People have fears and dislikes. It’s very unusual to say that while Paul Berlin was walking around the trail, he found a graveyard and thought it was a nice place to stay for the night. In the story, it said, “The graveyard had a nice perfumy smell. A nice place to stay for the night, he thought” (pg. 66). Many people wouldn’t like to stay in a cemetery during the night because of all the people that have past away and of the strange smell. Although the smell doesn’t seem to bother Paul Berlin at…
Voice, language, and imagery in Theodore Roethke's Root Cellar gave the feeling of horror and disgust. Roethke explains it is a dark looming place, smelly and old. The poem filled with words such as "dank", "dark", and "manure". These words have a pessimistic tone. He hated the place he was speaking of. I believe the poem portraits a place where ghost are inhabited and Roethke is afraid and wishes to not go there.…
In the story “Cremains,” Sam Lipsyte explicitly explores the theme of death. Death familiarizes itself with the protagonist as he tries to adjust to his new day-to-day life in his now-deceased mother’s apartment. He attempts to move on but is held back by his inability to decide on how to dispose of his mothers cremains. Meanwhile, he continues to get high off of her leftover morphine, until he eventually combines her ashes with the morphine and shoots them into his veins. Before doing so, he hears on the radio “our culture is afraid of death, and considers it something we must wage battle against.” It’s Tessa, his mother’s pain specialist, and she continues: “I say, surrender, submit. Go gentle. Terminal means terminal.” Tessa’s statement illustrates the issue the protagonist has in dealing with death. To the protagonist, it isn’t natural to surrender to death, it’s not easy to go gentle, and he is fighting his grief just like he would fight death itself.…
In Digging up the Dead, Michael Kammen shows how the essential peace and permanency of a last resting place at first evaded various outstanding Americans. Kammen summons convincing inquiries concerning the politicization of reburying the absolute most popular Americans ever. Crossing an extensive timetable starting with legends of the Revolutionary War, his colossal study incorporates a diverse cast of noteworthy figures. From presidents and lawmakers, to praised essayists and other learned illuminators, Kammen analyzes the frequently numerous exhumations of people, for example, Edgar Allan Poe, and Mark Rothko.…
Considering the topic of the essay, I find the author’s tone quite interesting. Throughout the essay her writing has an air of sarcasm. She is informing the reader of what goes on in a funeral parlor and the process a corpse goes through, but it is almost in a joking way. Her tone seems to indicate that she finds the whole procedure of making a dead person beautiful again then letting the family view them, somewhat ridiculous.…
As the birds are singing their sweet melody, the terrain of Arlington National Cemetery is filled with sadness. Although the brilliant rays of sun are shinning through the thick colossal treetops, there is a chill in the air. While watching the mourners, the feeling of their sorrows is all too real.…
takes on its more traditional role, as a place of grief, rather than a place of…
My visit to the cemetery was very interesting. When I first read the assignment sheet, I didn’t want to visit the cemetery. I thought it was scary to visit a stranger; it turned out to be very fascinating. When I got to Kewanee Cemetery I got the goosebumps all over my body; six crows following me around, watching every step I took. After a while, I was more intrigued about the headstones that I even forgot about the crows. I was curious about their lives and how they might of live in a time of war, but even though, none of them inspired me to write about anything, into I got across Edward Tunnicliff headstone.…
There are some analogies with the dead. First they are metaphored as ‘tree's ball of roots when it waits to be planted' and cocoons that will split down the center when the new life inside is prepared'. Those are very similar to appearance of the dead and characteristics such as stiffness however it also contains the meaning of life and prosperity. In contrast, the expression of 'pale gauze, tapered shapes' make us think of mummies. Writer tried to mummify and dehumanize the dead. Furthermore, 'naked calves hard as corded wood spilling' means piled corpses like stiff, dry wood with no life. Contrast in the metaphors tells us that the dead once having had vibrant life and had desire to restore vitality inevitably became very cold, rigid, abandoned dead body.…
This poem is essentially the speaker’s parting words to his love. We see that he is very conflicted about his life. Even as he looks death in the eyes he's unsure as to what comes next. He is weary of his life. He feels dead inside or perhaps he was born as a stillborn whose body had survived, adapting to the harsh world but his spirit still stuck inside the womb. He feels resentful that death has not come quickly, it was as if some force was pulling strings to keep his alive. So it's easier just to take thing into his own hand. He’s wondering if people will disdain and curse him before they mourn him. He feels calm at the end of his note, if it's in his head or head he was not sure. At the end he wholeheartedly believes that the grim reaper…
In her essay Looking for Zora, Alice walker ventures out to Eatonville Florida to find out more about Zora Hurston. Walker masquerades as Zora’s niece and goes around inquiring on what was the cause of Zora’s death, where her grave is currently, and what was she like, alive. Walker argues that the writer’s undignified and unfamiliar resting place is far less important than the memories and influence she has left behind. The main appeal Walker uses is pathos, to evoke empathy in the audience. In a way, it is seems like she has made it a personal quest to get a stone to put on Zora’s grave as a sign of homage for a great author she was.…
In the eye-opening excerpt from the book Silent Spring, by Rachel Carson, we are regaled with a tale of an ideal, albeit fictional, flourishing town that blossomed with vitality. Through descriptive passages and an abundance of detail the author uses the setting and mood to take us on a journey through time as we learn about a prospering town that succumbs to a doomed fate that can only be instated through humans careless actions. The author immediately plunged into descriptive detail in this short story, allowing a visualization so intense that you feel as if you are actually “in the midst of a checkerboard of prosperous farms, with fields of grains and hillsides of orchards.” This flawlessly portrayed Middle America town that becomes “famous for the abundance and variety of its bird life” is said to soon attract settlers hoping to prosper in the heart of the fruitful land.…
Through foreshadowing, death is shown to the reader on the family’s drive to Florida. “Outside of Toombsbaro she woke up and recalled an old plantation...” (O’Connor 370). The word Toombsbaro in the story is just a towns name, but if the word is broken down, it sounds a lot like “tomb”. A tomb is a burial chamber, or a house for the dead. The author makes up this name for a town to foreshadow that death is coming. Also, while the family is driving on the road, "They pass a large cotton field with five or six graves fenced in the middle of it, like a small island.”(368). When the family sees the graves, they do not realize that that will be them in the ground soon. The family also has six people in it and there were six graves. This is just one of the images that the family seems that is really their own destiny. According to Alex Link in his article “Means, Meaning and Meditated Space in A Good Man is Hard to Find.” he explains that O’Connor uses landmarks such as grave yards, so relate to the reader. So it is easier for us to understand that she is relating landmarks that we all know, to death. Death is still being foreshadowed once the family gets into a car wreck on the way to the plantation. The car landed in a ditch but ...”behind the ditch they were sitting in there were more woods, tall dark and deep.” (O’Connor 372). The woods represent death, and that it is getting close. The family is…
Growing up, my parents, who were strict christians not only ran a church but the cemetery that came along with it. In our cellar, believe it or not, we stored the corpses which were soon to be buried six feet into the ground. It was an unspoken rule, I never went there — until that one afternoon.…
The graveyard was a dark and frightening place. I shivered. Cold and afraid, I began to cry.…