Losing Religion and Finding God in The Day Zimmer Lost Religion
Paul Zimmer's poem "The Day Zimmer Lost Religion" tells of the narrator's respect and fear of Christ as a boy. He is now a man and dares to challenge Christ. The expected punishment does not occur, and Zimmer loses his faith in religion as he now perceives it.
The first stanza is about childhood fear of God. The narrator says, "The first Sunday I missed Mass on purpose / I waited all day for Christ to climb down" (1-2). Zimmer felt he deserved to be punished, to have Christ "Club me on my irreverent teeth, to wade into / My blasphemous gut and drop me like a / Red hot thurible" (4-6). Zimmer clearly expects something terrible to happen, emphasized by the presence of a watching, anticipating Devil.
Stanza two is about rebellion. "It was a long cold way from the old days" (8). Zimmer would never have dared to miss Mass in his younger years. Zimmer feels he has come a long way from his boyhood days, "A long way from the dirty wind that blew / The soot like venial sins across the schoolyard" (11-12). Is the dirty wind the forces in life that we cannot control? Is the soot the flaws we begin to see in our elders as we grow older? Has Zimmer observed how weak man can be and questioned why God allows our transgressions? In the schoolyard, "God reigned as a threatening, / One-eyed triangle high in the fleecy sky" (13-14). Does Zimmer feel God had reigned high in the sky and observed each sin we do? He equates the schoolyard with the world. Zimmer knows the minor sins of the schoolyard. God knows the sins of all.
The last stanza is about mature faith. Zimmer repeats that he "waited all day for Christ to climb down . . . and pound me / Till me irreligious tongue hung out" (16-19). Zimmer seems to feel that Christ is obligated to punish and that in fact He even enjoys it. Zimmer never mentions a God of love; is this why he feels there must be more to religion than what he knows now? In the last two lines, Zimmer tells us, "But of course He never came, knowing that / I was grown up and ready for Him now" (20-21).
Why I Left the Church” by Richard Garcia is a poem that explores the ongoing and conflicting relationship between a child’s fantasy and the Church. Although the majority of the text is told in present tense, readers are put through the lenses of a young boy who contemplates the legitimacy of the restricting and constricting nature of worship. It is a narrative that mixes a realist approach of storytelling with a fantasy twist that goes from literal metaphors to figurative metaphors in the description of why the narrator left the church. The poet presents the issue of childhood innocence and preset mindsets created by the Church using strong metaphors and imagery that appeal to all the senses.
In order to understand James Wright's intentions in writing this poem, one must first have an understanding of the biblical story that it deals with. According to the Bible, "Satan entered Judas, who was numbered among the twelve [apostles]. So he went his way and conferred with the chief priests and captains, how he might betray [Jesus] to them. And they were glad, and agreed to give him money. Then he promised and sought opportunity to betray Him to them"(Luke 22. 3-6). The Bible goes on to document Jesus and the apostles during the Last Supper, and Jesus revealing his knowledge of Judas' plan to betray him. He tells his apostles: "But behold, the hand of my betrayer is with me on the table"(Luke 22. 21). Judas later leads the officials to Jesus and identifies him to them by kissing Jesus. "Now His betrayer had given them a sign, saying, 'Whomever I kiss, He is the One, seize Him...Then immediately he went up to Jesus and said, 'Greetings, Rabbi! and kissed Him"(Matt. 26. 48-49). After Jesus is ta...
Dance is the universal language of the soul. Dance speaks of the truest inner feelings and life experiences of a dancer. Every dancer and/or choreographer will grow up to have a very distinctive style and set of unique techniques, dance values, and teaching methods to be followed. The dancer whom we will be analyzing in this paper is a pioneer of modern dance, Lester Horton. He was born on January 23rd, 1906 in Indianapolis, Indiana (Segal, 1998). He had moved to California to create dances and had developed a fresh and unique style of technique and choreography (Warren, 1977). He established the first permanent theater in America devoted to dance, and organized one of the first integrated modern dance companies (Yeoh, 2012).
The film, Dances with Wolves, is masterfully produced to change the stereotypical view of Native Americans as brutal savages to a fixed view of them as normal human beings. Shift in perception is achieved by first grabbing the audience attention with an initial matched stereotype of cruel Indians. The audience is carried to a new frame of thought through the trustworthy character of Dunbar and his developing relationship with the Indians. In the end, Dunbar's dance with the wolves becomes a great learning experience for him in his life, as well as an eye-opening tool for the humbled American audience.
