Prufrock Allusions

William Shakespeare’s titular character in the play The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark is a young prince who is overwrought with grief after his father’s death. The king’s sudden death has a negative impact on Hamlet’s state of mind and psyche. Through Hamlet’s thoughts and soliloquies, the audience can see the main character’s obsession with spirituality, death, and mortality. Hamlet’s fixation on life after death causes his descent into madness. Because of this, spirituality, death, and mortality are the most important themes in Hamlet.

Everyone has to deal with loss and Shakespeare understood that within his play Hamlet. Throughout the play Hamlet is dealing with the loss of his father, in fact he gives several soliloquies about it. Perhaps the most famous soliloquy given is the one from Act III, scene i. Hamlet begins with the famous line, “To be, or not to be, that is the question:”(1). Although there are many literary devices used within this excerpt, the most prominent are syntax, diction, and imagery, and Shakespeare creatively uses each to portray Hamlet’s state of mind.

Love causes people to do strange things. People either love the idea of love, or desire to run as far away from it as possible. Clarence Hervey is a character that has good intentions to be liked by others and to find this love; however, he is arrogant and easily swayed, causing him to lack moral values and turn away from his true self. This is evident through Edgeworth’s use of contrasting diction, capricious syntax and deceptive imagery.

Poems are very unique from other types of writings. For one, a poem’s structure is very different and unique compared to an essay or story’s formatting. Poems are used to talk about experiences, express ideas or emotions, and imaginative thinking. Readers can make different connections and find their own different meanings in poems. Many poems, like the essayist’s Richard Harrison’s work, deeply explore universal ideas about death, love, grief, and the mystery of life. Many readers, like myself, can find connections with Harrison’s poems on such topics of life and loss and deeper meaning hidden in the poem. Not only could I make connections with some of Harrison’s poems, but I also made new understandings and realizations

In Timothy Steele’s Sapphics and Uncertainties, “The Skimming Stone” reminds readers on how death can take hold of someone anytime and how precious friendships are. This is a sonnet dedicated to Steele’s dearest friend Billy Knight, who died of a heart attack at a young age of thirty-eight. In this sonnet, Steele, as the poetic speaker, reflects back at a certain part of time in his past when he witnessed his friend Knight pockets a smooth stone. What was the significance of that very action? The poetic speaker is left pondering whether it was, perhaps, a foreshadowing of his friend sensing his early death in life and that stone for him became a significant

In the 20th century poem “Sympathy” Paul Laurence Dunbar uses imagery, irony, and repetition to develop the three shifting tones. In addition, he points out that without freedom individuals will feel trapped and wounded.

In the poem “on the subway” Sharon Olds brings together two worlds , one reflects the life of a common working person, and the other is referred to as the life of a common criminal. This poem has a lot of imagery that helps bring the meaning of the poem. The author’s tone is full of insecurity and fear. The poem is organized to let the reader notice step by step what the narrator is thinking.

The poem “Richard Cory” is a poem by Edwin Robinson telling of the third person view of the life of a man who seems to have it all. Everyone living in the town alongside Richard holds him up on a pedestal. They look up to and admire him because he is of a higher socioeconomic class and appears to be extremely happy. In the end, however, the people of the town learn a valuable lesson when Richard Cory commits suicide. In the following paragraphs, I will describe the ways in which the speaker’s style of writing contributes to the overall meaning of the poem and then describe a few of the themes being carried across to the audience.

In this elegy, Seeger uses repetition, personification and diction. The repetition is evident as he writes “I have a rendezvous with death” (Seeger) several times in the poem. The personification of death as the subject of the story is a unique aspect of the story. Seeger also personifies spring in an ironic manner. The irony is evident when Seeger writes, “When Spring comes back with rustling shade… I have a rendezvous with death.” (Seeger). This allows for an interesting contrast between the life and beauty of spring and the cold and grim nature of death. Another instance of this is “I have a rendezvous with Death; when spring brings back blue days and fair.” (Seeger). Seeger uses diction in an artful manner in order to achieve contradictory meanings and manipulate the connotations of the reader. An example of such a paradox is in the sentence, “I have a rendezvous with

In the poem, “The Broken Heart” by John Dunne the theme of pain is supported through imagery and metaphors. Through the author’s vivid portrayals of tragedy, the reader understands that his idea of love is very bleak.

1. I see the connection between Faulkner’s stories and the poetry of Sylvia’s Path are the characters. Sylvia path’s is about a young women named Esther Greenwood entering college and she has dreams of becoming a famous writer while the rest of the girls just wasn’t to find a husband. “Her

The author T.S. Eliot was in my opinion a highly educated man looking at his educational background. For reference Eliot attended Harvard for both his undergraduate and graduate degrees. Not to mention Eliot studied abroad in Paris as well. However, Eliot could not have been able to receive such high education if it were not for his parents who had good jobs and provided Eliot with a comfortable upbringing. Likewise in terms of having wealthy people of high attainments in one’s life, Eliot’s grandfather, a Unitarian minister, had founded Washington University!

The answer to whether love is true or faithless is not always concrete, and it is this question that plagues the speaker in Philip Larkin’s An Arundel Tomb. The poem centralizes itself around the medieval tomb of the Earl and Countess of Arundel, in which the speaker questions the validity of the statues’ seemingly eternal love. Although historical allusions offer hints and statements about the infidelious nature of the time period, and bring into question the accuracy of the couple’s portrayal, connotations, unlike facts, are not set in stone. Despite the challenges bias towards periods of history presents, love ultimately prevails as an ideal that transcends time.

She evokes compassion for Mary by indirection: by focusing attention, not on the religious theme itself, but on the artistry of Michaelangelo who “saw” and was able to represent in stone “what a girl may do for Gods”( “Michaelangleo’s First Pieta”). Through his art, Michelangelo is able to “carve a compassion/ / But more. It is a prayer that he is saying / Wordless.” The statue he carves and the poem which celebrates it are aesthetic objects, and the process of creating these objects can be seen as a form of personal religious experience. The link between religious and aesthetic experience is affirmed in the final line, which suggests the peace normally attained through thought and contemplation of representations of Mary and Christ, and the completion of a work of art: “This girl he is displaying/ Has also brought him rest”

Intro: Within the poem, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, there are many characteristics of Modernism that make it a true Modernist Poem. Characteristics such as theme, structure, and style are modernistic in the way that they are portrayed in this poem.