All Life is Immortal
It is the natural agenda of life to clear out the old, withering past and create a semi-new present generation. Through human constructs like poetry, stories, and legacies, the past is often preserved or even revisited. Poet Rennie McQuilkin proves that it is through nature’s cycle of rebirth that people create these constructs greater than themselves to ultimately connect and preserve the links between past and future.
In his poem, “On The Rotting of Apples,” McQuilkin uses the idea of “spirit seeds” to convey the cyclical nature of rebirth and the passing down of one’s legacy. He explores the cyclical decay and regrowth of apple seeds, as they pertain figuratively to a human’s life. All aging humans look beyond themselves
…show more content…
He writes, “sit for me again...in your father’s salmon pink chair cockeyed with gratitude.” The speaker’s request to have his mom sit in the pink chair is intentionally placed in the first line of the first and last stanza. Since his mom is no longer alive, the only way to revisit the lustful past is to keep her alive through memories and constructs of her existence. The chair is personified with gratitude as it serves as the persisting memory of her mom and her passion to read. Thus, with momentos like this, “the heirloom clock, not stopped” are possible because like a cycle, the time with his mom is revisited. He continues his argument that the dead never truly die with the memory of a story; he writes, “Retell the stories, show vistas of the night: dead friends wearing jeweled masks, gaudy fingernails painted gold and pink.” Simply, the vistas, or mental views of remembered events, are cyclically revisited through constructs like her timeless stories. The story of the dead celebrating in a masquerade with sun-colored fingernails conveys that through stories, the dead are reborn with the sunrise. Each day brings back the past as long as stories are kept as memories. McQuilkin tells readers that although one cannot physically revisit the past through anything beyond memory, the stories provide “another day for you to celebrate.” The use of the word “you,” rather than “Mother” or “my love,” serves as a universal reminder to all that stories, in general, allow one to revisit and embrace the past. Ultimately, his mother’s life in time has not stopped ticking because the vista of dawn, before she died, can be relived everyday. McQuilkin aims to impart a genuine belief that like the speaker 's mother, one becomes immortal through lasting legacies and reminders of earlier
“Yet surrounded by memories and ghosts, / they are waiting for the next harvest with hope” (15 – 16) the memories coincide with the harvest! 40 years have come and gone but every harvest allows a sense of expectancy and excitement. The fruit of his labor is manifested every harvest
Moral Can someone keep their good morals after a battle that made history? The book April Morning by Howard Fast is a story about a boy named Adam who wants to be treated like a man. His family, he, and the town got in to a battle; one of them is Joseph Simmons his cousin who fights right beside him. The character Joseph Simmons is a man that is strong moral, a soldier, and surrogated father. Joseph has a strong moral and shows it for everyone to see.
McCarthy continues to elicit this hopeless tone through grim imagery as the man and boy journey down the bleak road and come across “a corpse in a doorway dried to leather. Grimacing at the day” (12), further emphasizing the horror of the world that is the man and boy’s reality. McCarthy solidifies these horrors of the present and then drags the man back to his past, filling the past with hope-filled diction such as: “yellow leaves”(13), “aching blue”(18) and “music”(18); utilizing beautiful imagery in a flashback the man has after the man and boy discuss a lake no longer filled with fish, the flashback describing “ a falcon fall down the long blue wall of the mountain… trailing its loose and blowsy plumage in the still autumn air” (20), this memory allowing the man to remember the days when life had color
In “My son, my executioner” by Donald Hall and Sharon Olds’ “35/10,” both speakers explore the duality of life and death and how their children serve as a reminder of their mortality. In “My son, my executioner,” the speaker acknowledges that the birth of his son is also the coming of their deaths. The father holds his son in his arms and shows an understanding that this cycle is inevitable: We twenty-five and twenty-two, Who seemed to live forever, Observe enduring life in you And start to die together.
The Awakening, Kate Chopin Chapters 27-39 Reading Journal Part III Chapters 27-30 Summary Edna and Alcee are alone in her house together. They talk about Reisz and Arobin says that Reisz is insane. Edna defends her but Alcee insists that they talk about Edna instead. Then he kisses her and she kisses him back.
Imagine being a 17 year old African American kid always being judged just because of his skin color. Everywhere you go you feel like all eyes are on you, especially when you go to a school that only has eight black kids. That's exactly how Justyce McAllister felt in Dear Martin by Nic Stone. In the book, the main character Justyce goes through a lot of conflict involving his skin color. Even though he has a full scholarship at Braselton Preparatory Academy, and is a very smart student, he still gets judged.
The poems of North of Eden perpetuate a theme of perpetual love in nature and humans alike. In the poem “Holding On”, McQuilkin explores a relationship between a man and a car. However, the car is portrayed as a humanoid being which he loves. Even though the car is old, his love continues to be expressed for
The author of A Thousand Splendid Suns demonstrates the significance of motherly love through Nana, Laila, and Mariam. The novel gives the reader a better insight of how passionate a mother’s love for her children can be, and how far she may go for the love of her
In Terrance Hayes’s poem “Mr. T-,” the speaker presents the actor Laurence Tureaud, also known as Mr. T, as a sellout and an unfavorable role model for the African American youth for constantly playing negative, stereotypical roles for a black man in order to achieve success in Hollywood. The speaker also characterizes Mr. T as enormous and simple-minded with a demeanor similar to an animal’s to further his mockery of Mr. T’s career. The speaker begins his commentary on the actor’s career by suggesting that The A-Team, the show Mr. T stars in, is racist by mentioning how he is “Sometimes drugged / & duffled (by white men) in a cockpit,” which seems to draw illusions to white men capturing and transporting slaves to new territories during the time of the slave trade (4-5).
Stories are the foundation of relationships. They represent the shared lessons, the memories, and the feelings between people. But often times, those stories are mistakenly left unspoken; often times, the weight of the impending future mutes the stories, and what remains is nothing more than self-destructive questions and emotions that “add up to silence” (Lee. 23). In “A Story” by Li-Young Lee, Lee uses economic imagery of the transient present and the inevitable and fear-igniting future, a third person omniscient point of view that shifts between the father’s and son’s perspective and between the present and future, and emotional diction to depict the undying love between a father and a son shadowed by the fear of change and to illuminate the damage caused by silence and the differences between childhood and adulthood perception. “A Story” is essentially a pencil sketch of the juxtaposition between the father’s biggest fear and the beautiful present he is unable to enjoy.
In this paper, I choose Georg Simmel’s article stranger as my analysis passage. George Simmel was born in Germany at 1918. He is a Jewish. His mainly research area in sociology is concerning the relationships of humans in modern urban society. His theory and concerns talking about people’s society and community indeed attracted me a lot .
In his poem, “The Shape of History,” Charles Harper Webb demonstrates the vastness of History, and the tiny peice Humans make up, by using a reverse shape. In the poem the time that Humans take up is a much longer section, whereas the much longer periods of time toward the end are much shorter, going to down to even a few words, or one. Through this form, the reader is able to grasp just how unimportant Humans are to the Universe. Our kings, wars, and inventions mean so much to us, but to time they are hardly a speck of dust.
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.
Kathleen Raine , the author of “Passion” ,manages to convey and portray her journey of thoughts towards happiness using certain phrases and meanings . Overcoming the heartbreak that unrequited love brings ,which she clearly suffered from . But eventually manages to overcome her feelings of depression and realizes throughout the poem that her happiness connects strongly to nature . Firstly , Raine describes her misery before anything else .
In the story, “A Glow in the Dark,” the narrator was afraid of a “soft, green, ghost glow” (Paulsen, 323). “The dogs were singing the death song” (Paulsen, 323) and reminded the