She apologizes with words put into simile, metaphors, and symbolism. At the beginning of Mirikitani’s Suicide Note, she begins with an italicized paragraph describing an Asian-American girl who fell under the pressure of her parent’s high expectations, and was reported to have jumped from her dormitory window ledge to commit suicide. The poet then follows with a suicide note written in the form of a poem. Throughout the poem the speaker continues with the depressing, apologetic, and wretched tone. She gains more emphasis of the tone towards the end of the poem, when she is taking the fall off of the window ledge.
Although it was just one unfortunate couple so terribly disturbed, they may represent the thousands of unnoticed tragedies that occur. The poem depicts one tragic death paralleling it with the loss of love and familiarity. The poem is from a woman, whose husband had recently died, as an expression of her sentiments. I believe the poem was a monologue and the woman was speaking to herself in a loss. It could also be interpreted as a funeral speech because she makes strict orders to aid her mourning.
The symbolism of time that is presented throughout the extract depicts an image of a woman so heart broken that she is stuck in the moment, reliving the day her fiancée left her. This extract is a physical manifestation of the emotion state Miss Havisham was left in. This is similar to the poem Havisham by Carol Ann Duffy, which also uses time to portray a theme of betrayal. Havisham explains her broken her through the repetition of b in “b-b-b-breaks”. From this we can conclude that there is no end to her suffering and that the repetition of the letter is a metaphor for the day and memory she is repeating each day of her life.
Medusa is described in a very negative manner. On the other hand, the final stanza makes us feel pity for her. Her lover had other ‘girls’ meaning he was unfaithful and the rhetorical question that follows makes Medusa seem desperate. This part of the poem evokes feelings from the reader as she is clearly distressed and suffering. She reminisces about when she was ‘fragrant and young’, illustrating her complete lack of confidence.
She published her autobiography Ghosts and Voices: Writing from Obsession in the spring of 1987 which detailed her life and all its confusion. Throughout her autobiography Cisneros creates a sense of disconnectedness with the world around her. She reveals feeling separated from society in her reading and writing. Her loneliness from being the only daughter in a family of sons and her helplessness to make friends separates her further from society. Cisneros said, “Instead of writing by inspiration, it seems we write by obsessions, of that which is most violently tugging at our psyche… there is the necessary phase of dealing with those ghosts and voices most urgently haunting us, day by day” ( 49).
I felt cheated, like I had lost something special. Until recently, I had forgotten that feeling, and I generally ignored the passage of time – until I read Gwen Harwood’s “The Violets”, a poem, (among other things) about a young girl lamenting the loss of her day to sleep. “But used my tears to scold the thing I could not grasp or name, that while I slept had stolen from me”. This poem brought me to consider once more my first ideas on lost time, ultimately leading to a greater appreciation for every passing moment in my life. By looking at the shifting dynamics of relationships, life, death and memory, Harwood highlights the fact that we are living in a world where time is constantly slipping out of our hands.
Her main theory came from the difficult and depressed time she had in 1923. Her husband was developing a disease and then his brother died, causing her to become really depressed and thinking of committing suicide. She focused that hard time into what now, she is most known for. After her hard few years, in 1930 she developed theories about the importance of sociocultural factors in human development. After this, she moved from Germany to New York and her career flourished.
William Faulkner explores Emily Grierson’s life by starting and ending with her death. Instead of telling her story chronologically he tells important tidbits in by breaking up the story into five parts, each one set at a different time in her life. The plot of “A Rose for Emily” focuses heavily on death and loss. Each of the five parts bears some mention of Emily’s loss and this constant reiteration helps the reader to feel some of Emily’s grief. First she loses her father, his death is mentioned throughout the story, then she loses the support of the town, eventually she loses her love and finally she loses her life.
In the second stanza, last line, “share in its shame” represents the foolishness the speaker feels for loving that woman. In the third stanza, the speaker does not like hearing the lover’s name after their separation. He compares hearing her name to the sound of a “knell” which means a bell usually used in funerals or deaths. By this word choice, the speaker tells the reader just how deep his sorrow is, comparing hearing her name to hearing death bells each and every time. It causes him to question why he ever loved his ex-lover.
Reading her poem about preferring to be isolated quickly transited to being a lot more depressing in her latter poems. “I Felt a Funeral, in my Brain” shows a darker side to Dickinson’s writing. “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,/ And Mourners to and fro “ (1-2). Dickinson writes about a funeral and describes it as if it were her own. Her dark tone speaking of death lead her literary mentor Thomas Higginson to “ advise her not to publish her work because of her violation of contemporary literary convention” (Dickinson 1).