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Yacht sailing to byzantium imagery
Yacht sailing to byzantium imagery
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Life of the Soul Revealed in Sailing to Byzantium and Shadows
The view of death from an aged individual can be one of acceptance of his life’s end or one of mystified wonder over the immortality of the soul. Both William Butler Yeats and David Herbert Lawrence take the latter view in their respective poems, "Sailing to Byzantium" and "Shadows." By viewing death as a continuation of their soul’s life in a different realm of being, they provide a comforting solution to the fear that death may be the end of their existence. In W.B. Yeats’ "Sailing to Byzantium" and D.H. Lawrence's "Shadows," death is addressed from the viewpoint of one preparing for its eminent arrival; Yeats, however, expresses the belief that he can live forever when his soul becomes a form of art whereas Lawrence states that death delivers him "to the hands of God to send [him] forth as a new man."
"Sailing to Byzantium" presents the end of a man’s journey through life in which he yearns to, "once out of nature," be cast in gold as a work of art. By using the motif of a journey to parallel the end of one’s life, Yeats presents Byzantium as the ultimate destination for his mundane body. He contrasts the "holy city of Byzantium" with the country for the young, a land which he has now departed. In the land of the young, "the aged man is but a paltry thing" who is out of place among those who are "caught in the sensual music." The knowledge that comes with age, including the respect for things immortal, causes the traveler to leave the place that "neglect[s] monuments of unageing intellect." The realization that life is ephemeral is a divisor separating those who reside in the land of the "caught" young and those who exhibit free action by traveling...
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Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1986. 128-132.
Holdberg, Michael. " ‘Sailing to Byzantium’: A New Source and a New Reading." English Language Notes VII (1974): 111-116.
Macheice, Louis. "The Ash of Poetry." The Poetry of W.B. Yeats. London: Oxford University Press, 1941. 139-141.
Olson, Elder. " ‘Sailing to Byzantium’: Prolegomena to a Poetic of the Lyric." University Review VIII (1912): 257-269.
Panichas, George A. "Voyage of Oblivion." Critics on D.H. Lawrence. Ed. W. T. Andrews. Coral Gables: University of Miami Press, 1971. 121-123.
Perloff, Marjorie. "The Rhyme Structure of the Byzantium Poems." Rhyme and Meaning in the Poetry of Yeats. Mouton & Co.: Paris, 1970. 122-131.
Young, David. "Byzantium and Back." Trouble Mirror: A Study of Yeats’ ‘The Tower.’ Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1987. 14-29.
The main character of the poem, Richard Cory, is an individual who represents the irony of modern American life. The poem seems to take place during The Gilded Age where the people who had an education were wealthy and the rest of them were just poor. The main thrust of this poem suggests the differences between the wealthy and the poor. During this time, people’s socio-economic classes were easier to identify. Richard Cory belongs to the high economic class, while the narrator fits in lower class. “We people on the pavement looked at him/ He was a gentleman from sole to crown” (2-3). It is a difficult time for working class people to obtain what they need, that is why they want to have Richard Cory’s life. Even though it can be difficult for the reader to know where exactly the poem takes place, the reader can have an idea of the size and system that it has. Robinson’s poem seems to happen in a small town where Richard Cory is one of the wealthiest men. He seems to be known by almost everyone in this town.
Culture and race have been a topic of discussion in America for centuries. Many American writers have taken on the undulling task of writing about culture and race in their novels or short stories. Richard Wright, who was an African American writer, wrote a short story entitled “The Man Who Was Almost a Man” which focused on the ideas of race and culture of African Americans in the south. Wright is known for his works that confirm stereotypes about black men held by white culture and in this short story he confirms these stereotypes like the dialect of African Americans in the south.
The tales were rediscovered around 1880 inspiring the Irish literary revival in romantic fiction by writers such as Lady Augusta Gregory and the poetry and dramatic works of W.B. Yeats. These works wer...
Skerrett, Joseph T., Jr. "Wright and the Making of Black Boy." in Richard Wright's Black Boy: Modern Critical Interpretations. New York: Chelsea House, 1988.
Richard Wright had a traumatic childhood. Jay Mechling, in Journal of American Folklore, describes Richard Wright’s works as an exploration of an unstable life. Wright’s relationship with his mother was traumatic. She raised him to be strong but her tactics were very harsh. In Black Boy, his mother made him fight the boys in the gang who would bully him for money he was supposed to buy groceries with. His mother called him “foolish” because he wanted to sell his dog to a white girl in return for a dollar. She also slapped him, when he went on his first train ride and began to question her about the race of his grandmother who had very light skin. She never communicated or bonded with him. The relationship he had with his mother caused him to become rebellious and stubborn. He was mistreated and alienated as a child. Being rebellious...
