Demeter the daughter of Cronus and Rhea was the goddess of harvest and fertility. The poet, Edith Hamilton, reveals the sorrow of a mother who has lost a child in the mythical "Demeter." The speaker laments on the consequences the natural cycles will receive due to this suffering Demeter is experiencing. Edith uses imagery of dry land and loss to express the agony a mother endures when losing a child. Furthermore, the speaker uses allusion to explain the consequences the society is suffering.
In the poem “Demeter,” an ancient myth retold by Edith Hamilton, celebrates on the agony a mother experiences when they lose a child. A mother love is unconditional and non forgotten. The speaker states the following, “The high hills echoed her cry and
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In the lines "Nothing grew; no seed sprang up; in vain the oxen drew plowshare through the furrows." These lines explain how the lost of her daughter are leading to lands to turn from green to dry. Furthermore, the speaker states at the beginning of the poem, “She withheld her gifts from the earth, which turned into a frozen desert. The green and flowering land was icebound and lifeless.” The speaker uses imagery to demonstrate the clear consequences Demeter sorrow is having on nature’s cycle. Nature’s cycle will not be correct until Demeter sorrow is fixed, those are the reasons to why we have a different cycles.
To further add, the speaker uses strong verbs such as ("screamed," "cried," "angered") describe a lifeless mother who prefers to be with her daughter rather than be living a life without her. The present state of Demeter emphases the negative and empty state of being one may be during a loss. Demeter is a goddess and as a goddess she should represent and help her people. Until Demeter torture is eliminate from her life, she will be able to be the goddess of harvest and
Aligning with Anna Comnena’s overall bias, the details in The Alexiad harbor a great deal of disdain for crusaders. The East versus West mentality is evident in the narrative through Comnena’s description of the Crusaders. She uses the names “Celt” and “Norman()” as derogatory describing the Crusaders as uncultured and “riotous().” With Byzantine bias she singles out the Normans especially with respect to Nicea where they “behaved the most cruelly to all (251).” Alexius, himself is written to fear their “unstable and mobile character (248)” which reiterates battles against Normans earlier in his life.
In Hesiod’s Theogony and the Homeric hymns, we see various mothers many of which are gods. Throughout these texts there is a repeated behavior displayed by mothers; by analyzing them and their behavior one can determine what the role of a mother consists of in these texts. The actions of Gaia, the earth, her daughter Rhea, and the goddess Demeter display some of the key characteristics that make up the role of a mother in these ancient texts.
Plot in line three was changed to garden. The feel was slightly changed in line three because while plot means, “A small piece of ground marked out for a purpose such as building or gardening” (oxforddictionaries.com). A garden is more specific. It is a plot set aside for the use of vegetation. Therefore, garden gives the poem more of feel for nature. Line four has three alterations. The first of which is changing rain to precipitation. The author’s use of nouns is better; since rain has a natural feel, and precipitation has more of a scientific feel. The author’s choice of green was better than my choice of vegetation again for the same reason as the last alteration. Green has more of a natural connotation than vegetation. Line four’s last switch was replacing the prepositional phrase “are gone” with “have receded.” The phrase “have receded” gives the feeling that something has fled slowly. Yet, the phrase, “are gone” just states that they/it are/is no longer
The night is a symbol for dark moments of solitude during the speaker’s life. Through being “acquainted with the night” (line 1), the speaker is saying that he is familiar with darkness, proving how symbolism brings out a detached tone with the help of diction, saying that isolated darkness is something the speaker experiences regularly. The exertion of the night as symbolism creates an image for readers to realize that Frost did not actually mean nighttime in his poem; he used the night as symbolism to provide deeper insight and bring the image of our own dark times to describe as “the night”(line 1) just as the speaker of “Acquainted With the Night” did. Symbolism goes on to present itself in line 2, the “rain” is used as a symbol for tears and melancholy. The rain was not meant to be read literally, but rather symbolically as tears, or times of mourning over the harsh struggles in life, just as the speaker did when he “walked out in rain and back in rain” (line 2) meaning he walked into and out of life’s struggles. If the weather is cold and rainy, no one goes outside because of the gloomy clouds and cold rain. Similarly, no one reached out to the speaker in “Acquainted With the Night” during his gloomy periods of “rain”(line 2) or sadness, which expresses
Demeter shows the theme of isolation when she disguises herself as an old woman of no childbearing and lives among the mortals, shunning herself from the gods and turning her grief into anger against Zeus. So when she arrives at Elusis, she take upon the duty of raising the child of Keleus and Meraneria, Demophoön. The part of the myth show Demeter's anger when she attempts to make Demophoön into a god. It symbolizes the fact the she is replacing a female child with a males, meaning...
Being described as “like four goddesses” while Demeter herself is divine and yet, unrecognisable as such seems to hark back to their youth and beauty as a divine gift, while Demeter, in her grief, appears to lose divine status (Hymn to Demeter,108, 94-95, 108). Her grief is almost transformative, the lines “men nor… women recognised her when they looked” characterises grief as something that has made Demeter look human (Hymn to Demeter, 94-95). In travelling from Mount Olympus to earth, an action fuelled by her grief, she becomes a metaphor for a step-down in status from deity to mortal (Hymn to Demeter, 92-93). This reflects the implications of women losing their status as mothers and membership to a family in ancient Greece, when they either cannot bear children, or lose their children.
