After reading the title of the poem Sick Room, Langston Hughes, the reader immediately undergoes a feeling of suspense and seriousness. The title explains the room in which the woman is lying in and what her condition is. The reader can speculate that she is not in a room to bring her happiness or good news, but rather a dreary and disheartening environment. Perhaps, because it is being called a “Sick Room” it could be taking place in a hospital room. In this poem, Hughes describes the feeling of the woman who does not have much time to live. She is stuck knocking on death’s door and fighting for a little longer. However, either way she will feel pain which is forcing her to make the best out of either outcome. Once the author distinguishes
In the beginning the narrator concentrates on a typo on the hospital menu saying “…They mean, I think, that the pot roast tonight will be served with buttered noodles. But what it says…is that the pot roast will be severed…not a word you want to see after flipping your car twice…” (Hempel 53) as if he’s trying to keep his mind off of everything. Nevertheless, the narrator continues on to speak regarding his memory, the realization of eventual death, and the duality of experience. Although from time to time, as a coping mechanism, he restrains himself from getting too serious—by means of making jokes on the surface—he finds himself plunging into deeper meaning.
Under the orders of her husband, the narrator is moved to a house far from society in the country, where she is locked into an upstairs room. This environment serves not as an inspiration for mental health, but as an element of repression. The locked door and barred windows serve to physically restrain her: “the windows are barred for little children, and there are rings and things in the walls.” The narrator is affected not only by the physical restraints but also by being exposed to the room’s yellow wallpaper which is dreadful and fosters only negative creativity. “It is dull enough to confuse the eye in following, pronounced enough to constantly irritate and provoke study, and when you follow the lame uncertain curves for a little distance they suddenly commit suicide – plunge off at outrageous angles, destroy themselves in unheard of contradictions.”
In the first three sentences of the essay, the speaker adopts a very childlike style. He makes use of simple words and keeps the sentences short, similar in style to that of an early aged teenager. But since the text is written in the past tense and the narrator mentions that he was 'going on thirteen' (181), we know the speaker is now older. After reading a little further, we find that the style becomes more complex, with a more select choice of words and longer sentences. The contrast between simple and complex styles is present all through the rest of the essay, and creates a more personal atmosphere. Another particularity of 'Salvation' is the fact that the story recounts Langston Hughes' own personal experiences as a young boy. This high degree of intimacy allows Hughes to supply the reader with some very concrete details and vivid descriptions. The beauty in Hughes? personal insights lies in their power to reach our senses. We can clearly picture th...
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,
Another example of Hughes’s constant struggles with racism and his inner and thoughtful response to that is clearly seen when he recalls being denied the right to sit at the same table. His point of view identifies that he was not able to sit at the table because he was an African-American. Yet, he remains very optimistic in not letting his misfortune please what is considered the “white-man” in the poem. Langston Hughes’s states,
The Victorians thought that their woman should be motherly and uninterested in sex. Women were supposed to be pure and virginal, and even after marriage, they should still be uninterested in sex. The bed is nailed to the floor, which is a metaphor for the culture of male dominance at the time. The narrator's husband, John, is a very successful physician. He tells the narrator time and time again that she is sick. He can be viewed as a very controlling man in which everything must happen his way or not at all. John was a metaphor for the type of society in the 19th century. He is the image of a male-dominated culture where every woman and child had to follow the rules without complaint. The narrator is like a child taking order for the male doctors in her life, even going on to say, “personally, I disagree with their ideas.” She does not accept their diagnosis but has no other choice but to follow it’s harsh procedures, much like the woman of the 19th century. The wallpaper, rules, and opinions of other stood between the narrator’s imagination and intellectual desires, eventually driving her to insanity. However, she is not the only woman in the story to feel this snared feeling. John’s sister, Jennie, claimed that she wouldn't mind tearing the wallpaper apart herself, proving she also felt oppressed by the strict rules of society. The narrator finds
The first character we meet is Ruth Younger. Ruth is a hardworking mother who has had a thought life up until this point. The Writer opens up describing her by saying that “she was a pretty girl, even exceptionally so, but now it is apparent that life has been little that she expected, and disappointment has already begun to hang in her face.” (Pg. 1472) This description bears a strong resemblance to the line in Harlem, “Does it dry up, like a raison in the sun?” (Line 2) We immediately are thrown into the madness of her life. She wants desperately to have a happy family and is in constant disagreement with her husband’s ideas. We see how her living arrangements have made her believe that there will never be anything better in this world for her. The saddest part is that she believes that bringing another child into this sad existence is something she cannot do. When she makes the decision to visit the abortion doctor, it immediately brought me to the final line in the poem where Hughes states “Or does it explode?” (Line 11) There had to be an explosion of desperation for a w...
