The Great Santa Barbara Oil Disaster Poem Analysis

A hurricane rushes up an American coastline, ravaging everything in its path! At the same time, an earthquake topples buildings in an Asian city! While this situation may be hypothetical, it is completely plausible. When Weldon Kees wrote his poem “The Coming of the Plague” he appeared to notice only the hurricanes, earthquakes, and disasters occurring around him, and found that the sunshine and rainbows found in daydreams arise few and far between. This poem harnesses the pain and sorrow ravaging the country, and the author, at that time.

Imagine living your everyday life in a town named Tangerine, where natural disasters commonly occur. This is the situation that the protagonist, Paul Fisher, has been enduring ever since his family moved to Tangerine, Florida. The novel, Tangerine written by Edward Bloor, describes how Paul Fisher sees the world through his thick-rimmed goggles due to his damaged eyesight from “staring at an eclipse.” Paul has to be circumspect around bullies and his older brother, Erik, who seems to have dissoluteness living inside of him.

The essay “The Damnation of Canyon,” by Edward Abbey, channels the emotional impact that the damming of a canyon river can have on a person. By telling this story the author utilizes many different rhetorical strategies that include personification, visual imagery, and first-person narration, all to help convey his point on why the commercialization and industrialism of nature should be avoided and stopped. He not only points out the wrong in the situation, but Abbey also gives a solution to the problem to better the canyon for all people. He tells of how many of the environmental pollution, habitat loss, and commercialization could be fixed if people stopped trying to make the canyon better for some people, the rich, and just let it be enjoyed by those who want to see its natural beauty. The fastest solution to this problem is to get rid of the damn and let the river run its course.

Galveston Hurricane: September 8, 1900. On September 8, a Category 4 hurricane ripped through Galveston, killing an estimated amount 6,000 to 8,000 people. A 15-foot storm flooded the city, which was then situated at less than 9 feet above sea level, and numerous homes and buildings were destroyed.

How effectively do the prescribed poems use language forms and feature to convey images of the Australian landscape?

In the poem “Death Over Water” by Elizabeth Rhett Woods, juxtaposition between the beauty and grace of ice dancing and the savage fighting between two enemy birds is shown as an eagle is compared to “the male of a pair of ice dancers” (line 9), a gull to the female ice dancer and “a clamour of crows” (line 1) to the crowd watching them. The eagle is the dominant force in the fight that is in control of the movements of the birds maintaining “every advantage of size and speed” (line 17), comparable to the lead dancer of a pair. In ice dancing, the male is often guiding the female through the moves remaining “above and behind” (line 8) the female dancer at all times. The gull is at the mercy of “the enemy” (line 16) eagle and is forced to move

In “Crossing the Swamp”, Mary Oliver depicts the process of the speaker crossing the swamp. The speaker makes many observations about the swamp and the descriptions of it correlates with her view towards swamp. At first the speaker only sees the swamp as dark and dense, but later realizes the hidden details of the swamp that was not visible before. After crossing the swamp, the speaker is able to see the swamp as part of beautiful nature.

Mary Oliver’s poem “Crossing the Swamp” shows three different stages in the speaker's life, and uses personification, imagery and metaphor to show how their relationship with the swamp changed overtime. The swamp is personified, and imagery is used to show how frightening the swamp appears before transitioning to the struggle through the swamp and ending with the speaker feeling a sense of renewal after making it so far into the swamp. Finally, metaphor is used to compare the speaker, who has experienced many difficulties to an old tree who has finally begun to grow.

The poem, “The Death of a Toad” by Richard Wilbur, ponders the appearance and reverie that a toad may have towards the end of its life. Wilbur uses careful structure, imagery and diction to gradually show that to the speaker, the death of the toad starts as just a simple cease of breathing; but it transforms into a mystical journey.

The speaker struggled with the swamp. Oliver expresses this with the use of strong diction and full imagery. Powerful dark words are used, and the swamps omnipotent grasp is felt. Through the use of structure and enjambment the intensity and pace builds to the end where a hope is exposed

In many poems, poets use nature as a metaphor for human life. In "Storm Warnings" by Adrienne Rich, she uses an approaching storm as a metaphor for an emotional storm inside herself. Although, there is a literal meaning of the poem. There really is an incoming storm. Rich uses structure, specific detail, and imagery to convey the literal and metaphorical meanings of the poem.

She traveled to the northern Haitian-Dominican border in the year of 1994, which was 57 years after the massacre. She explained that she wanted to place her hand in the massacre river where the colonists of the Spanish and French had once butchered one another over how to split the island of Hispaniola, which Haiti and the Dominican Republic currently share. While she sat by the side of the river, she jotted down in her journal that “nature has no memory.” She observed children who were bathing in it, men watching their animals drink from it, and women washing their clothes in it. Thus, instead of seeing blood in the river, which is what she was expecting, she saw people living and thriving. People were living even with such a painful and dark past. However, living does not entail forgetting. Parents and grandparents stories’ were inherited and passed down from generation to generation. Confused as to why there were no plaques or even a memorial to remember and honor the thousands of individuals who died, she asked an old Haitian cane worker why he thought that was. The cane worker was unsure why there were no plaques but he replied with the following: “the best way to commemorate the horrors of the past, is to stop the injustices of the present” (Danticat,

In Elizabeth Bishop’s poem “The Fish,” a fisherman catches an imposing fish. As the fisherman holds the magnificent creature out of the water with his/her ‘hook fast in the corner of the fish’s mouth,’ he/she begins to admire the fish for having obviously fought long and hard all its life (Bishop 3). In a sense, the speaker compares the fish to a war veteran who had seen one too many battles. On at least five occasions, five other fishermen had attempted to reel-in the beast given the “five old pieces of fish line” and “their five big hooks” embedded in its mouth (Bishop 51). Bearing this in mind, the speaker thinks of the fish-line and hooks as battle-scars and consequently, looks upon the fish as a skilled survivor rather than a regular,

Phenomenal Woman, by Maya Angelou is an inspiring poem that encourages women, including myself to be confident and to love themselves just the way they are. It encourages women to be independent and confident despite what others think about them, especially men. In “Phenomenal Woman”, there are various literary devices used, some of which include repetition, parallelism, metaphors and personification.

Pablo Neruda's choice of diction and literary devices combine to give off a very calm and soft tone. Neruda, throughout the piece conveys a sense of calmness using sounds and words such as: “sea”, “me”, and “waves . Each of these words fly off of the tongue with ease and grace, similar to how the seas waves are. Neruda creates the image of being near the sea by his diction by choosing words with smooth sounds such as: “me” ,”rose”, “foam”, and “vast”. These words create the soft sounds like what we would see at the sea and that was Neruda’s goal. His vision was not only that we can imagine the sea by the sounds used, but to physically see it with our own eyes by the structure of the poem.