Analysis of “Prayer” by Carol Ann Duffy

In the first two lines of the poem, Herrera communicates his theme via speaker and half-rhyme. In the speaker’s first appearance, it instantaneously remarks, “Let us celebrate the lives of all/as we reflect & pray & meditate on their brutal deaths” (Herrera, 5-6). The phrase “let us” establishes the speaker’s first-person, collective point of view. While the first stanza objectively lists the names of those injured and killed in recent atrocities, as though to pin blame onto the harmful individuals who caused their pain, the speaker’s collective perspective elucidates the fallacy of this perspective. By associating the whole of society, with the death of some citizenry, Herrera illustrates the all-penetrating nature of the pain caused by the disasters outlined in the poem’s first stanza. The dismal nature of these events does not simply imply the broken nature of a few people, but of society. Subsequently, when Herrera notes the healing practices of reflection, prayer, and meditation (6), he incorporates a half-rhyme between his initial statement, “Let us celebrate” (5), and the word meditate, the final in the list of three. Through his half-rhyme, Herrera suggests healing spiritual practices as a practice for embracing all of humanity as a unified whole, his ultimate solution to progress beyond society’s crossroads. Through these meaningful, beneficial practices, one can shift from having harmful, shallow perceptions and, by abandoning concepts, reach the reality of unity between people necessary for society to progress.

One’s identity may be questioned when suffering; ultimately suffering is what creates one’s sense of self or what destroys it. The poetry of John Donne and the play W;t, 1993, by Margaret Edson, both illustrate and explore a sense of suffering and identity. In John Donne’s poetry, suffering, both emotionally and physically allows the speaker to understand their identity in more depth, in comparison to Margaret Edson’s play, W;t, Vivian’s suffering leads her identity to be stripped away. In Donne’s sonnet, ‘If poysonous mineralls’ we are shown suffering religiously and emotionally, through one’s sin’s, questioning god’s justice, which leads to a realisation of one’s identity. In Margaret Edson’s play, W;t, Vivian’s emotional suffering

The first passage reveals the parallel suffering occurring in the lives of different members of the family, which emphasizes the echoes between the sufferings of the father and the narrator. The narrator’s father’s despair over having watched

BibliographyRomantic Writings: An Anthology, edited by W.R. Owens and Hamish Johnson (1998), The Open UniversityApproaching Poetry, Sue Asbee (2001), The Open UniversityRomantic Writings, edited by Stephen Bygrave (1996), The Open University

1-11) Annie Dillard is an American author born in 1945 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Claiming no religion as her own, she attended Hollins University where she began writing prose and poetry under the guidance of her writing professor, and later husband, R H W Dillard. Her first book, a collection of poems entitled Tickets for a Prayer Wheel, was published in 1974 and details her quest for spiritual knowledge, a reoccurring theme in her works. Her most famous work was published soon after, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. She was awarded the 1975 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction for her work. Her other famous works include Holy the Firm, An American Childhood, The Writing Life, The Living, and The Maytrees. She is currently married to historical

“ In praise of the F word” by Mary Sherry, the author has her point that flunking students is a way that can help students do better in school. Flunking students can be helpful in getting them motivated and lead to success in their education. Students who don’t want to put in effort because they are lazy, a troublemaker, or good student that gets just passed along to next grade deserve to fail. Is it not going to be easy for students to be successful in their education. The students need to try hard to get to their goals. The students have to pass through failure to have the motivation to do better in school. If more students go through the teacher’s threats of failing, the students will want to put in the effort to able

Geraldine Brooks provides a well-written novel. She achieves her goal to deliver an entertaining and informative story by incorporating accurate historical events and personal experiences with the fictional character March. This helps drives the story to create a convincing novel. The element regarding Grace and March enhances the story by creating an ulterior relationship that the reader may create strong feelings towards. Brooks also enhanced the book by including the character Marmee. She represents the women of the period, but unlike most women, Marmee is outspoken and strongly opinionated about the subject of slavery. Overall, the novel is historically based but

In any great work of literature, each action and thought should contribute to the underlying meaning of the entire work. No action should exist for its own sake; it must instead advance the plot and reinforce the symbolism of both the characters’ actions as well as the truth of what the composer or author is trying to convey. This is especially true of acts of violence; great literature must carefully articulate the violence into a logical meaning. Most importantly, violence and acts of extreme passion work best when communicating a character’s inner-struggles as they relate to the motive and effect of each scene and action.

