A soft whistle hummed through the pine trees and huddled around a dim fire sat Monkey, Monk, Pigsy and Sandy. The humble four sat around the lowlight crackle and reminisced about their long and enlightening journey to find Buddha. The four laughed and murmured about the adventure, but when the conversation finally died down Monkey stared up at the infinite sky. Millions of stars looked down upon him when in the distance he heard a soft cry. Monkey at first thought nothing of it, but it happened again, this time louder. The cry was the type that made a chill run through their bones and as it became louder and more frequent Monk finally said "do you hear that?". Monkey leaped up and replied, "Yes, it sounds like a bird." Pigsy murmured "far too loud to be a small bird." Monkey quickly argued back, "Sounds like someone needs help, we should go check it out." Finally after some light wining the group left their cozy fire and wandered out into the forest following the sound of the low squawk. As the group became engulfed in the dark foliage an eerie feeling set in. "I don't think we should of left the fire" Pigsy wined. Monkey simply rolled his eyes and carried on trudging though the mucky floor of the forest. The louder the squeal became, the forest finally started to weed out. The mucky floor became grassy and just when the squawk was so unbearably loud Monkey, Monk, Pigsy, and Sandy found themselves in an open field. In front of them was a white crane. The enormous bird stretched about five feet long and was lying in the tall grass. The group was in awe at the birds' beauty and size. The moonlit felid gave its once white feathers a light blue glow. The crane was lying in the field, breathing heavily and injured. Looking down Monk... ... middle of paper ... ... skinny arms and the feathers became a silk dress. The crane became a woman and as she gently landed back onto the ground, she smiled. "Thank you," she softly whispered. Her long black hair flowed in the wind like the sea and her voice was gentle like a harp. She walked towards Monk, kissed him on the cheek and said, "You will be repaid for your kindness." As soon as she came into his life, she was gone. Walking away through the talk grass, she vanished. The next morning the group found bundles of ripe berries and lavish plums on the trees surrounding them. The stream down the way was flowing with fresh water and large fish the size of a man's arm breached. Monkey, Monk, Pigsy, and Sandy ate like kings. Though they could never surely say that this was the cranes doing, deep in their hearts they knew their kindness to the injured bird gave them the plentiful hoard.
To briefly summarize this poem, I believe that the poem could be separated into three parts: The first part is composed in the first and second letters, which stress on the negative emotions towards the miserable pains, illnesses that the parents are baring, and also their hatred of the birds. The second part, I believe will be the third and fourth letters, which talks about the birds’ fights and the visiting lady from the church. And the last part, starts from the fifth letters to the rest of them, which mainly describe the harmonious life between the parents and those birds.
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.
...d genuine excitement, although the reasons were still scientific. The birds’ effects on Dillard, on the other hand, contrasted from how the birds had affected Audubon. Throughout her whole encounter with the starlings, Dillard “didn’t move” at all. She was mesmerized from when the birds first appeared to her up until they had wiped out into the woods. As the birds disappeared into the trees, she “stood with difficulty” with her “spread lungs [roaring]” Ultimately, Dillard was appalled by the magnificence of the flocks in flight.
Through the use of narrative and metaphor, Terry Tempest Williams beautifully depicts her life story in a poetic memoir. She describes the daily struggles she faced with change in her family, while her mother battled with cancer that eventually led to her death. She also describes the fluctuating lake levels, and how they affected the birds that migrate in the area. Through her experiences with the birds she learns how to cope and accept her mother’s death. Eventually, she moves on with the birds and learns how to love and not be afraid of death.
A White Heron and Other Stories. N.p.: n.p., n.d. Jewett Texts. Web. 5 Feb. 2014. .
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.
The couple in the story is a couple that has been together a long time and persevered through life together. When they first see the whooping cranes the husband says “they are rare, not many left” (196). This is the point in the story where the first connection between the couple and the cranes are made. The rarity of the cranes symbolizes the rarity of the couple’s relationship. Although they have started developing anomalies in their health, with the husband he “can’t smoke, can’t drink martinis, no coffee, no candy” (197) ¬—they are still able to laugh with each other and appreciate nature’s beauty. Their relationship is a true oddity; filled with lasting love. However this lasting love for whooping cranes has caused some problems for the species. The whooping cranes are “almost extinct”; this reveals a problem of the couple. The rare love that they have is almost extinct as well. The wife worries about her children because the “kids never write” (197). This reveals the communication gap between the two generations, as well as the different values between the generations. These different values are a factor into the extinction of true love.
