American Literature
"Song of Myself" stanzas 1-21 by Walt Whitman

Pride in the self and one's perseverance at life

"I celebrate myself, and sing myself, and what I assume you shall assume, for every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

"I am satisfied -- I see, dance, laugh, sing;"

Equality and the view of American lands

"And it means, sprouting alike in broad zones and narrow zones, growing among black folks as among white…I give them the same, I receive them the same"

"Along far in the wilds and mountains I hunt, wandering amazed at my own lightness and glee…"

The Hairy Ape by Eugene O'Neill

A view of what industry does to the future of class and American society in cities

"A procession of gaudy marionettes, yet with something of the relentless horror of Frankensteins in their detached, mechanical awareness."

"Where's all de white-collar stiffs yuh said was here -- and de skoits -- her kind?"

B.….

Your answer should be at least five sentences long.
The Legend of Arthur

Lesson 1 Journal Entry # 9 of 16

Journal Exercise 1.7A: Honor and Loyalty

1. Consider how Arthur's actions and personality agree with or challenge your definition of honor. Write a few sentences comparing your definition (from Journal 1.6A) with Arthur's actions and personality.

2. Write a brief paragraph explaining the importance or unimportance of loyalty in being honorable.

Lesson 1 Journal Entry # 10 of 16

Journal Exercise 1.7B: Combining Sentences

Complete the Practice Activity on page 202 of your text. After completing this activity, read over your Essay Assessment or another journal activity you've completed.

* Identify three passages that could be improved by combining two or more sentences with coordinating or subordinating conjunctions. Below the practice activity in your journal, write the original passages and the revised sentences you've created.

* Be sure to indicate which journal or writing assignment they came from.

The….

Unfair
Robert Francis was an American poet whose work is reminiscent of Robert Francis, his mentor. Francis' writing has often compared to other writers such as Frost, Emily Dickinson, and Henry David Thoreau. Although Francis's work has frequently been neglected and is "often excluded from major anthologies of American poetry," those that have read his work have praised him and his writing. In "Fair and Unfair," Francis comments on balance in nature and in society. Like Frost, Francis contends nature has the ability to provide guidance if only man is smart enough to observe it. In "Fair and Unfair," Francis is able to find balance through what is written and how it is written.

The poem is told from a first person, omniscient perspective and the narrator appears to be addressing the general public; it appears as though the narrator seeks to bring attention to how nature has become disregarded as….

Dickinson "I Felt a Funeral in My Brain"
Filled with words and phrases laden with imagery of death, drowning, and droning drums, Emily Dickinson's haunting poem "I Felt a Funeral in My Brain" provides insight into a fractured mind. The poet employs a plethora of poetic techniques such as alliteration, repetition, rhyme and rhythm to create mood and convey the central themes of emptiness and mental chaos. Alliteration and repetition reflect the motif of drums beating, while rhyming evokes the tonal qualities of the bells that the speaker hears. Therefore, in conjunction with the musical motifs in "I Felt a Funeral in My Brain," the poem is itself highly lyrical and rhythmic. The poet's use of repetition also creates the thematic tension much like the crescendo of a shaman's drums induces a trance. In addition to the poem's overt lyricism and musicality, Dickinson's work also includes powerful subtleties that contribute to….

Most individuals fail to appreciate life to the fullest because they concentrate on being remembered as some of the greatest humans who ever lives. This makes it difficult for them to enjoy the simple pleasures in life, considering that they waste most of their time trying to put across ideas that are appealing to the masses. While many did not manage to produce ideas that survived more than them, others succeeded and actually produced thinking that remained in society for a long period of time consequent to their death.

Creativity is generally regarded as one of the most important concepts in society, considering that it generally induces intense feelings in individuals. It is responsible for progress and for the fact that humanity managed to produce a series of ideas that dominated society's thinking through time. In order for someone to create a concept that will live longer than him or her,….

Apparently Plath wrote the poem during her stay in the hospital, which can be a depressing place notwithstanding all the nurses and orderlies dressed in white. The appendectomy followed a miscarriage that Plath had suffered through, so given those realities in the poet's life -- especially for a woman to lose a child she had been carrying -- one can identify with the bleak nature of the poem. Confronted with the birth that turned out to be death, and then a painful appendectomy, the tulips are used as something of an abstraction and the redness of them gives her pain because it "corresponds" to the wound in her body from the surgery.
The opening stanza's first few lines seem rather peaceful and restful: "The tulips are too excitable, it is winter here / look how white everything is / How quiet, how snowed-in / I am learning peacefulness / lying….

John Keats and Melancholic Delight:
To Autumn

To Autumn by John Keats is a testimonial of the omantic Era. The poem is filled with the importance of individual fulfillment at the behest of societal decline. The stoic nature of Keats's To Autumn is viewed by most as despairingly melancholic. However, when looking for hope one finds an eternal hopefulness amongst his opining. Autumn is used to symbolize the dichotomy in existence of life and death happening at once and forever. Keats sees in autumn the irony of life, and the contrast of humanity to the individual.

A general motif of the omantic era became the inevitable decline of humanity. Philosophers and writers alike viewed industrialism as an evil driving innocence further from the reach of the collective. In short, the precipitous pace of history was leaving innocence in its wake. More over, tramping it along the way. "Society embodied forces opposed to individual….

