“Strange Fruit” is one of the famous poems made by Abel Meropol in the 1937. It is briefly discussed about the Civil Right Movement, as it is to highlight the racism against the black people that actually happened in the Southern America. Awareness among people had risen, as they have finally known the problems of racism there. In this poem, Meeropol uses contrast to highlight social contradiction happening in the Southern America with varieties literary techniques that will be discussed in this essay. Moreover, this essay will also analyze the psychological tension in Sylvia Plath’s poem that is “The Arrival of the Bee Box” that is also one of the famous poems about Civil Right Movement that was made in the 1960. Meerapol used contrast to …show more content…
The psychological tensions can be seen in how the narrator uses her power to rule over the bees. She felt she had to be in control, as she referred herself as the owner and God, but then she could not use her power properly as she was unsure which is the best decision. For example, she was cruel to the bees, “I need feed them nothing, I am the owner.” (Plath 1960, line 25). However, she changed her mind to be kind to them by setting them free, “Tomorrow I will be sweet God, I will set them free.” (Plath 1960, line 34). This shows people usually have those powerful ideas, but they felt powerless in doing it. They have arguments in their mindset whether to put their thoughts into action. Moreover, there is also psychological tension happened when the narrator received the box, as she felt uneasy about it. The narrator feared of the box, as it is not safe to be near it, “The box is locked, it is dangerous.” (Plath 1960, line 6). Yet, at the same time, she was curious about the box as she saw it fascinating, “And I can’t keep away from it.” (Plath 1960, line 8). This suggests that in real life, everyone was curious about something that might destroy
Heart break, joy, love, happiness, The Book The Secret Life of Bees has it all! The book is about a young girls that accidentally shot her mother. After spending nine years with her abusive, and emotionally absent father, she decides to run away. So, she breaks her beloved nanny out of prison, and Lily escapes to Tiburon South Carolina, a town she links to her mother through the writing on one of her old possessions. While in Tiburon, Lily finds the calendar sisters three very different, very helpful sisters. The family agrees to take Lilly in, despite the fact that almost every white person in town frowns upon the very idea of this white girl staying in an African American household. While staying with the sisters, August, May, and June, Lily learns lots of things, ranging from bee keeping, to why and how her mother first left her. She falls in love, explores her past, and finds it within herself to forgive her mother for leaving her, and herself, for shooting her mom. This book is rich in both emotion, and culture.
Martin Luther King once said, “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.” Sue Monk Kidd’s novel The Secret Life of Bees fully embodies his idea of equality, by introducing the story of a fourteen-year-old white girl named Lily Owens, who lives during the time of the Civil Rights Movement in South Carolina. Lily’s mother was killed in an accident when Lily is a little girl. Ever since, she lives with her father T-Ray, and her black surrogate mother, Rosaleen, in Sylvan, South Carolina. Soon after her fourteenth birthday, Lily escapes to the Boatwright sisters’ house in Tiburon, South Carolina, with Rosaleen, who is arrested for assaulting a white man. Upon her arrival, Lily faces different racist situations and meets her first love, a handsome black boy named Zach. The novel The Secret Life of Bees demonstrates that although racism has a negative impact on everyday life, it also influences Zach and Lily’s development in a positive manner.
Deborah’s original fears sprouted from her largest secret, the secret of her personal safe haven. To Deborah, opening up about the Kingdom of Yr, sparked her fear that the haven in which she finds safety, has potential to be destroyed in the hands of another individual. During the earlier stages of the novel, Deborah’s fear for the destruction of Yr ran deep, as without the Kingdom she would no longer have an outlet to run towards during her period of hurt. The fears in which Deborah experiences, also linger towards the emotional pot brewing inside of her, as she is terrified that the anger building up will spill out like an erupting volcano, causing a great deal of damage to an individual, “The clamor of from the Collect built higher until it was an overwhelming roar and the gray vision went red” (Greenberg, Chapter 19, page 26). Once the anger which accumulated over her life finally erupts, it becomes clear that the fear of not being able to control her anger, instigated Deborah to cling onto the rage for so long, eventually forcing her to maintain control of her fear. The protagonist’s final fear is sparked by her belief that the world is a place of betrayal, and love and kindness are foreign objects in the physical world. Due to the taunts she received from bully’s as a child and the lies she was prone to from
Have you ever heard of the term “doppelgănger”? If not, it means “double” in German. To say that the character, Joan Gilling, is Esther Greenwoods “double” in the novel “The Bell Jar”, by Sylvia Plath, would be an understatement. Esther and Joan are one in the same. Joan and Esther endure many of the same obstacles throughout the novel. Joan’s actions to these struggles ultimately make Esther come to terms with reality. Either change her ways, and move on with her life, or end up like Joan, dead.
Furthermore, the incorporation of these experiences add a compelling and inspiring aspect to the literary piece, thus putting emphasis on the racism issue. By describing the character’s thoughts and feelings when encountering and conquering racism, the readers’ sense of indignation and hope are provoked. Therefore, the readers are given an insight of the cruelty that the Southern black girl faces in a society where racism is
The predominant symbols found in The Secret Life of Bees contributed greatly to the structure of the literature. The development of the writing’s structure, shown through increased emotional appeal and conflict description, was directly related to the usage of symbolism within the story. The passage reads, “‘They had all these little fish they’d caught fastened onto a stringer. They held me down on the bank and hooked it around my neck, making it too small to pull over my head,’” (Kidd 229). One of the symbols present in the text is a necklace of fish that Lily was forced to wear as a child. The necklace summarized the intricate issues that Lily was dealing with in her present life. The issues were like a tight necklace that could not be
Soto’s “Black Hair” is a perfect example of a poem that is effective through close analysis of certain concrete images which hold the key to the foundation of the poem and its underlying themes. In this poem, the universal themes of family and culture are hidden under the figure of Hector Moreno, the image of the narrator’s hair, as well as the extended baseball metaphor about culture. Although the title may seem ordinary at first glance, the challenge that the poem presents through its connection of concrete images and themes is very intriguing, and the themes are made clear through the effective use of certain poetic elements.