Sylvia was a 9 year old “nature girl” who met a charming ornithologist hunter on a mission to find the allusive white heron. Sylvia was about 8 years old when she moved with her grandmother from the city to a farm, “a good change for a little maid who had tried to grow for eight years in a crowded manufacturing town, but, as for Sylvia herself, it seemed as if she never had been alive at all before she came to live at the farm.” (Jewett, 1884, 1914, qtd in McQuade, et.al., 1999, p. 1641). Sylvia finds the secret, the white heron. Instead of telling the young hunter, she keeps the secret, because in her mind nature is more powerful than her feelings for “the enemy.”
Bird usually portrays an image of bad luck that follows afterwards and in this novel, that is. the beginning of all the bad events that occur in the rest of the novel. It all started when Margaret Laurence introduced the life of Vanessa MacLeod. protagonist of the story, also known as the granddaughter of a calm and intelligent woman. I am a woman.
Peters and his new wife where happy but as time passed she grew sad. One day when Mr. Peters was walking past the river he noticed Leita next to the river with a swan resting on her and she was crying. He asked her what’s wrong and she reveals to him that she is a swan and that she missed her family. At this point he realized that the swan he saved was the wife that he had wished for.
Since its first appearance in the 1886 collection A White Heron and Other Stories, the short story A White Heron has become the most favorite and often anthologized of Sarah Orne Jewett. Like most of this regionalist writer's works, A White Heron was inspired by the people and landscapes in rural New England, where, as a little girl, she often accompanied her doctor father on his visiting patients. The story is about a nine-year-old girl who falls in love with a bird hunter but does not tell him the white heron's place because her love of nature is much greater. In this story, the author presents a conflict between femininity and masculinity by juxtaposing Sylvia, who has a peaceful life in country, to a hunter from town, which implies her discontent with the modernization?s threat to the nature. Unlike female and male, which can describe animals, femininity and masculinity are personal and human.
There are many inspiring literary works from the short stories, plays and poems but there is one in particular that will have a lasting and profound effect on my perspective concerning the strength and determination of mankind, “The Open Boat” by Stephen Crane. Crane presents the epic battle of man against nature with such vivid imagery that it ignites the imagination. It is an attribute of mankind to seek supremacy against each other, fate and nature itself, as can be seen in this short story. The battle Crane describes begins as the survivors of a shipwreck, a group of four men, doggedly attempt to row a small lifeboat to shore amidst the turbulent waves and currents of a tempestuous ocean. “The Open Boat”,
bird as the metaphor of the poem to get the message of the poem across
“A Bird came down the Walk,” was written in c. 1862 by Emily Dickinson, who was born in 1830 and died in 1886. This easy to understand and timeless poem provides readers with an understanding of the author’s appreciation for nature. Although the poem continues to be read over one hundred years after it was written, there is little sense of the time period within which it was composed. The title and first line, “A Bird came down the Walk,” describes a common familiar observation, but even more so, it demonstrates how its author’s creative ability and artistic use of words are able to transform this everyday event into a picture that results in an awareness of how the beauty in nature can be found in simple observations. In a step like narrative, the poet illustrates the direct relationship between nature and humans. The verse consists of five stanzas that can be broken up into two sections. In the first section, the bird is eating a worm, takes notice of a human in close proximity and essentially becomes frightened. These three stanzas can easily be swapped around because they, for all intents and purposes, describe three events that are able to occur in any order. Dickinson uses these first three stanzas to establish the tone; the tone is established from the poet’s literal description and her interpretive expression of the bird’s actions. The second section describes the narrator feeding the bird some crumbs, the bird’s response and its departure, which Dickinson uses to elaborately illustrate the bird’s immediate escape. The last two stanzas demonstrate the effect of human interaction on nature and more specifically, this little bird, so these stanzas must remain in the specific order they are presented. Whereas most ...