The photographer sights, clicks, stops; the moment is captured; the vision settles. The poet sights, clicks, begins; the moment is released; the vision starts. Tess Gallagher says, "the poem is always the enemy of the photograph." The art of poetry demands more than external vision; a poem takes the reader outside and inside to see, hear, touch, and feel every detail. In Amy Clampitt’s poem "Fog," she immerses the reader’s senses in the entirety of the moment’s external grace and its secret inner core.
Clampitt seeks out what is hidden to the eye. She wants what the camera cannot record. Her subject allows her to show off poetry’s distinct function and strength. Fog obscures, shrouds, limits, dissolves; it defeats sight. "Fog" reveals, illuminates, widens, and intensifies; it gives sight. There is a pleasing poetic irony in Clampitt’s ability to render so present to the mind’s eye precisely what the eyes themselves cannot see at all. "A vagueness comes over everything, / as though proving color and contour / alike dispensable" (Clampitt 610). As things disappear, "the lighthou...
The timeline carries on chronologically, the intense imagery exaggerated to allow the poem to mimic childlike mannerisms. This, subjectively, lets the reader experience the adventure through the young speaker’s eyes. The personification of “sunset”, (5) “shutters”, (8) “shadows”, (19) and “lamplights” (10) makes the world appear alive and allows nothing to be a passing detail, very akin to a child’s imagination. The sunset, alive as it may seem, ordinarily depicts a euphemism for death, similar to the image of the “shutters closing like the eyelids”
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,
One of the main causes of the Revolution was the issue of the estate system in conflict with the desires of the social groups (i.e. nobility and th...
Basically the farmers and companies are getting the profit from this while the workers aren’t getting paid enough for the hard work that has to be put in to work on the fields. In the text, the workers were eventually free of this exploitation and the workers were able to work to their abilities receiving goods and services to their needs; not from someone telling them what to do in an aggressive way. In the video, exploitation for the workers was still demonstrated; such as not having a break to eat (sometimes), very low pay, long hours, early mornings, aches and pains, filthy clothing, exhaustion, dehydration, and sweaty bodies. The teenagers and their families are looking to be free from this bondage and live like normal people. The parents just wanted to see their kids out of this because they had to deal with it since birth, but their children thought very differently.
"Poetry is the revelation of a feeling that the poet believes to be interior and personal [but] which the reader recognizes as his own." (Salvatore Quasimodo). There is something about the human spirit that causes us to rejoice in shared experience. We can connect on a deep level with our fellow man when we believe that somehow someone else understands us as they relate their own joys and hardships; and perhaps nowhere better is this relationship expressed than in that of the poet and his reader. For the current assignment I had the privilege (and challenge) of writing an imitation of William Shakespeare’s "Sonnet 87". This poem touched a place in my heart because I have actually given this sonnet to someone before as it then communicated my thoughts and feelings far better than I could. For this reason, Sonnet 87 was an easy choice for this project, although not quite so easy an undertaking as I endeavored to match Shakespeare’s structure and bring out his themes through similar word choice.
France was a nation ruled by an absolute monarch who had power beyond the grasp of any peasant, and just out of the reach of the aristocracy. King Louis XIV (1774 - 1791) of France was not willing to give up his monopoly that had existed for seventeen years. It was the perfect situation for his absolute government, and may have remained that way if he had been able to manage France’s finances successfully. More money had been spent on roads' canals and wars then were being collected through taxes. In addition the government lost control over the bourgeois class. The bourgeois (working class merchants) gained control by using the disorganized peasant class, members of the Third Estate, who presented their grievances in cahiers to the Estates General. The disbanding of the Estates General resulted in the formation of the new National Assembly governed by the Third Estate. This assembly wrote the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizens that described political changes and freedoms for the Third Estate. The constitution of 1791 also resulted in dramatic changes to the political structure. It, however, did not bring relief to those who most deserved it, the peasants. These events were the prologue to the French Revolution, the most important event in France’s history. The French Revolution was a direct result of overspending by King Louis XIV and Louis XVI, leaving France a financially unstable nation and ultimately resulting in a revolt by the Third Estate upset by the dwindling social and economic conditions.
Forever Blowing Bubbles Always a child - seems to have more fun. Seeing things - which to an adult don’t mean much. Children are forever blowing bubbles, that rise high into the sky, glittering and shimmering like diamonds. Watching them blown by the wind, reflecting rainbow colors, so simple, so full of joy, to be forever a child - blowing bubbles into the wind.
