"Roman Fever" and "The Chrysanthemums" - A Comparison The two short stories have different characters, plot and setting and yet they have a common ground in which human beings are deeply involved. In short, the setting of each work powerfully suggests a rather calm, dull and peaceful mood at a superficial level; however, the main characters are struggling from the uncontrollable passions and exploding desire at heart. First of all, in "TheChrysanthemums" the Salinas Valley is depicted as somewhat dull, like "a closed pot." In addition, its geographical setting represents an isolated atmosphere, and, furthermore, Elisa's actions of handling chrysanthemums can be translated into a static, inactive one. However, when it comes to her concealed passion, the whole picture in this piece can be interpreted in a different way.
There is no reason a reader should read this poem and not have a better understanding of the mental illness of schizophrenia and how it affects not only the person but the family as a whole. Both the homes and the families are thought of as a place of safety and love, but in this family, due to a terrible disease, love is hard to find. It is a constant uphill struggle to try and love someone when you can’t help them. Often times, when we can’t help someone, we blame ourselves, which only causes more stress and distance. The line, “It was the house that suffered most.” (Line 1), illustrates that, although the person diagnosed with schizophrenia was probably suffering, it was the family, as a whole, that suffered the most.
The wallpaper is at first a great annoyance to Jane as she claims that it is confusing and contradicting. Jane was a writer and was not permitted to express herself through the means of writing. She is not only affected by the physical restraints of being inside the room alone, but the yellow wallpaper is dreadful and fosters only negative creativity. Jane's negative thoughts are first displayed through "It is dull enough to confuse the eye in following, pronounced enough to constantly irritate and provoke study, and when you follow the lame uncertain curves for a little distance they suddenly commit suicide plunge off at outrageous angles, destroy themselves in unheard of contradictions." This is displaying the beginning of her negative thoughts which is the contribution to her spiralling into insanity since her disease confuses her mind and contradicts her logic, the paper parallels her mental state at this point.
Henry Lawson ‘Up the Country’ and Kenneth Slessor ‘William St’ The view of the city being beautiful and the country being awful, is shared by both Henry Lawson and Kenneth Slessor. ‘Up the Country’ (Henry Lawson) show this view in his poem, by saying the country is a horrible, monotonous place to stay. ‘William St’ (Kenneth Slessor) portrays this view by beautifying the slums of the city. In ‘Up the Country’ Henry Lawson gives a very negative image of the bush. He has written this poem in first person, so as to give his personal opinion of the bush.
Words like “dull”, “dust” and “sweat” all illustrate how depressed and tough their life is. These gloomy adjectives used, makes the reader imagine the miserable state of the wife, married to an abusive man. With the wise choice of words, we get the picture that the man suffered to earn a living, however now the women is enduring pain as a result of his frustration. The lack of rhyme in this poem is also poem; reflecting the monotony of their life. From the beginning of the poem we realize that the situation is not pleasant; this is shown by the alliteration of the harsh consonant ‘d’.
“[M]iserable tenements made of cardboard and tin”, Indian slums are notoriously characterized as neighbourhoods of the poor, fraught with “filth and health hazards” (Dossani 189). Mistry mirrors this bleak picture of slum life by thrusting his characters into a “tin-and-plastic jhopadpatti” and leaving them to struggle for basic amenities such as water and proper sanitation (Mistry 189). In Mistry’s slum, “[w]ake up late, and you go thirsty. Like the sun and moon, water waits for no one” and “foul smelling stream[s]…trickle through mounds, carrying a variety of floating waste in [their] torpid flux[es]” (Mistry 218-219). The author employs the same imagery used in non-fiction work to stress the reality of his characters’ struggle for basic needs and emphasize the extremity of poverty within urban India.
How does Hardy tell the story in Under the Waterfall? In his poem Under the Waterfall, Hardy gives his wife Emma a voice, we assume he is writing with her as narrator and with the prior knowledge that their relationship is deteriorating the reader may already know that this is a retrospective, romantic yet sad look at the question of eternal love. Hardy uses a woman as a narrator in order to get a feminine perspective of the event of that day as well as a view on their broken down relationship; feelings of sadness and regret are conveyed using this technique since a sorrowful tone emanates from “no lip has touched it since his and mine” a play on words, not necessarily regarding the glass anymore but a metaphor for their marriage. Moreover, Hardy uses lots of personification and metaphorical language in order to convey similarities between the waterfall and the question of the elusive eternal true love. “With a hollow and boiling voice it speaks and has spoken since hills were turfless peaks” is an example of Hardy’s belief that like the waterfall, true love “never ceases” even “in wars, in peaces”.
The poem mostly revolves around the river which has a twin personality in this case. The poet starts off by giving us a beautiful description of a park and a river in the summer to make the setting dwell swiftly into our minds, only to follow it up by explaining the terror that beheld him. Even though the river was considered exotic and beautiful by the poet, it was the reason for so much loss and suffering. The destruction is a direct consequence of the flood and it can easily be said that the river was responsible for the damage and
The character of the river god is displayed, as often in dramatic monologues, far more prominently than the persona perhaps realizes. Initially the river god is portrayed as an isolated, lonely figure that inhabits his own world with its own “rules”. These rules seem to have no resemblance to those of the human world – he punishes at will those who “bathe close to the weir”, for instance. We are unsettled by his complete lack of remorse. He appears to need to display his power and ownership of his domain as well as a rather seedy, disreputable attitude toward women.
Reading the poems of both Wordsworth and Coleridge, one immediately notes a difference in the common surroundings presented by Wordsworth and the bizarre creations of Coleridge. Thus they develop their individual attitudes towards life. I will look at differences and similarities concerning people's relationship to nature in poems by Coleridge and Wordsworth such as: "The Ancient Mariner", "Kubla Khan", "The Nightingale," "Lucy", "Tintern Abbey," "There was a boy", " Old Beggar", "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud" and "Frost at Midnight". In "The Ancient Mariner," Coleridge demonstrates how violating nature and her subjects brings doom to the infracted. In this poem, the poet emphasises the vengeful, dark side of the land and the sea.