Blog 11, option one

A poem's form has a most literal way of guiding a poem's flow/ rhythm. There can be fast parts, slow parts, parts associated with a feeling that can be dying or rising, and parts can be emphasized or subdued in importance.

E.E. Cummings's “Buffalo Bill's Defunct” is a respectful ode to Buffalo Bill, and is remorseful of his passing. The second line is one word: “defunct”. The word “defunct” means “no longer operating or in use,” which gives Buffalo Bill a mechanical, machine-like element. This somewhat satirizes people's understanding of Buffao Bill as someone “who used to ride a watersmooth-silver stallion, [and so-on].” The word defunct procures its following description of Bill as the three facts that are presented about him in this poem; the things that everybody knew about him, and are no longer true. “Watersmooth-silver stallion” is given two lines to give the word stallion its own pedestal, enhancing its importance. The next line simply skips the spaces between the words to speed it up. Then the interjection is set off by its own line, and not indented quite as far as the last letters of the preceding line, mimicking how Bill's stunt would be reacted to in real time. The rest of the poem alternates between super-indented lines and lines that start at the edge margin. Only the names are capitalized. The time it takes us to get to the next word is normally periodic, like the lyrics of a song. Between each line there is a pause, usually of the same length. Buffalo Bill's Defunct has so many variations on this normal structure that all we can use to judge the beat and timing of the poem is the spacing.

The form in George Herbert's “Easter Wings” is much more shapely and has a pattern that is easy to follow. The progression of line length from large to small reflects the slope of deterioration that both such segments describe. The other sections of the poem give a rising sensation. The poem's text looks like a bird, or if viewed from the side, could be flames, storm clouds, even Devil horns. Or Sauron's helmet. A much more nerdy interpretation would be a sinusoidal graph, which would poetically support the same trend as the lengthening and shortening of the lines, even though science would provide us with no further understanding. “The flight in me” could represent the action the speaker is threatening to take, which I think might either be suicide or a strong indication of hope for future ability to achieve the “wealth and store” the Lord created in man in the beginning. It seems as though he is trying to point out the unfairness of the suffering he must endure because of Adam and Eve, stating that “my tender age in sorrow did I begin,” and that Adam and Eve had a chance to see what the “wealth and store” was like, but he didn't, and he wants to pursue it. The speaker points out how “affliction” will sill be his main motivation.

blog 10

Option 1:

First, to translate the first 8 lines: John Keats first claims his interest and experience in works of art and literature. He describes his credentials as a critic of the Odyssey, by referencing Apollo, the Greek god of Poetry. The next lines could translate, “I have heard a lot about Homer's 'The Odyssey,' but my mind was blown when I heard Chapman speak it.”

We can concur that Keats knows a good work when he sees it. His two epic similes have a surprising, adventurous feel to them. The first demonstrates his pleasant surprise, as though an unexpected gift had showed up at his doorstep. This first simile empathizes with science, which even further expands his credentials. He then compares his experience with what Cortez (really Vasco de Balboa) may have felt just after seeing the Pacific Ocean for the first time. This simile could empathize with historians, hikers, scientists, you name it.

I like to compare it to music. Like when you are listening to a song that you had heard many times before, but never understood the meaning until you were lucky enough not only to be paying attention to the lyrics line by line, but to put them together as a whole and see connections that weren't obvious to you. (this has happened to me before)

I believe Keats shows his roundness by empathizing with different kinds of people with different interests. This reaching out to a higher demographic allows more people to be touched by this poem. Both a planet and an ocean can be seen as whole, or examined for further detail, which scientists and artists alike would most likely do without hesitation. It is apparent to me that Keats intends to go far beyond reading Chapman's translation of the Odyssey, as he is an adventurer of his own type.

I'm not sure what made me like Sylvia Plath's “Metaphors” so much. It's hard to explain. I noticed that there are nine syllables in each line, and there are also nine lines(I'm not sure if this means anything). The first line could indicate that the following lines could be metaphors themselves. The two words “I am”(or I'm) are what give metaphors their identity. So it could be said that every line in this poem is a metaphor. Anything that can be put into print on paper could be the target of a metaphor. Or, if this poem is a riddle, as mentioned in the first line, the answer could be put into a metaphor for the poem: “I am every line of this poem!” It even has nine syllables!  The first line could be a metaphor for the riddle itself. ... “Metaphor metaphor metaphor.”

BLog 8, Dickinson and Hardy

At first, I found Emily Dickinson's poem “Because I could not stop for Death” to be frustrating. I had to read it several times on several different days, on each of which I had to be running a slightly different mood and level of brain performance. It was for the same issue that I was initially drawn to “The Man He Killed” by Thomas Hardy. To me, his poem was simple, and I understood it easily, and it didn't take this stressful coordination of my thoughts and evisceration of my leisure schedule to understand.

