“O say does that Star-Spangled Banner yet wave o’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?” To people like Francis Scott Key, the writer of “The Star-Spangled Banner”, the American flag is a symbol of men and women standing up for what they believed in, and even giving up their life for it. These people care greatly about the American flag being honored and respected, and I am too.…
The wounded heart now enormous tune of sorrow, Skunk breath a force to linger tomorrow. Saint unreal a body-less per poster, Bound by force that will never divide as greater. Benevolent a flaunt of no remorse, Unmistakable tone unruly of course. Patch up the hole in your britches; water new soil, Be thankful thieves ravishes in turmoil.…
Unfortunately the relationship between the speaker and the mother in the poem is unclear as it is stated that her mother has passed away and is in a grave, which is shown here in the following excerpt “… into the grave!” but all throughout the poem she speaks of her mother’s courage, which is shown here “courage that my mother had. Went with her, and is with her still… if instead she’d left to me. The thing she took into the grave!–That courage like a rock” which is not typically something that is said by someone who didn’t have a good relationship with the person who’d passed…
Randall Jarrell, poet, critic, essayist, and former Poet Laureate of the United States, was born in 1914 in Nashville Tennessee and attended Vanderbilt University in that same city. There, Jarrell received his BA and MA studying under John Crowe Ransom and Robert Penn Warren. His poetry is influenced by W.H. Auden and Robert Frost and often uses what poets call “the common dialogue of Americans.” He passed away October 14th, 1965.…
Individuality, this word is what makes a person who they are. It can be molded into whatever one chooses it to be. It also puts you in control of yourself and guides you through your existence. Being individualized is what makes us human. We are not all the same. In the novel “Anthem” by Ayn Rand, the thought of individuality is a constant theme throughout the book. The main character, Equality, believes he is cursed by being an individual, at first. Many similarities can be found between the novel “Anthem” and the poem “Invictus” by William Ernest Henley.…
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.…
A comparative analysis of two poems within the same poetic subgenre, showing how similar conventions may be used variously…
What is fire culture? What does that even mean? Well, I guess to know, you have to know something about what culture is and what cumulative it deposits of knowledge, experience, beliefs, values, hierarchies, religion and more. Now imagine having to live with people you do not know and having different work experience, beliefs, background, age etc. Well, that is what firefighters do. How does this work you may ask? It works because they have the same goals, the same values, and there is not really that many careers out there where you have a second family, where you know your brother or sister will not only have your back when it counts but one day may even save your life. Just like any good organization it has its challenges and these challenges have been changing the fire services since the 1950s.…
Dulce et Decorum est by Wilfred Owen and Homecoming by Bruce Dawe are about the disaster of war, yet they speak of different wars with different mindsets of the soldiers. In the following essay I discuss the history behind the poems, the poetic devices that Owen and Dawe used. Each poem addresses their own truths about war.…
Prompt: In the final chapter of Anthem, Prometheus writes that he now understands “why the best in me had been my sins and my transgressions; and why I had never felt guilt in my sins.” What has Prometheus come to understand about himself? Why does his society regard the “best in him” as sinful?…
During the time of the Harlem Renaissance, literature written by “colored folks” tended to have similar tones, messages, and visuals. These connections can be seen between the poems “We Wear The Mask” by Paul Laurence Dunbar, “If We Must Die” by Claude McKay, and an excerpt from Invisible man by Ralph Ellison, “Battle Royal.” A common tone between the three pieces would be pride. In “Battle Royal” the speaker is incredibly proud of his speech, to the point of delivering it despite coughing up blood and being ridiculed after the traumatic event that he had been put through. Paul Laurence Dunbar wrote his piece with a tone of pride in a sense of colored people not showing when their hurt but holding their heads up high and masking their pain.…
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 poem “An Echo Sonnet”, author Robert Pack writes of a conversation between a person’s voice and its echo. With the use of numerous literary techniques, Pack is able to enhance the meaning of the poem: that we must depend on ourselves for answers because other opinions are just echoes of our own ideas.…
Extreme Measures is about ethics. How far is someone willing to go, and how much we are willing to sacrifice, in order to cure the world's setbacks. Utilitarianism is defined as the moral philosophy that says we should act in such ways as to make the greatest number of people as happy as possible. In the movie, Dr. Myrick acts as the utilitarian. He takes healthy homeless people with “no purpose” to live into his lab and performs experiments on them for research to help people who are not able to walk, to try and walk again. He thinks these homeless people will not be missed because they basically have no purpose in life. Although, Dr. Myrick's intentions are good, he isn't going about it the right way. He's taking people against their free will. For consequentialist it doesn't matter what kind of thing you do. What matters is that we maximize good results. This is what he's trying to do; he's testing out procedures on these homeless people. He feels that if he practices on people who won't be missed, maybe he can get away with it, and help the many people who cannot walk. Not only does Dr. Myrick try and convey this message to sway another person into being utilitarian, but uses his utilitarian mindset and gives hope to the paralyzed. With this moral thought process Dr. Myrick is not taking into account the choices of the homeless people. He also isn’t taking the worth of each of these human beings into account and justifies through excuses. These excuses involve him making a decision on behalf of the homeless on the worth of their life, and its purpose, and the happiness these people have. Whereas the British doctor uses more of a Kantian ethics system and points out what the doctor has not taken into account.…
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.…