With the focus on gender inequality typically falling to the shortcomings of men towards women, many fail to realize the burdens males must face to preserve their masculinity as society deems fit. The speaker of Stephen Dunn’s “Ambush at Five O’Clock” faces situations which fully depict the expectations, such as emotional strength and a condescending attitude toward women, placed on him and similar males. The employment of various comparative literary techniques like metaphor and personification illustrate the expected characteristics of the individuals present in the text and the speaker’s desire to escape these expectations. The registers present in the poem serve to highlight the emotions associated with events taking place in the poem and emphasize the speaker’s interpretation of them. As the tone shifts throughout the poem, the audience views alternating ideas about the major emotional events through the speaker’s eyes. In “Ambush at Five O’Clock” by Stephen Dunn, the speaker juxtaposes the male and female characters to emphasize the societal expectations, e.g., strength and disdain of female emotion, of average, middle-class males.
Throughout the poem the speaker’s employment of metaphor and personification lends to the characterization of the speaker, his wife, and their neighbors. When depicting his male neighbor, the speaker points out that “The man was shy, though came to life when he spotted an uncommon bird” (13-14). The metaphor of the speaker’s emotions coming out, or coming to life, upon his viewing of uncommon birds expresses that though his interests may be relatively simple, he has found something that gives him great enjoyment and fulfillment. The speaker admires this in his neighbor and desires to emulate this,...
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...is soul. The military register present in the poem serves to reveal how the speaker feels ambushed by his wife’s sudden outpouring of emotion by the hedge between their property and their neighbor’s property. In addition, the register of suffering clarifies that, though the speaker desires to express his concerns over his soul, he cannot do so due to the societal restrictions on males tarnishing their masculinity through the public expression of emotion. As the tone shifts throughout the poem, the audience views alternating ideas about the major emotional events present in the poem with a focus on the frustrated emotions the speaker communicates at the conclusion of the poem. Through the constant characterization in the poem, the speaker effectively manages to highlight the inequalities between males and females resulting from the perpetuation of gender stereotyping.
...veryone else. He wakes up every day ready to crow his symbol to bring on that day. In the poem he is ready to protect all the female chickens, from another cock that could be in there house. He is ready to battle to the death for what he thinks is his. In this poem he uses ridicule, when he is talking about the old man in a terminal ward, and he also uses connotations. Some example of connotations are when he uses words like; enraged, sullenly, savagery, unappeased and terminal.
...t is arguable that the birds fight is also a metaphor, implying the fight exists not only between birds but also in the father’s mind. Finally, the last part confirms the transformation of the parents, from a life-weary attitude to a “moving on” one by contrasting the gloomy and harmonious letter. In addition, readers should consider this changed attitude as a preference of the poet. Within the poem, we would be able to the repetitions of word with same notion. Take the first part of the poem as example, words like death, illness
The tile of the poem “Bird” is simple and leads the reader smoothly into the body of the poem, which is contained in a single stanza of twenty lines. Laux immediately begins to describe a red-breasted bird trying to break into her home. She writes, “She tests a low branch, violet blossoms/swaying beside her” and it is interesting to note that Laux refers to the bird as being female (Laux 212). This is the first clue that the bird is a symbol for someone, or a group of people (women). The use of a bird in poetry often signifies freedom, and Laux’s use of the female bird implies female freedom and independence. She follows with an interesting image of the bird’s “beak and breast/held back, claws raking at the pan” and this conjures a mental picture of a bird who is flying not head first into a window, but almost holding herself back even as she flies forward (Laux 212). This makes the bird seem stubborn, and follows with the theme of the independent female.
One of the key components of literature is the usage of elements, these elements of literature provides readers underlying themes that authors put into their story. Without these elements of literature, the author would have no way to convey their true messages into their works. In Zora Neale Hurston’s story “Sweat”, Hurston uses many elements of literature to convey the seriousness and true relationship of couples that have a history of domestic violence. However, a specific element of literature that Hurston uses are symbols which give readers a clearer understanding of domestic abuse and most importantly, the characteristics of the victim and perpetrator of an abusive relationship. The symbols that Hurston uses in her story are what fortifies her plot and characters in “Sweat”. The symbols that Hurston uses are necessary because it destroys the typical gender role stereotypes between men and women. This is necessary because there is such a difference between the portrayal of men and women, men often being superior to women. Hurston uses through her symbol to show some equality between men and women or at points women can also be superior against men.
Two poems, “The Fish” by Elizabeth Bishop and “The Meadow Mouse” by Theodore Roethke, include characters who experience, learn, and emote with nature. In Elizabeth Bishop’s poem “The Fish,” a fisherman catches a fish, likely with the intention to kill it, but frees it when he sees the world through the eyes of the fish. In Theodore Roethke’s poem “The Meadow Mouse,” a man finds a meadow mouse with the intention of keeping it and shielding it from nature, but it escapes into the wild. These poems, set in different scenarios, highlight two scenarios where men and women interact with nature and experience it in their own ways.
