Comparing two poems on Siblings. Brother by Andrew Forster and Sister Maude by Christina Georgian Rossetti. The two poems I am comparing are Brothers and Sister Maude. Both are about siblings, except Andrew Forster’s poem is about how he left his younger brother on his own when they were going into the town as children, and how this has affected their relationship later own in life. Sister Maude is about bitter sister rivalry and how ‘Sister Maude’ tells on her sister about her lover.
In the poem, the narrator was having an affair with a lord. As they weren’t married and had a child, the narrator was seen as impure by the society and so, he cast her by choosing her cousin Kate. During the whole poem she talks about how her love for him was truthful while he used her like a “golden knot”, like an object made her a fool. She compares her situation to Kate’s and in some way reproves her choice of accepting him by “If she had fooled not me but you/ If you stood where I stand/… I would have spit into his face/and not have taken his hand”. We can also notice jealousy when she compares “… I sit in howl and dust/you sit in gold and sing” and “He lifted you from the mean estate/to sit with him on high/I was a cottage-maiden/… Contented with my cottage-mates,/ Not mindful I was fair”.
The boys mother finally enters the poem, with her face frowned, most likely due to the mess they had created. If this were a poem about abuse, normally a mother’s love and willingness to protect her child would have intervened and stopped the abuse. Safely assuming that this is an autobiographical poem and that Roethke is reminiscing about his father, when stating “The hand that held my wrist/ Was battered on one knuckle” (Roethke 10), could be over-read or misinterpreted if the reader is ignorant of Roethke’s relationship with his father. Reothke’s
Fist of all Olivia is a character present in both play and movie but is portrayed very differently. For example, Olivia is heartbroken after breaking up with her college boyfriend in the movie while in the play she is heartbroken by the death of her brother, and mourns for him. She also acts upon her feelings more with Cesario in the play, where she professes her love for him openly. Whereas in the movie, she is shyer about her feelings, trying to get him interested in her by making him jealous with Duke. Olivia is similar in the way that she falls for Cesario/Sebastian and causes him difficulties with Duke by showing her interests in him.
The two develop a magnetic bond which is tested by two love interests: Noé, the boy next door; and Gabrielle, the sometimes annoying neighbor and hopeless former lover of Lionel. The love Lionel and Josephine share is a strangely close relationship. At Josephine’s age, girls should be dying to escape from their father; however, the lack of that desire makes their relationship curious. The relationship Josephine and her father share make it difficult for her to move on with her life, as she is seemingly glued to her father. In the film 35 Shots of Rum, Claire Denis uses a number of subtle hints to illustrate the relationship between Lionel and Josephine as being formed from the residue of Josephine’s Electra complex: the idea that Josephine has a sexual attraction to her father.
We can see a few themes in Christina Walsh's poem "A Woman to her Lover" that are similar to themes in Romeo and Juliet. To begin with, we can liken the first stanza of Welsh's poem to the themes surrounding Paris's desires to marry Juliet. In this stanza, the woman proclaims to her lover that she refuses to be treated as one who should be subservient to a man, as one who should "bend to [a man's] will," like a "bondslave," or even as one who should be conquered by a man. This stanza captures a truism that often men have seen women as only child-bearers and household servants, which are things that the stanza is protesting against. We are not told a great deal about Paris, but we can speculate that, while he genuinely cares for Juliet as we can see from his profound grief, he might have treated her in this same way had he married her.
But as the poem progresses words such as: death, battered, and beat are used to describe the events taking place between the young boy and his father which make the poets’ melancholy tone even more apparent. It also becomes more evident that this waltz possibly isn’t a dance between a father and son but it is an abusive relationship shared between the two. The poems’ tone changes when the young boy describes how he clings onto his father. This is seen twice in the poem, first in line 3, where he hung onto his father and second in lines 15-16 when he stayed clinging to his father’s shirt as his father “…waltzed [him]
If we remember that he is speaking to a relative stranger, this is quite inappropriate conversation. He basically accuses his late wife of being unfaithful but Browning has encouraged us to dislike the Duke so much already that it is easy to think he was at fault or is paranoid about what could have been her
Poetry Analysis of Sharon Olds “Rite of Passage” When first read you might speculate if the poem “The Rite of Passage” by Sharon Olds is about the celebration of ones life. I sense, however, that the author is paralleling the malice of war with disillusions about the future of children. I will illustrate how a seemingly innocent birthday party is used with irony to portray a very disturbing observation of young children. The poem “Rite of Passage” is derived from a mother dealing with her son’s loss of innocence as he begins to transform from a young child into a man. It is important to consider the sensitivity of the speaker is biased, as she discovers her son has assumed peril behaviors.
The poem is a direct address from the son to the father, evoking a feeling of intimacy between them (Napierkowski R., Ruby M. 1998). “But I hung on like death” further implies the closeness of the two. It is a physical closeness, because the child was clinging to his father. One could think that “like death” would imply the child was afraid to let go because he didn’t want to get hurt because his father was intoxicated or one might imply that the child hung on because emotionally attached and therefore was afraid to let go (Napierkowski R., Ruby M. 1998). Lines five and six of the poem reveal the boisterous of the dancing, which