After this opening stanza, the poet begins to describe the contents of the photograph: "then as you scan / it, you see in the left-hand corner / a thing that is like a branch: part of a tree" and "to the right, halfway up / what ought to be a gentle / slope, a small frame house." Margaret Atwood is gradually drawing the reader inward, from the outside edge of the photograph towards the center of the photograph, the poem, and the poet herself. This can be seen clearly on the following lines: "I am in the lake, in the center / of the picture, just under the surface." The atmosphere created is one of introspection and self examination: "but if you look long enough, / eventually / you will be able to see me." Atwood is using the device of the photograph to draw the reader from the outside world inwards to her world in the center of the photograph.
Today many people think they need various things to be happy. They think they need a significant other, a lot of friends, success in a career, a certain amount of money, the list goes on and on. The poem Cloony the Clown shows that in most cases, these desires cause more harm than good. Shel Silverstein uses significant repetition, visual imagery, and situational irony to express the fact that people shouldn’t depend on certain factors to be happy.
The most concrete results of the French Revolution were probably achieved in 1789-91, when land was freed from customary burdens and the old corporate society was destroyed. The great reforms of 1789-91 nevertheless established an enduring administrative and legal system, and much of the revolutionaries' work in humanizing the law itself was subsequently incorporated in the Napoleonic Code. Politically, the revolution was more significant than successful. Since 1789 the French government has been either parliamentary and constitutional or based on the plebiscitary system that Napoleon inherited and developed. The Revolution nevertheless freed the state from the trammels of its medieval past, releasing such unprecedented power that the revolutionaries could defy, and Napoleon conquer, the rest of Europe. Moreover, that power acknowledged no restraint: in 1793 unity was imposed on the nation by the Terror. Europe and the world have ever since been learning what infringements of liberty can issue from the concepts of national sovereignty and the will of the people.
The repetition of the word "blind" introduces the theme of light and darkness. The streets of Dublin are described as "being blind"(2236) suggesting they do not lead anywhere. The houses are personified as being sombre and having "brown imperturbable faces"(2236), creating the shift from a literal setting to a state of mind. The streets remain silent until the boys are set free from school (2236), comparing the school to a prison: mundane and repetitive, and comparing their departure from school to a type of liberation for the children.... ...
Love comes in every way, shape and form, whether it be living under cattle’s feet or living in a beautiful creek. The theme of “The Clod and the Pebble” by William Blake is portrayed through very unique imagery, awesome word choice, and extraordinary relationships. This eccentric poem by William Blake talks about the different lives of a very simple clod and a pebble in which live in two opposite worlds. The way he starts this poem can be very misleading until the second stanza, in here it starts to tell us what it’s really about. William Blake then explains to us the two lives of these two very different souls. The theme of “The Clod and the Pebble” is to accept your life no matter where you live or travel and to not be that person who has a great life, but is always complaining.
	The speaker of the poem is a civilian observer, probably a local. There is a sense of tension and fear in the speaker’s tone. The speaker uses an observatory tone in the poem, a combination between 1st and 3rd person. The author shows us that the speaker is an observer when he says "They are not there…/You finger the trigger of your Bren." (ll. 8&10) You can clearly see that the author creates tension when he says "Half-fearing, half-desiring the sudden hell/ Pressure will loose." (ll. 11-12) The poet has a way of building us up to a climax then letting us down, and again he gets us on the edge of our seat, only to sit back down quickly.
The consistent pattern of metrical stresses in this stanza, along with the orderly rhyme scheme, and standard verse structure, reflect the mood of serenity, of humankind in harmony with Nature. It is a fine, hot day, `clear as fire', when the speaker comes to drink at the creek. Birdsong punctuates the still air, like the tinkling of broken glass. However, the term `frail' also suggests vulnerability in the presence of danger, and there are other intimations in this stanza of the drama that is about to unfold. Slithery sibilants, as in the words `glass', `grass' and `moss', hint at the existence of a Serpent in the Garden of Eden. As in a Greek tragedy, the intensity of expression in the poem invokes a proleptic tenseness, as yet unexplained.
It is this moment of recollection that he wonders about the contrast between the world of shadows and the world of the Ideal. It is in this moment of wonder that man struggles to reach the world of Forms through the use of reason. Anything that does not serve reason is the enemy of man. Given this, it is only logical that poetry should be eradicated from society. Poetry shifts man’s focus away from reason by presenting man with imitations of objects from the concrete world.