Heart of Gold is a poem 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. Heart …show more content…
Henry Flemming is very young and not running out of time at all. Neil is getting old and doesn’t have his whole life ahead of him or time to waste. He also seems to have been looking for his “heart of gold” his whole life and somehow just hasn’t been able to get the virtues he desires while Flemming seems to find the contentedness he was needing in a fairly short period of time, at a young age, and by the end of the book while Young does not improve despite his efforts. Not to say that he didn’t obviously have major struggles and some really powerful and hard experiences, but this journey of self discovery seemed to come really quickly and without as much conscious effort. Neil is also very open with where he falls short while Henry spent a while in blatant denial of the fact that he really needed to change. He only seemed to realize his problem after it was already in the process of being solved. It still showed that he wasn’t happy with who he was and wanted to change in the way he constantly lied and tried to make himself out differently, even if he refused to acknowledge what he was doing for a while. The main difference between the two is the conscious effort. Neil knows where he falls short and tries to improve throughout his whole life. Henry is in denial but subconsciously tries to improve and ends up changing for the better in the
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,
The first time Henry's flaw improves is when he is mad at himself for running away from the battle and he begins to relate to nature.
Some people never get satisfied with what they have. In the stories, "Amir", and, "Gold Mountain Poems", The life lesson is to be happy for what you have. In both stories the main characters are immigrants coming to America. In the story, Amir just moved here from India and is upset with the people. In the poem the speaker is taken to an immigrant island instead of being released to go live in America. In both stories they are grateful for what they have.
The death camp was a terrible place where people where killed. Hitler is who created the death camp for Jews. The death camp was used for extermination on Jews. This occurred on 1939 – 1945. The death camps were in the country of Europe. Hitler did all this because he didn’t like Jews and the religions. The book Night is a autobiography written by Elie Wiesel. The poem called First they came for the communist written by Martin Neimoller is a autobiography.
Throughout the poem, Brooks uses wealth imagery to show how when exposed to the unpleasant reality of poverty, the affluent, although well-intentioned, will refuse to help those in need. In the beginning of the poem, Brooks descriptively describes the wealthy women in Ladies’ Betterment League. While creating an image of these women, Brooks states that the women “are full,/ Sleek, tender-clad, fit, fiftyish, [and] a-glow..." (14-15) These well-off women who make up the Ladies’ Betterment League use their money to keep themselves well-fed, clean, and healthy. In fact, these fortunate women possess an excess of money to spend on themselves. The use of the words “full” and “tender-clad” create an image of comfortable, wealthy women who use their immense amount of wealth to
With long mournful guitar solos and a constant beat it is hard to forget. The opening lines, “There's a lady who's sure all that glitters is gold/ And she's buying a stairway to heaven.” makes clear that there is a lady who is rich and is trying to buy her way to Heaven. Then, the interpretations vary due to how we associate certain things in the song to our own life. A few lines later the lyrics “There's a feeling I get when I look to the west/ And my spirit is crying for leaving” and we can see how the focus of the song changes from the lady’s point of view to the speaker’s point of view. Following the song the lyrics “And it's whispered that soon/ if we all call the tune/ Then the piper will lead us to reason.” play into the band's ongoing theme of folk tale by referencing the Pied Piper and how he will give reasons for all things to everyone, but nonetheless the lyrics “here are two paths you can go by, but in the long run/ There's still time to change the road you're on” makes clear that even though this lady and the man may have both been through different things in their life, it is still their choice about what they do with themselves (Azlyrics;
Henry suffers from retrograde amnesia due to internal bleeding in the part of the brain that controls memory. This causes him to forget completely everything he ever learned. His entire life is forgotten and he has to basically relearn who he was, only to find he didn’t like who he was and that he didn’t want to be that person. He starts to pay more attention to his daughter and his wife and starts to spend more time with them.
The Tragic Impermanence of Youth in Robert Frost's Nothing Gold Can Stay In his poem "Nothing Gold can Stay", Robert Frost names youth and its attributes as invaluable. Using nature as an example, Frost relates the earliest green of a newborn plant to gold; its first leaves are equated with flowers. However, to hold something as fleeting as youth in the highest of esteems is to set one's self up for tragedy. The laws of the Universe cast the glories of youth into an unquestionable state of impermanence.
‘The Falling Soldier’ is one of many poems by Duffy which deals with the subject of human mortality. Duffy expresses what could have been over a harsh reality; this is characteristic of her as also seen in ‘Last Post’ and ‘Passing Bells’ which both seem to be largely influenced by poet peer Wilfred Owen’s personal experiences of war. In the ‘The Falling Soldier’ Duffy paradoxically captures the essence of Robert Capa’s famous photograph of a man falling after being shot during the Spanish Civil War (1936). She employs the form of an impersonal narrative voice, using second person to question the possibilities, to explore the tragic and cyclical nature of war. The futile reality of war contrasts to her central theme in ‘The Bees’ anthology of bees symbolising the grace left in humanity.
Robert Frosts poem “Nothing gold can stay” is trying to tell people about how nothing can last forever. Which is very much like S.E Hinton’s book “The Outsiders”, which has everything going just fine, but it unfolds and things end up going not super swell for the characters. Such as “The world was spinning around me, and blobs of faces and visions of things past were dancing in the red mist that covered the lot”(Hinton 155). Another quote is “I mean I got an awful feeling somethings gonna happen”(Hinton 127).
As one grows up and experiences the taste of life, opening one’s eyes to both negative and positive aspects of the world, it is common that one starts to lose their innocence little by little throughout one’s journey. The title of novel, The Catcher in the Rye (1952) by J. D. Salinger, signifies the desires of Holden Caulfield, the narrator, to preserve innocence, and the allusion to the Robert Burns poem “Comin Thro’ the Rye” further emphasizes his desires and also represents his innocence.
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.
Most of the ancient civilizations that have peen present throughout history, produce artifacts, stories, poems or other forms of literature that we can learn from and are passed down from generation to generation. The Epic of Gilgamesh is one piece of literature that really takes us back in time and helps us dissect the events of its time. A poem which was written over four thousand years ago The Epic of Gilgamesh can be used as a true historical narration of the Mesopotamian culture. The discussion of religion and cultural aspects, which include their attitudes towards gods, death, heroes and also the social and political organizations, also allows us to not only see, but also feel the experiences of such events. The Epic of Gilgamesh portrays to its readers how rich the ancient Mesopotamian civilization actually was and helps us in figuring out what the true meaning of life is.
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