In Thomas Hardy’s “Convergence of the Twain”, he effectively uses poetic devices such as imagery, personification, and structure to explore the theme of man vs. nature, that is was man’s “vainglorious” that led the Imminent Will to its downfall. Humans remain ignorant of the fact that it was their greed that resulted in the death of those on the Titanic. Hardy used the structure of the poem in order to show that mankind will never be triumphant over mother natures will. The poem opens with the Titanic being at the bottom of the ocean “deep from human vanity”. The Pride of Life no longer in control, the Titanic has met its fate. It’s at the bottom of the ocean where those with vain intent do not matter. The juxtaposition of the wealth the Titanic symbolized and how it is now at the bottom of the sea shows how fortune does not matter when facing death. In the second stanza, “Steel chambers, late the pyres” represents the consumption and warmth of …show more content…
Humans are solely responsible for the Titanic converging with the iceberg; we are deserving of our fate. Hardy uses imagery to show what happened due to man’s disturbance of nature. Throughout the poem, nature is always portrayed as the victor: deep from human vanity, sparkles bleared, august event. In the beginning, the ship is being described to the reader “solitude of the sea” with an alliteration using “s” to create a forlorn tone. The Titanic’s “jewels in joy designed” have an abundance of empty, hollow wealth that holds no true value after death. These jewels that once ravished the mind are in the sea consumed by nature. The “sparkles bleared and black and blind” is the dominating of man by nature. This “alien” ship will soon be removed from the sea powerfully due to its representation of vanity. “Twin halves” are coming together in order to be linked, however, this foreshadows the imminent tragedy the Titanic will
The juxtaposition of the Titanic and the environment in the first five stanzas symbolizes the opposition between man and nature, suggesting that nature overcomes man. The speaker characterizes the sea as being “deep from human vanity” (2) and deep from the “Pride of Life that planned” the Titanic. The diction of “human vanity” (2) suggests that the sea is incorruptible by men and then the speaker’s juxtaposition of vanity with “the
Some of the most intriguing stories of today are about people’s adventures at sea and the thrill and treachery of living through its perilous storms and disasters. Two very popular selections about the sea and its terrors are The Perfect Storm by Sebastian Junger and “The Wreck of the Hesperus” by Henry Longfellow. Comparison between the two works determines that “The Wreck of the Hesperus” tells a more powerful sea-disaster story for several different reasons. The poem is more descriptive and suspenseful than The Perfect Storm, and it also plays on a very powerful tool to captivate the reader’s emotion. These key aspects combine to give the reader something tangible that allows them to relate to the story being told and affects them strongly.
Mississippi Twain tells us of a man with a dream. As imperfection has it this
He turns her from beautiful, innocent, and pure to lifeless, brown, and limp like the dead seaweed. Additionally, just like how the daughter’s body is being tossed around by the waves without anyone else’s control, the outcomes of arrogant behavior also happen without anyone’s control. Although the skipper did not intend for his daughter to die, his borderline-smug attitude ultimately ends up ruining everything about her. The imagery used here depicts what a person’s overconfidence does to the things they love and care about. In conclusion, Longfellow uses imagery of the skipper’s eyes and daughter’s hair to convey the poem’s theme to his audience.The author of “Wreck of the Hesperus”, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, uses personification, simile, and imagery to establish that the overconfidence and pride that people have leads to a wild downward spiral for that person, and for the innocent things that the person loves. This is important for people to remember because overconfidence leads to an over-inflated ego and an excessive amount of pride, which weakens people and their relationships with others. People like this find it difficult to reach out and think it’s below them to ask for help or want help.
Mark Twain’s purpose in “Corn-Pone Opinions” is to inform the reader that it is human nature to conform to the rest of society. According to Twain,”self-approval is acquired mainly from the approval of other people. The result is conformity.” (Twain 720). While humans provide opinions, many of them are based from the association with others. Twain claims that it is a basic human instinct to receive approval, mostly that of others. In his essay, Furthermore, Twain is attempting to persuade the reader to stop conforming to what society wants. It is through this process that many individuals abandon their own beliefs and principles.
In this poem, the author tells of a lost love. In order to convey his overwhelming feelings, Heaney tries to describe his emotions through something familiar to everyone. He uses the sea as a metaphor for love, and is able to carry this metaphor throughout the poem. The metaphor is constructed of both obvious and connotative diction, which connect the sea and the emotions of love.
Imagine a scene in which a small, wooden boat is peacefully floating on the ocean. Now, imagine that the scene is panning out to reveal the boat is merely a tiny speck, the ocean reaching out endlessly around it. Suddenly, the peaceful quality of the boat has been replaced by a feeling of consuming meaninglessness. Stephen Crane, a naturalist writer and reporter in nineteenth century America, often used nature to prompt readers into questioning their purpose and place in the universe. In “The Open Boat,” complex symbolism allows Crane’s characters to reflect humanity's shared experience regarding existence and self-worth.