Venting done, moving on.

The speaker's tone was a big point of contention for me. I liked how Hardy accomplished a sort of accent, which I perceived to be Scottish or Irish, as this helps to give the poem somewhat of a whimsical mood. He speculates upon his foe as a man largely just like him, who “thought he'd 'list, perhaps off-hand-like, – just as I – ”(lines 13-14). This, I see, as the speaker's acknowledgment of the value of human life, which my prejudgment led me to doubt in Dickinson's poem. Whereas the speaker in Dickinson's poem seems constantly drawn to Death, Hardy shows his preference by sandwiching his description of what happened between two stanzas that emphasize an obviously preferable alternative to war. His fleetingness, given away by, “Yes; quaint and curious war is!”(line 17), he actively tames, using two examples of how these two men would be at the ready to help each other and be friends, had their countries not been at war.

Both poems had to do with life and/or death, which, for some reason, I liked.

I understand that Dickinson was suicidal, and at first, I judged her concept of human life as undeveloped beyond where her feelings of worthlessness had been keeping her, which there is no real evidence of.  Her romanticized depiction, “The carriage held but just ourselves and immortality”(line 4), made it seem like Death was her ticket to heaven/hell/the afterlife/whatever your preference. Before, this seemed irresponsible to me.

I guess my issue could have been to do with the stereotypical distinctions between men and woman. In the tone and structure of Hardy's poem, he shows great integrity of conscience, a trait I admire. Dickinson shows Death the normally girly trait of wanting to maintain decency in polite company. Initially, this angered me, but only after I mistakenly drew into account an imaginary presence of danger to the people around her, which she made no mention of. I came to that conclusion because of the way she paints Death as a concrete character, even capitalizing his name. I pictured Death as a serial killer, for whom the speaker was consciously allowing herself to be seduced. Upon further contemplation (some of which I have documented) on Dickinson's mental state, and ultimately recognizing her possible friendship with Death as a development I do not totally understand, on top of the fact that there is no evidence to support this in the poem whatsoever, I found the strength to let it go.

Now, for a (hopefully) final observation of my feelings regarding these works. Though I did initially not like Dickinson's poem, it presented a depiction of death that I have never thought about before. The last stanza gives a hint that the preceding girth of the poem was a description of something that happened to the speaker, maybe to her house. A near-death situation. Or this is the event that caused her to think about suicide for the very first time. I realized that over the amount of time, “Centuries”(line 21), probably her friendly depiction of Death became the best option for her, since confrontation is so hard to maintain for many women, and since the time frame is so long, the speaker may just as well be seen as an abstract, perhaps immortal, being. “Stopping for Death” was a phrase that I struggled with for a while, whilst writing this response. Now, I think it may mean that the speaker is telling of a time when she was caught up in living with the same perspective, doing the same things (her “labor and leisure”(lines 6-7)), and maybe the experience with the house being destroyed eventually led her to befriend the idea of dying, since they were so close at one point.

Blog assignment 7

Blog 7, option 3

And now, for another highly unorganized compilation...

Troy and his son Cory have the most confrontational relationship in this play. There comes a point when a son disagrees with his father, which eventually comes down to a general difference in philosophy on the best way to raise a kid. Such confrontation can be expressed in many different ways. Troy thinks his discouraging Cory from the football team is just, because of two reasons: One stems from love, and the other stems from jealousy. On one hand Troy doesn't want to see his son's hopes of being on the football team smashed like his dreams were of playing baseball. ...

As a father, Troy wants to give his son “the best of himself,” as Rose said.

Troy saw his own father as “the devil himself.” He bested his dad by withholding his assault on Cory with the bat, a gesture of affection that his own dad couldn't boast. This is where Troy shows his learned superiority to his father, who at one point beat him with a pair of reigns, to “whup” him into line. Troy claims his father wanted “the girl for himself.” This could reflect the same kind of misunderstanding that Cory has for his father's intentions. When Cory calls Troy “just an old man,” Troy reacts with the same hostility that his own father had toward him. Rose further pushes Cory to understand his father's love for him, when Cory threatens the ultimate disrespect of not attending Troy's funeral. She acts as a kind of bridge between Cory and Troy in the islands of compatibility.

Troy, like any breadwinner, seeks appreciation for the hard times he has been through and the work he has put in for his family. Lyons regularly provides this appreciation by owning his ignorance of such experiences, and thus gains some level of appreciation from his father. Cory never shows this kind of appreciation, because he feels so wronged by his dad denying him from the football team. This explains some of the violence that results in Cory leaving towards the end of the play. Cory and Troy's relationship is strongly cleft by Troy's life-long disappointing experience with baseball, and how he never made a living at it because of his color. Cory interprets his opposition as a hostile display of “jealousy,” to which Troy is unable to rise above a hostile response.

