Have you ever seen a child being born? Have you ever seen someone die? These two things happen hundreds of thousands of times a day. It doesn’t occur to us unless it happens to someone we love and care about. But once it’s your responsibility to choose who lives or dies, the way you think about the value of life changes. In both, the poem “Birdfoot’s Grampa” by Joseph Bruchac and “Traveling Through the Dark” by William Stafford the value of life is called into question. Is some life better than others? Or is all life valued equally? At first glance the two poems look very similar, though after taking a closer look they have many differences. While both touch on the subject that all life has importance, the value of life is different for each poem. They each convey their overall theme by using specific word choices and setting to establish the mood. …show more content…
In “Birdfoot’s Grampa” the message given is, all life has value no matter who you are. The author, Joseph Bruchac, chose to have the speaker make sure he continuously saved all of the toads, even if it meant he had to stop “two dozen times”. He never thought twice about not saving one over the other, he saved all of the toads and put their needs before his own. Whereas in “Traveling Through the Dark” some life is more important than others. William Stafford, the author, chose to have the speaker “hesitate” and have to think about all of the options available. He contemplates on staying there and saving the deer or just push it over the edge of the canyon. After thinking for a long time he figures that others lives are of a higher value he kills the deer. The speaker had so many other options he could have chosen, but instead he represents death over
Both Virginia Woolf and Annie Dillard are extremely gifted writers. Virginia Woolf in 1942 wrote an essay called The Death of the Moth. Annie Dillard later on in 1976 wrote an essay that was similar in the name called The Death of a Moth and even had similar context. The two authors wrote powerful texts expressing their perspectives on the topic of life and death. They both had similar techniques but used them to develop completely different views. Each of the two authors incorporate in their text a unique way of adding their personal experience in their essay as they describe a specific occasion, time, and memory of their lives. Woolf’s personal experience begins with “it was a pleasant morning, mid-September, mild, benignant, yet with a keener breath than that of the summer months” (Woolf, 1). Annie Dillard personal experience begins with “two summers ago, I was camping alone in the blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia” (Dillard, 1). Including personal experience allowed Virginia Woolf to give her own enjoyable, fulfilling and understandable perception of life and death. Likewise, Annie Dillard used the personal narrative to focus on life but specifically on the life of death. To explore the power of life and death Virginia Woolf uses literary tools such as metaphors and imagery, along with a specific style and structure of writing in a conversational way to create an emotional tone and connect with her reader the value of life, but ultimately accepting death through the relationship of a moth and a human. While Annie Dillard on the other hand uses the same exact literary tools along with a specific style and similar structure to create a completely different perspective on just death, expressing that death is how it comes. ...
Gail White’s “Dead Armadillos” discusses the idea that no one truly cares about something until they are faced with the possibility of losing it. Armadillos are used to make this point because they die in multitudes every day and it does not seem to faze anyone and has become an excepted event in life. The poem then goes to explain how when too many armadillos have died, causing the world to only be left with a few of them, they will be considered important.
Decisions are made every day, and greater the number of choices, the harder it becomes to evaluate the opportunity cost of a particular option, especially when the outcomes are unknown. Everyone experience a dilemma at some point in life, maybe, critical enough to alter their fates; some regret while others rejoice. Such is the case for the narrator, of “The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost, who is required to choose his fate. There is deep regret because he “could not travel both” only to settle for the “one less traveled by” (19). Blanche Farley, however, tries to cheat out of regret through her lead character of “The Lover Not Taken;” a companion poem of “The Road Not Taken,” only with a parodistic spin. Although the poems share common features of structure, style and a common theme, there is a distinct difference in the imagery and perspectives in the respective poems.
...ut something the mother is doing for herself, while the second poem is all about the sacrifices the father made for his son. Comparing them shows the mother to be the more "selfish" of the two, in that her child and husband are distractions from her revelry, and they are somewhat burdensome to her. But the father is totally self-sacrificing -- getting up in the "blueblack cold," making a fire with "cracked hands that ached." He takes no thought for his own comfort, except, possibly, when he gets angry. This makes me think if the father had spent some time relaxing like the mother, maybe he wouldn't have gotten as angry. Maybe thinking of yourself every once in awhile is a good thing, I don't know, but it is interesting to note the contrast. I think mother in the first poem is person we can relate to, but the father in the second poem is a person we admire.
An ideal father would be able to solve problems properly, support their children's thoughts, consider their feelings and treat all their children equally. In particular, Atticus Finch of “To Kill a Mockingbird”, by Harper Lee proves himself to be the perfect example of a better father in contrast of Baptista Minola from "Taming of the Shrew" by William Shakespeare.Although both fathers want a stable future for their children, Atticus Finch's teachings are considered more valuable by treating his children equally, and setting good examples such as promoting equality, and to not become prejudice.