I think from the attitude of the diver, he was suicidal. As he dove into the sea, he does so at a high speed and with reckless abandon, taking to account all the details of everything he sees as he plunged deeper into the sea. “swiftly descended/free falling, weightless”. He was doing all he could to forget about life as he descends “…. Lost images/fadingly remembered.” Initially in his descent into the ocean, the diver, having decided to end his life, treated the images in the sea as if they would be the last things he will see before his death, so I think he thought it best to savor his last moments while he had the time. When he got to the ship, he described all that was there. While I read the poem, I couldn’t help but conjure those images in my mind. The ship was very quiet and cold when he entered it but the silence drew him in and he was eager to go in, not minding the cold because at that moment he was suicidal and didn’t care about life. With the help of a flashlight, he saw chairs moving slowly and he labeled the movement as a “sad slow dance”. From this, I think the speaker is trying to point out that there are sad memories on the ship. There is no story of how the ship got to the bottom of the sea, but it seems the ship used to be a place of fun, celebration, and happiness. Now that it is wrecked and in the bottom of the sea, the
We have all heard about the Titanic. Either we have watched the romance movie or done our research in a different way. No matter where we get our information from we know the biggest parts of the tragedy. The ship Titanic crashed into an iceberg on a cold April night on the Atlantic Ocean while sailing its first trip. But haven’t you ever wanted to know more details about? Maybe how the people who were on it and survived? How could the situation be prevented? Couldn’t they have saved more people? Well in the book “A Night to Remember” it has details on the Titanic you have probably never thought of knowing. While reading the first chapter some parts really caught my attention. One was when people felt the jolt from the collision with the ice berg people didn’t suspect what tragedy was to come. A girl named Marguerite Frolicher, who was accompanying her father on a business trip, woke up with a jump since she was half asleep she was thinking about ‘little white lake ferries’ landing sloppily which made her laugh and thought to herself “Isn’t it funny…we’re landing!”. They really did...
The human voyage into life is basically feeble, vulnerable, uncontrollable. Since the crew on a dangerous sea without hope are depicted as "the babes of the sea", it can be inferred that we are likely to be ignorant strangers in the universe. In addition to the danger we face, we have to also overcome the new challenges of the waves in the daily life. These waves are "most wrongfully and barbarously abrupt and tall", requiring "a new leap, and a leap." Therefore, the incessant troubles arising from human conditions often bring about unpredictable crises as "shipwrecks are apropos of nothing." The tiny "open boat", which characters desperately cling to, signifies the weak, helpless, and vulnerable conditions of human life since it is deprived of other protection due to the shipwreck. The "open boat" also accentuates the "open suggestion of hopelessness" amid the wild waves of life. The crew of the boat perceive their precarious fate as "preposterous" and "absurd" so much so that they can feel the "tragic" aspect and "coldness of the water." At this point, the question of why they are forced to be "dragged away" and to "nibble the sacred cheese of life" raises a meaningful issue over life itself. This pessimistic view of life reflects the helpless human condition as well as the limitation of human life.
The three main metaphors in the specific in the passage above would be considered the wreck, the myth, and the drowned face. If you take into consideration that Rich was one of the greatest feminine writers in the 1970’s, you can begin to understand how the wreck is more than just a sunken ship, how the myth is more than just a book, and how the drowned face is more than just one person submerged in water. The wreck is a metaphor for everything that has been suppressed and devalued in women in history, and even at the time the poem was written. Rich uses the wreck to symbolize the oppression of women in a patriarchal society, and all the value that women could have added to society that has been lost and “left to rot” by the oppression of the female species, casting them out as ‘the others’ (line 82). The use of this metaphor has a great deal of impact. I believe Rich is trying to show that oppressing women has caused a great loss of knowledge, power, and riches that could’ve contributed to society in the same way that the loss of a great ship with loads of treasure and precious cargo would have been a loss to society as well. When Rich writes, “the thing I came for: / the wreck and not the story of the wreck”, she is saying the narrator was searching to represent the women who have been oppressed. She is fighting for the female species, and wasn’t interested in the false histories written
Hardy uses strong meaningful diction to convey his thoughts of the sinking of the Titanic. Words such as “vaingloriousness”, “opulent”, and “jewels in joy” illustrate Titanic for the reader so that he/she can picture the greatness of the ship. Phrases such as “Lie lightless, all their sparkles bleared and black and blind” describe what the Titanic looked after the sinking, loosing all of its great features. Hardy’s use of strong, describing diction depicts his view of the ship, before and after.
Write a comparison of The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World and The Drowned Giant, commenting in detail on the ways in which the authors' use language to convey their respective themes. "The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World" by Gabriel Garcia Marquez and "The Drowned Giant" by J.G. Ballard are both short stories written with similar plots but explore extremely different themes. In this essay I am going to compare the theme, plot, setting, language choices and stylistic effects between the two short stories and how all these relate back to theme itself. The themes of the stories are totally different. They are both about how societies react to the external world and exotic things, but the meanings are exactly opposite.
The story’s theme is related to the reader by the use of color imagery, cynicism, human brotherhood, and the terrible beauty and savagery of nature. The symbols used to impart this theme to the reader and range from the obvious to the subtle. The obvious symbols include the time from the sinking to arrival on shore as a voyage of self-discovery, the four survivors in the dinghy as a microcosm of society, the shark as nature’s random destroyer of life, the sky personified as mysterious and unfathomable and the sea as mundane and easily comprehended by humans. The more subtle symbols include the cigars as representative of the crew and survivors, the oiler as the required sacrifice to nature’s indifference, and the dying legionnaire as an example of how to face death for the correspondent.
Symbolism was used to express the Captains minds set. In the beginning paragraphs, the Captain is viewed as depressed, apprehensive, and insecure. The Captain viewed the land as insecure, whereas the sea was stable. The Captain was secure with the sea, and wished he were more like it.