April 24, 2014. That day, I wore my black suit. I was in a large crowded room. People throughout the room smiled with tears and teared up when telling stories. Suddenly, the room became silent as the doors shut; the funeral service for my friend’s dad was about to begin. I regretfully remember that throughout the service I fought to contain my tears. For some unknown reason, I felt that it was unacceptable for me to cry for someone else’s dad. I thought that society would not acknowledge my grief since I was not part of his family. Similarly, the speaker in Elegy for Jane, My Student, Thrown by a Horse, by Theodore Roethke, ponders the same thing. This elegy exposes the grief that the speaker feels for his beloved student. Within these lines, …show more content…
The speaker begins by recalling Jane’s life in the world of the living with bittersweet images. First, the speaker zooms in on the vulnerability of Jane’s neck. The reader runs into the word “neckcurls” and immediately relates it back to Jane’s horse accident. The lack of vitality in the words “limp” and “damp” back up this idea. However, the poet describes the neckcurls as tendrils, like a living plant. Thus, it becomes clear to the reader that the speaker is recalling Jane’s soft hair near her neck. The poet relates images of Jane to images of nature to show how Jane is constantly on the speaker’s mind and how Jane is part of the speaker’s life. For instance, in line two, the speaker recalls Jane’s smile as a sidelong pickerel smile. The poet produces a rhythm to elongate these four words, painting the image of Jane’s awkward smile. Hence, parts of the natural world seem to remind the speaker of Jane. On the other hand, the poet creates energy in the poem when describing Jane’s “quick look.” The energy in Jane’s “quick look” reminds the speaker of the active and alive Jane. The speaker’s voice follows with grief since Jane now only remains as a memory in the speaker’s head. The poet creates emotion in the speaker’s voice by including several breaks in the subsequent lines. Additionally, the poet endeavors to bring characteristics of Jane back to life in this poem by intensifying …show more content…
The speaker reflects fondly on Jane’s impact, wishing for his beloved student to
The author initially uses words with negative connotation, such “wild,” “storm of grief,” and “sank into her soul” (1), to suggest a normal reaction to the death of a loved one.
Theodore Roethke analyzes the complex attitude in an "Elegy for Jane." In the beginning the tone was reminiscent, heartfelt and warm bringing up cherishing moments between the speaker and Jane. However, the tone shifted as the piece developed going from a warm heartfelt poem to a dark sorrowing work. Roethke accomplishes this transition by using dominant literary devices throughout the work such as personification, similes, and imagery. These devices help us understand that the teacher loves and cares for Jane but is fearful of letting her go.
Imagine that the person you love most in the world dies. How would you cope with the loss? Death and grieving is an agonizing and inevitable part of life. No one is immune from death’s insidious and frigid grip. Individuals vary in their emotional reactions to loss. There is no right or wrong way to grieve (Huffman, 2012, p.183), it is a melancholy ordeal, but a necessary one (Johnson, 2007). In the following: the five stages of grief, the symptoms of grief, coping with grief, and unusual customs of mourning with particular emphasis on mourning at its most extravagant, during the Victorian era, will all be discussed in this essay (Smith, 2014).
The beginning of the poem describes Jane's character from the speakers' intimate point of view. It seems that the speaker was close to his student. He speaks of her vitality and exuberance, and recalls her qualities such as her hair, smile, and presence. “I remember the neckcurls, limp and damp as tendrils,” here, the speaker using a simile to compare Jane’s hair to tendrils, a plant known for its curls and climbing. Jane’s love for singing is mentioned as she is compared to a wren, “A wren, happy,...Her song trembling the twigs and small branches.” The speaker talks of how the “syllables leaped for her,” and how she “balanced in the delight of her thought,” emphasizing her liveliness. He also describes the power that Jane’s voice has, as normally when leaves blow, they make a cold, frigid whisper, but the whispers of the leaves “turned to kissing” when Jane sang. The speaker also implies how Jane can make something unappealing, such as mold, sing with her, “the mould sang in the bleached valleys under the rose.” This, however, unfortunately foreshadows her death.
The speaker begins the poem an ethereal tone masking the violent nature of her subject matter. The poem is set in the Elysian Fields, a paradise where the souls of the heroic and virtuous were sent (cite). Through her use of the words “dreamed”, “sweet women”, “blossoms” and
Death in a family seizes control over the emotional and physical health of the surviving family. Facing death is difficult, but it cannot be ignored. The trauma may be an opportunity to grow from the experience, if it is talked about and discussed and worked through with the support of others; or it may throw a family off course, misdirecting their actions or leaving them altogether emotionally stagnant. Two families confront death differently in William Faulkner’s “A Rose For Emily,” in which a well-respected woman degenerates into a reclusive spinster after the death of her father, and in Brady Udall’s “The Wig,” a flash-fiction story about a son who wears a discarded wig that resembles the hair of his dead mother. These two stories offer very different portraits of families who try to recover after the death of a parent -- in Udall’s story, the mom; and in Faulkner’s, the father -- yet each story, through imagery, metaphor, symbolism, and their climaxes, comment similarly on the importance of communication after a devastating loss such as death.
