Shantanu Jha When humanity is unable to atone for its sins, the innocent perish, while the living are left to suffer. In his elegy When the Towers Fell, Galway Kinnell laments the victims of the September 11th, 2001 attacks. In 2001, the world had just entered a new millennium; however, it was painfully reminded that the violence of humanity’s past would neither be forgiven nor forgotten. Through his captivating symbolic imagery, Kinnell is able to capture and emphasize the grief of the living, and the infectious nature of hate and war.
In the poem “Ego-Tripping” by Nikki Giovanni, she normalizes her worth by continuing to royalist herself as a black woman who is essential to mankind. Giovanni creates a vision throughout the poem, which leaves a thought in mind of how woman should look at themselves with much confidence as Giovanni does. “Ego Tripping” was written by Yolande Cornelia “Nikki” Giovanni, Jr. who was born in Knoxville, Tennessee on June 7, 1943. G9iovanni is a writer, poet, activist, and educator whose work was influenced during the Black Power Movements and the Civil Rights Movement. The poem was released in 2002.
The song that the title and book references symbolizes unity, which means different things for the dead and living characters. To the dead, the song means homecoming, of being able to move on beyond the trauma
“The City of End the Things” by Archibald Lampman, was published in the last anthology of his poems entitled Alcyone in the year 1899. This poem is an inevitable instance of a decadent modern urban life and city that predominantly represented an overwhelming view of oppression and human deprivation. This trait of representation reflects vividly in the poetry of most of the Canadian poets of the later part of nineteenth century. For most of these poets, the most corporeal as well as harsh realistic occurrences took place amidst an industry based city- life. Archibald Lampman was one of the brightest exponents in this particular genre of Canadian poets who is celebrated for the underlying overtones of socialist idealisms.
The speaker, using first-person narration is identified in the last line of the first stanza, saying “I am the grass; I cover all.” The grass, or nature in general (one could even make the argument that this is Mother Nature speaking), is instructing the people to build these mass graves and cover
"Wraith" by Edna St. Vincent Millay explores the complexity behind the ambiguous presence of the wraith suspended within the house. Never explicitly stated in the text, the wraith’s spirit lingers through the lines of the poem aided by the speaker’s use of personification. Portrayal of rain through humanistic traits, and by addressing aforementioned with female personal pronouns, constructs a conscious for an inanimate concept. As such is paralleled to a ghost-like figure haunting the speaker’s home and mind, rain allows for a visible embodiment of the paranormal spirit. In the poem, the speaker effectively personifies this beautiful yet haunting rain, allowing them the freedom to explore the supernatural wraith, it 's respective characteristics and most specifically, the reasoning behind it 's looming presence as it resonates throughout the poem.
Comparison Essay “Before the world intruded” By Michele Rosenthal, “Theme for English B” By Langston Hughes, and “Won’t you celebrate with me” By Lucille Clifton are all portraying the theme of identity but addressing it in a different way. As one can see, “Won’t you celebrate with me” is saying that her identity has forged her into a strong person that cannot be put down, while “Theme for English B” is about a man trying to find who he is. Lastly, “Before the world intruded” is about her identity when she was an infant and how it is hard finding one as a grown up. In conclusion, all three poems are using literary devices in order to portray identity in a different way.
Second, the poem parallels the description of the Valley of Ashes as a “desolate area of land” (35), just as the hollow men live in “the dead land” (line 39). Third, in lines 22-23, “There, the eyes are sunlight on a broken column.” Just as a broken column symbolizes decay, Doctor T.J. Eckleburg’s eyes look down on the Valley of Ashes, which symbolizes God looking down on the moral decline of the 1920s. Fourth, in lines 27-28, the poem illustrates a dream “more distant and
The Vacuum is a poem about the emptiness of an old man after her wife died. Nemerov started by presenting the environment in which the old man lived in. He also pointed out that the vacuum cleaner was in a corner, seemingly “grinning” (4) at him. He then stated that after his old wife has passed away, she seemed to be inside the vacuum cleaner (8, 9), cleaning up the house whenever the old man used it. The poet further expressed his feeling of loneness by recalling his days with his wife, where she “crawl (s), in the corner and under the stairs”.
Also in line 19, the word “autumn” appears, and it gives the image of the fall of life, and a time that is near death. Even more, “shroud” which is used to describe people’s heart, originally means a piece
“Ghost of a Chance” Interpretation In the modern world, people are surrounded by their possessions and do not really think for themselves any longer. “Ghost of a Chance” by Adrienne Rich conveys an image of a man sitting separated from the world as he tries to think for himself. Rich demonstrates a major simile in the poem to solidify the man’s desperate need to think. In society, people are so involved within their own lives asserting people are seen to not really be thinking.
The poem A Step Away From Them by Frank O’Hara has five stanzas written in a free verse format with no distinguishable rhyme scheme or meter. The poem uses the following asymmetrical line structure “14-10-9-13-3” while using poetic devices such as enjambment, imagery, and allusion to create each stanza. A Step Away From Them occurs in one place, New York City. We know this because of the lines, “On/ to Times Square, / where the sign/blows smoke over my head” (13-14) and “the Manhattan Storage Warehouse.”
Ta-Nehisi Coates extensively explores the vulnerability of black bodies, he writes about the distance from the assumed societal norm a black body must endure. “This chasm makes itself known to us in all kinds of ways. A little girl wanders home, at age seven, after being teased in school and asks her parents, “Are we niggers and what does this mean?” (136). What does it mean to be Black in America?
Hearing the words “Exquisite Corpse” used to mean something very different for me, at a point a figurative corpse wasn’t really a thing. After coming across the artist of Exquisite Corpse, Watsky, I learned what an Exquisite Corpse is. For those as unfamiliar with the term as I was, an Exquisite Corpse is a song or story that was written by a lot of different people; one person starts it by writing a page or verse, and then its passed on to another writer who does the same. The result is a story crafted by the sum of all the writers’ parts. That’s how I see myself, as the sum of the parts of those who have been or are in my life.
The poet compared the graves like a shipwreck that is the death will take the human go down and drowning to the underground like the dead bodies in the graves. The last line “as though we lived falling out of the skin into the soul.” is like the rotting of the dead bodies. The second stanza there is one Simile in this