Influential 20th century American writer Langston Hughes describes an incident which made him lose his religious beliefs as a young boy of twelve in his essay called “Salvation.” At his aunt’s church, there was a service being held for the children of the town to be “brought to Jesus” (Hughes). Hughes’ aunt and many other people of the congregation said when Jesus came to Hughes, he would see a light and feel something happen on the inside. After the preacher “sang a song about the ninety and nine safe in the fold, but one little lamb was left out in the cold,” a few girls jumped up and ran to the altar (Hughes). Over time, all of the children had gone to the altar except Hughes and another boy, Westley. After a while of not seeing or feeling Jesus, Westley just wanted the service to be over and he said, “God damn! I 'm tired o ' sitting here. Let 's get up and
The movie Dances with wolves is a movie that depicted the Indians in an unstereotypical way. Everybody in this time thought of the Indians as thieves, beggars, and savages. They took over other people’s land and killed the buffalo. I know that a lot of people have misunderstood, mistreated, or misjudged someone in their lifetime. All people are worthy of respect, you cannot just judge by first instinct or by what others say. Americans back then were small minded, revengeful, prejudiced, and swayed by rumor very easily.
Still even more evidence of these mixed feelings is illustrated in the third stanza. "This love dance, a kind of blood rite between father and son, shows suppressed terror combined with awe-inspired dependency" (Balakian 62). "The hand that held my wrist/was battered on one knuckle;/ At every step you missed/ My right ear scraped a buckle"(Roethke 668). The speaker's father's hand being "battered on one knuckle" is indicative of a man who...
After dancing over thirteen years at Annabel Timm’s School of Ballet, I was given the opportunity to help teach a hip-hop class for kids in elementary school. Every Wednesday night, I would meet fifteen little girls at the studio and teach them a new dance to perform in front of their parents. After only a few lessons, each girl became such an important part in my life. During class I would answer their questions about technique and different fundamentals of dance, but when class was over I answered questions about their homework and talked them through all of their problems pertaining home and school. I realized I wasn’t just a dance assistant to them, but I was a mentor.
In the third stanza, the language becomes much darker, words like: anger, explode, and against make this stanza seem even more warlike than the first stanza.
Miami Dade College’s very own dance majors, who were challenged by the artistry of guest choreographers as well as themselves, performed The Art of Dance. Watching this performance truthfully made me question if the dancers in this program were being trained properly to be professional dancers
Dance, more specifically ballet, began as early as the 1400s, developing through many parts of the world including France, Italy, Russia, and America. This physical art began for the King and traveled through centuries to transform into the modernistic version America and around the world sustains. To find out how this transformation occurred many people must be mentioned such as King Louis XIV, Rudolf Nureyev, Natalia Makarova, Anna Pavlova, Sergei Diaghilev, Mikhail Baryshnikov, and George Balanchine. To convert from the beginning of ballet to where it is in America now, one must consider style, purpose, and use to find out why it is the way it is now.
The first and second stanza effectively sets up the poem; as an old man wanders amongst children he feels detached from them because of both his experience and age. The opening stanza commences with a description of the speaker’s location, “ I walk through the long school room” (1). It continues in an epic sentence ending with a period just before the second stanza. The speaker walks down the hall of a school with a nun as his guide; symbolically, the school represents the speaker’s life. As he wanders through the rooms and corners of the hall, he also navigates the episodes of his own life. The nun mentions that the children learn to cipher and read “in a modern...
I, like so many little girls at age four, donned the tulle and canvas slippers of a ballerina to pirouette and sashay across various studios and stages in search of happiness. Within a year, I had begun to immerse myself entirely in the art. I learned the production history of all of the canonical ballets; I mastered the French pronunciation of every position, ballet master, and dance step; I spent at least twenty hours per week in the studio and invested countless hours in ballet classes, competitions, and auditions. Dance became an integral, primary part of my identity and lifestyle, the one constant through the tumult of my adolescence. By my middle school years, dance was as large a commitment as school. Nonetheless, I was happy dancing and I took pride in the work ethic dance had instilled in me. Ballet demanded that I learned to handle immense pressure at a young age and I was made to understand the importance of self-motivation and responsibility.
From century to century and country to country, ballet has traveled, leaving behind a rich and artistic past, worth talking about to this day. Starting in Italy in the 1400’s, ballet has traveled all throughout the world. Improvements to the dance style and stunning dancers have been brought forth from the countries ballet has traveled through. Throughout ballet’s history, choreographers have put there own twist on this specific genre of dance, leading to new dance types, new ways expression, and ways of performing. What makes the history of ballet so interesting to many people is how much it has changed over the years and how it has impacted several generations. Watching ballerinas perform today would be much different than watching ballerinas
...nity of all living things, including himself. The harsh reaction of organized religion to this idea is illustrated in the second "Little Boy Lost," in which the youth is actually burned for his rebellious thinking. The first set of poems tells of the boy's lack of success in a religious system in that did not seem to really care about the boy, and left him floundering. It then describes his introduction to God in the forest, who brought him back to his mother, the earth, which showed him proper reverence of God through nature, not priestly education. The second poem captures organized religion's harsh reaction to this unorthodox and rebellious thinking, and destroys the boy for trying to reach outside of the accepted normal teachings. Together, the poems show an evolution from Blake's dissatisfaction with organized religion to an outright indictment of its practices.