Life is a journey. It is filled with challenges, lessons learned, happiness, and celebrations. Everyone experiences the twists and turns that life can throw, but some do not experience it as Linda Pastan did during the women’s movement. She expresses her feeling of “life” in her poem “Marks” and “Baseball. Both of these poems portray the use of extended metaphors to set the theme of her poems and are similar in comparing two distinct things to life, but in different ways.
Linda Pastan was a great poet while also a wife and mother. She “suspended her writing for a decade while raising her three children” (Potvin 2). Pastan stated in an interview with Jeffery Brown that she stopped because she could not be the perfect wife and mother that were
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The structure of “Baseball” and “Marks” are very different, but their two distinct structures tend to prove the same meaning. “Marks” is a poem consisting of three stanzas with three lines in the first, five lines in the second and four lines in the third. This poem has three groups of four lines, in which each family member has their own group of lines. One unique thing is that the husband’s last line runs into the second stanza. Pastan does this to make it clear that her husband grades her on her intimate abilities and only gives her a B plus. “Baseball” on the other hand consists of seven short two lined stanzas and is also written in free verse. Again Pastan could have chosen to write this poem in seven short two lined stanzas because a little league baseball game is played in seven innings with each team hitting and playing the field once and each inning. This structure is unique in portraying the game baseball. Each poem has its own way of expressing the use of a metaphor, because one deals with a historical event and another is just Pastan’s thoughts about life. These poems are not only different in structure both include informal diction, alliteration, and distinct world choices to convey the meaning of the extended metaphor in each
Hoops by Walter Dean Myers takes place in New Jersey, a city where basketball may be the future of a lot of teenagers.Basketball is their only escape to success. Loonie is an All-Star basketball player but he just got a new coach,Cal.Cal was a professional basketball player but he lost everything because of drugs.Now Cal is trying to find his way back to basketball and in other part Loonie is trying to find his way to success.
Both awe-inspiring and indescribable is life, the defined “state of being” that historians and scholars alike have been trying to put into words ever since written language was first created. And in the words of one such intellectual, Joshua J. Marine, “Challenges are what make life interesting; overcoming them is what makes life meaningful”. Essentially, he is comparing life to a bowl of soup. Without challenges or hardship into which we can put forth effort and show our potential, it becomes a dull and flavorless broth. But for characters in novels like Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, and Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, the difficulties and trials that we all must face can transfigure the mundane liquid mixture of existence into a vibrant and fulfilling gumbo. The protagonists of these works are two strong-willed and highly admirable women, who prevail in the face of overwhelming odds stacked in everyone’s favor but theirs. In their trying periods of isolation brought about by cold and unwelcoming peers, particularly men, they give their lives meaning by simply pushing forward, and living to tell the tale.
also be seen as a man who enjoyed killing but must come up with an
Mark Doty is an American poet who uses his platform and his poetry to speak out about society’s castigation of homosexuality. A plethora of Doty’s poems share a theme: a community impacts one’s individuality from a young age.
Baseball is America’s pastime. The sport of baseball goes back all the way to civil war era, 1839. August Wilson saw the potential this sport had to send a message, and incorporated it into his play Fences. His collection of ten plays portrays the hardships of African Americans for every decade of the twentieth century (Wilson 961). Fences, in particular portrays the nineteen fifties (Wilson 961). When one reads Fences, yes it is about the struggle of African Americans in the time period, but it also incorporates baseball as multiple plot elements, and a metaphor for life.
In “Football Dreams” by Jacqueline Woodson, the message that any dream can come true if you put the work in is supported by the structure of the poem. The structural elements that are most impactful are repetition and the title. While she talks about her father’s dreams at the beginning. Later towards the end of the poem, she starts to explain how they came true. “My father dreamed football dreams, and woke up to a scholarship at Ohio State University” (10-12). The repetition is “dreams” and “football” which tells the audience that her father dreamed of playing football and he put in the effort and got a “scholarship at Ohio State University.” The title “Football Dreams” is the repetition
on: April 10th 1864. He was born in 1809 and died at the age of 83 in
On the surface, "life" is a late 19th century poem by Paul Laurence Dunbar. The poem illustrates the amount of comfort and somber there is in life. Unfortunately, according to Paul Laurence Dunbar, there is more soberness in life than the joyous moments in our existence. In more detail, Paul Laurence Dunbar demonstrates how without companionship our existence is a series of joys and sorrows in the poem, "Life" through concrete and abstract diction.
In the early 20th century, baseball became the first professional sport to earn nationwide attention in America. Because it was our first national professional team sport, because of its immense popularity, and because of its reputation as being synonymous with America, baseball has been written about more than any other sport, in both fiction and non-fiction alike. As baseball grew popular so did some of the sportswriters who wrote about the game in the daily newspaper. Collectively, the sportswriters of the early 20th century launched a written history of baseball that transformed the game into a “national symbol” of American culture, a “guardian” of America’s traditional values, and as a “gateway” to an idealized past. (Skolnik 3) No American sport has a history as long—or as romanticized—as that of the game referred to as our “national pastime.”
As Edgar Allan Poe once stated, “I would define, in brief the poetry of words as the rhythmical creation of beauty.” The two poems, “Birthday,” and “The Secret Life of Books” use different diction, theme, and perspective to give them a unique identity. Each author uses different literary devices to portray a different meaning.
During the process of growing up, we are taught to believe that life is relatively colorful and rich; however, if this view is right, how can we explain why literature illustrates the negative and painful feeling of life? Thus, sorrow is inescapable; as it increase one cannot hide it. From the moment we are born into the world, people suffer from different kinds of sorrow. Even though we believe there are so many happy things around us, these things are heartbreaking. The poems “Tips from My Father” by Carol Ann Davis, “Not Waving but Drowning” by Stevie Smith, and “The Fish” by Elizabeth Bishop convey the sorrow about growing up, about sorrowful pretending, and even about life itself.
The poems facilitate the investigation of human experience through illustrating life’s transience and the longevity of memory.
In his preface of the Kokinshū poet Ki no Tsurayaki wrote that poetry conveyed the “true heart” of people. And because poetry declares the true heart of people, poetry in the minds of the poets of the past believed that it also moved the hearts of the gods. It can be seen that in the ancient past that poetry had a great importance to the people of the time or at least to the poets of the past. In this paper I will describe two of some of the most important works in Japanese poetry the anthologies of the Man’yōshū and the Kokinshū. Both equally important as said by some scholars of Japanese literature, and both works contributing greatly to the culture of those who live in the land of the rising sun.
In Linda Pastan's poem "Ethics," the speaker recounts a moral dilemma that her teacher would ask every fall, which has been haunting her for a long time. The question was "if there were a fire in a museum / which would you save, a Rembrandt painting / or an old woman who hadn't many / years left anyhow?" and the speaker tells us through the theme that ethics and moral values can be only learned from the reflection which comes through experience and maturity. In this poem, imagery, diction, and figures of speech contribute to the development of the theme.
In class we have been studying poetry, and the two poems I have chosen to compare are “In a Brixtan Markit” and “Not My Business”.