Poems are pieces of writing that convey meanings through nature and rhetorical devices. Phillis Wheatley uses nature as well as light and dark imagery, reason and love to show the meaning in her poem “Thoughts on the Works of Providence”. Her audience is forced to think about the meanings of the poem through the imagery she uses. Wheatley efficiently uses rhetorical strategies to get her message across about God’s providence, which is how God provides for us. The reader must adequately absorb the imagery in order to understand what the poem is about.…
Value is a “dangerous word” because it can be and has been defined in many different ways. The current definition of value, according the Merriam-Webster, is “usefulness or importance.” Something that has importance or usefulness is related to a commodity with utility because a commodity doesn’t have value without utility. Value is a “dangerous word” according to Jevons because the term, value, can hold many underlying meanings that are not always supposed to be used. Three of these underlying meanings are value in use, urgency of desire, and the ratio of exchange.…
Johnson carefully assesses many different “excuses” that theists give for why an all good, all powerful god approves or neglects to prevent the burning of an innocent baby. I believe his weakest “excuse” is when he claims that a baby going to heaven is only justified if it was necessary for the baby to suffer. If it was not, then it was wrong to allow it. I believe this is Johnsons weakest point because I feel as there is never a necessary reason for a baby ’s death.…
Rough Draft: Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night Poems are like objects; they come in a variety of shapes and forms. For the most part the form of the poem is its overall structure. Two very complex forms for poems are the Villanelle and the Sestina. The Villanelle is considered a “fixed form” being that it can be categorized by the patterns of its lines, meter, rhymes and stanzas. The Sestina is also considered a “fixed form”, like the Villanelle, but a little more challenging than the Villanelle and also does not rhyme.…
Often times individuals wish to change things about themselves whether that be their looks or their personality or other ideas about the world. When this happens, many may view it as a progressive change, yet in E. E. Cummings’ mind, this is the exact opposite of what is actually happening. When society tries to change something about itself, it changes for the worse. By wishing that things were different, the world occurs a loss. If people take an understanding of how something is supposed to be, and wish for it to be something else, that wish will not be fulfilled because it will just be changed temporarily because it would have to be completely changed and then society would have to mold around it as well.…
While death may sound like a simple subject on it’s own, with all of it’s weight, it’s possible to still make the best from it. Dylan Thomas’ Do Not Go Gentle Into The Good Night is a stellar example of the layers that come with death and how people may handle it. While death is often associated with extreme sadness and grief, we find in symbols how people may treat it. Despite the sad paragraph before that, Dylan also shows that it’s important to make the best out of what someone has; whether it be nothing or something, and leave that mark. Lastly, Dylan encourages readers with a classic line that battles the thoughts of the depressed: live is something to fight for.…
When life brightens up, it can always reach back to darkness. Edgar Allan Poe demonstrates this throughout the poem “The Bells”. Poe starts the poem off with silver bells making us remember the happy memories big and small in our life. Then Poe goes on to describe golden bells as joyus by saying, “How they ring out their delight... what a gush of euphony voluminously wells!”…
Light is often associated with truth, shining through the darkness, breaking through the lies to show the facts behind it. Light will illuminate what is really there, ridding you of the uncertainty and doubt that the darkness gives you. In Emily Dickinson’s poem, “There’s a certain slant of light”, light is thought of as just that. In this poem, light comes in through windows, exposing the truth that cannot be seen when the window is closed. The light pushes away the darkness, causing the shadows to run away and flee.…
One dark cold morning in my deer stand, my grandpa had just got there before dawn. We still had a little bit before it got daylight so he told me a story. It was a story about a deer that hunters have seen but it would always disappear in a blink in of an eye, before they could even life their gun up to shoot.…
Using this quote to increase our understanding further, we can also evaluate this poem's description of man’s effect on nature in contrast to Byron’s description of nature's effects upon man. We see a mirroring between the poems. It is the case of “Darkness” we see that it is nature’s deterministic progression, which result in the destruction of mankind and the degradation of human virtue. Wordsworth’s portrayal of a human’s free actions resulting in the destruction of nature. In the closing line of the poem we see a warning for how one ought to interact with nature and the substantiates it with a symbolic token that personifies nature and associates it with a conscious agent like a human: “Then, dearest Maiden, move along these shades…
! @#@#@!!@##William Styron an accomplished novelist expresses his own account of what it is like to suffer from depression in his memoir Darkness Visible. Depression is an illness that affects more than twenty-five percent of the population, yet little attention publicly is drawn to the illness. The reason why is because it is difficult explain the illness to someone who has not experienced it. There are no physical signs of depression, but only invisible symptoms that are indescribable for the victim.…
Jean Toomer was a well-known writer of the Harlem Renaissance. He chose to look at the United States as a ‘melting pot’ rather than as ‘black’ or ‘white’. He also elected to view and refer to himself as an ‘American’ rather than as ‘black’ or ‘white’. These ideals were emphasized within his works. Jean Toomer’s Cane is his most famous piece.…
Life is composed of singular opportunities and chances. When faced with the position of death; generally people try to accept that death in itself is a natural force that can not be stopped. It is not welcolmed by any means; however no percipetive or sane individual would try to go against something so powerful. The concept of death and life has been explored by many poets before; all seeming to agree that death is a natural type of rest; one in which everything is left in mystery. Contrary to others the author, Dylan Thomas believed that death should not consume the indivdual; in a dark twist to the ordinary “Carpe Diem” poems.…
The seductive mistress of science has not alluded the minds of the few that know how to innovate it and the masses who take advantage of it every day. Whether the advancement be in the realm of medicine or in the dominion of electronics, humans use the application of the field as a positive benefit in their lives. However, science can easily be transformed into something devastating and harmful to the human race; scientists have been able to design the cure for polio as well as atomic technology capable of wiping out much of the world in a nuclear holocaust in a matter of hours. These abilities that exist in science have been able to adapt its capabilities from the real world into literature; it has been able to seep itself into the novels…
The struggle of life- its changeability, unpredictability, and man’s inability to block the blows of chance- is difficult, but how someone deals with life- whether they wither away and cry out in defeat or whether they stand tall, accepting the blows without a complaint- is completely up to them. In the poem “Invictus” by William Ernest Henley, one can see his determination to be strong, independent, and fearless. Though it seemed like he would be defeated, Henley chose to stand up and face the coming trials of life because he had learned that a person’s fate can only be controlled by themselves. Henley begins the poem with two negative lines. In the first two lines Henley writes that there is a “night” (1) covering him, and he describes…