Essay about A Critical Analysis of Judith Wright's 'the Killer'

As the snake “drew back his head and [the man] raised [his] weapon” they both were ready for their last fight. Both felt threatened by each other; thus, both felt the necessity to become defensive. However, neither one saw the situation as an immediate threat, so they did not immediately strike. When the narrator “made an unprovoked attack,” the snake performed “a little song of death.” The reader’s sympathy for the snake once again returns because the snake did nothing wrong. The “little song of death” depicts an image of the snake’s last effort to live. However, there is nothing “little” in death, but rather displays the snake’s submissiveness to the man. The “ominous” situation with “poison dripping from [the snake’s] fangs” is reminiscent of the tragedy that just occurred. The author reminds the reader of the necessity to rid the world of the danger from a snake. It lessens the reader’s grief towards the snake, bringing a more neutral tone to the

As the initial path of conflict between snake and man is developed, literary devices such as imagery allow the reader to more easily visualize and connect to the story. Descriptive imagery is the first literary device used in “The Rattler”. The use of “ Light was thinning; the scrub’s dry savory odors were sweet on the cooler air. In this, the first pleasant moment for a walk after long blazing hours” (The Rattler 1) in the opening of the piece encourages the reader to delve into the narrator’s life and experience what he feels. After the narrator abruptly sees the snake, the imagery changes from the peaceful rural life to a dark, intense description of the snake, “a six-foot black snake thick as my wrist, capable of long-range attack and armed with powerful fangs” (The Rattler 2), changing to the viewpoint of the snake for the reader. The switch in the use of imagery takes the reader through a completely different path and alters their emotional response to the story. The snake’s presence illustrates the narrator’s obvious fear and anxiety while allowing the reader to feel the same emotions

The poem suddenly becomes much darker in the last stanza and a Billy Collins explains how teachers, students or general readers of poetry ‘torture’ a poem by being what he believes is cruelly analytical. He says, “all they want to do is tie the poem to a chair with rope and torture a confession out of it”. Here, the poem is being personified yet again and this brings about an almost human connection between the reader and the poem. This use of personification is effective as it makes the

In the poem there is also an idea of man verses nature, this relates to the survival of the fittest. John Foulcher shows this through the use of first person point of view. For example in the second stanza “Then above me the sound drops” this again possesses sensory imagery creating a deeper human aura throughout the poem. Foulcher further uses a human aura to build a sense of natural imagery for example in the last stanza : “I pick up these twigs and leave them” adding closure

The speaker shows his initial perception of death as gruesome and extremely unpleasant. As “the shrike pinned smaller birds on the tree’s black thorns…while some burned holes in the sky overhead.” Perillo deliberately uses imagery to reflect his frightful view on death, but clearly describing the “desiccated” state of the bird. The imagery invokes a sense of discomfort and disgust to the to the audience.

Prompt: Write a well-organized essay in which you analyze how the poem's organization, diction, and figurative language prepare the reader for the speaker's concluding response.

The diction which is emphasized upon the story gives a clear picture of how everything happened in a sudden and fulfilling way. The man noticed that the snake “lay rigid” and had “suddenly arrested” and eventually watched him in calm watchfulness. The snake was placid and was not doing any violent action. The man, instead, decided to fulfill his duty concerning the community. The man describes seeing the snake as he looked like a “live wire” while his “tocsin sounded”. The man’s sudden encounter with the snake was still calm up until he decides to bring out the hoe.

Apart from that, the poem consists of a series of turns that reflect different parts of the speaker’s feelings and the experiences he had. The significance of these turns is made possible through the use of stanza breaks. For example, the first

The author uses the poems structure and stanzas to help get her point across. The poem is composed of four stanzas with a total of 25 lines. Each stanza signifies a different part of the child’s life. The stanzas have irregular lengths and structures. The numbers of lines in each stanza vary from five to seven. Piercy separates the pieces of the story by stanzas to tell the girls story so the audience could see how she was treated since birth. For instance the first stanza talks about her birth and adolescent years, while the third and forth stanzas talk about the end of her life.

The second begins with “Now, he lies looped and useless” (5). Beginning with “when” and progressing to “now”, the poet is suggesting a cause and effect philosophy. The snake quickly flashed across the road, but after being hit by the truck, lies “useless” in the road. The poet has given the snake a male identity. The narrator describes the snake as “an old bicycle tire” (6). The poet uses this technique of imagery to portray the now lifeless snake, as an old rubbery tire tube. The narrator reads “I stop the car” (7). This conveys that the narrator is an observer, and telling the story from a third person point of view. The narrator feels some sort of remorse or sympathy for the snake, removes him from the road, and carries “him into the bushes” (8). The poet uses “bushes” to indicate where the snake is taken to, and hidden or out of sight of the road.

Our translation almost seems to create key-words in the lines that contain alliteration and assonance. Examples such as “fight with the fiend” (440), “frenzy fouling” (449), or “fear on that flower” (444) add a sense of drama and heightened awareness to the lines because of their bold, descriptive

Walt Whitman loved to experiment with form when it came to poetry. He used his verses to show his complete adoration of all things wild, and our role as beings in this infinitely complex and thought-provoking universe in which we exist. To say he had a bit of a “nature crush” would be an understatement – Whitman goes in to great detail of his love for the wildness and often describes his emotions in a viscerally sexual manner, using poetic devices to underline his immense feelings for environment and hammer in the imagery to readers of how majestic the world appears to him. “Romantic” poets loved the outdoors – if it wasn’t contained in four walls and a roof, they were all about it. They loved to praise the innate details that made our planet so incredible,

Nature has an undefinable meaning as the theme is utilised in literature, and it has been a topic of reflection within the Romanticists since the beginning of the era. Romanticism and nature and inextricably linked ideas. Poets; Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman wrote during the romantic era, and both drew heavily from aspects of nature in their work. Nature can be paralleled against several things, including humanity and the idea of life and death. The contrast between the natural world and the artificial world, and what this means for society, is also strongly eluded to in Dickinson and Whitman’s poems. Each poet uses nature as the backbone to their poetry in several instances. Dickinson’s, “Hope is the Thing with Feathers”, (Dickinson, 19) and “My Life Has Stood A Loaded Gun”, (Dickinson, 69) are strong examples of this. Whitman’s, “Song of Myself”, (Whitman, 29) and, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d”, (Whitman, 255) are also poems that show the connection between nature and romanticism. Poets, Dickinson and Whitman engage with romanticism in a creative and constructive manner through the utilisation of the natural world.

This poem opens with an extreme and vivid simile, “The bright wire rolls like a porpoise” (line 1). This beginning not only grasps the attention of the audience, but the image intensifying language that Kooser has chosen

A resistant reading of the poem uncovers the idea that religion, specifically the Judeo-Christian religious tradition, is intrinsically harmful and retrogressive in nature. If the ‘snake’ is interpreted as a synecdoche for Judaeo-Christian religious tradition as a whole, a profoundly negative opinion of such an ideology is formed throughout the poem. Without the ‘snake’ that is this religion, there would be no “pain and suffering”. The poem asks, “what could bear such a weight”, interrogating the conscience of religion, implying guilt on its behalf. Furthermore, the imagery suggested in the second stanza surrounding the snake’s “shadow” evokes negative ideas concerning the nature of the religion, which is further bolstered by its ability to “separate itself” from this shadow, and to “move on