Accident by Todd Davis

Along with the death of a loved one or the loss of a significant piece in one’s life comes a time of mourning. How gradually one heals and recuperates from sorrow is personal and cannot be dictated by another’s schedule. In “Snowbanks North of the House,” one significant component is how Bly uses the natural world to represent the continuation of life after death. “And the sea lifts and falls all night, the moon goes on / through the unattached heavens alone” (Bly 19-20). Nature continues on despite someone’s personal anguish. This poem encourages people to relinquish their agony and to return to normal life because the universe pays no attention to you. Sometimes this is easier said than done, as Gonzalez writes in “1999.” The alleviation of despair is not immediate following loss. As shown in this poem, even years after a tragedy, there are lasting effects on people. The speaker tells of the years that have passed since the sibling’s death. “Then the year / my stomach hurt all year, & then / the year no one spoke of you” (Gonzalez 15-17). The speaker explains that as the years pass, people begin to accept the reality of the death and recover. However, the speaker has a sorrowful tone about him or her. After all the years that have gone by, the speaker continues to feel grief and is heartbroken over the death. The speaker is frustrated that no one else seems to reciprocate the

“You don't understand the power of loss when it first hits you like a baseball coming fast from an out-of-control pitcher. You reel back stinging from the blow.” (Bauer,162). Throughout the novel Hope Was Here we see characters go through struggles and gain strength to overcome them. In our everyday lives we have struggles that we also have to overcome. In the novel Hope Was Here, one of the characters Braverman has to choose his family or education. The character Addie, faces the struggle of miscarrying three babies. In my life I have struggles and so do the people around me. For instance, my grandma went through the struggle of losing her husband. From this novel it is learned that if there's no struggle there's no strength.

The poem “The Widow’s Lament in Springtime” is a poem about a women who has lost her husband of thirty five years. Williams writes in the voice of a grieving woman instead of in his own voice. Now that her husband has died, the widow cannot find joy in her yard that she used to love. The widow may even be considering suicide. Williams, writing in free verse, writes a metaphor comparing the grief of a widow to her blooming yard in the springtime setting a tone of great sadness for the widow.

The theme of new beginnings and the harness of the past in another natural setting is discussed again in the second stanza, but now with a focus on time. The visual image presented my the passage as the sun hesitating and losing its direction show allow the reader to observe the symbolism of the sun. The sun universally represents time, the rise and set of sun symbolizing the beginning and ending of each day, days leading into months, years, and lifetimes. The rise of the sun is a new beginning, but it "seems to hesitate," and "lose its/ incandescent aim." The new beginning brought on by the rising of the sun was held back and lost "in that second." Hope and the fresh start were halted by the sun, who was not ready to let time pass and continue. The passage concludes with an affirmation of the symbolism, that "the past is brighter yet" than the sun who could not pull the new start cleanly into the future.

This shows that even a terrible event like this, will eventually work out. Another example that shows hope, is when maddie and grandfather are abandoned on the side of the road. They had to have hope, or else they would not have been able to gather food or water. As you can see, through these experiences, you must always have hope, because without hope, you will not succeed.

Hope is a very powerful thing and the way you handle it can affect you in different ways. Everyone sees and feels hope differently but it is overall a beautiful thing. Throughout the novel Copper Sun by Sharon M. Draper, Amari tends to lose hope very often from herself and others but mostly regains it. The novel Copper Sun has a very similar theme to the poem, “Hope is the thing with feathers” because it captures the thought of losing all hope but being able to regain it and never letting go of it just like Copper Sun portrays. Amari is a hopeless soul when she is reminded that her life is not well, she has lost all contact of Besa, her family is all dead, and through her struggle to freedom.

The second stanza, that talks about "That perches in the soul," uses the imagery of a bird to explain hope. She believes hope perches in people's souls as the hope becomes the home for hope. The subject is viewed as a metaphor as hope rests in people souls the way a bird is known to rest on its own perch. In both the third and fourth stanza the poem talks about a bird singing the tune without any words and does not stop at all. Dickinson makes use of the imagery of continuous bird's songs to depict eternal hope as the bird does not stop singing the hope song. The fifth stanza, which states "And sweetest in the gale is heard", explains the song of hope by the bird as sweetest to the wind (Dickinson & Vendler

“If he couldn’t make it,” he recalled thinking to himself, “what chance do I have?”