This give-and-take relationship between father and son is also shared between a mother and her daughter. In the last scene, this trend is reflected by the exchange between Rose and Raynell, “a watched pot never boils,” to which Raynell responds, “This ain't even no pot,” which is a problem with the idiom that Rose probably never thought of before, because she was too busy trying to maintain the existence of the pot, which comes from making a living. Again, from a misunderstanding, comes a new idea. Only with an absence of hostility. But to Raynell, a little girl with different values than her mother, advances beyond what the idiom means to a viewpoint yet unexplored. Raynell finds a problem, and the mother offers a solution, sometimes they show their disagreement through misunderstanding the meaning of what was said. and often try to think of a better thing to say.

Essay 1 Fiction rough draft

David P. Martin

John Michael Toth

English 102

9-30-2012

Writers of literature usually mean to create a better understanding of a situation they themselves have learned from. In other words, writers are, in their own way, instructors of their audience. Arguably, the most important lessons can be directly seen in how characters such as Eva in “The Found Boat” or Lieutenant Cross in “The Things They Carried” change and develop throughout the story. By analyzing exactly what makes these characters change, and through holistic consideration of all contributing psychosocial factors, readers can learn valuable things about people and their personal development.

Tim O’Brien's “The Things They Carried” can be compared to a lecture from someone with first-hand experience in being a soldier at war. Warfighters are subject to a very common stereotype of humanity, which points out the ferocity of those that carry weapons and mean to shoot people with them. O'Brien explains that much of the burden a soldier carries is abstract. In almost every paragraph of this selection from “The Things They Carried”, is some incorporation of feeling that O'Brien lumps in with all the other concrete things that most people easily know to be burdensome. This is summed up by the line, “They carried all they could bare, and then some, including a silent awe for the terrible power of the things they carried”. Through this close relationship of feelings and physical weight, O'Brien is able to point out humanity in the most un-human duties. O'Brien includes examples of pride, fear, guilt, love, and how they can contribute to something as awful as warfare. His account of his experience in Vietnam tells of all these burdens objectively, and, to be fair, includes some of the morbid realities of how soldiers handle their emotions. Largely, they have to make light of things: “They used hard vocabulary to contain the terrible softness”. These verbal coping strategies culminate into their own language, which O'Brien does his best to translate for the inexperienced reader. O'Brien makes a good point of a soldier's need to be “between crazy and almost crazy, knowing without going”.

This degree of toughness is necessary in some cases. This story creates a very good line of sight for a reader to understand what makes a person into a soldier.

“The Found Boat” by Alice Munroe can be seen as a field-trip through a few months in the lives of a group of young neighborhood kids. The author's choice of detail directly probes the reader's memory, by putting some of the kids' actions and tendencies into simple grown-up language. She begins the story by funneling the reader's attention into this analytical comparison between young and mature, by citing a trend solely based on age: “those under 15 and over 65 were most certain that it [the Flood] would [invade the town].” In the beginning, the girls are more distant from the boys. When Munroe includes that the girls were surprised at the boys' interest in the boat they found, the reader can start to follow the path of baby steps the boys and girls will take toward a cooperative alliance. Continuing the path, Munroe includes an example of jealousy, marked by Eva and Carol's “fish mouths of contempt”. So already, we have a perfect launching pad for a story of unity between boys and girls, plus a comparing aspect for older readers to understand the developing minds of young kids. Later on when they are repairing the boat together, the point is made that Eva “wanted to make a good impression on Clayton's mother,” again, we see another age-specific interaction, putting obvious detail on Eve's intentions. This emphasizes the variety of drives a child may be influenced by, which is built upon later in the story, when hints of passion are eluded to when the kids go for a dip in the river. Hopefully, this story can help the reader, many of whom are future parents, understand how children think.

