In “Oxygen” Mary Oliver focuses on the importance of oxygen, and how vital it is. She is talking about how important her love is with her husband. Their love together is like oxygen that keeps them going strong. She is doing whatever she can to keep the fire going stirring it with a stick of iron. Letting the logs lay loosely, while he is in the upstairs room. He is in his usual position dealing with his aching right shoulder. Her husband is breathing patiently in the upstairs room and she refers to the breathing as a beautiful sound. She feels as if she is in the same postion with him because she doesn’t know the measure between one another. They are so close you couldn’t cut them apart with a knife. “It is your life, which is so close to my own that I would not know where to drop the knife of seperation.” (Lines 13-17). That has everything to do with love, the fire rises and offers a …show more content…
You may never know when your body is starting to shut down so share your last breaths with someone you love. Love is like a fire it needs to be tended for and stirred so it will rise and offer roses of flame, just like the fire in the poem. Love can be like a burning fire, it burns quietly and sometimes roars. Whatever the flame is feeding on could be devoured if it burns to much out of control, the hearth would be emptied. Love like the fire must be patient and burn steadily so the love will last. It appears that her husband may be on an oxygen machine. “Working away in its lung-like voice” (Lines 4-5). The machine produces the oxygen that keeps him alive. The oxygen continues to nourish the body and the soul inside of it. The machine doesn’t give out pure oxygen, it is a mixture so it won’t overwhelm him. The love between the woman attending the fire and her pained man in the room above attached to the oxygen machine is so close that the love between them is in the woman’s mind
She gets terrified and self-conscious and runs away because she thinks that he is only staying with her because his devotion felt more like a curse than actual love. In this piece of text you can catch heaps of similes and metaphors like, “Those calves, I swear, like bricks” (Rassette, 31), “He kept his dreams of us tucked away, hoarded them like those gas-station receipts he jams into the back pocket of his jeans” (Rassette, 32), “He’s charming, but in a dusty way, like the chimes of an old clock” (Rassette, 34), “Now I felt shriveled and curled, more like a fetus feasting on a conjoined twin than a mother growing a son” (Rassette, 31); this quote can also fit into the imagery category, even though it’s a bit too gory for readers to read about love. I picked this piece of text because it is one of those cliché stories where there is always a happy ending. It is also told in first person point of view, along with the other two
...rown puts it “Each of us is born with a box of matches inside us but we can't strike them all by ourselves; we need oxygen and a candle to help” (Esquivel 115), in Tita’s case the candle was an actual candle and the fire took the form of real fire, in order to bring the extended metaphor or fire and matches as a symbolic representation of the soul to a magical and passionate climax. Esquivel uses fire to symbolically represent passion and love, which in just like fire, is not without negative effects. Passion and love can be used as a tool of spite, as it was by the ghost of Mama Elena or it can be pure bliss. Either way, the exaggeration of the attributes and pivotal role of fire as the driving force of life illustrate a deeper truth about the dualistic nature of passion.
The narrator, a new mother, is revoked of her freedom to live a free life and denied the fact that she is “sick”, perhaps with postpartum depression, by her husband, a physician, who believes whatever sorrows she is feeling now will pass over soon. The problematic part of this narrative is that this woman is not only kept isolated in a room she wishes to have nothing to do with, but her creative expression is revoked by her husband as we can see when she writes: “there comes John, and I must put this away, - he hates to have me write a word (Gilman,
The author, Amy Tan is a fictional writer who is “fascinated by language in daily life” and inscribes her love for language into her work. As the article, “Mother Touge” progressed into the beginning paragraphs, she realized the different types of “Englishes” she uses. She was giving a speech to an audience with her mother in the crowd about her new book when she realized the language she speaks to the audience is different from her conversation with her mom. Then, later in the book she was walking with her husband and mother and noticed one of her “Englishes”. This type of English, “No waste money that way”, was a personal language that she only used around her family. She did not speak this “limited” language in public or professional settings because of judgment and disrespect. She
Throughout the text, the reader clearly sees that John has approached the near imprisonment of his wife with very tender and caring words and actions. He always refers to his “little gooses (Charters 228), his darling, and his dear, and he reads her bed time stories. However, the protagonist, as well as the reader, soon begin to see through this act. John may act as if he simply just cares about his wife, and that is why he is putting her through this. But why then does he not listen when she says that she feels worse rather than better? (Charters 232). Because he is not doing it for her at all. He is far more concerned for his career. He is a physician after all, and to have a mentally and physically unstable wife would be tumultuous for his future in that vocation. So he must lock her away in this vacation, away from civilization, so that no one will know. It seems that the protagonist realizes her husbands motives early on, but she is unwilling to believe what she fears is true. She willingly suspends her disbelief of her husband. She says things such as, “Dear John! He loves me very dearly, and hates to have me sick” (Charters 231). In these statements she is not trying to communicate an idea to a reader, but rather attempting desperately to convince herself of the idea. Ultimately she succeeds, and this leads to her final mental collapse. Her willing suspension of disbelief causes her to
... her with joy this sense is only experienced while being confined in her bedroom. And as soon as she leaves her room, the freedom she’d just begun to understand is now taken away from her in an instant. She actually died of sorrow and great disappointment of her husband’s return as he waited at the front door.