As societies grow and diversify, the need for cultural role models expands proportionally, and these roles are filled by mythological deities. One such cultural icon is the mother goddess, who nourishes and guides mankind throughout life. Mother Goddesses typically represent femininity, in terms of their ties to creativity, birth, and fertility, as well as playing a key role in the cycle of life and maintaining dominance over their husbands. They also serve to represent the ideal traits of a women in a given culture, expressing how women should act and carry themselves. Within Greek mythology, there are many female deities that fit the role of a mother goddess, yet it is Demeter that truly embodies the role.
In this assignment, I will be considering the character of the goddess Demeter as she appears in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter. Demeter is motherly and nurturing, reasonable and respectful, and she can also be incredibly vengeful when angered. Firstly, The goddess of Demeter embodies the role of a mother, not only to her daughter Persephone, but to everyone. She is responsible for the growing of grain and provides food for mortals, providing nourishment for them as a mother would to her baby.
In The Hymn to Demeter written by…, Persephone, Demeter’s daughter, is abducted by the god Gaia to the underworld to be his bride. In order to do this, he grows a beautiful flower in order to lure and kidnap her. The flower is used as a medium for propelling the plot in the story. However, the flower is more than just a beautiful flower Gaia placed, the flower is a symbol of the deceptive nature of beauty and presents a theme of the blurred lines between the appearance of good and bad throughout the story.
Also, the procession represented Demeter’s own journey back to Eleusis (Mylonas,
This is how seasons came to be. The shift from joy and delight to darkness and despair helps to illustrate the change in Demeter’s mood and how her emotions affect nature as a result. The birth of Demeter’s daughter, Persephone, exemplifies the growth of nature in Spring and the joy it brings. In the beginning of the story, Persephone is born as lovely as a flower representing new growth in nature,“To Demeter, the grain goddess, was born as a daughter more fairer than any flower that grew.” Persephone represents the start of fair growth in spring and the beauty of it.
The general symbolism relating to nature assumes a common base of knowledge from which symbolism can be built. The poem opens with a description of Arkansas: "Old crimes like moss pend/ from poplar trees./ The sullen earth/ is much too/ red for comfort." The first example of general symbolism in this passage is the reference to moss. Moss is considered the base of the forest, the lowest level from which all of the other plants grow. Although moss is vital to a forest, it is often thought of as slimy and dirty. The moss "pend(s) from poplar trees," our second natural symbol. The poplar tree is weak and useless. Nothing can be built from its wood, and it often bends and breaks during storms. The visual image of the moss clinging to the poplar tree shows the slimy moss as "old crimes" and the poplar tree as the frail attempt at growth and a new but weak beginning. The reader gets a clear sense of the struggle toward a new life that is hindered and held back by the old, dependable moss that has been and always will be present. The second part of the passage discusses the "sullen earth" that is "much too red." Red earth can be symbolic in two ...
Keats begins with the poem with a question, “O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms, alone and palely loitering?”. He does this to ask the “knight-at-arms” what has made him this weak, this pale, dying in a field somewhere and the knight’s answer takes up the rest of the poem. The imagery in my visual representation depicting a heart broken and weakened by the icy, deceptive lips of ‘femme fatale’ is both powerful and highly symbolic because it expresses the coldness and the deviousness of the deceptive witch that has weakened the knight. The icy cold lips of the witch symbolise her deceptive nature, and the way she tricks the knight into a deathly sleep, which is also visualised in my representation. His deathly sleep is also represented in a ‘before/after’ representation in which an image of the beautiful woman in the meadows is shown, and after his nightmare, the icy cold, desolate and dark hill side upon which the knight awakes is shown in the neighbouring image. The speaker says that the "sedge" have all died out from around the lake, and "no birds sing”. We can deduce that it 's autumn since all the birds have migrated, and the plants have “withered." The speaker continues to address this sick, depressed "knight at arms." He asks about the "lily" on the knight 's "brow," suggesting that the knight 's face is pale like a lily.
In the earlier Greek source, the Homeric Hymns to Demeter illustrated Persephone as a youthful innocent goddess picking flowers with her youthful playmates “the girl was playing with the deep-bosomed daughters of Okeanos picking flowers, roses, and crocus, and beautiful violets” (HHDem. 4-6). In parallel, in Ovid’s text, features and characteristics of the youthful goddess were still retained. Proserpine, the equivalent Greek goddess of Persephone, was also found playing and picking flowers “Here Proserpine was playing in a glade of flowers… filling her basket and her lap to gather more than the other girls” (Met., p. 111). In Ovid Metamorphoses, Proserpine’s sphere of influence was still retained with equivalent Greek goddess of Persephone, the goddess of spring, si...
Here the speaker clearly warns against Melancholy’s fit as if she is a force of nature. As a force of nature beauty is drowned out by “a weeping cloud” or Melancholy’s fit when she “fosters the droop-headed flowers” (Keats 932). The force of her fit drowns out the beauty as seen in spring time flowers. Furthermore, in order to personify Melancholy, she is referred to her as, “thy mistress some rich anger shows, / Emprison her soft hand, and let her rave, /And feed deep, deep, deep upon her peerless eyes” (Keats 932). The depiction of this mistress is another personification, but this time it is of Death as a Goddess. These confusing lines of the poem could refer to Melancholy or Death in this stanza as either goes from an untouchable Goddess to a Goddess with a human nature that includes anger and pain. A distinct opposition to Melancholy or Death’s choler is the soft hand that the speaker is asking someone to restrain. This opposition shows Keats highlighting the delicate correspondence between happiness, death and melancholy having humanistic