Literature Module #2.6, Death Comes for the Archbishop Prompt: What role does the landscape play in the story? In what ways can it be seen as a character? All She Needs is Pen and Paper “The heavy, lead-coloured drops were driven slantingly through the air by an icy wind from the peak,” (74). Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop holds within it startling imagery that forms picturesque aspects of the terrain that no one could mistake. Lacking such details would bring a dullness to her works. Therefore, her marvelous pen never ceased to weave a blanket of pictures with ink that made her matchless writing style famous among her readers. It is effortless to notice the brilliancy of the clarity formed beneath the tip of Cather’s pen.
Throughout the book Peace Like A River, there are several mentions to landscape and setting. I believe that the landscape is a analogy for the main character, Jeremiah’s, health. Throughout the book there are obvious analogies such as the badlands and winter. But those can be talked about later. In the start of the book they are at August Shultz’s farm hunting geese. He describes the landscape as “soaked swaths with a december smelling wind” (Page7) from this we can say for certain that Jeremiah is in good health.This could also mean a fresh start. This setting comes into play a few times and can mean different things contextually. Throughout the second chapter, through chapter 10, the landscape does not play a huge
Willa Cather is the author of the award winning novel Death Comes For The Archbishop written in 1927. She was born in 1873 near Winchester, Virginia and soon moved to Nebraska (Cather, 1927). During her childhood she was surrounded by foreign languages and customs. Even at her young age she felt a connection to the immigrants in Nebraska and was intrigued with their connection to the land. Willa also loved writing about the vanished past of the American Southwest where nature and Christianity is opposed to the modern urban life and society (http://fp.image.dk). She was raised Episcopalian and later in life she joined the Protestant Church in search for spirituality while still being captivated with the grandeur of ceremonies performed in the Catholic Church. These fascinations were projected directly into to her writings, as seen in her book Death Comes For The Archbishop. This book was awarded the Howells Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1930 (http://www.geocities.com).
Privett, Anne. "Appropriating Nature: Gilpin, the picturesque and Landscape Gardenting." Appropriating Nature: A Presentation for English 409. 10 Feb. 2005. Khaghan Parker, Anne Privett and Luke Ingberg. 18 Feb, 2005 2006. http://members.shaw.ca/weaters/index.htm
Topography is the features of land in an area. Those features can include rivers, mountains, lakes, hills, forrests, etc. A White Heron is overflowing with references to the topography of Maine, and more specifically the coast of Maine. The first sentence of Jewett’s A White Heron gives the reader a preview into the appreciation Jewett has for her home state of Maine, “The woods were already filled with shadows one June evening, just before eight o’clock, though a bright sunset still glimmered faintly among the trunks of the trees” (413). While this description isn’t specific to Maine on the surface, it is specific to Jewett’s interpretation of the woods at sunset in Maine, and the beauty of color writing is that each reader will imagine their own sunset based on their own woods in their own region. Jewett was just beginning and her description of the land around her, and as the story progresses the d...
In Death Comes for the Archbishop, Willa Cather does not portray Bishop Latour and father Vaillant as hero, saints, or martyrs, but as two priests who do not live glorious lives and yet leave behind a glorious legacy through their missionary work and spreading of Catholicism in the Southwest. Bishop Latour and Father Vaillant did not live and die in vain, but rather created a legacy. At the end of the priests’ lives, they look back on their journey of life and feel a sense of happiness even in death because they did everything they wanted to do in life and they made their lives a work of art. In the eyes of the people they helped, they are heroes and they exemplify how everyone can be a hero. Bishop Latour and Father Vaillant are brave,
Percy Shelley’s “Mont Blanc” (1816) and William Wordsworth’s “The Prelude” (1805), both tell the story of the individuals meetings with an impressively, beautiful mountain landscape. In Mont Blanc, Shelley describes the icy glacial capped peaks of the Swiss Alp’s, whereas in The Prelude, Wordsworth describes his meetings with nature and his interactions with the landscape. Both these poems focus on the beauty of the landscape, and thrive off their own personal experiences which they have had with nature. These poems however have a strong representation of the sublime and the effects this theory has on them personally and sensually. Beauty is also present in these poems; however there is a difference as beauty indulges in the aesthetic experience of equilibrium and synchronization, whereas the sublime focuses on the senses such as your mind and imagination. Leighton (1984) believes you can see the difference as, ‘the picturesque world would be exemplified by variety, the beautiful by smoothness and the sublime by magnitude’, showing just how differentiated they are. Both these poems both have different meanings and morals, and both authors have different beliefs
Throughout his villanelle, “Saturday at the Border,” Hayden Carruth continuously mentions the “death-knell” (Carruth 3) to reveal his aged narrator’s anticipation of his upcoming death. The poem written in conversation with Carruth’s villanelle, “Monday at the River,” assures the narrator that despite his age, he still possesses the expertise to write a well structured poem. Additionally, the poem offers Carruth’s narrator a different attitude with which to approach his writing, as well as his death, to alleviate his feelings of distress and encourage him to write with confidence.
The diction and detail used by Willa Cather in the book A Lost Lady, paints a picture in the readers mind by her prose selection of diction and arrangements of graphic detail, which conveys a feeling of passion, sadness, tense anger and unending happiness through Neil Herbert. Throughout the book, Cather describes Neil Herbert¡¯s life from his childhood, to his teenage years, and then to his adulthood with surpassing diction and supporting detail.
shows in Under Milk Wood that he is Able to write in the opaque poetic
As readers scan Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado,” they can easily find elements of a Gothic story. The story’s evident decay and death, suspenseful setting, and passionate narrator legitimize its place in Gothic literature. In “The Cask of Amontillado,” Poe devises a nerve-wracking setting by establishing the Montresor’s catacombs, a place comprised of “long wall of bones, with casks and puncheons,” as the setting (110). As the bones and caskets reappear throughout the story, the appearance of death and decay is clear throughout the story. The presence of death unnerves the readers, and as the characters travel deeper into the catacombs, the suspense grows as readers wait for the foreshadowed deadly end. In addition to the hair-raising
diversity of the landscape. The movie has shown vast rural fields and the urbanized emerald
The beach is somewhat dull in the way of landscape. On the beach there's sand, just sand. Maybe there is a seashell here or there, but mostly just sand. However, the mountains are diverse and vivid. There are more colors in an acre of mountain landscape than in twenty miles of ope...
Nature inspires Wordsworth poetically. Nature gives a landscape of seclusion that implies a deepening of the mood of seclusion in Wordsworth's mind.
Several authors have based some of their writings on their spirituality. Some of these writings are as intricate as the Bible or as basic as an article in a local newspaper, but the meaning and passion behind them should never be doubted. In Leslie Marmon Silko's "Landscape, History, and the Pueblo Imagination", she expresses how her people have a very different meaning of "landscape". To Silko's people, the popular definition of landscape as being "a portion of territory the eye can comprehend in a single view" makes it seem as though the viewer is on the outside looking in. To them, the term landscape is much more than that. One cannot leave their surroundings, the earth and nature are always around us and we are always interconnected. The ancie...