She remembered the rose bush outside the prison door; how when she gazed upon it’s beauty, she couldn't help but recall how she felt. No longer was Hester Prynne’s life the same. Hester lived these seven years in shame, with the beauty of the scarlet letter always present to remind her of her unfortunate sin. Half an hour passed as Dimmesdale spoke about the Lord and his power. Near the end of his speech, his behavior shifted suddenly.
Change comes with certain adjustments, and everyone deals with these adjustments differently; therefore, ultimately, the poet suggests that if these adjustments are not met with reality at the right time, it can be costly to everyone involved. In Nepinak’s poem, he describes the grandmother as an old fashioned woman living in the modern day world. The unfamiliarity of her surroundings causes her to constantly live her life within her dreams. The words “berries” and “roots” create an image of the nature she was once surrounded in and suggests her longing to be back in that environment. She takes comfort in the nostalgia of her past, which in turn becomes detrimental to her abilities to cope with the present, and ultimately the future.
The metaphors found in this poem bestow upon the reader a sense of the overdramatic; “the world drops dead” is an overstatement of the desperation she is feeling. Nothing exists but her lost love. The first line of the first stanza reads: “I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead:” (1) When she closes her eyes everything in existence fades from her mind and she is no longer thinking of the many problems that exist in the world, she can only think of her former lover. This line carries throughout the poem showing the significance of emotions. The second
Addy was still weak from the efforts of her labour, and still sore and bleeding, but she knew she had to leave and she had to leave today" (Lansens 271). Then, when Addy loses Chick, she handles the situation in a better way: "She would not pass through the big oak doors though. Instead she climbed the fire escape stairs, stepping around Mr. Baldwin's winter wood and kindling, intent on keeping her memories at bay" (Lansens 472). Addy is able to overcome the feeling of hurt fast after the death of her second child because she already faces a similar dilemma with her first child. She leaves a whole country to conquer the feeling of loss of her first child whereas she simply decides to ignore the passage her family used to take together in her building after her second child dies.
The two poems are also different in that in Suicide Note, the young girl has time to think about and give reason as to why she is taking her life. The college girl feels that she has to achieve perfection in everything that she does, and feels a sense of inadequacy. In Out, Out, the boy’s death is sudden (Frost, 1393). In conclusion, there are some similarities and differences in both poems. The authors in both poems portray how short life is, and unpredictable life can be.
Short Essay on Emily Dickinson’s Poem 712 In Emily Dickinson’s poem “Because I could not stop for Death ---“ it deals a woman who basically tells the character Death she is too busy to die, but he takes her away with him anyway. Dickinson seems to deal with death time and time again in her poems, though she does not always use the same circumstances in each poem. When you read the first stanza it looks as if Death picks up the speaker in a carriage, which seems to be the metaphor throughout the entire poem (Dickinson). One may notice that she uses a lot of symbolism throughout almost every single stanza in this piece. During the second and third stanzas one may see the speaker sort of longing to keep her life, which seems to make her envy the youth.
‘War Photographer’ and ‘Mother in a Refugee Camp’ are both melancholy poems with either memories they wish to forget or memories they can never forget because they are so distressing, ‘Once Upon a Time’ and ‘Poem at Thirty-Nine’ are from the perspective of a personae looking back and remembering their childhood. ‘Half-past Two’ and ‘Piano’ are similarly both child-based with naïve and innocent approaches to the past. Memories can be pleasant, warming and remind us of happy times, but they can also be sad, ominous and unpleasant things dragging up forgotten pasts and terrible nightmares. ‘War Photographer’, is an upsetting poem consisting mainly of contrasts between the idyllic ‘Rural England’ and the war torn countries ‘fields which explode beneath the feet’ he is photographing. Similarly, ‘Piano’ includes contrasts between his memories ‘A child sitting under a piano’ and now ‘I weep like a child for the past’ this line also displays a different side of the Lawrence’s poem, a much more sombre tone.
An example of someone pursuing a relationship for companionship is Rachel. She is the main characters wife who becomes promiscuous after their son, Carlton, dies. To describe this season in her life, she leaves a poem on Julian’s, the main character’s, pillow which has a line that reads, “a season of folly was all that I needed. Where is the love that once I called mine” (Phillips 140). Rachel is unable to deal with her life after Carlton dies, and she abuses sleeping pills to cope with her pain (Phillips 191).
Her voice is followed by a solemn description of present dryness when “the dead tree gives no shelter”. Then the poem returns to an incomplete love scene of the past, perhaps the countess's. The scene shifts to a fortune-teller who reads the tarot cards and warns of death. This announces a certain feeling of the future being doomed, as there is no future. The final stanza presents a contemporary image of London crowds moving along the streets blankly, as if dead.
Critical Essay – The Choosing “The Choosing” by Liz Lochhead is a poem that shows a vivid personal experience. It is a poem where the poet and her childhood friend – Mary – end up growing apart because of choices Mary’s parents made. The theme of the poem is that the choices that are made by our parents can affect your future. I will be discussing how Lochhead uses several different techniques to help show a vivid personal experience. At the beginning of the poem, where she tells us about the girls’ time at primary school, the poet uses repetition to emphasise how alike the girls were.