Geraldine Brooks’ compelling novel, “Year of Wonders”, explores the various facets of human behaviour invoked when experiencing a traumatic and deathly event; the bubonic plague. The negative side of human nature is revealed when the villagers collapse under the pressure of the plague and begin to lose themselves within their scapegoating, greed and witchcraft. Untimely deaths rack the village with suffering and fear, with people not knowing which moment is their last and having no hope for the future. However, through this plague, there are events of great significance and joy, such as births and solid friendships that strongly…
During the text ‘Year of Wonders’ knowledge, isolation and ignorance is a major factor, highlighted throughout the understanding of many different characters. Most of these factors are a result of the important and life-taken religion, which cause characters for example, Sam and his deserted and lonely life in the mineshaft where he worked and died, ‘Sam’s world was a dark, damp maze of rakes and scrins thirty feet under the ground… His whole life was confined by these things.’. People are limited to what they want to discover as the plague and their religion prohibit them from being rebellious. ‘Like most in this village, I had no occasion to travel father than the market town seven miles distant.’ Anna Frith notifies the reader how no one…
There are two types of tundras, Arctic Tundra and Alpine Tundra. They both make up about 20% of the earth's surface. The southern limit of Arctic tundra follows the northern edge of the coniferous forest belt. In North America this line lies above latitude 60° N, while in Eurasia most of it occurs north of 70° N. Tundra is about 3 million square miles long and covers about 20% of the earth's surface.…
There are, however, places where Kinsella tightens his focus on how disaster is lived out in personal ways, by highlighting what a calamity can do to people, families. This technique is used to evoke affective responses in the reader – to make a connection. The crest is described to be an “undoer of families”, illustrating the effects of the accidents it can cause on them and which readers can relate to in apersonal way. There is also a type of contrast used by saying how our uncritical enjoyment of the country views we have from the road can be ended, over the crest. The rural landscape and countryside is beautiful with its natural features; hills rolling out into the distance. What lies on the other side of the crest is not beautiful at all.…
In the poem named Man on a Fire Escape, written by Edward Hirsch, the author presents a unique eye-opening experience when a devastating tragedy arises. Throughout, the poem Man on a Fire Escape, Edward Hirsch uses third person point of view as if he is addressing his poem to someone. Furthermore, the poem slowly reveals the mass chaos and destruction of a fire outbreak that engulfs everything in its path. On the contrary, towards the end of the poem, after witnessing all the mayhem everything was back to normal as if the fire did not happen. Edward Hirsch uses lexis, literary devices, and his poetry to illustrate to his audience that poetry is never-ending because poetry will always portray “the true voice of feeling.” (QUOTE).…
Whether it’s a massacre in Tiananmen Square or a mass murder throughout parts of China, Bruce Dawe uses historical references as a technique to highlight the importance of the events in each of his two poems. The use of this technique in the poem ‘War Without End’ emphasises and applies the idea in to the reader’s minds that the accidental deaths on our roads is compared…
In complete contrast with the reality of the poem’s setting, the touch of snow is equated with an image of lying under a blossom-laden tree in England. The home fires contain glowing coals described as ‘crusted dark-red jewels’, this actually signifies a dying fire, a symbol of people’s waning interest in the fate of the exposed soldiers. That the ‘doors are all closed: on us’ is also symbolic, representing the total loss of the memory of the men and that…
The travelers in Robert Gray’s poems Flame and Dangling Wire, and Arrivals and Departures undergo negative experiences that, although constitute as new knowledge, result in them viewing the world as a more destructive place. Exposure to death and destruction are commonalities in the poems, which in turn disillusion the journeyers. Flames and Dangling Wire creates dark imagery of a desolate, defective future that has been destroyed by the pollution of man. Men are compared to “scavengers/ as in hell the devils/ might pick about through souls” and are presenting people as incomplete figures of humanity. This simile provides insight into the idea that man’s eternal existence is futile because the world, which in the past was civil, has become a place of mockery where “the horse-laughs”. Similarly, the journeyer in Arrivals and Departures is confronted with death, leading him to question what is morally right. The sound of “the engines’ then almost subliminal thump would stop” suggests that the continuous heartbeat of…
In the short story “Hunters in the Snow” Wolff uses the snow and cold atmosphere as a symbol of impact on the characters to create a theme of crisis, conveying the uncertainties and intricacy of human interaction and personal struggle. The weather itself plays a crucial role in defining the theme for this story. Winter is the symbol of death, hibernation, or depression. The snow also adds to the cold weather as a symbol of a blanket that obscures, and covers the secrets of loneliness, emptiness, and the coldness within each character’s personality.…
A loss of identity is evident from the first stanza, where a sense of uncertainty, expressed in the line “Sudden departures…who would be coming next”, permeates the poem. These lines highlight the loss of control and certainty in the migrant’s life, and the fear of the unknown as no warning was given before the departure of fellow migrants. The emotional instability of the migrants is also expressed through the alliterative ‘h’ in “Memories of hunger and hate”, which suggests a heaviness of people’s spirits and hearts, engendered by their memories of the past.…
Bruce Dawe’s poem, migrants, portrays a long quest from the perspective of a migrant group. This group is acknowledged as ‘they’ were met with indifferences from the local people. ‘They’ react to this treatment with confusion and surprise which is evident in the line ‘indifference surprised them’. This creates a sense of ambiguity and lack of identity. The text portrays a physical journey between continents. This is evident ‘in the fourth week the sea dropped away and they were there…’ which contains features of imagery, pronouns and ellipsis. The imagery used appeals to an audiences visual senses and creates an atmosphere while the ellipsis gives the sense of ambiguity and evokes attentiveness in the audience. Pronouns evoked in the poem allows the theme to be easily accessed by the audience by suggesting the migrants have a lack of identity as a result of leading their homeland and travelling for a long period.…
Upon first reading the poem “Those Winter Sundays” by Robert Hayden, I was an objective reader who assumed Hayden was looking back with nostalgia at his lost childhood. Without researching the poem, as well as Hayden himself, I had no way of knowing his background as an adopted child to unhappy parents in a dysfunctional household. After reading several sources, I’ve formed a somewhat new outlook on the poem and what it means not only to we the readers, but also to Hayden the poet.…
The most common means of managing the pain that this world brings would be that of a superficial means. People will forsake all knowledge, or pursuit of thereof, to find a menial escape from their pain. Consumers find it in their possessions, lovers in their love, people persons in their friends and family, musicians in their music, everyone in their opiates and vices, and so on and so on. It is the easiest form of mental escape, temporary ignorance. Levi The Poet…
In their 1978 book Organization Strategy, Structure, and Process, Raymond E. Miles and Charles C. Snow argued that different company strategies arise from the way companies decide to address three fundamental problems: entrepreneurial, engineering (or operational), and administrative problems. The entrepreneurial problem is how a company should manage its market share. The engineering problem involves how a company should implement its solution to the entrepreneurial problem. The administrative problem considers how a company should structure itself to manage the implementation of the solutions to the first two problems. Although businesses choose different solutions to these problems, Miles and Snow suggested that many companies develop similar solutions. As a result, they postulated that there are four general strategic types of organizations: prospector, defender, analyzer, and reactor organizations.…
Many times we don’t realize some things that may be going on in world, or maybe just around our city, or maybe in our school, or maybe even in our own home. Yet there are other times when we can see things that others can’t when we notice something that others don’t, when we know there is something we can do to help but others can’t. Similarly there was the time where I saw a certain Icarus drowning in the sea as others just walked by, such as in the events of the poem “Musee des Beaux Arts”, by W. H. Auden.…