Richard Wright’s Black Boy is a moving autobiography that takes place in various states within the cruel, racist, and early 20th century United States. The protagonist is the young African-American, Richard Wright. The major conflict is Wright’s special nature which consists of wit and self-reliance that indisposes him from conforming to society’s standards. Despite being raised in a Southern problematic home, he excels in school, works for “superior” whites and reaches his dream of becoming a writer in Northern Chicago. It is after reading H. L. Mencken’s A Book of Prefaces that Wright is truly inspired and grows determined to become an author. Ultimately, he’s able to persevere through society’s antagonism and strives to not only connect
During the Elizabethan period, the rational soul was understood to be that part of a person that was the closest to God. This soul caused the person to be more rational in thinking and to behave logically. The main characters in each of these plays are not governed by the rational soul. Richard is driven by his desire to be the king of England, and Iago is driven by his hatred of Othello. Richard becomes a ruthless murderer who will stop at nothing to be king. He indirectly kills his brother King Edward the Fourth, kills his nephews who are heirs to the throne, and anyone else who he believes is in his way. Iago is also very cold-hearted. He is Othello's lieutenant, and, as Othello believes, his good friend. However, Iago devises a plan to destroy Othello. By doing so, he must also destroy those closest to Othello, most notably his wife Desdemona. Iago does this simply because he is able to. In this way, the two characters ignore the rational soul and are not guided by it.
Ziolkowski, Eric. "Ancient Newcomer to Modern Culture." World Literature Today 81.5 (2007): 55-57. Web. 19 Feb. 2014. .
Despite that he cannot live forever, the paradox established between the abstract symbolism of the scraggly eagle and the concrete metaphor of the shadows allows him to comprehend that raw beauty and power are eternal, though the people and objects who channel and depict them are not. In “On Seeing the Elgin Marbles”, Keats proposes that reveling in true majesty cannot delay the inevitability of death: humans are destined to change, grow old, and eventually die, and no amount of contemplation is going to change that. It is possible to gaze upon beautiful objects or landscapes, but the perpetuity they embody is unattainable. Just as an elderly woman can only fantasize about her youthful looks once wrinkles line her face, humans can only dream of the immortality of Gods when confronted with the stark proximity of their own mortality. But this realization is not as pessimistic as it may seem. Even after all of humanity fades into oblivion and civilization is wiped away, majesty and brillance will endure. Try as it may, time can do nothing to diminish their nature. As the optimism of Keats’ argument that splendor and glory can never be lost in “On Seeing the Elgin Marbles” demonstrates, not even death can rob the world of
Keats, John. “The Eve of St. Agnes”. The Norton Anthology of English Literature: The Romantic
Richard Wright believed that all humans are a product of their environment and when this environment oppresses any member, there is physical and psychological devastation (Wright, 1940, p. 6).” The ghetto, though no longer assumed to create pathological social conditions today did, however aid in the pathological, or deviant behavior of many African Americans in the late nineteenth century. Some psychologists would argue that, the ghettos of today in the United States do in fact still have devastating impacts on African American youth. In Wright’s novel, The Native Son, the protagonist, Bigger Thomas and his single mother, younger brother and sister reside in a one-bedroom apartment in Chicago’s South Side Black Belt. Throughout the course of the novel, it is evident to the reader that Bigger’s
William Butler Yeats, born in 1865 and died in 1939. Yeats is one of the greatest poets that is well known in the twentieth century. Also a philosophical person, Yeats had developed his own philosophy which states, “Yeats developed a philosophy that united his interest in history, art, personality, and society. His basic insight was that, in all these fields, conflicting forces are at work. In history, for example, as one kind of civilization grows and eventually dies, an opposite kind of civilization is born to take its place. Similarly, human personalities can be defined as opposites: the creative or subjective person versus the active or objective person.” (Prentice Hall Literature [page 1144 Yeats’s Philosophy]). With this said, Yeats believed that if you believed there was such a thing called a “soul” you would not only live a life of concentric circles, but indeed there would be this thing we call an “afterlife”. Thus, explaining Yeats’s Philosophy, meaning that we will be reborn depending on whether or not of you wanted to live life, or as he states it in Sailing to Byzantium, live the new life like a monument. Critic Richard Ellmann states, that Yeats’s poetry is based on the opposition between “the world of change” and a world of “changelessness”. Evidence of this is supported in Yeats poetry, When You Are Old, The Lake Isle of Innisfree, The Wild Swans at Coole, The Second Coming, and finally Sailing to Byzantium. All five of these poems represent change and stability in each poem; however, the change can vary among nature and civilization.
Chickenpox is caused by the Varicella-zoster virus, the genus is Varicellovirus and the species is Humanherpes virus 3. (Merriam Webster Dictionary, 2016) On average the incubation period is 14 days but can range from 10-21 days. It is a very contagious disease that can be
...at "more than their rhyming tell" ("To Ireland", 20). Yeats investment in the mystical Order of the Golden Dawn deepens his symbolic resources, extending his fascination with Celtic mythology into a syncretic spirituality which stresses the Jewish mystical doctrine known as the Kaballah. Through a combination of highly accessible rhyming and metrical poetry with such esoteric systems Yeats is able to construct a dual-level poetics in which readily traceable meanings are amplified by an acquaintance with the symbolic systems Yeats spent a great deal of his life mastering. His investment in these symbolic systems, and their ability to invoke unseen spiritual forces instantiates the poet's resistance to certain developments of modernity - such as the stress on reason, urbanity and individuality - and makes his poetic work a central aspect of his magico-religious Work.
Damrosch, David, and David Pike. The Longman Anthology of World Literature. The Ancient World. Volume C. Second Edition. New York: Pearson/Longman, 2009. Print.