“Hard times are about losing spirit, and hope, and what happens when dreams dry up.” (225) In the novel Out of the Dust by Karen Hesse, Billie Jo, a young girl living in the Oklahoma Panhandle, finds herself in a tough situation when she sees her mother, the “glue” of her family die, and her beloved farm fail. This situation causes Billie Jo to look for hope to help her get through this tough stage of her life. Similar to Billie Jo, during a person’s life, when he or she is in a hardship or in a tough time, usually, the only thing that gets them through is hope.

By the end of the poem there is another shift in tone. The tone takes on a more hopeful meaning. Now, Bryant uses the spring season to compare to a new age. He mentions, “The youth in life's green spring, and he who goes/ In the full strength of years, matron, and maid,/ The bow'd with age, the infant in the smiles.”(68-70) The rebirth of human life compares to nature in the sense that when nature is reborn in springtime everything turns green. The reader ends the poem with an enlightened sense of feeling instead of the dark and gloomy feeling they felt at the beginning of the poem.

The main theme of the poem however, is the sadness and misfortune that accompany us on our journey through life. The Wilson River Road, in which the events of the poem take place, is symbolic of the road of life that we all travel upon. The darkness and the setting of the poem point to the seclusion and indecision that we experience when dealing with life’s tragedies. Many people feel as confused as the narrator does when he was “stumbling back of the car” (5, 911) in his attempt to do the right thing. In his moment of decision, though, the only company the narrator had was the silent and unheeding world around him.

Then, Williams finds a way to change the depressing mood of his poem by using specific words to convey feelings of hope. He does this in his fourth stanza with the lines: “Lifeless in appearance, sluggish/dazed spring approaches” (L14-15). Williams is saying that the plants, the trees, and the vines only appear to be dead, but they are not. Once again imagery is being used here. Also, what is going to save this otherwise seemingly desolate land is the approaching spring; “sluggish” and “dazed” as it may be, it is imminent – life is forthcoming. Williams also proffers up more hope with the lines: “One by one objects are defined/rooted, they/grip down and begin to awaken” (L22,26-27).

Again, the author selects a new set of imagery, such as stars, moon, sun, ocean, and wood to remind of the heaven in which the speaker used to live, and then to sweep it off right away. The last statement “For nothing now can ever come to any good” (16) finally reinforces the speaker’s loss and unhappiness. In loneliness, the speaker’s love becomes fiercer and more truthful. It is the fierceness and truthfulness that lead the speaker to the last stair of hopelessness. The end of the poem is also the hopeless end of the speaker’s life because of “nothing …good.”

She introduces the metaphor in the first two lines of the poem by saying, ““Hope” is the thing with feathers - / That perches in the soul -” and then builds the poem around the idea of a bird. When Dickinson says, “And sings the tune without the words- / And never stops - at all -” she shows that the hope doesn’t have to be sensible, and it never stops existing in one’s heart. In the last stanza she says, “I’ve heard it in the chillest land - / And on the strangest Sea -”. It is not a possible thing to hear the hope, but in this line she tries to say that that hope is everywhere. Even though the main idea of the poem is hope being in everyone’s heart, the metaphor of hope being a bird is actually what makes the poem more interesting for the

If hope has left, even though it is gone, can it be considered any more present had it never existed? In Cummings Study Guide, the loss of hope experienced was described as both frustrating, and discouraging. This course of thought tends to make the reader sympathetic to the narrator, while he is more clearly depressed and angered rather than just hopeless. Found in these lines of the poem is anapestic meter that quickens the pace at which the reader reads. It contrasts the desperate mood of the poem by giving a sing-song feel to the poem. It contradicts the message sent across and gives off an unsettling feeling Poe is trying to send. In the poem, these multiple mentions of hopelessness and sadness eventually lead the reader to the first occurrence of the refrain: “All that we see or seem / is but a dream within a dream (10-11). Poe references dreams again, and it still represents his powerlessness to help himself escape from his lack of hope. The narrator is overcome by the feeling of everything that he sees and feels, is uncontrollable to him. The narrator feels hopeless and, according to Student Bounty: “Trapped”. The word trapped, adds another element of depth to the narrator’s situation. It shows