After a Time and Stairway to Heaven

‘Look We Have Come Through! The title of this section suggests a note of hope and faith in human resilience. How far is this reflected in the poems?’

The topic that chosen was to compare the way a short story treats death with the way a poem reveals death. The short story chosen was “The Story of an hour” by Kate Chopin and the poem chosen was “Ballad of Birmingham” by Dudley Randall. They each have their own way of expressing the nature of death.

All times, the disappearance of cherishable beings brings people unbearable agony. Eventually, they cry, and then suffer more heartache, yet the attitudes when confronting a farewell vary dynamically within individuals. In Dylan Thomas’ “Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night” and Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art”, both speakers experience a painful loss. However, while Thomas strongly opposes the undeniable fact of his father’s death process, Bishop reluctantly accepts the departure of her beloved. The two speakers react differently to recover from the ineluctable sadness, to regain inner peace. In the end, the poems’ comparison concludes losing valued relations is distressingly unavoidable, and that there is no ideal way to cope with losses. Therefore,

In the book “A Long Way Gone” music plays a role as a healer and a saviour.

Each individual has a unique way of coping with death, and this is evident throughout Christina Rossetti’s, “Remember” and W. H. Auden’s “Stop all of the Clocks”.

This internal war starts the second that you set foot in this unknown word as a baby, all the way up to the last step you take to say your last goodbyes to this world. The poem begins with a life of a child in whom people around him tended to call the child “...crybaby or poor or fatty or crazy and made [the child] an alien…”(Sexton), and the child “...drank their acid and concealed it.”(Sexton) illustrating how painful it is, not react and take actions,but counseling is the best method the child seemed fit. Furthermore, courage in a person can also cause a war, in which the author shows the imagery, how the child’s “...courage was a small coal that [the child] kept swallowing.”(Sexton) and encouraging to society to make his own future. As an adult, the person endured many difficulties, such as the of enduring “...a great despair…”(Sexton), but you didn’t do it with a companion but rather “...did it alone.”(Sexton) and endured that suffering within yourself. Being an adult is not only passing a time with your loved ones and remembering the ones that sacrificed their time to make you who you are now, from your teachers to your peers to your parents, but to actually live your life the fullest and make each day worth living.Until the last moment that has been waiting since the beginning in which the death “...opens the back door...” and “...[the adult will] put on [his] carpet slippers and stride out.”(Sexton), exemplifying how all you have done, from engulfing the pain given by the society to living your whole life just to see a tear of happiness from seeing your grandchild, will not be taken with you at the moment when you really need it the

In “September, 1918”, Amy Lowell shows her readers an interesting and illuminating poem. That war can be an ugly time and the people that experience it often seems to live in a “broken world” (19). To fight an evil, sometimes war is needed, nonetheless it is still costly to the people living through the war. Some in a literal sense, like soldiers fighting in a war, while some in a physical sense by the world that they now see and live in. I find the poem truly interesting though, in how the author shows that even in war we can still hold onto hope for more promising days. Lowell portrays a melancholy mood throughout her poem that makes her readers thinking about war but also the hope of it being over.

Emily Dickinson is one of the most important American poets of the 1800s. Dickinson, who was known to be quite the recluse, lived and died in the town of Amherst, Massachusetts, spending the majority of her days alone in her room writing poetry. What few friends she did have would testify that Dickinson was a rather introverted and melancholy person, which shows in a number of her poems where regular themes include death and mortality. One such poem that exemplifies her “dark side” is, “Because I Could Not Stop for Death”. In this piece, Dickinson tells the story of a soul’s transition into the afterlife showing that time and death have outright power over our lives and can make what was once significant become meaningless.

Every child needs their parents as a role model in their life. In addition to having a role model one needs a family too. Kids look up to their parents and learn the ways of life from them. Additionally, their parents are there to teach them how to succeed in life and how to grow into nice young men/ women. In the two essays “Superman and Me” by Sherman Alexie portrays what it’s like to not have a parent as a role model ,and “Once More to the Lake” by E.B. White states what having a that perfect parental role model and what it’s like to have a family. While “Once More to the Lake” has a strong family and parental influence, conversely “Superman and Me” tells a whole new story and recounts on what it is like having no family or

Upon everyone’s reunification in heaven they realize that the one thing that paradise is missing is life. They decide that they need to be reborn in order to experience the beauty that is living. Through all of their struggles, they have experienced a myriad of emotions. They have hated life, and yearned for death. Now they look forward towards life with a changed and renewed outlook.

No matter how many times you ask somebody to give you an interpretation of what the song Stairway to Heaven really perseveres, you will get a different answer every time. The song Stairway to Heaven was written by Led Zeppelin in 1971. Throughout all these years, still every time you ask an individual about their interpretation to the song, they will respond differently. The reason being because the songs represents many different values throughout it, but it is your choice to determine about how you choose to have an outlook on it.

When faced with the countless problems of war including death, disease, sorrow, and loss, soldiers develop and intense bond between one another as they seek support in one another. A brotherhood is formed among these soldiers who rely on one another for protection and companionship amid a time in their lives where they are faced with the constant threat of death and violence everyday of their lives. But what happens to them after the war? In After the War, poet brings awareness to how the war-torn soldier attempts to reestablish their self in a society they have been isolated from for so many years through use of free verse and repetitive phrases, which further reinforces the theme throughout the poem.

The songs Who Wants to Live Forever by Queen and Lazarus by David Bowie are two songs that talk about life ending and were both written at the end of each artist's life. However, while their means of describing the end of life and dealing with that are different, they make up two major parts of how almost everyone deals with death; depression and acceptance.

The main audience of the song stairway to heaven was not limited to any particular group or country. The creative diversity of this song seemed to have adopted a broad range of listeners from throughout the globe. The song was open to anyone and everyone, from people who strictly liked the new acoustical factors of the song that had not been prevalent in many song prior, to people who wanted to do some soul searching and analyze the lyrics to better understand themselves through interpretations without having to conform to strict definitions that society had pressed upon heaps of musical works prior and up to the release of this song. The take off of this song was a little shaky because of the new elements and components that Plant and Page added into the instrumentals of the song. All of these new unique parts required the listeners of this song to do some “getting used to”. Your ideal listener to this song is younger people who were trying to navigate their lives through a new system of beliefs and wanted to become detached from the concrete lifestyles of their previous generations. These people wanted to experiment and go beyond the confines of a sheltered routine life and experience life

The Structure, style and poetic techniques of a poem contribute greatly to the development of the central idea of a poem. Three poems with central ideas that stood out to me were ‘The Darkling Thrush’ by Thomas Hardy, ‘Days’ by Philip Larkin, and ‘Remembrance’ by Emily Brontë. The central idea of each of these poems revolve around the idea of time and change. Firstly, I will discuss how in ‘The Darkling Thrush’ the simple and traditional structure, the bleak yet straightforward style and techniques such as vivid imagery and capitalisation combine to develop the central idea of change. The same can be said for the simple structure and style used in ‘Days’ which combine with poetic techniques such as metaphors to develop Larkin’s argument against time and change. Finally I will discuss how the idea of time is developed through techniques such as vivid imagery and symbolism in ‘Remembrance’ along with changing styles and a slow, consistent rhythm.