Therefore, Oliver’s incorporation of imagery, setting, and mood to control the perspective of her own poem, as well as to further build the contrast she establishes through the speaker, serves a critical role in creating the lesson of the work. Oliver’s poem essentially gives the poet an ultimatum; either he can go to the “cave behind all that / jubilation” (10-11) produced by a waterfall to “drip with despair” (14) without disturbing the world with his misery, or, instead, he can mimic the thrush who sings its poetry from a “green branch” (15) on which the “passing foil of the water” (16) gently brushes its feathers. The contrast between these two images is quite pronounced, and the intention of such description is to persuade the audience by setting their mood towards the two poets to match that of the speaker. The most apparent difference between these two depictions is the gracelessness of the first versus the gracefulness of the second. Within the poem’s content, the setting has been skillfully intertwined with both imagery and mood to create an understanding of the two poets, whose surroundings characterize them. The poet stands alone in a cave “to cry aloud for [his] / mistakes” while the thrush shares its beautiful and lovely music with the world (1-2). As such, the overall function of these three elements within the poem is to portray the
Suggested roles of all types set the stage for how human beings perceive their life should be. Gender roles are one of the most dangerous roles that society faces today. With all of the controversy applied to male vs. female dominance in households, and in the workplace, there seems to be an argument either way. In the essay, “Men as Success Objects”, the author Warren Farrell explains this threat of society as a whole. Farrell explains the difference of men and women growing up and how they believe their role in society to be. He justifies that it doesn’t just appear in marriage, but in the earliest stages of life. Similarly, in the essay “Roles of Sexes”, real life applications are explored in two different novels. The synthesis between these two essays proves how prevalent roles are in even the smallest part of a concept and how it is relatively an inevitable subject.
Beton discovers men’s anger toward women by glancing through an apparently well-known Professor von X’s book titled The Mental, Moral, and Physical Inferiority of the Female Sex. The mere title makes her angry—outraged that the words could even form the title of a book, which, to Beton, is the natural response to “be[ing] told that one is naturally the inferior of a little man” (32). She does not know at first why men are so critical of women, but she does know that their arguments say more about them than they do about the women they write about. The books “had been written in the red light of emotion,” she says, “and not in the white light of truth” (33), meaning that the men Beton speaks of are responding to something—some feeling or condition that they, as a sex identifying with one another, are sensing, rather than merely expressing a natural fact as their rhetoric seems to suggest.
As a way to end his last stanza, the speaker creates an image that surpasses his experiences. When the flock rises, the speaker identifies it as a lady’s gray silk scarf, which the woman has at first chosen, then rejected. As the woman carelessly tosses the scarf toward the chair the casual billow fades from view, like the birds. The last image connects nature with a last object in the poet's
John Updike’s poem “The Great Scarf of Birds” expresses the varying emotions the narrator experiences as he witnesses certain events from nature. His narration of the birds throughout the poem acts as numerous forms of imagery and symbolism concerning him and his life, and this becomes a recollection of the varying emotional stances he comes to terms with that he has experienced in his life. These changes are so gradually and powerfully expressed because of a fluent use of diction and figurative language, specifically symbolism and simile, and aided by organization.
Many different depictions of gender roles exist in all times throughout the history of American culture and society. Some are well received and some are not. When pitted against each other for all intents and purposes of opposition, the portrayal of the aspects and common traits of masculinity and femininity are separated in a normal manner. However, when one gender expects the other to do its part and they are not satisfied with the results and demand more, things can shift from normal to extreme fairly quickly. This demand is more commonly attributed by the men within literary works. Examples of this can be seen in Tennessee Williams' “A Streetcar Named Desire”, where Stella is constantly being pushed around and being abused by her drunken husband Stanley, and also in Charlotte Perkins Gilman's “The Yellow Wallpaper”, where the female narrator is claimed unfit by her husband as she suffers from a sort of depression, and is generally looked down on for other reasons.
Throughout the poem, there is repetition of the line “I am the man, I suffer'd, I was there, ” to emphasize his empathy. He also includes alliteration such as “rent roofs” and powerful imagery like “the long roil of the drummers” to liven the poem. Additionally, he helps the reader experience the events in the poem by using similes to compare the challenges to things that the reader has experienced. One line reads, “The twinges that sting like needles his legs and neck”. In the poem, Whitman becomes the heroes, but by incorporating the literary devices, Whitman allows the reader to experience the same experience as the heroes as
In many great works of literature, whether they be plays, novels, or poetry, the idea of masculinity is prominent throughout the novels because for an extended period of history, men were seen as superior to their female counterparts. As time went on, writers began to portray females in their work as more dominant and less frail. In works such as Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, and Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire, the female characters are more assertive, while the male characters are submissive in comparison. All these plays were written in the mid twentieth century, a time where America was changing, and the stereotypical roles for people, especially women and African Americans,
..., the content and form has self-deconstructed, resulting in a meaningless reduction/manifestation of repetition. The primary focus of the poem on the death and memory of a man has been sacrificed, leaving only the skeletal membrane of any sort of focus in the poem. The “Dirge” which initially was meant to reflect on the life of the individual has been completely abstracted. The “Dirge” the reader is left with at the end of the poem is one meant for anyone and no one. Just as the internal contradictions in Kenneth Fearing’s poem have eliminated the substantial significance of each isolated concern, the reader is left without not only a resolution, but any particular tangible meaning at all. The form and content of this poem have quite effectively established a powerful modernist statement, ironically contingent on the absence and not the presence of meaning in life.
He is almost sleeping while doing this. This creates a very powerful visual image. It epitomizes how the people left to grieve act. Many people stricken by death want to be left alone and bottle themselves up. The first few lines of the poem illustrate how deeply in sorrow the man is. This image should affect everyone. It should make the reader sympathize or even empathize with the man. Another main way he uses imagery is through the black bird or the raven. The presence of the bird is a bad omen. It is supposed to be followed by maleficent things. The bird is used to symbolize death figuratively and literally. The bird only says one word the entire poem. It repeats “nevermore.” This word can be interpreted multiple ways each time it is said. It is also possible that the bird is not talking. It is possible that the bird is an image created by