‘Marks of weakness, marks of woe’ Blake uses marks as an abstract noun to describe the sadness of the people that he meets and also as a concrete noun to describe the physical cuts and scars. This is also commented on in Jon Crook’s critical reading of London where he states that the word shifts from a verb to a noun and that by making marks Blake discovers worlds, in London he has discovered a world of misery marked in the faces that he passes. The second stanza has a semantic field of sadness and pain, the repetition of ‘in every’ is an effective way to show that this sadness is affecting everyone in the city of London at the time. It shows the emotion in ‘cry of every man’ and ‘infants cry of fear’ that they are all going through the same pain. It also symbolises the lack of freedom when he says ‘in every ban.’ The last line in the second stanza is ambiguous ‘The mind-forg’d manacles I hear’ is a metaphorical phrase that reinforces the feeling of being trapped in London, the word manacles has connotations of slavery and that the people of London are enslaving themselves.
Both “The Prelude” by William Wordsworth and “London” By William Blake” convey strong ideas and feelings about a place. Blake’s poem is most subjective about the city, contrary to the title. The reader would think that the title “London” is objective and unbiased; however Blake’s condemnation of the city is apparent from the start of the poem. On a simple level, the poem is a description of the misery Blake sees as he “wanders” around London. On a deeper level however, he is criticizing not only the condition of the city itself, but the monarchy and government who oppress it.
Eliot portrays life as tarnished through urban decay, which is typical of the modernist era. This can be seen in ‘Love Song’ when Prufrock observes the “half-deserted streets ... one-night cheap hotels and sawdust restaurants”. These recurring images of urban isolation emphasise the corruption present in society. Similarly, in ‘Preludes’, the persona describes a woman he sees as clasping “the yellow soles of feet in the palms of both soiled hands”. The colour yellow, which symbolises decay and disease, is used to show the woman’s state of mind, which has been corrupted by the society she is part of.
His use of ‘withered’, heavy with negative connotations, implies the harmful potential of urban environments. Furthermore, Eliot’s structuring of the poem - which refers to a diverse range of people and experiences throughout its four stanzas - conveys the fragmented nature of the urban landscape on the people immersed in them. Eliot also conveys this fractured society through a use of disconnected limbs, such as “feet” and “hands”, the fragmented body parts a metaphor for urban civilization – never to be whole. Similarly, Bradbury positions the reader to view the city in a negative light, through his language used to depict and describe the city. He writes, “The street was silent and long and empty, with only his shadow moving like the shadow of a hawk in midcountry”, utilised list of words such as ‘silent and long and empty’ to illustrate through implication his interpretation of the city.
How does Susan Hill use Pathetic Fallacy to create mood and atmosphere in Chapter 2? In Susan Hill’s book ‘The Woman in Black’, Hill uses Pathetic Fallacy to show the setting of London in the 1920’s. Hill sets the scene with the very first sentence of the paragraph, ‘where it was already growing dark, not because of the lateness of the hour...but because of the fog.’ He describes how it hemmed us in on all sides; this is creating a feeling of entrapment like Eel Marsh House. She then goes on to describe how the fog was ‘hanging over the river, creeping in and out of alleyways...seething through cracks and crannies like sour breath’, this is creating an atmosphere of malevolence. All of these small details that Hill has included in her description
1. Read from p.26 “About halfway between…” to p.27 “… I first met tom’s Buchanan’s mistress” How does Fitzgerald vividly describe the scene? The scene took place in a place called “the valley of ashes”; this scene was described as a very poor area in this story. “Where ashes take forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and, finally, with a transcendent effort, of ash-grey men”. The author specifically wrote this quote in order to emphasize the grey and dullness of the place with a little bit of exaggeration and so that the reader would have a better understanding of the place.
The ‘curse’ could also insinuate that prostitutes were a curse on society, yet Blake uses the phrase ‘blights with plague’ which suggests that it was the sexually transmitted disease syphilis that was the curse. He emphasises this with an oxymoron ‘marriage-hearse’. The wealthy men sleep with the harlots then go back and sleep with their wives, spreading the killer disease. Syphilis destroys lives and harlots destroy families and family was the most important part of English society. Simon Armitage’s poem ‘A Vision’ is a contemporary piece based on a balsa-wood model of a new updated Huddersfield town, he had seen as a child in the local Town Hall.
Like a true existentialist, Tarrou demonstrates three critical attributes; anguish, forlornness and despair. Because of Tarrou’s character and ideas, he can be identified as the ideal man of existentialism. When the narrator in the book The Plague first mentions Tarrou, he is introduced as an outsider who arrives in Oran on vacation who demonstrates anguish. As Tarrou finds himself in the midst the outbreak of the plague, he documents the series of events of the town as the situation digresses from bad to worse. When the first occurrences of plague are reported Tarrou remarkably, becomes “the man who involves himself and who realizes that he is not only the person he chooses to be, but also a lawmaker who is, at the same time, choosing all mankind as well as himself” (Sartre 1194).
As if often the case with sections of town that become “poorer” or turn into “ghettos,” in Harlem, dreams fall by the wayside. With “Harlem,” (Also known as “Dreams Deferred”) he asks us the very poignant questions of what happens when we fail to see our dreams come to fruition. His lines “Does it dry up / like a raisin in the sun?” (2-3) bring to mind the photos we have all seen of the older Black gentleman, wrinkled by life, sitting aimlessly on a stoop. Perhaps “Uncle” (as many of the former slaves were called in old age) has a bottle in a paper sack, a cigarette dangling from his mouth as he sits there and ponders what might have been. His dreams are gone, they have “festered like a sore” (4) as time has passed him by, and all he has left are the memories of the ideas he never followed through on.
Examining Inherent Sin in Hawthorne’s Short Stories Nathaniel Hawthorne often presents his readers with myriad references to hidden sin in both his short stories and novels. In his short stories, protagonists Mr. Hooper in “The Minister’s Black Veil” and Georgiana in “The Birthmark,” experience the negative social gaze of those around them. For Reverend Hooper, it is his congregation that views his black veil as the symbol of sin or imperfection – there is something abnormal about his wearing of the veil. In Georgiana’s case, her husband, Alymer, views her birthmark as an unnatural imperfection which has manifested itself into the shape of a hand on her cheek. Both stories arguably demonstrate the idea of unnatural, abnormal objects overpowering