They show that skin color isn’t what is important and that they should be recognized for what they do instead of how they look. This road to their achievement might not have been smooth, but all that matters is that they succeeded in the end. Through imagery, the author of the poem, Sara Holbrook, portrays a deep meaning about how an individual can cope with tribulations. She writes about new opportunities and the risks that come with taking them. It starts off by saying, “Safely standing on the bank of what-I-know, Unfamiliar water passing in a rush.”
In the Lake of the Woods Analysis In chapter one of the poem, Tim O’Brien begins by introducing two unnamed characters who, indeed after the aftermath of a primary election, the audience learn that they decide to rent a cottage in what the author refers to as Lake of the Woods. The area surrounding the cottage has no people or towns. However, the same cottage has a beautiful view in terms of a lake facing to the north of Canada. The two unnamed characters came to the place in sought of solitude and togetherness. From this perspective, O’Brien develops his fiction story from a point of uncertainty.
The poem states, “...-it is in that split second, when perhaps the roses drink and the clouds form, that I most understand the invisibility of life and the intensity of vanishing, like steam at the slick edges of the mirror, without a trace. (Line 24-29)”, the author relates how the mystifying of nature, which where used to create similes, is not actually a mystery but just how life goes. The selection of detail that explains why or how roses get their water and answer some of the other mystifying previously mentioned is a way for the readers to see the narrator’s thoughts and his coming to peace with the mysteries of the world. The quote relates back to the narrator as he questioned how certain aspects of nature arrived, but realizes that these things are just how life passes on, which the narrator can relate back to his father. Since the father passed away at a young age, the narrator questioned why his father left him at such an early age at the beginning of the poem, but at the end of the poem, he realizes that he can not spend his whole life questioning why things happen because life is something that constantly moves forward.
Values are those which seem of great prominence to one and meaning influenced by the daily movement, experiences and viewing of perspectives that profoundly surround us and change our thinking. A text can challenge these values by the use of characters that reach out to the audience and allow them to rethink their own by the presenting of differing perspectives. A text’s word can influence different meaning, send out a message, inform and change one’s opinions and beliefs by allowing one to experience different ideas and then to re-think about them. The ideas can oppose conceptions formed without any evidence resulting in the creation of new values, beliefs and visions to perceive the world by filling in the gaps of evidence that was not there
Amabelle returns to the river where she finds a man nearby and says, “I wanted to ask him, please to gently raise my body and carry me into the river, into Sebastien’s cave, my father’s laughter, my mothers eternity.” (Danticat 310). Throughout the novel, the river has continuously represented the death of Amabelle’s loved ones. But at this moment, Amabelle is finally able to make peace with her grief and use the river to bond with her loved ones. The river ultimately represents the obstacles she has overcome in order to replace her grief with loving
This Elizabethan sonnet by George Gascoigne is a tortured self-confession of one “He” who “looked not upon her.” Gascoigne effectively illustrates the speaker’s paradoxical feelings for a woman through a series of literary devices such as extended metaphors, imagery, and alliteration, developing an easily identifiable conflict between the speaker’s desire for his lover and fear of being hurt again. The first stanza introduces us to the central paradox of the poem: why does the speaker “take no delight” in ranging his eyes “about the gleams” on his lover’s beautiful face? To answer this question, the speaker employs two extended metaphors that vividly illustrate this conundrum.
The couplet at the end of the poem (lines 13-14) serves as a separation between the rest of the stanza. This is shown through their own separate rhyme scheme, as well as it being indented from the rest of the poem. This is developing the attitude of the author by providing a complex situation between sadness and love. The speaker talks about a “wink” per say in a relationship, but then immediately goes into her “blazing eyes”. Two metaphors are also mentioned in lines 5 and 10.
As the end of the poem approaches, Dawe justifies his positioning by informing the readers that the mother and children silently renounce their individual desires and accept the ‘drifter’ lifestyle in order to belong to the family in which they feel safe and loved. Dawe’s father was a farm labourer who moved from place to place to find employment. His mother longed for the stability in life that circumstances
In the first stanza’s, the narrator’s voice and perspective is more collective and unreliable, as in “they told me”, but nonetheless the references to the “sea’s edge” and “sea-wet shell” remain constant. Later on the poem, this voice matures, as the “cadence of the trees” and the “quick of autumn grasses” symbolize the continuum of life and death, highlighting to the reader the inevitable cycle of time. The relationship that Harwood has between the landscape and her memories allows for her to delve deeper into her own life and access these thoughts, describing the singular moments of human activity and our cultural values that imbue themselves into landscapes. In the poem’s final stanza, the link back to the narrator lying “secure in her father’s arms” similar to the initial memory gives the poem a similar cyclical structure, as Harwood in her moment of death finds comfort in these memories of nature. The water motif reemerges in the poem’s final lines, as “peace of this day will shine/like light on the face of the waters.”
In the poem History Lesson by Natasha Trethewey, Trethewey uses nostalgic tone, sentimental mood and contrasting imagery to remind people of the tainted past of American history and encourage people to hope for a better future. The poem addresses the struggles and hardships that the African-Americans had experienced during the period of racial segregation and how this phenomenon slowly disappeared and changed over time. In the first two stanzas, the speaker of the poem is reminiscing about her past through a photograph of herself. In the photo, she was a small girl in a bright flowered bikini who is “[curling] around wet sand” with her toes dug in the sand, perhaps she was painting or doodling “on the wide strip of Mississippi beach.”
I view this poem as symbolism for a cycle of thought. Sex without love is viewed in a very positive and negative light throughout, leaving its audience to create their own conclusion to best suit their narratives in life. While it isn’t directly mentioning any people by name, it allows the audience to envision the scenes described to them
The tone that was build up in the beginning was formal and made it seem like having sex without any pleasure is a beautiful act because the poet uses images like “beautiful dancers” and “ice skaters” who “glide”. This kind of confuses the reader, but this aspect of the poem means that even if there is no love between the two people, the act of sex is a beautiful thing in general. To the poet sex feels like “beautiful dancers” and “ice skaters” who “glide”. “How do they do it, the ones who make love without love? Beautiful as dancers, gliding over each other like ice-skaters over the ice, fingers hooked inside each other's bodies, faces red as steak, wine, wet as the children at birth whose
This poem is intriguing because of its ability to draw different ideas of the theme based on the reader’s experiences and influences. What is the intended interpretation, and what could be interpreted? Dawes writes the poem, alternating between comparing the first person mentioned to a storm with the baby leaving the mother’s womb and the experiences between the first person and external individuals. Dawes writes this poem using his own experiences and other influencing factors in his
The poem begins with the speaker looking at a photograph of herself on a beach where the “sun cuts the rippling Gulf in flashes with each tidal rush” (Trethewey l. 5-7). The beach is an area where two separate elements meet, earth and water, which can represent the separation of the different races that is described during the time that her grandmother was alive and it can also represent the two races that are able to live in harmony in the present day. The clothing that the two women wear not only represent how people dressed during the different time periods, but in both the photographs of the speaker and her grandmother, they are seen standing in a superman-like pose with their hands on “flowered hips” (Trethewey l. 3,16). The flowers on the “bright bikini” (Trethewey l. 4) are used to represent the death of segregation, similar to how one would put flowers on a loved one’s grave, and on the “cotton meal sack dress” (Trethewey l. 17) it is used to symbolize love and peace in a troubled society.
They were playful with each other and the poem highlights one
