Title; Anne Fogarty describes Paula Meehan as a poet who has taken up “a more impersonal and urgent role as an expressive commentator on, and visionary hierophant for, communal experience and social change and dislocation” (An Sionnach 213). Discuss, making detailed reference to Meehan’s poetry. The aim of this essay will be to investigate the theme of death and transformation in Paula Meehan’s decorative poetry collection. I will also shed light on Anne Fogarty’s controversial description of…
By analyzing the quote by critic Roland Barthes stating “Literature is the question, minus the answer,” we can apply this ideal to the novel As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner. We can observe the characters in the novel and analyze the ways they cope with their dead mother. Faulkner introduces the question of how one should grieve with death? Literature proposes many questions, but the reader must decipher the answer. Many of the characters in the book portray different ways of dealing with…
Carol Ann Duffy’s poetry combines myths, fairy tales, historic stories, Bible, legends, horrors - the wide range of cultural and family heritage, mythological tradition and autobiographical transaction. She celebrates them all, discovering the truth which hasn’t been completely unveiled. Her poems demonstrate a female mindset, in a way that personally connects her with myths, history, fairy tales. The World’s Wife collection of poems starts with “Little Red Cap” which is about a…
“Another Elegy” is a poem about the relationships in life that happen. In the line “This is what our dying looks like..” gives us as a reader the feeling that we need to believe that when something bad happens, we need to just believe that something that is there. The poem is about someone trying to kill themselves. It happens in the line, “he let the gun go off in his mouth.” Then, all of a sudden, the bad side of the person in the poem comes out. The husband’s head and the wife’s mouth…
Analyzing “The Death of a Moth” Gary Gilmore states that, “Death is the only inescapable unavoidable sure thing. We are sentenced to die the day we were born.” As we look into the “The Death of the Moth” we are able to see the conflict between life and death. Virginia Woolf illustrates that the struggle between both is neither won, or loss. In the way that Woolf changes the tone throughout the piece, and the metaphor of the struggling Moth conjure a sense of pity and hopelessness to the reader.…
One connection I found in this set of poems was Bishop’s fascination with animals, particularly birds. I decided to focus on her poetry and their allusions to animals because I thought there was more of a connection to be had between the different poems. “Some Dreams They Forgot” is a rather somber poem and it starts off by describing the death of bird: “The dead birds fell, but no one had seen them fly” (PPL, 139). The poem refers to the birds for a few lines before it focuses on the people in…
Poetic Explication: “We Real Cool” We Real Cool, is a rather short poem written by Gwendolyn Brooks in 1960, right in the middle of the Civil Rights Movement. Near the beginning of the poem it sounds like everything is quite alright with everyone, with “We real cool,” but by the end of the poem, everything is not ok, and the poem ends with “We / die soon,” which means that death will soon occur, if change does not happen (Brooks 3, 9-10). Through the use several literary techniques, Brooks…
Sylvia Plath is known for being a feminist writer before the women’s rights movement. She wrote numerous poems and books including The Bell Jar. The story is about a women that is slowly losing her sanity and includes all of her family and friends. The time frame makes the story more intense because treatment then was very harsh against mental illness. But they didn’t know how much more damage they were actually causing. Mental illness can’t be forced out of a human but it can be helped if the…
Well used imagery can be as vivid as a one million paintings. Kate Chopin uses imagery throughout many of her timeless short stories. Kate Chopin was a short story author based out of Louisiana. Chopin was born on February 8, 1850, in St. Louis, MO and later died on August 22, 1904. Throughout her life Chopin was a very well-known women’s rights activist. Kate Chopin was also very against the abuse and enslavement of African Americans. Chopin uses amazing imagery throughout the short story…
Many people fear death at the back of their mind, unconsciously dwelling over the surreal fact that they would have to come face to face with it some day, yet most do not bring themselves to explore it completely until it lurks in the corner or appears on their doorstep. The sonnet “And You as Well Must Die, Beloved Dust” and the dramatic monologue “Identification”, explores the concept of death and how each writer comes to grips with it. Both poems express reactions to the inevitable nature of…