Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister
The poem doesn’t even start with a word, it starts with the sound, he just growls. When the speaker sees someone passing and calls him his "heart's abhorrence" –in which abhorrence is used as a strong word for hatred. He says that if hate could kill, Brother Lawrence would be dead. Then it seems the speaker is answering to Brother Lawrence or thinking what he would be saying. As the narrator and Brother Lawrence sit together: Brother Lawrence says to him: "Salve tibi" is Latin for "Hail to thee," Then they continue with some small talk until: The speaker makes fun of Brother Lawrence's interest in learning the Latin name for "parsley" by asking what the "Greek name" is for "Swine's Snout." He's making fun of Brother Lawrence for taking too much pride in his personal belongings. It sounds like the speaker is using the royal "we". The narrator introduces the nuns as they bathe themselves down at the riverbank and trade stories, Brother Lawrence likes to check them out. He even compares Brother Lawrence's lust for these nuns to that of a "Barbary corsa...
The passage from Bernal Díaz del Castillo’s The True History of the Conquest of New Spain is a clear example of a narrative source. Díaz is presenting his personal account of Hernan Cortes’s expedition into Tenochtitlan. An interesting aspect of this narrative is that it was written almost 50 years after the events described occurred . Bernal Díaz del Castillo was only 24 years old when on November 8, 1519 he and the rest of Hernán Cortés’s expedition first entered the city of Tenochtitlán . He did not finish his account, titled The True History of the Conquest of New Spain, which many suspect was intended as a slight to Francisco López de Gómara’s accounts of the expeditions , until 1567 . This was not his first travel to the New World, in fact, it was his fourth . Díaz del Castillo was 19 years old the first time he traveled to the Americas, this time was to Panama . Díaz later became a governor in Guatemala, mostly as a reward for his actions as a conquistador . The event that is commonly seen as spurring the not-well-educated Bernal Díaz del Castillo to write of his experiences with Cortés was the publication of Francisco López de Gómara’s Coleccion de historiadores primitivos de las Indias Occidentales, which Díaz saw as seriously flawed and underappreciating the work of the conquistadors . The book this passage comes from languished on shelves until it was published in 1632, posthumously .
This is a deviation from the typical sonnet in the sense that the usual speaker is a male character praising the body of a lover, feature by feature. The breakdown of the body is one aspect that remains present in this sonnet; “when your mouth is an absence of screams” (Line 11). The metaphor use shows that at this moment she did not have a voice; she did not yet have a way to call out for help or express her emotions in this very early stage in the healing process. The moment after the assault is when the healing process begins; the sonnet expresses the emotions that she could not speak of at the time. The speaker calls attention to the eyes of the subject with the phrase, “your eyes’ salty runoff,” (Line 2). This metaphor is used to compare the tears that are running down her face to the small rivers that are drowning her. This suggests that she is being overwhelmed with emotions that she cannot put a name to. The typical sonnet examines the female body in a loving manner but Alleyne examines her body with a negative approach to amplify the wrongs that were committed against her
A Guatemalan native, a male graduate student that I work with in my research group at the University told this story. He came from the countryside, living in a small village back home. According to him, the story of La Llorona, involving a weeping woman, arose sometime in the 1700s and became well known both at school and home. Some claimed to have actually seen the weeping woman. Some disregard it as unscientific and implausible. No one is sure of the exact origin of this urban legend. This story was told to me and another graduate student in our research group while sitting in lab waiting for the experiment results. The story began as we started sharing our own background and the culture of our own countries when the storyteller decided to make a little shift and started to tell a story told to him by his older cousin--the story of La Llorona:
Prior to the careers of Popes Celestine V and Boniface XII in the 13th century, the long and, sometimes tumultuous, history of the church can be helpful in setting the stage for these two church official’s very famous, and very different tenures as pope. In different forms and methods, the medieval Catholic Church has always had a strong hold on society in addition to politics. The church has also had a troubling past when it comes to corruption, usually manifesting itself through the pursuit of this dominance over political and outside figures on all aspects of everyday life. Coupling these two themes together, the past actions and power exerted
A name is given in the second stanza “Tom Dacre” used to show the realism of the event described in the poem. The second stanza contains the only simile in this poem, “That curl’d like a lamb’s back”(6), symbolizing the lamb as innocence and when they shave the child’s head it’s like they are taking the innocence away from the child.
This paper will attempt to accurately examine the development of the Spanish Inquisition, from the spread of the Inquisition into the Spanish territories through the ultimate upheaval, and the initial dissolvement, of the authority it held over the public who feared it. It will endeavor to show the implications of the Spanish Inquisition and how it was ultimately used as a device in its own undoing. Such an examination helps to explain the use of Church authority in secular governing, and later the separating of the Church from the crown. The paper will also take a closer look at this racial injustice in an attempt helping to see just how this may happen again if not understood and foreseen.
