Poetry Set 6 “Taste the Pain” The poem “Taste the Pain” by The Red Hot Chili Peppers is a very interesting and intimate poem that was actually performed musically and rendered into a song. This poem tell the story of a guy who is in denial about the strong and intimate feelings that he has for someone. Throughout the poem the author strongly develops this theme and even teases the reader/listener through slight acknowledgement of the cause of his distress quickly followed up by another statement of denial.
In Tim Seibles' poem, The Case, he reviews the problematic situations of how white people are naturally born with an unfair privilege. Throughout the poem, he goes into detail about how colored people become uncomfortable when they realize that their skin color is different. Not only does it affect them in an everyday aspect, but also in emotional ways as well. He starts off with stating how white people are beautiful and continues on with how people enjoy their presence. Then he transitions into how people of color actually feel when they encounter a white person. After, he ends with the accusation of the white people in today's world that are still racist and hateful towards people of color.
In Drea Knufken’s essay entitled “Help, We’re Drowning!: Please Pay Attention to Our Disaster,” the horrific Colorado flood is experienced and the reactions of worldly citizens are examined (510-512). The author’s tone for this formal essay seems to be quite reflective, shifting to a tone of frustration and even disappointment. Knufken has a reflective tone especially during the first few paragraphs of the essay. According to Drea Knufken, a freelance writer, ghostwriter and editor, “when many of my out-of-town friends, family and colleagues reacted to the flood with a torrent of indifference, I realized something. As a society, we’ve acquired an immunity to crisis. We scan through headlines without understanding how stories impact people,
When I first watched the video “Strange Fruit” I found it nothing short of gruesome. The words swelled my eyes with tears as the images thwacked into my empathetic heart like an axe cutting into a tree. I could feel each clang as each picture changed. I listened intently to the words that sadly sawed through the lyrics leaving sawdust and residue in my mind. The song bears the pain of the fruit that has been lost. The title, like the trunk of a tree, is the foundation of the song, the representation of its strength but not what is most remembered. The pictures, are the flowers, of the video blooming of the face of each hanged man. The leaves, as Billy Holiday sings them, so simple but yet the crown of the tree, the sadness over the hierarchal rank
Beginning in residential school, Painted Tongue is called heathen by a religious school teacher, and after a while, he starts to question if maybe he is a heathen (Boyden 72-73). Boyden is illustrating the relationship between colonizer and colonized, with a repression of one’s spiritually by the preaching of another’s religion. This is another example of the effects of slow violence on Painted Tongue, where small differences such as contrasting religious or spiritual faiths, become the oppression of the minority
Sylvia Plath was known as an American Poet, Novelist and Shorty story writer. However, Plath lived a melancholic life. After Plath graduated from Smith College, Plath moved to Cambridge, England on a full scholarship. While Plath was Studying in England, she married Ted Hughes, an English poet. Shortly after, Plath returned to Massachusetts and began her first collection of poems, “Colossus”, which was published first in England and later the United States. Due to depression built up inside, Plath committed suicide leaving her family behind. Sylvia Plath was a gifted and troubled poet, known for the confessional style of her work, which is how “Mirror” came to be. Although this poem may seem like the reader is reading from first person point of view, there is a much deeper meaning behind Plath’s message throughout the poem. Plath uses several elements of terror and darkness to show change to the minds of the readers.
On June 17, 1917, Gwendolyn Brooks was born in Topeka, Kansas to Keziah and David. After Brooks’ birth, the family moved to Chicago where Brooks spent her childhood and remained until death. She was an avid writer from the young age of seven and at thirteen, Gwendolyn had her first published poem in the American Child magazine. After graduating from Woodrow Wilson Junior College in 1936, Brooks joined the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Youth Council. She then married Henry Blakely II in 1939 and gave birth to her son a year later, and then also gave birth to her daughter.
“Didn’t you know, I was waiting on you” is a quote from the song “Bad News” (Bhasker, West, Simone, and Bass, 2008, p. 1). The theme of this particular song is about heartbreak in relationships, and many times the woman is the one breaking a man’s heart. Three songs sung by Kanye West tell the tale of heartbreak caused by a woman and how the man has emotional pain, deals with heartbreak, and loses the woman to someone else.
