Dickinson

Gwendolyn Brooks’s poem old relative begins with a commentary on death, that is somewhat flustered into a morality poem. The poems morality contemplation is not an austere good or evil, but a just-unjust analysis of social institutions. Within the first lines, we are shown a gentleman who is not ‘dead’ until he is arranged for death. Demonstrating that the funeral as a conventionality eclipses the reality of life and convolutes man into a God assessing when one passes. One’s body is in limbo as…

“After Plath’s 1963 suicide many critics examined the writer’s different facets, contrasting her put-together, polite, and dexterous self with her raging, explosively-creative inner self” (“Sylvia”, Poems). Plath’s career in writing is explained in all of her poems from her life experiences. She was a very successful writer and attended great colleges. The collection of poems and novel she had written throughout her life were very personal. She wrote one of her most interesting poems, “Mirror”,…

Death has always and will always be part of a human's life. Lots of things that are said or done can glorify life or death but there are three that either do both or just talk about one, “Dust in the wind” by Kansas, “Don’t Fear the Reaper” by Blue Oyster Cult and “Thanatopsis” by William Cullen Bryant. The three poems have three different perspectives on death. All of the messages are similar but they all have a different intended point for each. All of the messages are similar because they…

Life and death are concepts that are interconnected. We cannot live a life void of death, nor can we die without living, without existing beforehand. The poems I chose deals with these two notions and the link between them, and will be analysed in this essay based on language, imagery, meaning and effect. “A Consumer’s Report” by Peter Porter revolves around life, while “For Heidi With Blue Hair” by Fleur Adcock is about the method of grieving a loved one’s death that a girl employs. Both…

In the poem “After Apple-Picking” by Robert Frost there is a complex message as most poem or works of literature do. In this specific poem there is a message of death or the thought of death and how the narrator feels about how his life was lived and when his own personal end will come. As he thinks his life was to repetitive and not as he wanted it since he is just a simple apple picker. In the pome Robert Frost mentioned “Long ...Or just human sleep” (Apple-picking 42) as the “Apple Picker”…

In her essay Jane Austen and John Keats: Negative capability, Romance and Reality, Beth Lau connects the two writers previously not commonly associated. Most comparisons of Austen and Romantic poets are with Wordsworth and Byron, as it is known she read their works. Alas, even without her reading works of John Keats, parallels between ideas in their works can be made (Lau, 2006). The fact remains that concepts of Romantic period, canon and ideology are based on the assumption of shared…

The poem “Mezzo Cammin” by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow is an Petrarchan sonnet that has an octave followed by a sestet. It explains the type of feeling the speaker is having with a main theme of death. The poem contains Longfellow’s self-reflective thoughts. He thinks about the passed time, past mistakes, his lost aspirations, his current situation and the hopes that he has for the future. He starts feeling as though he has not accomplished what he had hoped to by this point in his life, and he…

Sasha Maharaj has used a personal tone to convey emotions underlying her feelings about relationships in the poem, “Worthless’’. In this essay, I disclose how poetic devices, diction, syntax and other language functions have been utilized to reveal feelings/emotions of the writer in regard to relationships. Taking into account the title of the poem, one cannot put a figure on what or who is worthless. Nevertheless, it is known that worthless is an adjective; meaning something that has no use or…

Song of Myself “Song of Myself”, which is famous for “representing the core of Whitmans poetic vision” (Greenspan) was written in 1881 by Walt Whitman. This poem is baffling to many people because of both the symbolism and wordplay. Walt Whitman begins by introducing the subject in the poem, which is himself and he goes on by celebrating this theme. Whitman utilizes words such “I”, “myself” and his inner soul to generate a feel of being and depiction in specific sects of the poem. Whilst it…

Beautiful Ugliness Often, one does not think about what death sees. Usually the common thought is what someone sees when they face death. Their last hours, minutes and seconds. There is never really a thought of what Death sees and experiences on his way to take someones soul, especially if he is always around the same people or person and is constantly taking people out of their life. Eventually each loss starts to accumulate. In Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief, the ugliness and beauty of…