Both swallowed in their job, the janitor in “Jorge the Church Janitor Finally Quits” by Martin Espada and the secretary in “The Secretary Chant” by Marge Piercy feel unappreciated and lost as employees. Jorge is “outside…of [Americans] understanding” and The Secretary is lost in her work and compares herself to objects such as her “hips are a desk.” The employees from these poems have become hidden behind their duties and are slowly sinking into the unknown.…
Believing in one’s self is common, and it thrives throughout the novel, Freak the Mighty, by Rodman Philbrick, and the poem, “Ability,” by Selina E. Matis. There are several lines in the poem, “Ability,” that relate to the novel, Freak the Mighty.…
“The Centaur” by May Swenson portrays an imaginative, care free young girl as she becomes one with what she thinks is the centaur, she is “the horse and the rider” (38) , but eventually her mother brings to an end her wild ride. Through structure, diction, figurative language, and imagery, Swenson describes a special time for the ten year old girl.…
‘The Waking’ is a contemporary jazz piece written by American vocalist, Kurt Elling, and features Theodore Roethke’s 1954 poem of the same title. Released in 2007 on the album Nightmoves, Elling uses musical techniques to enhance the message of Roethke’s poem. However, in order to understand the reasoning behind the devices Elling has used, the meaning of Roethke’s poem must first be discussed.…
Time has gone by, which means things have changed. Hollywood has become good at changing any type of story to better fit the American eye. Anywhere from Cinderella to Hansel and Gretel. Hollywood will take a normal story and make a movie that will be more modern. They did the same thing, that they’ve done to a lot of other fairy tales, to Beowulf so it would be more appealing to varied audiences. Hollywood changes the epic poem so much in the movie to draw people's attention, make it a good versus evil kind of movie instead of flat like the poem and making it a more sexy/ emotional movie.…
The song speaks of death as something, almost inviting. “-Seasons don’t fear the reaper, nor do the wind, the son or the rain.-” it goes on to saying “-we can be like they are-”. Its referring to how we should just go with it, and how it is a good thing when it comes down to it. It speaks about Romeo and Juliet, and how they “-are together in eternity.”. They had died because they could not be together, so in death they are. That the sadness will end when death comes, “come the last night of sadness, and it was clear she couldn’t go on.”, “The curtains flew open and then he appeared saying; ‘Don’t be…
In the poem Sympathy for the devil, the speaker uses many different historical allusions and understatements to gain the readers sympathy for him. The speaker of the poem is the Devil and he tries to make it sound as though he is forced to be around all of the death and despair so that the reader might feel bad for him. He uses the historical allusion of “I was around when Jesus Christ had his moment of doubt and pain” to show that he has been around for a very long time and he has seen some of the most sorrowful deaths in history. The speaker tries to make the reader feel sorry for him because he has seen so much death. Throughout the poem he makes it very clear that he himself did not murder or cause any of the deaths that he talks about by making the understatements “I was round when” and “I watched “. Those kind of understatements show that he was not the reason for the deaths even though he was there when they occurred and therefore he should not be to blame but in fact he wants remorse. The biggest understatement that the speaker use is the second to last stanza when he list the contradictions “Just as every cop is a criminal, And all the sinners saints, As heads is Tails”. In that stanza he tries to show that people should not be judged for what they see or are around because no one is perfect. The best way that he attempted to elicit sympathy for himself is by being polite by saying “Please allow” and “Let me please”. Him being polite was probably his best chance to gain any kind of sympathy from the reader because usually if you are nice to a person they are generally nice to…
With all of the violence in the past, and now the most recent shooting in Charleston, South Carolina, society is more scared than ever. Dylann Roof, proven to be a white supremacist, walked into a church in Charleston, South Carolina and killed innocent people. This incident hit home for so many Americans because not only did the innocent people die, but it was in one of the safest places imaginable, a church (Tauber, Michelle). Many believe that weapons are to blame for this, and others believe that racism is the main focal point. This is not the first of violent crimes in a local church. A poem was written by Dudley Randall about a true story that happened in Birmingham, Alabama in 1963. A group of white supremacists bombed a church that belonged to Martin Luther King Jr. What they did not know was that there were four little girls playing in there at the time. The church should be a safe, quiet place one can pray to God, but these incidents indicate that violence is creeping into the most innocent of…
In the story, the walls and the pendulum were described in great detail to help us imagine what the character had to go through. Poe writes, “The figures of fiends in aspects of menace, with skeleton forms, and others more really fearful images, overspread and disfigured the walls” (67). Poe describes the drawing on the walls to show us of how the demons on the wall are supposed to make the narrator feel hopeless, because all around the him is demons. Even though the demons were meant to bring the narrator down he still fought on to escape the pit. Poe uses this as an example to not give up hope even if the obstacle seems be to big to break…
In a dark room lies a dimly lit light, as bright as a Minecraft furnace during a pit black night, considering your Gammas turned down. The ball of light, as if pulled by a gravitational force, flies towards what seems like a black hole.…
The works we studied within Creative Writing were all helpful in creating my own works to submit to the class. Throughout all of the reading, many of the works inspired me in different ways, whether it was short story plot ideas or word usage in the poems. While crafting my work for the final portfolio, I reviewed many of the poems from our poetry packet in an effort to find inspiration and to create new interesting images. I took the most inspiration for my formal poem, which I found most difficult to write. One of the poems that was most useful to me was Jilly Dybka’s “Memphis, 1976.” Dybka’s poem follows the sestina form; I also wrote my last poem in this form, so it helped to follow the form by looking at her poem as an example. Dybka’s…
In “The Dream of the Rood”, the unknown poet uses lines 125-156 to develop the theme of triumph achieved by Christ as a warrior king, bringing the dreamer to realize there is hope for a better life after death. The poet develops these notions by the use of heroic diction, symbolism, and irony. These lines are significant to the text as a whole because they allow the dreamer to summarize the sermon of salvation that the rood has preached. They also mark the change of reaction given by the dreamer from hopeless to hopeful.…
In the poem, “Enter The Dragon”, we see a relationship between the speaker and his dad. Throughout the poem, there is a shift in tone. One interpretive problem presented by John Murillo’s “Enter The Dragon” is the tone the speaker uses when he says “I learn the difference between cinema and city, between the moviehouse cheers / Of old men and the silence that gets us home” (ll. 30-31). The poem begins with the speaker and his dad watching a Bruce Lee movie, Enter The Dragon. For the speaker the good part “starts with a black man / Leaping into an orbit of badges,” (ll.1-2). Here we are seeing imagery because you see this black man, Jim Kelly a super hero, being in the middle surrounded by cops orbiting him. The black man uses “arc kicks” and “karate chops” to beat the thirty cops. After beating them up, Kelly takes off with…
There is a lot to gain from this poem. It teaches people that they can have a great life even though it is rough during their childhood. If he can survive dealing with his parents going through a divorce and then his mom passing away at a young age, then anyone can. It is tough for the boy. But at the end of the poem, he expresses that he is happily riding his bicycle with no worries in life.…
In the song “Demons” by Imagine Dragons a man sings about a beast inside him. This man is having a hard time as the things that he looks up to betray him and his dreams disappear. The beast inside this man is portrayed as his emotions. The hurt that he feels, and the loneliness he feels can be seen through the words he uses in this song.…
