walker takes a shortcut home through a swamp, Irving describes the swamp as follows “The swamp was was thickly grown with great gloomy pines and hemlocks, some of them ninety feet high, which made it dark at noonday, and a retreat for all the owls of the neighborhood. It was full of pits and quagmires, partly covered with weeds and mosses, where the green surface often betrayed the traveler into a gulf of black, smothering mud; there were also dark and stagnant pools, the abodes of the tadpole, the bullfrog, and the watersnake; where the trunks of pines and hemlocks lay half-drowned, half-rotting, looking like alligators sleeping in the mire.
As long as humans rely on some combination of the five senses, authors will be able to appeal to their readers through the use of sensory descriptors. Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald utilize the five senses to express their imagistic style and create an atmosphere in their literature for their readers. The Great Gatsby and The Old Man and the Sea are riddled with allusions to the senses in every scene. The use of sensory description allows the author to portray the feeling or mood of certain fictional situations their characters find themselves in. The reader experiences this fictional atmosphere which allows for them to understand such literary devices as foreshadowing, imagery, and figurative language at play.
Adventure and desire are common qualities in humans and Sarah Orne Jewett’s excerpt from “A White Heron” is no different. The heroine, Sylvia, a “small and silly” girl, is determined to do whatever it takes to know what can be seen from the highest point near her home. Jewett uses literary elements such as diction, imagery, and narrative pace to dramatize this “gray-eyed child” on her remarkable adventure. Word choice and imagery are necessary elements to put the reader in the mind of Sylvia as she embarks on her treacherous climb to the top of the world. Jewett is picturesque when describing Sylvia’s journey to the tip of one unconquered pine tree.
Dana Gioia’s poem, “Planting a Sequoia” is grievous yet beautiful, sombre story of a man planting a sequoia tree in the commemoration of his perished son. Sequoia trees have always been a symbol of wellness and safety due to their natural ability to withstand decay, the sturdy tree shows its significance to the speaker throughout the poem as a way to encapsulate and continue the short life of his infant. Gioia utilizes the elements of imagery and diction to portray an elegiac tone for the tragic death, yet also a sense of hope for the future of the tree. The poet also uses the theme of life through the unification of man and nature to show the speaker 's emotional state and eventual hopes for the newly planted tree. Lastly, the tree itself becomes a symbol for the deceased son as planting the Sequoia is a way to cope with the loss, showing the juxtaposition between life and death.