Compare the ways poets present a speaker’s attitudes towards another person in ‘Harmonium’ and ‘Manhunt’.…
The entire poem is written with a tone of sadness or depression. This evokes the senses of the reader by being able to sense how the girl is feeling and see how the words of others affect her. It can be pictured, this little girl who plays with the Barbie doll and it is just a toy, but to others it is the appearance that society wants and she soon realizes that when a fellow classmate hurts her with mean words. She can not go on with the fear that everyone sees her as imperfect or flawed, so in the end she gives up on trying and eventually gives up on herself. A simile in the poem, “Her good nature wore out/like a fan belt,” the message here is that she has given up on everything.…
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…
More violence is evident when the speaker says, “We romped until the pans/Slid from the kitchen shelf.” This suggests a struggle. An image that comes to mind is the little boy being thrown into the wall and knocking the pans off of a nearby shelf with the force of his body. More evidence that violence is in this poem is on line ten. Line ten reads, “Was battered on one knuckle.” This means that the speaker’s hand is all scraped up and bloody, possibly from a struggle or banging it off something. “You beat time on my head/with a palm caked hard by dirt,” shows even more evidence that there is violence occurring in the poem. “With a palm caked hard by dirt” tells a little…
Authors use the way characters act or think to tell the reader how the characters are feeling.…
It can be said that struggles bring people together and, at the same time, break them apart. When two people realize their life situations are quite similar are controlled by fundamentalism, they tend to stay close to one another for comfort and understanding, even though they share nothing in interest. However one will eventually attempt a change, to try and manipulate their circumstances for the better or to leave. The other is inevitably left alone and desolate. Although a complicated kindness entwines many such consequences from social issues and other obstacles deep inside its storylines, it reveals its dominant theme in the conclusion: that love endures in the end. Love will make hardships tolerable, will bind people together in spirit if not in a physical sense, and will brighten the optimism in the heart.…
“Cranky Spanky” is representative of hard bop because it displays many characteristics of the genre. The structure is much like bop with improvisations and solos taking up much of the song besides a quick intro and outro. This song was performed by a small combo and has a fast tempo. This song defines hard bop by its dark and heavy tone color and its complex melodic improvisations, although not as complex as some bop improvisations. The rhythm section is much more active in the hard bop genre.…
The diction in the poem “History” initially conveys an objective tone that shifts to a playfully mischievous tone which then transitions to a morbidly depressing tone. In the beginning of the poem, the speaker describes Grandma with eyes that are “small with sleep” and how she crushes chiles with a “stone brought from Guadalajara.” The way the speaker depicts Grandma’s eyes can be described as neutral and factual.…
Both Blake and Douglass’s poetry seem to be captivated by the themes of exploitation and cruelty, we can see this in these poems by both authors. The author’s stay true to the theme of exploitation and cruelty by providing the reader with a somber tune throughout all readings and providing explicit and raw scenarios that the characters were in. William Blake’s poems touch upon child labor, people wishing for death, and the somber environment that these poems take place in. Douglass’s autobiography is a little different than Blake and tells the devastating story about slavery and his exact hardships of being a slave. Both authors stayed true to the common theme of exploitation and cruelty, however in Blake’s poems he approached the theme of…
Structure plays an important role in the meaning of this poem. The cruelness of abuse is amplified through enjambment and emphasis on the last word of the sentence. When the lady beats the boy , no pronunciation is used, which allows the poem to flow rapidly with no pause. The lack of stops shows the reader that the beating is rapid, and there are a lot of strikes. Hayden uses this enjambment to warn the reader of the cruelty of physical abuse, with it being rapid and harsh. The use of “breaks”, “struggle”, “fear”, and “hateful” as end words in the lines also attacks the…
The main themes throughout this poem are love, hate and jealousy which eventually lead to death.…
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…
“Slaveship,” by Lucille Clifton, is a free verse poem from the perspective of slaves that the white men capture and trade in the slave trade, forcing them to travel on the Middle Passage. Ironically, the ships bear the names of religious symbols and figures such as Jesus, Angel of God, and Grace of God (lines 14-15) even though the act of slavery is one of the most sinful systems in the eyes of these slaves and in the eyes of all decent human beings.…
The theme is also very dark. The theme of this poem is a want for control and an urge to feel belonged even if it means becoming violent. Throughout the poem, it repeats the line “What the hell am I doing here?…
Because that's the only way you might be able to get in with those B's.…