When writing poetry, there are many descriptive methods an author may employ to communicate an idea or concept to their audience. One of the more effective methods that authors often use is linking devices, such as metaphors and similes. Throughout “The Elder Sister,” Olds uses linking devices effectively in many ways. An effective image Olds uses is that of “the pressure of Mother’s muscles on her brain,” (5) providing a link to the mother’s expectations for her children. She also uses images of water and fluidity to demonstrate the natural progression of a child into womanhood. Another image is that of the speaker’s elder sister as a metaphorical shield, the one who protected her from the mental strain inflicted by their mother.
In the book All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy, symbolism is shown in multiple different ways. Symbolism is the usage of symbols to represent ideas and qualities. When reading the book, in the beginning these symbols do not tend to stand out, but as the plot continues symbols are found everywhere. Multiple symbols are used throughout the story like horses, blood and water. Some more less-noticeable symbols are dust, religion, and sunsets.
...ttachment or emotion. Again, Heaney repeats the use of a discourse marker, to highlight how vividly he remembers the terrible time “Next morning, I went up into the room”. In contrast to the rest of the poem, Heaney finally writes more personally, beginning with the personal pronoun “I”. He describes his memory with an atmosphere that is soft and peaceful “Snowdrops and Candles soothed the bedside” as opposed to the harsh and angry adjectives previously used such as “stanched” and “crying”. With this, Heaney is becoming more and more intimate with his time alone with his brother’s body, and can finally get peace of mind about the death, but still finding the inevitable sadness one feels with the loss of a loved one “A four foot box, a foot for every year”, indirectly telling the reader how young his brother was, and describing that how unfortunate the death was.
Elegy can be used as a way to grieve, or a way to get past the mourning stages for a poet. In "Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude" by Ross Gay, one of the pivotal points of the book is when he writes about the death of his dad. In his poem "Burial" we see how he travels through the mourning stages and eventually comes terms with his death. The specific elements of an elegy include, speaking with the dead, grief and shock, and naming the dead. Gay specifically targets all of these components. He begins by naming not how his father died, but by stating, "out back I took the jar which has become my father's house" (pg. 11). We know that he is in the process of mourning, and now the only thing he has of his father is his ashes. Gay begins to heal after
The purpose of this essay is to analyze and compare and contrast the two paired poems “My Last Duchess” by Robert Browning and “My Ex-Husband” by Gabriel Spera to find the similarities presented within the pairs. Despite the monumental time difference between “My Last Duchess” and “My Ex-Husband”, throughout both poems you will see that somebody is wronged by someone they thought was a respectable person and this all comes about by viewing a painting on the wall or picture on a shelf.
..., the content and form has self-deconstructed, resulting in a meaningless reduction/manifestation of repetition. The primary focus of the poem on the death and memory of a man has been sacrificed, leaving only the skeletal membrane of any sort of focus in the poem. The “Dirge” which initially was meant to reflect on the life of the individual has been completely abstracted. The “Dirge” the reader is left with at the end of the poem is one meant for anyone and no one. Just as the internal contradictions in Kenneth Fearing’s poem have eliminated the substantial significance of each isolated concern, the reader is left without not only a resolution, but any particular tangible meaning at all. The form and content of this poem have quite effectively established a powerful modernist statement, ironically contingent on the absence and not the presence of meaning in life.
During the early seventeenth century, poets were able to mourn the loss of a child publicly by writing elegies, or poems to lament the deceased. Katherine Philips and Ben Jonson were two poets who wrote the popular poems “On the Death of My Dearest Child, Hector Philips”, “On My First Son”, and “On My First Daughter” respectively. Although Philips and Jonson’s elegies contain obvious similarities, the differences between “On the Death of My Dearest Child” and “On My First Son” specifically are pronounced. The emotions displayed in the elegies are very distinct when considering the sex of the poet. The grief shown by a mother and father is a major theme when comparing the approach of mourning in the two elegies.
The theme of the poem, “Names of Horses” is the circle of life and how the author feels about animal labor. The poem has the story of this horse and a man’s life in this small poem perfectly aligned from the beginning to the end. Donald hall showed us a connection between the man and the horse; not just labor uses but the love between the two. The seasons go by and the author doesn’t hesitate to add more description to paint a picture of the lives they share. The author states in the poem, “When you were old and lame, when your shoulders hurt bending to graze, one October the man, who fed you and kept you, and harnessed you every morning, led you through corn stubble to sandy ground above Eagle Pond, and dug a hole beside you where you stood
Mrs. Mallard’s repressed married life is a secret that she keeps to herself. She is not open and honest with her sister Josephine who has shown nothing but concern. This is clearly evident in the great care that her sister and husband’s friend Richard show to break the news of her husband’s tragic death as gently as they can. They think that she is so much in love with him that hearing the news of his death would aggravate her poor heart condition and lead to death. Little do they know that she did not love him dearly at all and in fact took the news in a very positive way, opening her arms to welcome a new life without her husband. This can be seen in the fact that when she storms into her room and her focus shifts drastically from that of her husband’s death to nature that is symbolic of new life and possibilities awaiting her. Her senses came to life; they come alive to the beauty in the nature. Her eyes could reach the vastness of the sky; she could smell the delicious breath of rain in the air; and ears became attentive to a song f...