Sharon Olds On The Subway Summary

In the representation, illumination of facial features are created by all the symbols and images that the person is made up of because it exemplifies the morals and characteristics of the person, but when the drawings and symbols are peeled away, the face is all saliently white, showing how there is no character or depth behind those drawings. This represents how people are now just made of the themes consumerism and materialism because they have no personality and morals anymore and that they are dehumanised and unidentified as a person. This shows the ideas portrayed in the poem as the family that it focuses on always wants more than what they have and how their main goal isn’t their care for their child, but to win money and spend it. The

Poetry is an effective means used to convey a variety of emotions, from grief, to love, to empathy. This form of text relies heavily on imagery and comparison to inflict the reader with the associated feelings. As such, is displayed within Stephen Dunn 's, aptly named poem, Empathy. Quite ironically, Dunn implores strong diction to string along his cohesive plot of a man seeing the world in an emphatic light. The text starts off by establishing the military background of the main protagonist, as he awaits a call from his lover in a hotel room. After his significant other finally calls him, presumably to end the relationship, he then aimlessly goes to the zoo. Empathy, by Stephen Dunn exponentially displays the interplay of empathy and self interests, as the main protagonist seeks out his individualistic desires by searching for an empathetic connection through other living vessels.`

Personification is a main literary device used in this poem. She often refers to the sun as a person. Someone that we can "...Hear the fierce hammering Of his firm knuckles Hard on the door..." It goes on in this style throughout the entire poem, and it really adds to us being to understand the purpose of the poem.

In Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s, Notes from Underground, we are presented with a complicated character named The Underground Man. He is exceedingly egocentric and believes that he is more intelligent than those in his surroundings. Despite all this, he is also a man who hates himself and often times feels humiliated. As a person who has isolated himself from society, he consistently analyzes and critiques every interaction with another person. For example, when an officer casually shoves the Underground Man In order to deescalate the situation in the tavern, the Underground Man takes offence to this and plots a long term solution to a meniscal problem. Rather than moving on with his life, he draws up plans to exact his revenge on the officer who probably doesn’t know he exists. These kinds of actions would be supported by Dostoyevsky because it requires strategic and calculated planning for the success of the mission.

Introduction is a decisive part in a novel since it may introduce important key facts about the work to the reader. “Ceremony”, by Leslie Marmon Silko, opens with a compilation of poems, some larger than others, but all equally important for the novel.

While reading this poem you can see "...where the Indian in a white poncho lies dead by the side of the road" and you can see how sad that scene is. This image is a striking image because it grabs the readers attention as to how bad someone's life could be and what Linley someone could be filled with. Another striking image that grabs the readers attention and makes them thing is when the reader pictures "how you ride and ride/ thinking the bus will never stop,/ the passengers eating maize and chicken/ will stare out the window forever." This image strikes the reader because it makes them look into the passengers lonely hopeless faces. The imagery in this poem makes the reader think about their life and what sadness and sorrow is really like and how kindness can change someone's life all around. The literary elements in this poem add to the effect the poem has on the reader, which can be different for everyone, but it makes the reader reflect on their own life and how kindness has changed

Billy Collins appropriately created the title “Schoolsville” for this poem. The title is broken down and is imagined by readers of a little town occupied by former students who still act as they did in high school. From the beginning line, it is clear to the reader that the speaker is reminiscing his past by “glancing over my shoulder at the past,” (Collins 534). By stating, “I realize the number of students he has taught is enough to populate a small town,” also adds to the image created by the title (Collins 534). The speaker has taught so many years that his former students could populate a town.