O Captain
Three Themes in "O Captain! My Captain!"

alt hitman wrote "O Captain! My Captain!" In 1865 and it serves as an elegy to the President Lincoln, who had just been assassinated. As a patriotic American and the "poet of America" (as he called himself), hitman was duty-bound to mourn the loss of the 16th U.S. president in verse. That he did so in a way completely opposite from his free verse "Song of Myself" -- the poem dedicated to himself and the spirit of freedom and license -- is telling. Lincoln, the "captain" of America during the critical time of the Civil ar, represented order, structure and unity. These elements serve as the foundation of hitman's "O Captain!" which deals with three themes in its three stanzas: a mission, fatherhood, and death. This paper will analyze these themes and show how they are brought about.

The theme of the mission is….

The imagery is very clear and stark; the objects and people she recalls in this stanza are not pleasant or beautiful, much of it is ugly and disgusting, such as a worm that lived in a cat's ear, presumably ringworm, or some other type of disease. Perhaps, she is comparing love to all of these awful, drab things. In the places we could find love, such as in the everyday objects we enjoy, or the people who are supposed to bring us spiritual clarity or advice, such as the preacher, are disgusting, dangerous, and full of death. She certainly does not have a positive view of religion, or the representative of religion, as she describes the preacher with thin lips, who scuffles, and looks for scapegoats. She did not describe him as pious and sweet, as we might think the average preacher is, and for him to be coming by….

hile most of the poem centers around this face, there are a few stanzas where the poet breaks away and discovers what he knows to be himself after this tragedy. The dreadful aspect of life and even his own early demise surface in the emotions revealed in this poem. It is deeply personal and intense. On the other hand, "Don Juan" is less personal. hile the poem may feel less personal, it cannot be denied that we see a little of Byron in this character. However, this is more than a character sketch. Each poem successfully utilizes the literary techniques of voice, mood, and tone to explore meaning. Shelley is remarkably successful in capturing moments of grief. The mood and tone of the poem are nothing to question. The stanzas examine focus primarily on sorrow and how this sorrow affects the poet. There is nothing else to know about….

Night funeral in Harlem: When the funeral was completely over and the boy's coffin was carried out to the hears, which drove too fast down the street, the streetlight even seemed like it was crying for the boy. He was well-loved by everyone, and their love made the funeral magnificent, even if things looked more poor.
Connotation: The meaning behind the literal sense of the poem seems to be that despite what hardships, disadvantages, and unfairness, human relationships are the really important things that make us rich. The words that Hughes uses juxtaposes symbols of money, greed, and death with love, friendship, and life -- insurance men with satin boxes, flowers and the greedy preacher man, etc. This implies that many people just don't understand what's really important.

Devices: As stated above, the rhyme and meter of the poem enhance the poem's varying meanings. In addition, the use of repetition drives….

The keys and the house are not in her possession any longer but the "cities, rivers, and caves" do not belong to her as they once did. This kind of loss, too, does not represent what the poet would define a disaster. However, true loss is explored in the last stanza
The poet's real intention emerges in this stanza as she turns to more personal and private matters. The last stanza is the most powerful in that the poet moves from speaking about things to people - more significantly, "you." The poet also attaches noteworthy attributes to the lover by remembering the "the joking voice, the gesture / I love" (16-7), which move her to reinforce the notion that loss is not difficult to master. It is worth noting that the punctuation in this stanza because it strays from what the poet has employed in earlier stanzas. The dash before….

Memory of Elena
A Poem to Explain Grief

Often a poem's meaning is apparent from only the title. This is not the case with "The Memory of Elena," a poem written by Carolyn Forche in 1981. At first, the title suggests a poetic recollection of Elena, but as the poem develops, we see that it is at first a memory of a lunch with Elena and then Elena's own recollection of the tragic events that destroyed her life. The memories of the poet and Elena merge, becoming as one. The poet remembers her meal with Elena even as Elena recalls her last night with her husband years earlier in Buenos Aires. In the poem, Forche uses the simple symbolism of a meal shared together to bring to light how important remembrance is and how important it is to mourn and recognize the sacrifices others make on our behalf.

"The Memory of Elena"….

Let the unknowable touch the buckle of my spine.

Let the wind turn in the trees, and the mystery hidden in the dirt (Oliver).

Thus, the differences between the two narrators can be seen clearly through these two stanzas. hile Olds' narrator gives the impression of urgency, frustration, sadness, and overwhelming emotion, Oliver's narrator is calm, released, and accepting.

Thus, a comparison of Sharon Olds' "Little Summer Poem Touching The Subject Of Faith" and Mary Oliver's "The Daughter Goes To Camp" reveals that the poems have both similarities and difference. Both poems take place during summer, are narrated by a rather female voice, and discuss the subject of worry. Differences, however, suggest that the poems may, indeed, be antithesis of each other. hile an urgent, worried, narrator who is overcome with emotion narrates Olds' poem, Oliver's poem gives the reader a sense of calmness and acceptance. Thus, while one poem ends with a….

The overall effect is like slogging through sucking mud -- there is a depressive inertia in the poem, as if one does not want to go on but must.
2) What does he mean by "blind skyscrapers"? What does this mean symbolically? The line before this one comments on the "neutral air" in New York (this is before they entered WWII), making the blind skyscrapers perhaps "blind" in the sense that they aren't taking sides; blind like Justice is blind. They are also blind to the evils being committed in Europe where war has been going on for awhile. All of this is symbolic; it is also possible that Auden is alluding to tall buildings of a bygone era, where towers and lighthouses -- the tallest building -- were built specifically to see.

3) in the seventh stanza... what is the "ethical life" of which he speaks in the first line?….