“Song of the Sky Loom” by the Tewa Indians, is a poem that has a passionate tone and speaks about the Tewa universe. The poem begins and ends with “O our Mother the Earth, Our Father the Sky (1 & 12),” which represents the cyclical worldview of the Native Americans and how the circle of life always repeats itself. This quote from the beginning and the end of the poem also represents the ancestor of things because it talks about family and how much it is respected, just like nature. The mother and father are an extended metaphor of the earth and how it never dies and continues everyday with new things being created. The imagery that is used throughout the poem to describe the nature is very enthusiastic.
In two poems “Sympathy” written by Paul Laurence Dunbar and “Caged Bird” written by Maya Angelou talk about a poor bird that is trapped in a cage and wants to be free. It longs for everything that the free bird has but it cannot achieve it. In both of the poems, there is a use of comparisons between freedom and nature. It is also interpreted from the poems that the use of a song is a form of coping for the birds. Both of the birds sing for their freedom and sing through their pain.
The bird symbolizes the manifestation of Yolanda’s words: “Delight and surprise are written all over its wing grin. It plummets down towards the sunning man on the lawn. Beak first, a dark and secret complex, a personality disorder let loose on the work, it plunges! ‘Oh no,’ Yo wails. ‘No, not him!’…And now, down it dives towards the man she wants immune to her words’’ (Page 84).
Each time, she mentioned the word "earth" to stress the unity between people. She adds an analogy between man and nature in the fact that both have histories. The personification in the evocation of the wind described as a person singing "Kiowa war" when natives were slaughtered, and dancing modern songs, implies that people do not have to forget their ancestors, their roots, their culture and history. Both the verbs singing and dancing demonstrates that the ancestors ' memory is alive. Moreover, as every action needs more than one person to be realized like language or dancing, also the existence of one 's life needed the contribution of numerous factors to occur.
Raami’s father expressed “I told you stories to give you wings, Raami, so that you would never be trapped by anything—your name, your title, the limits of your body, this world’s suffering”(134). This quote shows Raami was told countless stories which dealt with mythical creatures, animals, people their issues and how they were overcome, so that she may understand how she could apply the wisdom of those creatures and animals to reality. Eventually, Raami learned through the atrocities that has happened in Cambodia and she realized the survival is this that cannot do not lose of sense of self. She stated that, “If I was to survive my uprooting and transplantation, I must grow and stretch myself as a young rice shoot would. I must rise above the mire and muck, the savagery of my environment, while appearing to thrive in
The poem ends with the silencing of the man with the raven using his home as a permanent perching place. Despite the years of discussion over this work of literature throughout the years and many programs it has been involved in, it is still widely debated what the raven in the story actually represents. Within the poem his attitude towards the bird shifts into five different emotions, each one correlating with a stage of grief. The fact that Poe wrote it in this matter shows that the raven is supposed to represent grief, therefore the narrator is expressing his five stages at this physical manifestation of the grief itself. The first stage of the five is denial.
In the poem when Maya discusses the free bird, she is representing how whites are able to be happy and carefree and are encouraged to “claim the sky.” The white people in America during Maya’s time had an easy ticket to the so-called American dream. They never had to experience racial oppression. The blacks are the caged bird that is tied down and “sings of freedom” because freedom isn’t already given. Black people have to fight for what they deserve because they are denied their rights. Racism is the cage around the caged bird.
He seems to be excited about the visitor, but does not imagine it being a bird. After the unpleasant conversation with the raven, the speaker wishes to be alone and undisturbed once more: “Leave my loneliness unbroken!” (Poe). Though his separation from society is partially at fault for his madness, the speaker does not realize this. Dennis W. Eddings writes that Poe also intertwines a less obvious theme: “Imagination, unchecked by reason, leads to a dead end.” The raven sits idly atop Pallas, the goddess of wisdom, throughout the poem. This is symbolic of the raven controlling the speaker’s reason (Eddings).
In “The Great Scarf of Birds” by John Updike, the speaker concludes that his heart has been lifted by the image of a gray scarf. The poem is marked with joy and reverence to the natural world around the speaker, but there is sadness in his last few words. The speaker prepares the reader for this conclusion through an abundance of imagery, similes, and poem structure. The speaker opens the poem by describing his setting through a series of individual but connected natural images. The reader is immediately shown ripe red apples from Cape Ann in October, and one after another, the speaker uses similes to compare one part of nature to another.
“The Weaver Bird” contains a speaker who also explains his attitude towards the European colonization with a few disparate views. As a matter of fact, his tone is bitter as he describes how the Europeans destroyed their way of life and diminished their culture: “We watched the building of the nest (4)” . His tone remains bitter throughout the poem, however, towards the end, the tone transitions to hope. The speaker explains how the Africans were determined not to lose their culture, but they were unable to prevent it: “We look for new homes every day / For new altars we strive to build (15-16)”. Adding more, the speaker implies that even though the Africans were foreigners in their own country, they are searching for new homes and seeking to rebuild their “Africa” and “The Weaver Bird” have numerous contrasting features that make the poem different to each other.