Grief leaves an imprint on those who experience it. Some can survive its deep sorrow, others cannot. In The Secret Life of Bees, by Sue Monk Kidd, she explores the effect of grief on the main characters. The novel opens with fourteen-year-old Lily Owns struggling with the knowledge that her mother was dead because she, as an infant, picked up a loaded gun and accidentally shot her. She runs away from her abusive father in search for answers of who her mother was. Lily hitchhikes to Tiburon, South Carolina; the location written on the back of an image of the Black Madonna – one of the only belongings she has of her mother’s. There, she finds a pink house inhabited by the Boatwright sisters who are African American women making Black Madonna honey. The Boatwright sisters have had their share of grief with the death of two of their sisters and the racial intolerance they face despite the passage of the Civil Rights Act. The Boatwright sisters and Lily Owens have different methods of coping with grief; internalizing, ignoring, and forgetting are some of the ways they cope, with varying degrees of success. They discover that they must live past their grief, or else it will tear them apart.
The Secret Life of Bees delineates an inspirational story in which the community, friendship and faith guide the human spirit to overcome anything. The story follows Lily Owens, a 14 year old girl who desperately wants to discover the cause of her mothers death. Her father T. Ray gives her no answers, which leads their maid, Rosaleen, to act as her guardian. Together, Lily and Rosaleen run away to Tiburon, South Carolina and find a welcoming community. It is in Tiburon that Lily learns many life lessons, including many about herself. In her novel The Secret Life of Bees, Sue Monk Kidd explores a theme of spiritual growth through Lily's search for home as well as a maternal figure.
Makayla Williams Mrs. Mandy Feasel AP English III 11 May 2015 “Lady Lazarus:” Free to Die “Lady Lazarus,” a poem widely known for its dark images and symbolism, captures the reader’s attention and entices him or her with a sense of familiarity with Lazarus. However, the comfortable feeling shatters as the reader takes a frightening journey through the life and death of Lady Lazarus. Sylvia Plath’s “Lady Lazarus” is semi-autobiographical in that through the pseudonym of Lady Lazarus, Plath uses her own personal issues and growing frustration with her oppressing father as the starting point to express her ideas on bigger issues such as the Holocaust, universal oppression, and the inhumanity of modern war. Lady Lazarus, the narrator, dies “one year in every ten,” (Plath 2) and Herr Doktor brings her back, however unwilling she may be, to an amused crowd; but this third time, she comes back and promises revenge on Herr Doktor, vowing to “eat men like air”
Sylvia Plath reflects her pain and suffering from depression in her life in the novel The Bell Jar, and Plath reveals her depression in her two poems, “Mirror” and “Daddy.” Plath had a weakness that was easy to spot but hard to control, “If Plath is to be faulted, this quality is perhaps her greatest weakness: she was not able to project her personae a great distance from herself. Plath was aware of this limitation. She once wrote: ‘I shall perish if I can write about no one but myself’”(Giles). She knew all of her literature was about her personal experiences, most of her writing is very dark and shows the world from a different point of view that not many people have. Plath commonly wrote about death, corpses, the moon, fetuses, and the sea. In “Mirror,” she wrote about hiding her inner self from the rest of the world, while in “Daddy,” she wrote about her selfish father, dying and leaving her to be alone. While critics such as Jeannine Johnson call her only novel, The Bell Jar an obvious “autobiography.”
In conclusion, Plath’s exercises various poetic devises that emphasize the attitude towards death by the speaker. Diction as a poetic devise shows though the choices that Plath makes in the selection of her words to depict the unenthusiastic tone of the poem. Then, the next poetic devise used is imagery, which was the most affective devise because of the vivid images the audience can imagine in their own minds. This approach also represents the depressing attitude and tone towards death. Lastly, the sounds and repetition are also used to show and express the downing aspects of the poem, including the tone and the attitude of the speaker. All together they make up just some of the important poetic devises that are being used in this poem that can analyze the speaker’s attitude towards death, which clearly is deadly.
“Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything, it is because we are dangerously close to wanting nothing.” ( http://thinkexist.com/quotes/sylvia_plath/)
Poetry is the wind for a trapped and wounded soul. A great example of a wounded soul is, Sylvia Plath. She was an immaculate poet, who expressed her personal troubles through writing. As Plath’s life smouldered into a heap of dust at the age of 30, her poetry grew and bloomed. In the years before her death, her most troubled period, Plath penned three of her most well-known poems, “Daddy”, “Lady Lazarus” and “Tulips”—all three illustrating the horrors of despair with strong, expressive literary devices. Plath, who committed suicide in 1963 at the age of 30, has been hailed ubiquitously as one of the most acclaimed and preeminent poets of the 21st century. Plath’s poetry was influenced by tragic events in her life and her prolonged battle against her deep depression and obsession with death. Plath’s personal issues made her the definition of a confessional poet. In the poems, “Daddy”, “Tulips”, and “Lady Lazarus”, Plath confesses her emotional and nervous breakdowns during her endless depression.
In lines 51-60 of “Stings,” imagery, allusion, and antithesis are employed by the author, Sylvia Plath, to develop her attitude towards men. In this section of “Stings,” Plath uses the “queen bee” as a symbol of herself -- a fiery, angry, vengeful daughter who rises up in spite of the man (her husband Ted) described in lines 38-50.