The observer and the observed with one having control over the other. In her poem, “On the Subway,” Sharon Olds asks her readers to enter the mind of a white woman who observes a young, black man as they travel together as strangers. She attempts to lay bare the similarities and difference between the lives of a Caucasian person and that of an African American person by contrasting two people of this description throughout the poem. This poem contrasts the lives of two separate individuals with relations to imagery and tone. “On the Subway” is patterned in one stanza having a free verse with 34 lines.
The beams of streetlights through the windows of the same office accompany the lyrics “if I stepped into the light”, placing emphasis on his chosen isolation. Watts also uses lighting to draw the audience into the hopelessness of Julia. The side lighting sculpts the contours of Julia’s face perpetrated with pain as she conceals herself within the darkness of her home. She remains in semi-darkness as she silently stands outside in her merciless industrial suburb. In the same scene there is a light glowing from the windows in the background that persuades the audience to identify her dislocation.
This character gives the feeling of death or hell, which is used as a tool to foreshadow Blake's eventual dimise. The camera periodically shows a close up of the moving train wheels, showing that a lot of time is passing while Blake is on the train. Blake's first walk through the town illustrates a mise-en-scene of death. He is walking through the frame in a very morbid Western town, wearing his plaid suit and bow-tie.
However, her coworker, the woman on the left, holds a green bottle, presumably some sort of alcohol that she drinks to cope with the hardships of her life. Both her rigid appearance and the yawn on her face evoke a weary feeling in the viewer, and give the perception that she is frustrated with the confines of her job. When one first glances at the painting, the fuzzy appearance, and the dejected appearance of the woman are the most distinct aspects of the painting. Degas’ use of body positioning gives both of the women the look of a machine; while one strains down on the iron, the other yawns in exhaustion. The up and down postures of the two women present the viewer with the image of some sort of piston, a hard-working, efficient machine.
On the Subway On the Subway is a short poem written by Sharon Olds. The poem details the feelings experienced by the narrator, as she sits in alone in a subway with a young black man. The poem focuses on race and oppression, and the narrator expresses her sentiments in regards to these topics. The use of metaphors, contrast, symbolism and diction lead the reader to understand the major themes of the poem, oppression and inequality. Metaphors were present throughout the poem.
In “London”, William Blake uses many stylistic devices to convey the setting and the tone of the poem to his readers through the first person point of view of a person walking through old London. A solemn and oppressive mood is articulated through rhyme scheme, parallelism, repetition and more. The writer uses two senses, hearing and vision, to tell a story of the confinement felt by residents and of the early loss of innocence in a city riddled with corruption. The four stanzas and perfect abab rhyme scheme help show that what the writer is seeing and hearing is not only ubiquitous, but also cyclical and persistent. Blake also uses the meter to reflect the ideas the poem is trying to get across.
The tracks look to be currently in use, but one is left to wonder where all the workers are in this industrial complex. The piles of raw materials to our left are given mass by Sheeler’s use of shading. The sun is somewhere over our left shoulder casting shadows from the mounds of earth, railroad tracks, and buildings. In the foreground of Model with Unfinished Self-Portrait the artist achieves trompe l’oeil in the reflection of the vase and the draperies on the highly polished table top. The face of the man on the couch is almost photorealistic due to the artist’s use of shading.
The Train station setting ties in to the plot of the story, the characters behavior, and even the point of view that the story is being told from. The story is about a man and a woman discussing the sensitive subject of abortion. They are at a train station waiting for their train while having this conversation. The man and girl are sitting by other passengers awaiting the train while you the reader are told of their surrounding landscape. On one side it is a dessert-like environment with scorched land and no sign of life in sight.
But these lower class patrons are left to “stare at the dismal scene” of the Valley of Ashes, on “waiting trains” demonstrating not only their failure in trying to grasp the American Dream, but the reality in which they can’t escape. Throughout the novel, Nick Carraway details the bellicose and materialistic nature of Tom Buchanan, with his aggressive and possessive mannerisms further exemplified in this passage, as Nick states that Tom’s behaviour “bordered on violence”. As the two head out for lunch in New York, his eagerness is showcased as he “jumped to his feet and, taking hold of [Nick’s] elbow, literally forced [him] from the car”. Such pugnacious behaviour demonstrates the façade of Tom’s personality, this being a representation of the façade of East and Wet Egg, in that, Tom, whilst on
The story begins with a young American man and a woman sitting in a bar as they wait for their train. The woman seemed distracted as she glanced at the hills across the Ebro River. The hills are meant to be representative of the pregnancy of the woman. Hemingway describes the hills as looking like the stomach of a pregnant woman. He also uses the white elephants to represent an unwanted gift such as the unborn child that the woman is carrying.