“Sloth” p. 21
I was over thinking this poem and trying to make a frog connection for the first few readings. I am old enough to remember Clifford the rasta muppet from the Muppet Show, so the second stanza’s mention of “else rasta muppet who’s fur teems with green alge”, made me think of the Muppets and Kermit. Initially, I had to look up camaru and jatobi and lianas and it helped in determining the setting of the poem. Even though the title of the poem is sloth, I still kept trying to make the frog connection, but once I researched sloth, it all came together.
The language used makes me think of a slow lazy animal, meandering around the jungle and is in line with my perception of sloth behavior. However, after reading the second stanza and looking up information about the sloth, I learned new things about the creature that gave deeper meaning to the poem. In the third stanza, Shankar describes the sloth’s fur as “teeming with green algae” and the last line, “nutrients that seep back through” makes me visualize the fur as being its own little ecosystem for the ticks and beetles.
“Peacock” p. 22
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I initially took the word train literally; when I read “a thrall of eyes peers from a train”, I envisioned a zoo setting and a small train taking visitors around to see the various habits. Upon researching the peacock I found that the colorful span of feathers is referred to as a train (Hullinger). After learning about the train, I decided to look up thrall, and found it meant “a state of servitude or submission” (Definition of Thrall). Digging a little deeper, I found that Darwin referred to the circular patterns on the tail as “eyes” and he believed the more feathers, thus eyes, a bird had the more likely a female would submit to his calling
Nearly everyone has had that dreadful encounter with the last person they want to see in places like the supermarket, dry cleaners, or the movie theaters. What follows are a few awkward moments of strained conversation while one looks for signs of bitter regret in the eyes of his or her ex. Carolyn Krizer’s poem “Bitch” depicts such a meeting. The poem brings the reader to reality of what really goes on deep beyond conversation while seeing an ex. Through the use of personification, diction, and tone Kizer delineates the speaker’s struggle with feelings of animosity, repression, and desire for reconciliation.
The poem's situation is simple, a lone traveler driving along a desolate canyon road spots a felled deer; the traveler, desiring neither to hit the deer, nor by swerving to avoid it, hurtle his car over the canyon precipice, stops his vehicle and proceeds to push the fallen animal over the canyon face, into the river below. As the driver struggles to displace the cold, stiff deer corpse he senses warmth emanating from its abdomen, it's an unborn fawn. Realizing that life remains in the body he had assumed dead, the traveler hesitates. Finally, he pushes the deer, one dead and the other not yet alive, off the road and into the chasm.
Humans are all different in nature. We think deeply about issues and then react according to our values and beliefs. This helps us pick the best possible course of action. In “Useless Boys” the narrator doesn’t want to make the commitment because he believes that it does more harm than good to a person. He also states that he has had a problem with others keeping their commitment, for example, his father, who is never around.
The narrator is trapped by their past, and the poem describes it affecting their daily life. They have a black cat they are envious of, because the cat is carefree and does not make the same mistakes that the narrator does. “He refuses to be snared by a single love the way I did” (319). The narrator had gotten trapped by a love that went badly, and left them being broken from it. Their cat does not make this mistake, and is also carefree, “He leaps from the rooftop . . . doesn't dread crossing bridges or dark alleyways” (318). He just lives his life out and is not concerned about any sort of danger, and because of this the narrator is envious of the cat. They cannot act the same way as the cat does, they are too concerned about their life and what happens with it, “He doesn't cling to life as I do” (318). The narrator seems to be trapped by their past, and because of this, it affects the way they live now. They have shut themselves off purposefully, they let their past affect them this much, they corrupted themselves. They know this, and they wish they had not let it happen, this is why they envy their
Enticingly, the Spanish homesteaders came to this land with a passionate objective to develop the land and extract its natural resources for their profit. To this day, the Spanish's activities on this land has brought success and has propagated California to be the leading role in the advancement of new technologies and the creation of motion pictures. Notwithstanding of having this recognition, people seldom discuss on the origin of the land. When the Spanish came, the Indian are the occupants of the area; governing the land and surviving through the natural resources. As history is portrayed by the victor, the destiny of the right proprietor of the land has dependably been untold. Their once serene time has ceased to proceed as the Spanish
The symbolism in the poem paints a ghastly picture of a man’s life, falling apart as he does his best, and worst, to keep it safe from himself. In lines 1 through 8 (stanza one), he gives a brief description of an incident in his life where things have gone wrong. “When the tiger approaches can the fast-fleeting hind/Repose trust in his footsteps of air?/No! Abandoned he sinks in a trance of despair,” He uses these lines to show the lack of control he has over his actions, how his will to change his circumstances has weakened. He is both the hind with the person he is tormenting, and the tiger that
The poets do not faithfully consider the animals as animals. They relate them more to humans, rather than what they physically are, animals. For example, in Walt Whitman’s poem, “A Noiseless Patient Spider,” Whitman compares the actions of the spider to humans. The lines of both stanzas correspond to each other. The second line, explaining about the spider, states, “I marked where on a little promontory it stood isolates” (Whitman 723). It corresponds to line seven, which is “surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space” (Whitman 723). Line seven talks about a human. As seen, these lines are about solitude. It continues to go on about the desolate feeling both the spider and human have. So the spider is, indirectly, actually a human.