Brooks’ uses the symbol of death many times in her work. According to author Harry B. Shaw, the sheer frequency with which death appears in Miss Brooks’ poetry indicates its importance in her thinking (Shaw 48). In one of Brooks’ first poems “The Mother”, Brooks discusses the heartache and the pain of a mother who has had numerous abortions and now feels remorse for what she has done. She speaks of how the child is created and growing in the womb of the mother, but how the child’s life is ended before the child can ever become successful. The mother never gets a chance to watch her child grow or to discipline their child for being disobedient, or ever get to comfort the child when the child is sad.
Both poems inspire their reader to look at their own life. In addition, they treat the reader to a full serving of historic literature that not only entertains, but also teaches valuable lesson in the form of morals and principles.
... overall themes, and the use of flashbacks. Both of the boys in these two poems reminisce on a past experience that they remember with their fathers. With both poems possessing strong sentimental tones, readers are shown how much of an impact a father can have on a child’s life. Clearly the two main characters experience very different past relationships with their fathers, but in the end they both come to realize the importance of having a father figure in their lives and how their experiences have impacted their futures.
To begin with, both of these superlative works show a state of suffering in which they feel agony by an individual or predicaments in the contemporary world but do so in a different matter. In "Alone" by Maya Angelou, she says " The race of man is suffering/ and I can hear the moan." She doesn't talk about how suffering is something which we all, the humans experience at certain times in out lives but rather she warns us about something she sees being calibrated in the world. Nevertheless, it's as if humans are suffering significantly each day. She hears the moaning from the agony as well as separation by the reason of prejudice. In the poem it also says, "How to find my soul a home, Where water is not thirsty, And bread loaf is not stone." It's as if her soul needs another place to live in because it isn't safely remained in her body. Water isn't a sentient being thus she's showing how the natural order of things are distorted. In "The Red Convertible," after Stephan gets drafted to the salvation army, his relationship with his younger brother Marty begins to fragment apart. When he finally returned, he came back as a humorless stranger. "I looked up at the wall and Stephan was staring at me. I don't know what it was but his smile had changed. Or may...
During the process of growing up, we are taught to believe that life is relatively colorful and rich; however, if this view is right, how can we explain why literature illustrates the negative and painful feeling of life? Thus, sorrow is inescapable; as it increase one cannot hide it. From the moment we are born into the world, people suffer from different kinds of sorrow. Even though we believe there are so many happy things around us, these things are heartbreaking. The poems “Tips from My Father” by Carol Ann Davis, “Not Waving but Drowning” by Stevie Smith, and “The Fish” by Elizabeth Bishop convey the sorrow about growing up, about sorrowful pretending, and even about life itself.
The poems facilitate the investigation of human experience through illustrating life’s transience and the longevity of memory.
Reading a book once in a while helps us from being ignorant from the outside world. Readers many times dare to compare and discuss about the books that they have read. This works when we read two master pieces of literature that could be very similar and in the same time very different stories. I had the great fortune of reading the screenplay of “To Kill a Mockingbird” as well as the part of the memoir “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings”. After reading these two great pieces of literature I dare to compare the main characters, Scout from “To Kill a Mockingbird” and Maria from “I know why the caged bird sings”. The main intentions of this two books are to teach lesson to their readers whether they could be children or adults.
He presents a few hypothetical stories and one real one to get the students to think this question through. In one of the illustrations used the professor asks how many in the audience would actually push a “fat man” over a bridge onto the tracks below to stop a runaway trolley from killing five workers who were on the tracks in the way of the unstoppable trolley. I was surprised to see that a few hands actually went up. The argument of a student that had raised their hand in hypothetical agreement to pushing the man over the bridge, for the greater good, was that five other lives would be saved for the life of this one. Opposing views, of which whom I agreed with, were that by pushing the “fat man” over the bridge you were actually choosing and making a conscious decision to take a life; who are we to decide whose life is more valuable than
Both poems have a tone that is not angry or extremely emotional, this makes the reader feel even more sympathetic. this is because it shows the reader they have given up hope. Auden uses a neutral tone to show us that hope is lost, that the death of Jewish People is inevitable and there no point putting up a fight. The speaker du...
The poem in brief summary allows us to experience an outsider’s view of the death of Lucy Gray and her parents’ grief. The character narrating the poem tells the story of Lucy, a girl who was sent by her father with a lantern to light the way home, for her mother in town. On her way to town a snow storm hits and Lucy is never found neither dead nor alive. The fact that a stranger is narrating the story as opposed to one of the parents telling the story, allows the reader to witness the tragedy of Lucy Gray without feeling too tangled up in the parents’ grief. By having an outsider who is in no way involved in the tragedy tell the story, the writer of the poem William Wordsworth, gives the reader an objective point of view on the tragedy as well as room to relate the reader’s own experience to the poem without feeling uncomfortable. Had the poem lacked objectivity the reader would have surely felt uncomfortable and stifled by emotions of the parents’ or a parent telling the story of their daughter’s death. As well as that, the objectiveness of the stranger narrating gives the reader almost a communal experience. It is as if the reader was in a small town one day, and a local just happened to...