I would not say this is a love poem, as the narrator never once says
...e that was hers for an hour”(Line 16-20) when they are making love she day dreams of her time with her self and the only thing she has is her thoughts she has no desire to love her husband as the speaker explains she thinks of the place “where she [is] nothing, pure nothing, in the middle of the day.”(Line 20-22)
By closing her off from the rest of the world, he is taking her away from things that important to her mental state; such as her ability to read and write, her need for human interaction, her need to make her own decisions. All of these are important to all people. This idea of forced rest and relaxation to cure temporary nervous problems was very common at the time. Many doctors prescribed it for their female patients. The narrators husband, brother, and their colleagues all feel that this is the correct way to fix her problem, which is practically nonexistent in their eyes. Throughout the beginning of the story, the narrator tends to buy into the idea that the man is always right and makes excuses for her feelings and his actions and words: "It is so hard to talk to John about my case, because he is so wise and because he loves me so," (23).
The relationship of the narrator and her husband, John, is one that of the time period. The narrator has no other choice but to be obedient to her husband and the things he asked of her, though that isn’t much at the time, due to the recent birth of a child and the “mental state” of the narrator. Though the house seems to intrigue her to an extent, John has her in a room she doesn’t really like and has her isolated for most everything and everyone. He treats the narrator as though she is a child and dismisses her thoughts and ideas, even of her own health and what may help her get better. He “hardly lets me stir without special direction” (Gilman).
In Lynda Barry’s Common Scents, she considers scents a demon for many reasons. One reason being that everyone has his or her own scent preference and scent in general, yet we also judge the way that other people smell. When the woman whose house smelled like a fresh bus bathroom talking about the smells of different Asian people’s houses, Lynda notes that she was “free with her observations about the smells of others” (18). She sprays her house with disinfectant sprays and air fresheners, which to her smells better that whatever her house smelt like before, but to others, such as Lynda’s grandmother, these smells are too strong and are trying to hide the fact that not everything smells good all the time.
In “To Build A Fire”, the main conflict throughout is man versus nature although it would be inaccurate to say that nature goes out of its way to assault the man. The fact of the matter is, nature would be just as cold without the man's presence regardless of him being there .The environment as a whole is completely indifferent to the man, as it frequently is in naturalist literature. The bitter environment does not aid him in any way, and it will not notice if he perishes. In the same way, the dog does not care about the man, only about itself. Ironically enough though, as the man was dying he was getting upset toward the dog because of its natural warmth, the instincts that it had, and its survival skills and those were the elements that the man lacked for survival. It is ironic that the man had to die in order to find out that man's fragile body cannot survive in nature's harsh elements, regardless of a human’s natural over-confidence and psychological strength.
... be casting stones, or holding a conversation. The speaker of the poem does not move on from this emotional torment, yet I do feel as if in his quest for closure he does resolve some of the tumultuous feelings he does have in regard to losing his love.
When a couple say the words “till death do us part” it is an unbreakable bond that only death can break. Ironically, this is the case in the Story of an Hour. When Louise believed that her husband had passed away she cried hysterically however, not with sadness but, with joy. “She said it over and over under her breath: "free, free, free!" Her pulses beat fast, and the coursing blood warmed and relaxed every inch of her body.” (Gioia, 157). It’s obvious that at this moment she felt relieved or like a weight had been lifted off her shoulder. This is due to the fact that since she is ill, she has to be taken care of, and because of that she is mostly confined to her room. However, in this case, she has never felt more alive. In fact, her heart began beating faster and pumping more warm blood throughout her body allowing her to relax. At this moment she is literally being physically freed from her marriage. She now can live for herself with no one to hold her back from her passions or wishes. Even before Louise began
After being hurt the person should bounce bad slowly or quickly, coming back is the good part. The author said," Then you can write your name / Claiming me... Until the sun shines," (14-20). These quotes are from the last stanza in the poem. I feel that this shows the coming back part of the persevering and finding real love. The last part of the quote is the best part of the poem, it makes the poem complete and it is amazing.