“Sloth poses as the love of peace...Extravagance masquerades as fullness and abundance…The spendthrift makes a pretence of liberality...The envious struggle for preferment…Grief eats away its heart for the loss of things which it took pleasure in desiring, because it wants to be like you, from whom nothing can be taken away” (50).
The poem “First Poem for You” by Kim Addonizio is a sonnet written by a woman contemplating on the permanence of her lover’s tattoos. The sonnet focuses on the speaker’s perspective of her lover’s tattoos as she appears to regard them with fascination and aversion. Upon closer analysis, it could be said that the speaker’s contemplation of her lover’s tattoos is a reflection of her perspective of their relationship. By comparing the permanence of her lover’s tattoos to the fleeting nature of relationships, the speaker addresses the uncertainty of their relationship and her desire for the relationship to become permanent.
At the beginning of the poem, the speaker “thought about the smaller lives that were caught” in the forest fire (Jeffers 3). These “smaller” animals literally refers to the squirrels, raccoons, and other animals of shorter size. But “smaller” also connotes the importance and value of the lives of these animals. Born in their insignificant form, the less fortunate inhabitants of the forest are not able to escape their fiery demises quick enough, supporting the idea of an uncontrollable fate in nature. From the moment one is born, life either traps or blesses that person or animal. A talent or comforting lifestyle could grace one’s life, or a terrible disease or circumstance could befall another. Soon after mentioning the small lives, the speaker notes that “beauty is not always lovely” (Jeffers 4). In this paradox, Jeffers delves into the death of the “smaller lives.” Death is the end to life, yet it can also symbolize change and new beginnings. Although a fire devastates a forest and extinguishes the lives of many creatures, the beauty of new life and renewal will bloom in the aftermath. In short, nature will move towards the idea of a fundamental balance between life and death, using the destinies of the inhabitants as the driving force. Every animal has a basic role to play from birth to death that will drive the course nature will take. Additionally, Jeffers backs up this perplexing claim by detailing the return of an eagle to its nest: “Insolent and gorged, cloaked in the folded storms of his shoulders / He had come from far off for the good hunting” (Jeffers 8-9). Jeffers illustrates a yet another paradoxical situation, where death of others can lead to the life of another, to support his argument of fixed fate. Gaining nourishment from the “good hunting” of the fleeing animals, the eagle’s destiny is to kill and to become
Walt Whitman’s poem Time to Come explores Whitman’s curiosity of what happens when people die. Rather than taking a pessimistic approach, his writing is more insightful about the experience. The title alone introduces an aspect of his purpose; to point out that dying is inevitable. With Whitman captures the reader’s attention and shares his curiosity with vivid images, sophisticated diction, and his use of metaphor and personification in Time to Come.
Robert Burns was a famous writer. He wrote two famous poems called, To a Mouse and To a Louse. In the poem to a Mouse, the mouse's home is destroyed by a plow in the middle of winter. In the poem to a Louse, a lady at church has a louse on her and a man sits there and watches it crawl around on her. These two poems have a deeper meaning than what the author is just writing about. In the poems, To a Mouse and To a Louse by Robert Burns, express three messages.
In “A Noiseless Patient Spider”, Walt Whitman compares the images of a spider creating a web to catch its prey to his own soul. In the first stanza, he describes the spider creating its web. In the second stanza, he begins to describe his own soul searching for something it needs. Throughout the poem, Whitman is relating the spider to the human soul by showing how both would pursue and capture what they need to continue to exist in this life.
Even if he grew up within nature, he didn’t really appreciate it until he became an adult. He is pantheistic; a belief that nature is divine, a God. Since he has religious aspect of nature, he believes that nature is everything and that it makes a person better. His tone in the poem is reproachful and intense. His poem purpose is to tell the readers and his loved ones that if he feels some kind of way about nature, then we should have the same feeling toward it as well.
Although this poem is reverent to the yellow bird, it is undoubtedly about its death and burial; it is a poem about beauty that has been “extinguished”. The “electric, excited, murmurous”(36-38) bird whose beauty pertained to its “defiance”(54) was entrapped, restricted, forced to go against its natural ways. Even when Neruda mentions the beauty of the bird, he does not forget to attach the reminder that it no longer exists or that it was taken away from the bird. The characteristics, the “yellow flashes, the black lightning”(lines 10-11), that once made the bird one with nature were covered in dirt when it was buried. Readers can imagine not only the bird encaged and dead, but also the way Neruda associated its color and way of being to one of nature 's occurrences. So when the reader imagines the bird buried, they also see yellow and black lightning. And the inevitable noise and the feeling of fearful amazement that comes with it. The burial of a bird is also a reminder of the mood at people’s funerals. Moreover, many people keep birds as pets trapped in a small cage rather than let it be free where it 's supposed to be. Many times, the captors are aware of the cruelty but still wish to selfishly and without benefits hold on to their beauty and not let it go. Intertwined in