Cereus Blooms At Night Analysis

Death is something that at some point will come to each of us and has been explored in many forms of literature. “The Raven” and “Incident in a Rose Garden” are two poems that explore common beliefs and misconceptions about death. Though both poems differ in setting, tone, and mood there are surprising similarities in the literary tools they use and in the messages they attempt to convey. The setting and mood establish the tone and feel of a poem. In “The Raven” we are launched into a bleak and dreary winters night where a depressed narrator pines for his dead girlfriend.

When Frances Cornford wrote “The Watch”, she must have been in an unbelievably dark place; the poem is downright depressing. However, regardless of the macabre nature of the poem, it is executed in supreme fashion, and creates a real sense of dread in the reader. Cornford, a granddaughter of Charles Darwin, was not a particularly popular poet. However, in “The Watch”, she manages to convey a powerful message to the reader, and demonstrates her poetic skill in stride. The theme of this intriguing poem appears to simply be ‘Memento mori’, a reminder to the reader that death is inevitable and inescapable. Cornford conveys this message to the reader using an arsenal of literary devices, most notably the mood, tone, symbolism, and epizeuxis.

“O yes, he seemed to say, death is stronger than I am.” This is the last sentence of Virginia Woolf’s essay, The Death of the Moth, in which Woolf describes to her readers the cycle of life and the struggles that she faced because of the psychological issues that she possessed. There are various correlations between the moth in Woolf’s essay and her own personal life. What exactly is interpreted by the actions of the moth and the events that occur is a matter of opinion. One may ponder the question, “why had Woolf chosen to write about a moth, instead of a more intriguing subject that relates to her life?” What, if any, significance does the moth have towards Woolf? While these questions may leave a reader unsatisfied or perplexed, Woolf

In this essay, I will be while answering the questions from prompt one, “How and why does the protagonist's attitude toward her own situation change over the course of the story? How and why does she paradoxically become more alive and powerful after she “dies”?”, to complete Journal Assignment One. I will be discussing the short story by Margaret Atwood, titled “Lusus Naturae”.

The poem “Thanatopsis” by William Cullen Bryant reveals a very unusual aspect of nature. While most people think of nature as beauty and full of life, Bryant takes a more interesting approach to nature. He exposes a correlation between nature, life, death, and re-birth. Using nature as a foothold, Bryant exercises methods such as tone, setting, and imagery in a very intriguing way while writing “Thanatopsis.”

Explore any primitive culture and you are likely to unearth taboos about death. Whether universal or not, there appears to be a propensity for not saying aloud those thing that will attract the attention of bad spirits, the evil eye, or the grim reaper. Looking away from evil is believed to keep one safe from harm. It is no wonder then, that the superstitious behavior of humans extends to death as if it were an unnatural event instead of a completely natural milestone albeit, the final one in a life. Doubtless, there are times when people could be more sensitive to the harbingers of death, as John Updike intimates in his poem Dog's Death. Fiction, fantasy, and film are chock-a-block full of images representing death. Even the beloved The Christmas Carole tells the story of a present in which Marley is dead and spirits escort Scrooge to a season in the future in which Scrooge is absent. So, too, Jean Rhys takes her character into the future. In analyzing, comparing, and contrasting these two literary works, we can see that the human tendency is not to acknowledge mortality, but rather to live with the incomprehensibility of death by ignoring it as fervently, studiously, and deliberately as we are able to, right up until the point when death is irrefutably imminent or has irrevocably occurred. This paper will analyze the content, form, and style of Dog's Death by John Updike and I Used to Live Here Once by Jean Rhys.

In the poem “Thanatopsis” by William Cullen Bryant, he uses many literary devices such as personification, symbol, and simile to reveal the meaning of the work. The meaning of the poem is most easily stated that, people should approach death pleasantly. With each device Bryant uses, he intricately places them in the writing as well as has them frame the poem. This is what makes “Thanatopsis” so easy to understand even though the author is using such cultured ideas. His ability to portray the meaning through these devices shows the sophistication of his writing as well as his thoughts. By using these literary devices, the audience better comprehends how vital it is to learn the meaning.

Emily Dickinson’s poem, “465 I Heard a Fly Buzz—when I died—”, uses its form to emphasize the distracting elements in a human’s life. In the case of this poem, the appearance of multiple caesuras throughout the poem asserts the distractions the speaker is experiencing. With the help of the caesuras, the readers get to experience death as real life and not like as it is seen in the movies and this shows that distractions are around us at all time. Along with caesuras, Dickinson structures her poem with four stanzas. Each stanza represents the speaker getting closer and closer to death. the third stanza, however, there is a shift. In addition to caesuras, the shift brings in to play the element of distraction, which is the main theme of the poem.

