Octave

Ding, dong. DING, DONG, the extremely irritating doorbell rang. Waiting was hard. I just wanted to burst through those doors and finally meet Michelle’s new baby hedgehog, who she had been telling me about for weeks. I was impatiently hopping from one foot to another when I heard footsteps coming closer. “Caitlin!” she exclaimed as soon as she opened the door. “Come on, come on, Quilliam’s upstairs!” I could hardly contain my excitement as I pushed past her and ran up the wooden stairs to her…

“Echo,” a poem by Christina Rossetti, reveals the universal longing for a loved one departed and the nature of one’s thoughts as they echo without a person on the other end to respond. The speaker in the poem, perhaps a woman, appears to have lost her lover to some kind of death. She wishes to be reunited with her lover, either in dreams, or in her own death. The speaker utilizes sestet stanza units, specific meter with metrical variations, and repetition to enact the experience of longing.…

Wilfred Owen was a war poet who enlisted in the British army in 1915 and began writing poetry after meeting Sassoon at the ‘Craiglockhart War hospital in Edinburgh’ (1). Anthem for Doomed Youth was one of the poems which was written with Sassoon’s help; he helped Owen transform his poetry and encouraged him to publish his poetry. In Owens’s preface, he wrote his ‘subject is war, and the pity of war.’(2)Owen presents death in the poem Anthem for Doomed youth by using vivid, strong and bold…

In My Father’s House by Ernest J. Gaines is a novel about a young man who goes by Robert X visiting a small Community St. Adrienne in Louisiana. Robert X claims to be from Chicago and is in town for a conference sparking the interest of everyone he meets because no conference is set to happen. His true motive is to meet Reverend Phillip Martins a minister and civil rights leader, it takes about two weeks of staying with Virginia Collar before he has his chance. Robert finally sees reverend…

The light from the morning sun shone through the windows of their hotel room the next morning. Their prior evening was filled with libations and passion. Clarissa woke up to Johnny with her wig uneven and her makeup smudged upon her white pillow. And Johnny was still somewhat unconscious when Clarissa opened her eyes to him. She wasn’t the slightest bit afraid of him waking up to her like this because he had seen her without makeup before this moment. She leaned into him with his eyes still…

The role of a woman and man in the Victorian era was sharply defined, a subservient woman was not only valued but idolised. Elizabeth highlights this suppression in the octave of sonnet 1. This is evident through the alliteration and oxymoron in “the sweet, sad years, the melancholy years”. This deep and revealing reflection on her past life highlight her vulnerability and uncertainty. Similarly, to Gatsby, Elizabeth’s…

Dobereiner, a German chemist, in 1829. Dobereiner arranged these elements in groups of three based on patterns he found in the atomic masses of elements. An English chemist named John Newlands also tried to organize the elements. He created the Law of Octaves but it did not prove to be accurate for any elements heavier than calcium (cK-12…

This poem comes from William’s very first book of poems which was published by Moore Black Press back in 1998 called The Seventh Octave. The layout of Language in Zoos is complex in its rhyme scheme and patterns because the stanzas are broken unevenly yet rhyme scheme always begins after the first three lines of every stanza. The poem itself can be interpreted in many different ways…

In his lieder inspired by Klaus Groth’s “Es hing der Reif”, Brahms highlights both the dreamy and nightmarish aspects of fixating on love by floating in-between the relative keys of A minor and C major, introducing foreign “problematic” harmonies and chord members, and implying a strong sense of irony when concluding lines and stanzas. By never truly establishing a key until the very last lyrical statement, Brahms keeps the piece suspended in a dreamy uncertainty. This is evident even as early…

Baroque music, which started around the 1600s, was the start of great growth in the composition timeline. In this period, composers like Bach and Purcell dominate and bring forth new forms like ritornello and fugue. Romantic music, starting in the 1800s, goes into a thematic transformation. Composers like Chopin and Schubert are popular during this time, and new forms such as cyclic and strophic arise. The Baroque music period focused mainly on the idea of tonality. Composers began to use new…