Osaka Municipal Subway

“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 able to maximize his talent. He begins to realize that his “Maker” (Milton Line 5) doesn’t demand that from him. “Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best” (Milton Line 11) says a lot about Milton’s epiphany. He comes to the conclusion that no matter what you’re going through; if you can get through it and still have faith, you “serve him best”(Milton Line 11). This poem is a parable because Milton teaches himself the religious lesson of having absolute faith in his religion despite hardships. The poem starts off with Milton considering how his “light is spent”(Milton Line 1) or in other words how he used up his vision and now it’s gone before even half his life is over. He now has no light and he lives in a setting that is “dark” and wide” (Milton Line 2). He then refers to his talent “which is death to hide” (Milton Line 3) which refers to “The Parable of Talents” (Matthew 25:14-30) in which a lord gives three of his servants some money to do whatever they wanted with while he leaves…

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…

Emily Dickinson’s, “Some Keep the Sabbath Going to Church,” presents a unique poem regarding the man-made traditions that numerous people follow in church with the intention to draw closer to God, and whether or not one should observe the Sabbath by staying at home or fellowshipping with other Christians in a church building. In this particular poem, Dickinson is attempting to inform and instruct the audience of a single method of worship that can also be practiced in the home setting. 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…

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…

“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…

In Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 116” the speaker gives the reader a set of guidelines on what love is and what love is not. Quatrain 1 and 3 focuses on what love is not, except for the last line of quatrain 3 which tells us what love is. In quatrain 1, the speaker uses wordplay and an enjambment to explain that real love does not change under any circumstance. In quatrain 3 the speaker explains what love is not through the personification of time. Love is not at the mercy of time, it is not “Time’s…

'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…

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…

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,…