Have you ever put together a large jigsaw puzzle? When you put away the puzzle, sometimes the pieces get lost or bent. If they do, when you take it back out and try to reassemble it, the puzzle is not complete; the overall picture, however, is still satisfying. In John Donne's "No Man Is an Island," the author similarly says that the inhabitants of the world comprise a team. When the team
(the world) loses a player, the team is not complete, but it finds some way to move on without that player. Every player is like a pebble that has been dropped onto a perfectly still pond; the consequence of the impact ripples out from the center. The ripples reach all sides of the pond, in a far-reaching expression of cause and effect.
Donne begins his poem by telling the reader that every man is a part of a whole: "No man is an island, entire of its self; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of a main" ("No Man Is An Island" sent. 1). He asserts that no person is entirely by himself. Every person is somehow connected to the world.
Regardless of whether he is aware of it, he makes his mark in some way. He sends his own ripples out, his own cause and effect; he is a part of the whole of the world. All beings and all things in the world are to work together as a team for one common goal, such as to co-exist. Every human has some kind of connection with someone or something else. No one is complete with out anything or anyone else, and everyone is a par...
...orld, not to despise it, not for us to hate each other, but to be able to regard the world and ourselves and all beings with love, admiration, and respect.' (147)
his own and he does this in a number of ways. The most obvious of
“My nearest neighbor is a mile distant, and no house is visible from any place but the hill-tops within half a mile of my own. I have my horizon bounded by woods all to myself; a distant view of the railroad where it touches the pond on the one hand, and of the fence which skirts the woodland road on the other. But for the most part it is as solitary where I live as on the prairies. It is as much Asia or Africa as New England.”
Every writer leaves his mark, his imprint, in his writing; a thumb print left behind the ink if you know how to look for it, and Donne is no exception. The problem is extracting Donne’s imprint, and essence, from the poem, and understanding what that tells us about him. In one poem in particular this stands out, his Holy Sonnet IX, where Donne’s imprint lingers, giving another story behind the text, of his belief in God, but also his inner questioning, and confliction and doubt which come out as contradictions. Behind the text, Holy Sonnet IX, as Donne speaks through his speaker and poem, we come to understand that he is a religious man, though conflicted, which leads to doubt and contradictions, as he resents God in a way, while also just craving for his absolution and for him to forget and forgive his sins and wash them away, sins which weigh on him heavily and he believes taint him.
The speaker in Donne's poetry is a theatrical character, constantly in different situations, and using different roles to suit the action. He can take on the role of the womanizer, as in "The Indifferent," or the faithful lover from "Lover's Infiniteness," but the speaker in each of these poems is always John Donne himself. Each poem contains a strong sense of Donne's own self-interest. According to Professor J. Crofts, Donne:
Both stories were written by women, Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Kate Chopin. But is this fact important to understand the aim of every story? Would they have had the same effect if the had been written by men? I will explore these matters.
"No man is an Island, entire of himself; every man is a piece of the Continent, a part of the Main."
These social norms had been established in poetry for several hundreds of years when Donne began his work breaking them down. Working against such conventions in the perception of love and women, Donne radically altered his poetry to accommodate both a more human and more equal view of both. In the end, the effect of these changes may have been lost for a few centuries, as his poetry was swept aside and not embraced until the onset of Modernism, but perhaps, given the underlying misogyny of his poetry, this was for the best. Going from the diminutive extreme to the entirely distrusted extreme may have been a more frightening alternative for women's history than the more gradual climb from silence we now conceive of.
no voice of his own, but all accounts affirm to the reader that he is
Alice Munro's creation of an unnamed and therefore undignified, female protagonist proposes that the narrator is without identity or the prospect of power. Unlike the narrator, the young brother Laird is named – a name that means "lord" – and implies that he, by virtue of his gender alone, is invested with identity and is to become a master. This stereotyping in names alone seems to suggest that gender does play an important role in the initiation of young children into adults. Growing up, the narrator loves to help her father outside with the foxes, rather than to aid her mother with "dreary and peculiarly depressing" work done in the kitchen (425). In this escape from her predestined duties, the narrator looks upon her mother's assigned tasks to be "endless," while she views the work of her father as "ritualistically important" (425). This view illustrates her happy childhood, filled with dreams and fantasy. Her contrast between the work of her father and the chores of her mother, illustrate an arising struggle between what the narrator is expected to do and what she wants to do. Work done by her father is viewed as being real, while that done by her mother was considered boring. Conflicting views of what was fun and what was expected lead the narrator to her initiation into adulthood.
humanity is our burden, our life; we need not battle for it; we need only to do what
The poem, “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning,” has incredible wording. Donne is trying to explain to his wife that their love is much greater than physical love, and they are also conjoined in the mind. Some of the words he uses are “a love so much refined” and other enhance language like “two souls” to ease his wife when he is away. He is trying to calm his wife
Through my life experiences and the influence of my family members, I’ve gained a personal and unique perspective on life. I consider these perspectives to be my identity. In addition to my perception of the world around me, my life experiences have contributed to the formation of my moral values, as well as my distinct personality traits. I have evolved into the person I am today because of my strong family oriented background and experiences.
John Donne will not accept death as the finale, his religious conviction supports in the belief of eternal life proceeding death. Throughout the poem Donne’s main purpose was the personification of death, his use of figurative language gave death humanistic characteristics and made death vulnerable and unintimidating. The structure of three quatrains and a couplet for the poem allowed for easier understanding of the context because the layout and rhyme scheme helped the poem flow and also revealed the tones. The imagery of death described by Donne breaks down death’s pride and bravado, as well as shine an encouraging light past the process of dying, on to the hope of delivery to eternal life. Each element played a significant role in the interpretation of the paradox of the poem, that ultimately death is not the universal destroyer of life.