In the Middle Ages, the Christian community 's hatred towards the Jews still remained as the Spanish inquisition had approached. The Jewish community was expelled from Spain because the church authorities had figured out that the Marranos, who were converted Jews, still practiced Judaism in secrecy. This is what the Christians took extreme offence to, and believed that the Jews were deliberately going against the church. The purpose of the inquisition was for the Catholic authorities to root out, suppress, and punish the Jewish heretics. The Christian community believed that the Jewish heretics were corrupting their society and wanted them removed. The inquisition was operated by the enraged Christian population themselves, as they drove the
When we think about society, there is often a stark contrast between the controversy projected in the media that our society faces, and the mellow, safe view we have of our own smaller, more tangible, ‘local’ society. This leads us to believe that our way of life is protected, and our rights secured by that concept of society that has been fabricated and built upon. However, what if society were not what we perceive it to be, and the government chose to exercise its power in an oppressive manner? As a society we would like to think that we are above such cruelty, yet as The Lonely Crossing of Juan Cabrera by J. Joaquin Fraxedas recounts the state of Cuba in the 1990’s, we must also remember that all societies and governments view the individual differently as opposed to the whole. Each group has unique expectations that are enforced upon the individual which extend beyond those expectations that are written. What this book brings to light is the extraordinary repercussions of refusing to meet the demands and expectations of those that lead our governments. When we veer from the path well-trodden and into the ‘wild’ as Juan did, we may not face death quite as often, but the possibility of those we once called our own, persecuting us for our choices is a true and often an incredibly frightening danger.
During the first century Europe was plagued with many different wars for political and religious agendas. At this time Christianity was still just a new trend and seen by many the way that we see doomsday cults today. Rather than making it impossible for Christianity to get a foothold in the people, the new Christianity trend used the turmoil as a doorway through which it was able to find strong followers. Saint James, known in Spanish as Santiago, was one of the twelve apostles of Jesus; during his lifetime he came to Spain to preach the gospel, probably following a route that leads to the "End of the Earth" which held a great deal of mythical and mystical value to Europeans (Lehelma). During this time the Moors, or Arabs, were in the process of expanding their territory, infringing upon many people's lands and belief systems. In the year 711 Visogothic Spain had nearly been conquered by the Moors, and the Spaniards were in dire need of a savior. Thus follows the birth of the Cult of Saint James. During the battle of Clavijo Saint James appeared as a holy warrior fighting for Ramiro I of Leon, attempting to push back and defeat the troops of Abdurrahaman II. The image of Saint James the Moor-slayer,mounted horseback striking down all Moors in his path with a mighty sword, however grotesque, was then used to strengthen the Christian resistance to the Arabs.
Before delving any deeper into this poem and its meaning, a few basic questions must be answered first. I believe the speaker to be William Blake himself. I am able to infer this from the repeated use of the pronoun “I.” Thought the course of the poem, the speaker’s temperament changes. At the start of the poem the speaker ...
The poem told the story of a man who is inhibited by language, and has never quite had the ability to articulate his thoughts and feeling through words. It is said that his family members have tried
Anytime dialogue is used in this poem it is mainly positive. In the second to last paragraph of the poem, the lover and the brother engage in one last conversation before the brother leaves. The lover says to the brother “Forgive yourself for not wanting to know him after he told you. He did” (Lassell pr. 12 line 6). The dialogue acts as a key point in the brother’s forgiveness process. When the main character forgives himself he also reminded of another challenge that his brother had to face. His brother wasn’t accepted by him but he still had the love in his heart to forgive his brother. This shines a light on the change of attitude the main character had towards his brother. “I never thought I was good enough looking to deserve your brother” (Lassell pr. 4 line 5). The use of dialogue here lets the reader and main character understand the love that the lover had for the brother and how good of a man he must have been. This evidently changes the main character’s attitude towards the
The sacred space of the Cathedral of Chartres in France and the Parthenon will be discussed in comparison with each other.
Marie de France’s “Lanval” is a Breton lai dominated by themes common to 12th century literature, which through its exploration of love, erotic desire, wealth, gender and community, tells the story of a young knight who finds himself caught between two worlds: his lover’s and his own. Forced to separate these societies by a warning in which his lover states, “do not let any man know about this…you would lose me for good if this love were known” (Lines 145-148), Lanval must keep his love a secret and exist apart from the Arthurian world into which he was born. Consequently, romantic love between Lanval and his fairie queen exists conditionally, that is upon Lanval’s physical and emotional isolation. This restriction suggests that romantic love, as described in terms of erotic desire and physical/emotional devotion throughout “Lanval,” is unsuited for existence in the mundanity of Arthurian society. Therefore, Lanval’s solitude is necessary for his maintaining his relationship with the fairie queen, a fact that suggests the incompatibility of romantic love with Arthurian society, as Marie depicts it.
Best known for his use of color, Henri Matisse cleverly cultivated his status as a modern artist using many different styles of painting from Impressionism to Fauvism. The artwork of Matisse has been a milestone in the history of painting. Henri Matisse’s self-proclaimed masterpiece, however, a chapel in Vence, France, is a small, minimalist building. The amalgamation of modern art and the sacred creates a unique spiritual experience in that it welcomes Christians and non-Christians alike to appreciate the artist’s religious symbolism. The elegantly simple architecture of the chapel, the use of light in the space, and the binary of colors on opposite walls have a calming, cleansing, and transformative effect that is undeniable.