Gwen Hardwood The emotive qualities of Gwen Harwood’s poetry resonate with her readers. She uses her own memories to illustrate love for her family, her loss of innocence and the swiftness of time passing. She demonstrates this in her poems Father and Child, The Violets and At Mornington. The poem The Violets opens with the line “It is dusk and cold,” the time of day symbolising that this persona has reached old age and is metaphorically drawing closer to nightfall or the end of her days. Death is made apparent with the negative adjective “cold.” The flowers she is picking at the beginning of this poem are clearly what stimulate her memory of childhood as they are referenced later in the poem.
Poetry Extended Response Question 2 Poetry often appears simple but subtly suggests and implies complex ideas. With reference to at least two poems, discuss the ways in which poetry achieves this. The poems Where the Sidewalk Ends by Shel Silverstein (1974) and The Lamb by William Blake (1789) at first glance, would appear straightforward and simple in nature, seen only to describe the sidewalk and a lamb respectively. However a deeper analysis reveals the more complex ideas of the power of imagination and childhood innocence implied in each text. Where the Sidewalk Ends uses poetic conventions such as metaphors, alliteration and visual imagery to effectively convey its meaning to readers.
An Explication of Sharon Thesen’s “Summer Twilight” “Summer Twilight” is a short poem, and thus I will be using the linear model to convey its meaning. Sharon Thesen uses vivid imagery, deep feelings and recollection of the narrators past to bring meaning. As you read the title “Summer Twilight”, the first thing that came to mind was a sunset; this thought is confirmed as you read the first word of the poem, being ‘sunset’. The overall tone and attitude of the narrator is calm and relaxed like a sunset. We see the poem starts and finishes with a two-line stanza, with the middle stanzas containing three lines.
In the beginning of “The Lady of Shalott” the tone the author sets is calm and peaceful. Describing the beautiful surrounding area of the island of Shalott with “barley and rye,/ that clothe the world and meet the sky” (2-3 Tenysson). This brings the reader to almost false pretences, thinking it will be a nice, calming poem. The time dramatically changes from peacefulness to darkness as Lady Shalot bluntly states that she is, “Half sick of shadows” (71). This bold statement provides the reader with a whole new understanding of the poem and of Lady Shalott.
The use of the words ‘green’, ‘pastels’ and ‘first kittens, first love’ also portrays new life that is created through the process of haymaking and the pleasant memories that can bring from working. The use of positive imagery and a subsequent sense of enjoyment in work is also explored in A.B. Paterson’s poem ‘Shearing at Castlereagh’ through the use of words such as ‘merry’ and ‘golden’, revealing that work can be a happy experience if the worker has a sense of pride in their job. These two poems differ greatly to William Blake’s poem ‘The Chimney Sweeper’, which looks upon work in a much more negative approach. The poem as a whole explores how work exploits and oppresses the innocence of the chimney sweepers.
In the beginning of the novel Cather use weather to describe that calmness that Burden was feeling after being in Nebraska for a little while. For example, Sitting in his grandmother's garden, Jim observes: "There in the sheltered draw-bottom the wind did not blow very hard, but I could hear it singing its humming tune up on the level, and I could see the tall grasses wave. The earth was warm under me, and warm as I crumbled it through my fingers" (Cather 42). Cather uses very relaxing,
The poem throws us into events immediately occurring. The flash of the brass in the sunlight as the horses turn at near end of the field punctuates the poem. “The lovers disappeared into the wood.”: Lovers appear again as key figures in a Thomas poem. We only see them at the beginning and the end of the poem, but they are important symbols of love and life. In ‘In Memorium (Easter 1916)’ and ‘The Cherry Trees’ the absence of lovers is a terrible loss; in ‘As the Team’s Head Brass’ their fleeting presence is a cause for optimism and hope.
However, after a while, when they begin to wither, they release an unpleasant smell. Similarly, the woman in the poem may liken herself to the “pot of rusting Gardenias”. She may have imagined herself to be joyful and full of life before she had beared a child, like a Gardenia passing its prime age, but eventually became what she is now, feeling the need to stay at home to take care of her son. In the stanzas 4, 5 and 6, our central character begins to feel disconnected to the world and wonders why she feels such when “surely this day is
e Crucible Act Two Summary Page 1 The setting is the Proctor’s house, the common room (or the living room, as we know it). Elizabeth and Proctor discuss farm business items, while Proctor eats. He tells her he wants to please her, but when he tries to kiss her, she simply “receives it.” He’s disappointed and returns to eat. They continue discussing everyday things, until Proctor suggests that she seems sad. Elizabeth admits that she is worried that he had gone to Salem that day.
In the first stanza, the poem opens by portraying the warm days of early autumn in their finest, representing a mother’s pregnancy and the birth of a new life. Newly-born autumn and the “maturing” sun are personified as “conspiring… how to load and bless / With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run” (3-4), closely associating young autumn with the aging sunlight while alluding to the Christian belief that the father God, through his son Jesus, blesses those who take the path of the righteous with the “fruits” of joy and peace. It is curious that Keats would use the word “conspire” with such positive intentions on part of autumn and the sun, suggesting a sort of kind-spirited wittiness that is common among the nymphs and mythical creatures of Greek and Roman lore. Keats goes on to write that autumn and the sun “bend with apples the mossed cottage-trees” (5); one would not expect something as short and stumpy as an orchard tree to grow something as rich as apples, providing an implied sense of irony and an appreciation that life “knows no bounds,” as one would put it. Keats expands this idea of growth being a merciful bounty by using the olfactory and gustatory imagery of providing “flowers for the bees” (9) and “fill[ing] all