The book, Lament For a Son, written by Nicholas Wolterstorff talks about his pain and grief after losing his 25-year-old son (Joy, 2009). His son died while on a mountain-climbing expedition. Dr. Wolterstorff has several books published during his career as a philosophical theology professor in Yale Divinity. However, he wrote Lament for a Son with a different journal style since it is a personal thing for him. The book is similar to a journal as he narrates the events that happened before and after his son’s death. The emotions expressed in the book are common among people who lose close relatives. What matters is how a person handles the issue. Kubler-Ross invented the five stages of grief; denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptancethat explain the escalation of grief when stricken by bad news (Axelrod, 2004). The paper looks into the book and its relation to the five stages of grief.

“The Psychodynamics of the Family” has greatly resonated in feminist literary theory and psychoanalytical theory. Chodorow’s first edition of The Reproduction of Mothering has been the object of criticism due to shortcomings and its limited view of the family and

This is expressed by the multiple examples of old men whom regret certain aspects of their lives and defy death even when they know their time is up. The speaker is urging his father to fight against old age and death. The meaning and subject of the poem influence the tone and mood. The tone is one of frustration and insistence. Thomas is slightly angry and demanding. His words are not a request, they are an order. The mood of the poem is is serious and solemn due to the poem focusing mainly on the issue of death. This mood and tone is created by words such as “burn”(2), “Grieved”(11) and “rage”(3) along with phrases such as “crying how bright”(7), “forked no lightning”(5), “near death”(13) and “fierce tears”(17). The insistent feeling is also created by the repetition of the lines “Do not go gentle into that good night”(1), and “Rage, rage against the dying of the light”(3). The figurative language used also affect how the meaning, tone and mood are interpreted.

In this stylistic analysis of the lost baby poem written by Lucille Clifton I will deal mainly with two aspects of stylistic: derivation and parallelism features present in the poem. However I will first give a general interpretation of the poem to link more easily the stylistic features with the meaning of the poem itself.

The multiplicity of meanings and (re)interpretations informing critical studies of The Awakening reveal a novel ripe for deconstructionist critique. Just as Chopin evokes an image of the sea as symbolic of Edna’s shifting consciousness (“never ceasing, whispering, clamoring, murmuring, inviting the soul to wander in abysses of solitude,”138), likewise the deconstructionist reading of a text emphasizes fluidity over structure: “A text consists of words inscribed in and inextricable from the myriad discourses that inform it; from the point of view of deconstruction, the boundaries between any given text and that larger text we call language are always shifting,” (297). From this

Love makes people become selfish, but it is also makes the world greater. In this poem, the world that the speaker lives and loves is not limited in “my North, my South, my East and West / my working week and my Sunday rest” (9-10), it spreads to “My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song (11). The poem’s imagery dominates most of the third stanza giving readers an image of a peaceful world in which everything is in order. However, the last sentence of the stanza is the decisive element. This element not only destroys the inner world of the speaker, but it also sends out the message that love or life is mortal.

Psychoanalytic film theory, which is derived from Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, appears in the discussion of cinema early in the 1970s. As the conjunction of psychoanalysis and film theory, scholars use this theory for textual analysis and different elements like the monstrous-feminine, mirror stage identification, and the Oedipus complex are concluded and developed. To reexamine the mother-child relationship, I will argue that these key elements of psychoanalytic film theory are useful to understand the psychic activities of protagonists of Black Swan and The Babadook. Additionally, they provide some evidence to explain the mode of how a mother gets along with her child. I will begin by discussing the term