The final poem of significance is Jazzonia, in which Hughes experiments with literary form to transform the act of listening to jazz into an ahistorical and biblical act. Neglecting form, it is easy to interpret the poem shallowly as a simple depiction of a night-out in a cabaret with jazz whipping people into a jovial frenzy of singing and dancing. But, the poem possesses more depth, when you immerse yourself in the literary form. The first aspect of form to interrogate is the couplet Hughes thrice repeats: “Oh, silver tree!/Oh, shining rivers of the soul!” Here, we see the first transformation. The “silver tree” alludes to an instrument used to perform jazz (probably a saxophone). “Trees” are long, like a saxophone, and the “keys” and “key

The author uses language and setting to influence the mood and meaning of the poem. She starts off the poem with the speaker looking at a “photograph” (Trethewey l. 1) of herself when she was four years old. The reader is instantly taken into a personal memory of the narrator and

“On the Subway,” written by Sharon Olds, is written from the perspective of what is presumed to be an upper class white woman, who finds herself on a subway with a lower class black boy. In “On the Subway”, Olds focuses on the controversial issue of racial conflict, and the theme of White v. Black. She does so by use of contrast between whites and blacks, by using harsh enjambments, powerful imagery, and by using the tone to convey the purpose.

The memoir opens with Jeannette, the author and main character, sitting in a taxi, wondering if she has overdressed for the evening, when she looks out the window and sees her mother rooting through a dumpster. She recognizes all her familiar gestures even as she is at times hidden by people scurrying home in the blustery March weather. It has been months since Jeannette has seen her mother, but she’s more overcome with panic that the woman will see her. She slides down in the seat and then orders the taxi to take her home again. She listens to Vivaldi, hoping the music will settle her down. She sits down in her favorite room and looks around at the possessions that make the room such a comfort to her

Maintaining a healthy relationship can present some reservations because of the way characters interact with each other and also as a result of bad nurturing. For example, in “Those Winder Sundays and “The Possessive” both authors face discomfort as a result of each protagonist in the poem relying on someone else to make them happy. A level of maturity is the key to understanding one’s self- identity and one’s own independence. In Robert Hayden’s poem “Those Winter Sundays” he explains how his father’s motive for loving him and raising becomes a challenge for the son to accept, because of his adolescent behavior and likewise in Sharon Old’s poem “The Possessive” the narrator would describe how uncomfortable she felt when she her daughter grow up too fast. Both poems use a narrative that suggest that there are

The poem “Last Night” written by Sharon Olds, describes a night of love, sex, and passion. I could say that she is relating a passional night that she experienced because she uses first person throughout the whole poem. The author portrays the moment with exquisite details of how everything happened; however, she leaves much more to the imagination. As readers, we do not know if she is having an affair, or if she is making love with her husband, boyfriend, or friend. We only know what she wants us to know, that it was wild encounter and she is insecure about the meaning of the moment. She is confused the next day, she does not know if it was only sex, or if it was love. The author provides details that creates a contradiction; she first expresses

Since antiquity the human imagination has invested symbolic significance in the three separate worlds of underground, everyday surface life, and a metaphysical other world located as often or not in the skies. In Christian mythology, the underground represents hell, whose opposite above us is heaven, and our real world is often a vale of tears. In Birdsong (1993), Sebastian Faulks both exploits this archetypical symbolic structure, but also extends it in a complex, multilayer trope around the idea of tunnels and tunneling. In Faulks’s symbolic world, the trope operates on many levels: tunnels can be underground mazes, cities, places for hiding, protection and danger; on another level, tunneling can represent a search for hidden treasure, a journey towards a meaningful goal, and obstacle course for heroes to overcome to reach a Holy Grail. At the same time, the dichotomy between underground and surface can represent the subconscious emotions and drives that the characters conceal or are unaware of in their conscious life; this dichotomy can also stand for the ‘underclass’ of workers and bourgeoisie or aristocracy. Although these various and complex deployments of the tunnel trope appear and reappear throughout the novel, this essay tackles the topic in three sections, corresponding

The use of symbolism helps further expose this universal theme found in the two poems. In Outdistanced, Rubin, compares the old man to a “wooden gentleman”(5) and is curious if the “Grandfathers (will) turn to lumber above their graves”(8). He uses this symbol of wood and trees to represent the idea that the old man, representative of the elderly, is quiet, does not move fast, and is constantly in the way. He uses lumber to represent that the old man is then dead, but not being used to his full potential. The ignorance of the young men fail to heed to anything the old man says ultimately changing what shapes humanity in a negative way. Similarly, Collins uses symbols to talk about the idea that intentionally lacking self awareness can quickly