Emily Dickinson is considered to be one of the greatest poets of figurative language and imagery. I found her poem “Because I could Not Stop for Death” to be an exemplary illustration of those forms of writing. Enlaced with the personifications of Death, Immortality, and Eternity; Dickinson reaches into the depths of the reader’s psyche and transports them on a journey into her world of life after death. In this essay, I will attempt to show that due to certain event that occurred towards the end of her life that death’s arrival; although premature, was a welcomed relief and set the tone of the poem. The negative attributes that are normally associated with the arrival of death are replaced with a memorable carriage ride to meet the narrator’s eternity. The figurative writing within the poem leaves plenty of room for different interpretations of its meaning; however, Dickinson leave many key indicators within the symbolism and figurative language of the poem to convey a clear understanding, that is once you analyze all the facts.

Time’s inconsistent form is captured by variations in the meter as the poem progresses. The meter in the first line of the third stanza “Man disavows, and Deity disowns me” (9) adheres to the format of a dactyl followed by four trochees. Man’s disavowal of the narrator renders his life terminable, putting an end to his time on earth. The repetition of assonance with “dis” in “disavows” and “disowns” with a sound that means an absence of something is quite contradictory, thus creating a void of what death might be. The stress placed on “Man” lingers on this disavowal, as the “Soul” travels from transience to eternity.

A wild and untameable force of nature, the sea can represent a multitude of abstract ideas, most, if not all, can be applied to “Annabel Lee.” Seas or oceans are often signs of death because of their ferocious qualities and humankind’s inability to fight against an ocean-borne disaster. This interpretation of the sea being a harbinger of death fits when looking at the later stanzas of the poem, when they “shut her up in a sepulchre / … by the sea,” or when the speaker lays down in death to join her in “her tomb by the sounding sea,” (19-20, 41). That interpretation doesn’t fit, on the other hand, in the earlier stanzas when the speaker reminisces about the childhood he spent with Annabel. Rather, the interpretation of timelessness and eternity fits much better with the depictions of youth.

What a tragedy and relieve it is that Death can lure and heist away the hearts of our love ones and eradicate the individuals we despise. Differences in love and hate is what separates one’s consuming devotion and/or fueled distaste towards others. Whether we come to love someone or grow to loathe them exceptionally, Death will inevitably seduce them away into the fading night—of that is certain—often leaving individuals mourning or with a sense of release. Life and Death have been in love since the formation of the stars and galaxies, perpetually exchanging beautiful creatures as a sign of affection. Death can either work in one’s favor or work against it. There’s never quite an in between for humanity. In “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “Annabel Lee” by Edgar Allan Poe, one can behold the contradistinctions and similarities between the collapse of Anabelle Lee and the old man through the incorporation of unifying themes, symbols, and other literary elements.

William Cullen Bryant's poem “Thanatopsis” is centered around the theme of death. Bryant manages to keep the poem joyful and uplifting trying to help young readers understand that death is unavoidable. He is able to convey the idea of death by comparing it to nature and making it much less threatening. Death is a part of the circle of life and nature is full of examples to reinforce this idea.

The poem ‘Lost Woman’ by Patricia Beer is about the speaker losing her mother and then creating an image of her mother who goes onto become her muse. The speaker evokes mixed feelings in the reader’s heart and creates a strong contrast in the poem. The contrast is brought out through the use of sounds, juxtaposition, structure, metaphors, visual imagery, caesura and diction. The poet employs juxtaposition right from the start to bring out the contrast of emotions the persona felt when her mother died.

In Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night, nature is as interwoven into the narrative as the characters themselves, and the character in whom nature comes alive most fervidly is the town's alleged mad woman, Mala Ramchandin. This “madness” originates from Mala’s childhood, when her mother leaves her and her father begins sexually, physically, and mentally abusing her, and this “craziness” continues after Mala supposedly kills her sadistic father. As a result, Mala's hearsay-loving, scandal-inducing community make her the pariah of their town and the target of their rumors, ostracizing Mala until she retreats into the solace offered by her yard, which she encourages to grow wild by not interfering with it. However, after enduring decades of vicious and demoralizing verbal abuse from her father, peers at school, and the rest of her community, Mala abandons the conventions of language and separates herself from the people who use language as a tool of violence and slander. Mala adopts a method of communication centered around mimicking the sounds of her only companions: singing birds, chirping crickets, among other sounds present in her natural surroundings. With the implementation of vivid insect drawings on the novel's pages and the repetition of nature similes in the language, Mala's true story is finally revealed and brought to life in a manner that encompasses who Mala is in a way that words alone cannot. By doing so, Mootoo rejects the idea of relying