Love can always turn sour when misunderstandings happen and jealously enters the heart. The poem, My Pretty ROSE TREE, in The Longman Anthology of British Literature, was originally published in Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience by William Blake. My Pretty ROSE TREE, under the section of ‘Experience’, tells a simple yet heartful story about a love gone wrong. Blake uses tone, rhyme, and figurative word choice to paint a picture with nature imagery to highlight the emotions and themes of love and jealously. The tone starts off light, with the narrator being presented a beautiful ‘flower’ and him being tempted to acquire it. “A flower was offerd to me; / Such a flower as May never bore”, (Line 1-2) the narrator has presumably never seen a more pleasing ‘flower’ before, and compares it to one the springs of May couldn’t bloom. He, however, “passed the sweet flower o’er”, (Line 4) because he has a ‘Pretty Rose-tree’ at home. The encounter is innocent in nature, as he continues his way, however by acknowledging his desires twice, there is a sense of forbidden longing. The tone changes when he goes back to his Rose-tree and she, the Rose-tree, learns of the flower. It’s not implied how this happens, but she becomes jealous, and even though the narrator remained faithful and didn’t take the flower. It could be because of him being tempted in general by the allure that caused the change. The tone transitions again into a few more possibilities within the last stanza. The…
Anne Bradstreet was born around 1612 to a Puritan family in England. Bradstreet was known as being one of the first published poets in America. Her first poem entitled “To My Dear and Loving Husband” was written between 1641-1643, but published 6 years after her death in 1678. It was rare for women in these times to become writers given that more than half were educated due to father’s often feeling that education should not be wasted on girls. However, her father Thomas Dudley held a high…
“The White House” is a poem written by Claude McKay in 1919 to express the struggles of African Americans with the Jim Crow Laws. McKay was born in Jamaica and his work consisted of poetry, novels, and scientific texts. During this time in America, African Americans were experiencing harsh segregation laws; which caused McKay to portray the struggles of African Americans trying to fit in the society. Title of the poem “The White house” is referring to the whites and the house refers to the…
“When I Consider How My Light is Spent” (Milton Line 1) is a great poem that teaches a highly important lesson about God-given talent. A careful examination of the text helps us understand what John Milton was trying to get across to his audience. The symbolism that he portrays throughout the poem, tells the reader that he was having trouble with losing his vision; which happened in 1652. He was not able to fully use his talent of writing poems and he felt that God would scold him if he wasn’t…
It was a dark and stormy evening when a mentally unstable main character pondered whether word choice and extravagant descriptions would have any effect on the reader of his written works. He looked at the purple velvet curtains his long dead love had hung years ago when he was still sane and concluded that this was indeed the case. The shadows cast upon the floor by the dying coals in the fireplace helped him to understand that a reader’s first impression is characterized by the first…
In the two passages, Vergil draws a striking contrast between the private image of Aeneas, the man, and the public image of Aeneas, the leader, where the leader is able to motivate his people so that they can all move forward while the private image of Aeneas wants to give up. Before these first two speeches, the reader knows little about who Aeneas is. His characteristics as a person and a leader are unclear, so it is natural that the reader would pay attention to the first thing this character…
'To Autumn ' consists of three eleven-line stanzas, each containing the sights, smells and sounds of an Autumn scene. Each stanza has a different subject matter, following a chronological sequence. The poem is written in rather strict iambic pentameter, with only four lines in the poem breaking this structure. There are generally five iambs to each line. This methodical meter is effective as it gives the poem a lyrical, relaxed tone. Although the poem 's scene is bursting with life, it is…
Differences and Similarities of Two Poems Have you ever lost close relatives or friends by death? What did you feel when you lost them? Did you ask where death took them? Emily Dickinson, a famous American poet, answers these questions in her two poems called “Because I could not stop for Death” and “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain.” Dickinson uses various techniques such as simile, metaphor, anaphora to express the shared theme of Death and the tone of the poems. Both poems are about immortality,…
A Child’s Christmas in Warrnambool This text A Child’s Christmas in Warrnambool’ is an extract from the book The Complete Book of Australian Verse written by Dylan Thompson. This extract is written in Standard English prose and is directed towards members of the general public whom are interested in Australian culture and students or academics studying this period of time. Being an Extract from a book, the primary purpose is to engage the readers by demonstrating both a descriptive and creative…
Jabberwocky- Inherency approach Firstly the presentation of the extract certainly looks like a poem, as it is constructed of seven stanzas in iambic tetrameter but the final stanzas only have three feet instead of four. Somebody said that when it looks like literature then we tend to treat it like literature. ‘Twas brillig, and the slithy toves’ (line 1) are words that are not familiar to the reader. Humpty Dumpty stated that ‘Brillig’ means four o’clock in the afternoon, when it’s time to boil…