The focus of James Joyce's “Araby” is a lesson in a unique subject unfamiliar to many. The lesson collectively attainable from this story is about what can become of a young soul suppressed and misunderstood. The setting of the story is dark and bleak. The speaker's social life is limited to strategic games of avoidance with the neighborhood kids and parents. The imbalance cultivates a skill set which spills into his flirting tactics: “when we came to the point where our ways diverged, I quickened my pace and passed her.” His attitude towards people is reflected by his imagining the people in his “single sensation of life” as a “throng of foes”. Throughout the story, the narrator focuses on his thoughts, which are almost entirely internalized. He jumps around from random details of his environment, to the constant battle that plagues his imagination, where realism and hope get confused with each other and his fears. No connection is made between his random daydreaming of Mangan and what may have sparked the dream in that moment. Evidence of his largely suppressed anger is confirmed in his reaction to his aunt's claim about the “night air”: “when she left I began to walk up and down the room, clenching my fists.” Almost immediately after this, we see the ultimate proof of his anguish: “My eyes were often full of tears... I thought little of the future”. So the reader must wonder why the narrator has become this way. One possible cause for the narrator's subdued relationship with people is evident in two interactions with the people he spends the most time around: first, “when my aunt went marketing, I had to go to carry some of the parcels...,” and second, when his uncle had forgotten about his plans to go to the bazaar. Both sentences feature an abrupt absence of passion in the narrator's diction. Almost everything any of the other characters say has this similar lack of passion, or some non-caring, arrogant undertone, including the members of his family, having the effect of lumping them in as equals to any enemy on the street. The narrator's adoption of a generally adversarial relationship with people is suspiciously linked to a family that makes him feel like an accessory. This story can show the reader how much anguish a kid is capable of harboring when expression is discouraged. Joyce uses striking imagery and detail in describing the feelings that no one (likely including himself) saw as important at the time: the combination of unsatisfied love and unbearable social anxiety. This could indicate that still, at the age of thirty-two, Joyce laments over a time in his life where he brooded so much and understood so little.

Writers understand that some of what contributes to any struggle is other people who misunderstand them. Writers, Vietnam veterans, and Average Joes alike have all experienced some degree of “shit”(the struggles of life itself). The only thing that stands in the way of people understanding each-other is ignorance, which writers hope to reduce in their audience.

Blog 4 Option 1

Faith is something required for life as we know it. For example, if I didn't believe in my legs to hold me up, I would be afraid to walk. And if I didn't have any faith in the person trying to convince me that I can walk, then I would not listen to him. And then I would starve. It is this initial faith that allows the speaker in Raymond Carver's “Cathedral” to follow Roger's wisdom, and learn a way to help a blind man.

Raymond Carver's “Cathedral” is a realistic scenario that centers around just a few powerful symbols, and one man's brief lesson on what can be accomplished with the integration of faith. In the exposition of the story, the speaker makes clear his ignorance, and some of the things that make him uncomfortable. He concludes his endurance through his wife's tape with, “I'd heard all I wanted to,” letting his anxiety for what came next on the tape move his attention on to the man ringing the doorbell. The cathedral is something most readers recognize and associate with something people put their faith in.

It is hard for me to imagine reading this story, and understanding the importance of faith that the author is trying to emphasize without the cathedral. For me, aware of the benefits of hindsight, a number of other things might have worked, such as a diesel engine, or a brick and a dead guy with a bloody head wound (I realize that not many people have faith in violence, but I can see the sense in having faith in the brick as a better weapon than an empty fist). For me, a diesel engine would have worked because, from my experience, diesel engines are reliable. But most people haven't had the same experience with diesel engines that I have. A cathedral is a more universal symbol of faith, and drives home the author's point to a bigger audience.

The speaker describes his irritations, knowing that it is possible to get over such uneasiness, but not knowing how. In knowing this, the speaker initially puts his faith in this little snippet of his intelligence, which proves the speaker's capacity for faith all along. The speaker simply expanded upon his own faith. For this situation (drawing the cathedral) to take place, Roger must have faith in the speaker to have the capacity to learn from him. This is a wide-reaching demonstration of the importance of faith.

Blog 3 option 1:

The setting in “Araby,” by James Joyce, is one of the elements that helps the reader understand the narrator's enduring mood of gloominess and obsessive tendencies. While most kids had the chance to grow up on a street where other kids lived and the people were friendly, less fortunate kids like the narrator of this story grew up on a lifeless street with very little interaction with other people.

The underlying dysthymic feeling created by the setting is reinforced in a number of bitterquotes by the narrator. He mentions at one point how he stared at the clock. Just before that, he said, “The air was pitilessly raw and my heart misgave me,” only because he could not see his crush in the way he always got the chance to once a day. The narrator's spying denotes his fear of social interaction. He is desperate for a silver lining, and works hard to get his daily glimpse at his version of hope.

Hypocrisy has a way of misleading a child into believing something inaccurate. When the narrator's uncle finally shows up for dinner, he claims, “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.” But at the same time, the narrator probably sees how his uncle does not recognize his pain, and what could have caused it. The narrator at one point mentions his father talking to himself. At another point towards the end, the narrator apparently feels a bit excluded due to the way the lady at the bazaar talked to him impatiently, like he was interrupting her conversation with her friends.

The narrator's suffering in this story is evident by a disturbing level of detail used to describe his feelings at such a young age of his life. He personifies the houses as having faces that did not change, just like the life inside them. The neighbors did not seem to have seen much of each-other. This is a feeling that happens to be reinforced by the way he describes his attempts to talk to his secret love. This shows us youth's capacity for sensitivity, and it is doubtful that he would have had the ability to express his feelings to the extent that he was able at the age of thirty-two by writing this story.