Davaris Brown Professor Johnson English 1102 18 April 2012 Explication of “My Last Duchess” This narrative poem is about a Duke who is looking at a picture of his dead Duchess. He talks about the portrait on the wall of her, which he admires. The Duke thinks about how the Duchess compares everything to him. The death of the Duchess shows another side of the Duke which started to show while he’s talking and is unrevealed at the end. The Duke thinks he is bigger than God and also a jealous and possessive man.
The description Wuthering being a significant provincial adjective, descriptive of the atmospheric tumult to which its station is exposed in stormy weather" immediately creates the a dark and desolate image which would provoke a sense of fear within 19th century readers. They would visualise this gothic setting, and foreshadow that dark and mysterious events will unfold here. This element of pathetic fallacy can be identified through the description of the "gaunt thorns" surrounding the house and "a grotesque carving lavished over the front" since both of these reinforce the idea of entrapment and claustrophobia; something that a modern day audience could identify as being an irrational fear. The house is enveloped in an air of mystery, it's inhabitants, most likely Heathcliff, are renowned for being recluses to life away from the moors. The most poignant chapter that highlights pure unadulterated terror, is chapter 3.
The short story “The Birds” by Daphne du Maurier and the film The Birds directed by Alfred Hitchcock created an event in which birds attacked people for unknown reasons. Although the characters and setting are vastly different, both creators conveyed a similar mood of fear and suspense. Both the author and director used effective methods of creating suspense, even though the techniques themselves varied. In the short story, Daphne du Maurier uses weather imagery to create suspense. For example, at one point in the text Nat says, “This is a black winter, not a white one.” This creates a dark mood, because black, which represents death, is being contrasted to white, which symbolizes purity.
“From my books surcease of sorrow – sorrow for the lost Lenore -- For the rare and radiant maiden whom the angels named Lenore.” In Poe’s poem “Annabel Lee”, the tone is also gloomy and sad, as you can see from lines 25 and 26: “That the wind came out of the cloud by night Chilling and killing my Annabel Lee.” “The Raven” and “Annabel Lee” both have hints of sadness and gloom, some more than others, but they are indeed present in both poems distinctively. Another similarity between the two poems is their dark and gloomy imagery, especially in lines 23 through 26 in “Annabel Lee”, where Poe begins to mention where his Annabel Lee had gone. Unlike “The Raven”, this poem talks about a woman or girl named Annabel Lee, who is said to have been taken by the sea, as lines 40 and 41 mention. “In the sepulcher there by the sea, In her tomb by the sounding sea.” Both of these Poe poems talk about women who are gone. “The Raven” mentions Lenore
Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven” is an excellent example of eerie poetry at its finest. Poe uses rhythm and flow in a way not only to draw his reader in, but to create the dark and empty tone that is in all well-written eerie literature. Poe also uses several other literary devices in his poem, such as the main character’s house, creating a mentally unstable narrator, an overall dark and eerie tone and symbolism. In “The Raven”, Poe uses the “house” to convey a depressed and somewhat ominous mood. Parallels between the house and the main character are made, physical and emotional.
Constant Reminder In “The Fall of the House of Usher” Edgar Allan Poe uses foreshadowing, gothic doubling, symbolic imagery and detailed descriptions of the house in order to showcase the effects the house has on the consciousness of Roderick Usher. This ultimately displays the negative effects on rich aristocratic incestuous families, undeniably resulting in their demise. There are only so many incestuous relationships that can go on within a family until someone becomes no longer okay with it. In this case that person is Madeline. In the first paragraph the narrator reads: I reined my horse to the precipitous brink of a black and lurid tarn that lay in unruffled lustre by the dwelling, and gazed down – but with a shudder even more thrilling than before – upon the remodelled and inverted images of the gray sedge, end the ghastly tree-stems, and the vacant and eye-like windows.
The weather conditions when they meet can all be linked with the theme of chaos and disorder, which foreshadows their role within the play as it is their predictions which awaken the seeds of ambition within Macbeth. The fact that they cannot be trusted is also implied in this first scene as their speech is full of antithesis and this foreshadows the equivocation they use to confuse Macbeth and fill him with a false sense of security, “When the battles lost and won” “Fair is foul, and foul is fair;” When we next meet the witches, the setting is again chilling in that they meet in thunder. Again, the supernatural powers that the witches have are highlighted as they wreak their revenge on a sailor, whose wife refused to give one of them chestnuts. Their power to control the experiences of the poor sailor is established and they explicitly discuss their ability to
In contrast to this, Rosenblum’s article explores the perception of war from the view of the solider and the tension between “Romantic militarism” and liberalism. Talmon’s chapter makes connections to many romantic themes by relating events to the dominant forces or ideas at work in the era—such as the French and the Industrial Revolution. And finally, Coleridge’s poem reveals the influence of the French Revolution upon British Romanticism. Portraying nature as a spiritual gateway, he utilizes the natural world as an escape from his fears of a potential invasion in England. In each of these
Two of his most famous poems after her death were Dante's Divine Comedy (1867) and Keramos (1878). He was a prominent writer until his death in 1882 at age 71. Some of his most famous poems were, “Poems on Slavery” (1844), “Evangeline (1847)”, “The Song of Hiawatha” (1855), “The Courtship of Miles Standish” (1858), and “Tales of a Wayside Inn” (1863) . “The Arrow and the Song” is a poem written my Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and I am going to break it down in my own words then in someone else’s. I think that the poem can be taken as literal meaning with the arrow shooting in the air and landing in a tree somewhere else.
William Wordsworth: The Affliction of Margaret About the poet William Wordsworth (1770-1850) is arguably the most popular and famous of all English poets. As a young man, he had quite radical ideas about political change - and he travelled to see the effects of the revolution in France - of which he wrote "Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive". With his good friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge, he published, in 1798, a collection of poems called Lyrical Ballads (in 1800, they published a second volume). In some ways, these poems mark the beginning in England of what we now call the Romantic Movement. The Preface, written by Wordsworth, has come to be seen as one of the most important explanations of poetry in English literature.