The room describes the narrator. The room was once a nursery so it reminds her that she has a baby which she is not able to see or hold. The room was also a playroom so it reminds her once again that she cannot play with or watch her baby play. The room has two windows which she looks out of and sees all the beautiful places she cannot go because of her husband. The bars on the windows represent a prison which her husband has put her in to heal from her illness.
...ttachment or emotion. Again, Heaney repeats the use of a discourse marker, to highlight how vividly he remembers the terrible time “Next morning, I went up into the room”. In contrast to the rest of the poem, Heaney finally writes more personally, beginning with the personal pronoun “I”. He describes his memory with an atmosphere that is soft and peaceful “Snowdrops and Candles soothed the bedside” as opposed to the harsh and angry adjectives previously used such as “stanched” and “crying”. With this, Heaney is becoming more and more intimate with his time alone with his brother’s body, and can finally get peace of mind about the death, but still finding the inevitable sadness one feels with the loss of a loved one “A four foot box, a foot for every year”, indirectly telling the reader how young his brother was, and describing that how unfortunate the death was.
Now that the summary is out there for all who did not get to read the story let’s make some connections to everyday life. In the story is it said by the author that, “All the while I hated myself for having wept before the needle went in, convinced that the nurse and my mother we...
The creation of a stressful psychological state of mind is prevalent in the story “The Yellow Wall-Paper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, as well as, Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart”, Ophelia’s struggles in William Shakespeare’s “Hamlet”, and the self-inflicted sickness seen in William Blake’s “Mad Song”. All the characters, in these stories and poems, are subjected to external forces that plant the seed of irrationality into their minds; thus, creating an adverse intellectual reaction, that from an outsider’s point of view, could be misconstrued as being in an altered state due to the introduction of a drug, prescribed or otherwise, furthering the percep...
“A Story about the Body”, a prose poem by Robert Hass, is literally about a man who supposedly loves a woman but then finds out about her health conditions and then changes his mind. This poem, when I read it, was more like a short story than a poem. The poem uses imagery and a variety of adjectives which allow the reader to put themselves in the story as if they were watching it happen.
Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes wrote the poem “Ballad of the Landlord” in 1940, a time of immense discrimination against people of African descent. The poem details an account of a tenant, later found out to be an African American, who is dissatisfied with his rental property. The tenant is politely asking the landlord to make the needed repairs on the realty, but instead the landlord demands to be paid. The tenant refuses to pay the rent, and the police are called after a threat is made towards the landlord. The police arrest the tenant; he is jailed for ninety days with no bail. Langston Hughes’s “Ballad of the Landlord” is a startling poem that underlines the discrimination African Americans had to cope with in the nineteen-forties by illustrating an account of an African American tenant’s troubles with a Caucasian landlord through the use of theme, dialect, tone and multiple speakers.
the poem, then it may be about a woman being sick and dying because of
During his stay at the house of Usher, the narrator finds himself unable to draw his friend out of the abyss of misery in which he has enshrouded himself, both figuratively and literally. Admitting to his sister's approaching death being one of...