Did I Miss Anything? is a poem written by a Canadian poet and academic Tom Wayman. Being a teacher, he creates a piece of literature, where he considers the answers given by a teacher on one and the same question asked by a student, who frequently misses a class. So, there are two speakers present in it – a teacher and a student. The first one is fully presented in the poem and the second one exists only in the title of it. The speakers immediately place the reader in the appropriate setting, where the actions of a poem take place – a regular classroom. Moreover, the speakers unfolds the main theme of the poem – a hardship of being a teacher, the importance of education and laziness, indifference and careless attitudes of a student towards studying.
Helen of Troy, known as the most beautiful woman of ancient Greek culture, is the catalyst for the Trojan War. As such, she is the subject of both Edgar Allen Poe’s “To Helen” and H.D.’s “Helen”; however, their perceptions of Helen are opposites. Many poets and authors have written about Helen in regards to her beauty and her treacherous actions. There is a tremendous contrast between the views of Helen in both poems by Poe and Doolittle. The reader may ascertain the contrast in the speakers’ views of Helen through their incorporation of diction, imagery, and tone that help convey the meaning of the work.
“A Story about the Body”, a prose poem by Robert Hass, is literally about a man who supposedly loves a woman but then finds out about her health conditions and then changes his mind. This poem, when I read it, was more like a short story than a poem. The poem uses imagery and a variety of adjectives which allow the reader to put themselves in the story as if they were watching it happen.
Pain can be expressed in both sorrow and anger. Sappho creates great imagery in this fragmented poem by taking pain into natural moving actions. She expresses how her feelings change from hurt to anger and how heavy pain can really be. Sappho uses physical movement to express her emotions in different directions. She also emphasizes how she sees revenge is the ultimate goal in order to recover from that pain.
Swimming through the river, like a red bolt of lightning, the salmon tries to find the place it was born at so it can spawn. It has learned this through the species’ trial and error, which is acquiring knowledge, one of the most important parts of a journey. As we’ve seen through many journeys, such as the poem by CP Cavafy “Ithaka”, and the migrations of animals like salmon, beluga whales, and horseshoe crabs, the journey is the most important thing out of an adventure. Although the destination still matters, the journey is where you gain all of your knowledge and your important items from.
“The Spring and the Fall” is written by Edna St. Vincent Millay. The poem is about two people, the poet and her significant other that she once had love for. The poem integrates the use of spring and fall to show how the poet stresses her relationship. Of course it starts off briefly by having a happy beginning of love, but the relationship soon took a shift for the worst, and there was foreshadow that there would be an unhappy ending. “I walked the road beside my dear. / The trees were black where the bark was wet” (2-3). After the seasons changed, the poet begins to explain why the relationship was dying, and all of the bad things she endured during the relationship. So, to what extend did the poet’s heart become broken, and did she ever
Heart of Gold is about a man- we’ll just say it’s Neil Young himself for the convenience of giving him a name- who feels like he is running out of time to become who he really wants to be. He feels like he’s gone through his whole life, but not had enough good things come out of it. He’s getting old. Most of his life has passed by and he feels he is running out of time and wanting to be a better person and be content with himself. Throughout his whole life, he’s searched for meaning and virtue in himself but hasn’t achieved it. He wants to have had a life that has brought good to the world and had some value before it’s too late. He wants peace within himself and to know that he is a good, genuine, golden person.
The three poets convey the feelings of seriousness, happiness, and failure. In the poem “Simile”, Scott Momaday explains how people and the actions we do are similar to animals in which the comparison was towards deer. In “Moon Rondeau” by Carl Sandburg he illustrates that working together in a relationship, you may be able to accomplish a task and generate a strong bond. In the final poem “Woman” by Nikki Giovanni she displays how one may want to grow and be someone special to your significant other but they may not care of what their other may want. The three poets are illustrating the theme of humans being similar to animals in which case they either work together or they just ignore each other within the literary similarities and differences of the three poems.