Dead Butterfly

Life. Death. Time. The poem “Life” is about how everyone birthed and lives their lives, and then everyone dies one day no matter what. Times runs out for every person on the Earth. This poem reminds me of when my great-grandmother died. She was in her nineties and my family and I thought that she would live longer than she did. It was very sudden and I was shocked at the funeral. I think it was just time for her to let go. It’s hard losing someone who is close with one. The author’s tone is light- hearted and simple. The mood of the poem can make someone feel more comfortable with the thought of death. This essay will show how the author’s tone and the reader’s mood can affect how the poem, “Life” is read.

Annie Dillard’s piece “The Death of the Moth”, is about Dillard being reminded of the death of a moth she observes and how it relates to herself, this piece is a great depiction of the impact of life and death. Dillard describes her surroundings living in a rural area and within her bathroom is a spider which Dillard reminds of a moth that she killed in her past when she sees the web that the spider has spun and how it has caught many bugs including two moths. She is intrigued by the dead moth’s bodies and givings a vivid description of the bodies While describing the moth’s dead torn body she relates it to a personal experience from her past where she watched a moth die with candle two years ago. Dillard described the burning moth in vivid

The second stanza of the poem takes a shift. He urges that they are to die soon and that life is too short while death is forever. In lines 27 to 28, the speaker scares her by saying worms will try to take her virginity if she doesn't sleep with him now. As for the third stanza, the speaker is simplifying what is going to happen when she dies, so why not use up her precious time now?

Life is a constant struggle against the ever present chill of death. Fear, betrayal, and cowardice all stems from life’s distaste of death. Human beings naturally rebuke the unknown, so it is only logical that people fight the inevitability of death. However, most people are ignorant of the reality of one day dying, prompting writer Virginia Woolf to write the essay, “The Death of the Moth”, in order to convey the frailty of life whilst also showing the awesome might of death. In the essay, her main purpose is to show that the moth embodies the human race, and that death is an inevitable fact of life no matter how much the human race struggles to stay alive. Woolf is able to get her purpose across by

After taking bold political action, a young man sets off on a boat to America in order to escape from the oppressive Haitian government. Soon after setting sail and leaving his lover back in Haiti, the lover receives a message from a butterfly. The superstition goes that “The bright ones bring happy news and the back ones warn us of death.”(5). In this instance the butterfly is black and warned the young man's lover of his death. The lover didn’t want anything to do with the butterfly, and “[she] began to run and run so it wouldn't land on [her], but it had already carried it’s news.”(24) The butterfly represents the death of the young man who needs to escape his oppressive society in order to reach a better life in America. If the young mad had not attempted to leave, he would have been thrown in prison and tortured by the government, so he didn’t have much of a

In the last stanza of the poem, this is a realization of the poem where a schoolgirl who is hiding underneath her desk understands the meaning of death, grief, and sadness unlike the society around her. When the schoolgirl says

While the poem speaks of death, the tone is very subtle and joyful because of the multiple imageries of nature through diction such as “bird,” “garden,” and “water.”

Although “The Death of the Moth” seems to be about the struggles of life and death for a moth, it is really about Virginia’s own struggles of seizing her moment. She is caught stuck in her thoughts to write something she can verbalize. It is through these struggles as a writer coming to terms with her own unhappiness, at her abilities to write the adventures of her story. Even if she feels happy and fights to write and express herself, the moth is the picture of that lucid writing. She was visualizing her writings through the moments of seizing what she had already pictured. In this writing, we are seeing her past and present struggles for life and the future.

She turns the point of view of the poem and asks the reader some questions. These questions have a tone of negativity and she has a sense of unfulfillment by asking “what else should I have done” and asking the question that “if everything dies at last and too soon”. This line has a connotative meaning which can conclude that the animal she connected with the most likely died or that she is afraid of death and is depressed. This is supported later on in the poem where she writes a question of what the reader “should do with their wild and precious life”. This level of unfulfillment comes back as she wishes to motivate the reader to go out and follow their dreams because death creeps up on you. The death theme at the end brings in the aspects of nature as whole and that everything

“The Vacuum” Analysis “Grief is the price we pay for love.” – Queen Elizabeth II. As the quote above explains to love something that can die is to welcome pain. The poem, “The Vacuum” focuses on the private aspect of life where one spouse dies leaving the other alone after many years.

The words will get into your soul and bring sorrow and anger to the surface. The word “whiskey” (line 1) shows the father is a drinking man, and the word “dizzy” (line 2) implies the amount of whiskey his father consumes sickens the boy. The boy is young and fragile which plays in the lines of the poem “death” (line 3), “battered” (line 10), “beat” (line 13), and “caked hard” (line 14), are all negative hidden meanings. The word “countenance” (line 7) parallels the mother’s stern disapproval. “Hung” (line 3) is past tense reflecting on an earlier time.

Virginia Woolf’s “Death of a Moth” may, at first glance, seem lackluster; however, her creative and impactful message is brilliantly hidden within symbolism that demands an abstract perspective. She uses imagery to describe a moth and personify its actions in order to present it as a symbol for life. Additionally, pathos throughout her work evokes emotions and prompts the analytical thinking needed to understand her underlying meaning. Thus, Woolf’s analysis about life is composed using symbolism, imagery, and pathos that combine to create a contemplative style and motivational purpose.

In the second stanza of the poem the poet presents the reader with a funeral setting. The mourners are all seated, and a service begins. The poet describes this service as being quite intense ("like a Drum (that) Kept beating—beating"). The intensity of the service causes the poet’s mind to go numb. The numbness represents the death of her mind.

The poems, “I heard a Fly buzz-when I died” and “Because I could not stop for Death” both give details of what the women experienced with death. In “I heard a Fly buzz-when I died” it is safe to say the woman took death with a grim sight calling it a “…Fly…” (12). The fly in the poem can be viewed as death since flies often gather around dead things and death itself. In, “Because I could not stop for Death” the description of the woman’s grave as her “…House…” (17) gives insight as to how comfortable she is in her resting place. A home is usually visualized as a place of warmth and happiness. Although both poems are about death, both poems give different views of death.

The next stanza begins with possibly the most wonderful line in the poem, which speaks to personal survival, joy, and the continuation of life: “You laughed with the spirit of your husband who would toss stars!” (Harjo). Here Harjo uses the metaphor again, this time to compare the widow’s tears to a butterfly, which is both beautiful and fragile. But here, because of the Butterfly Dance, it takes on a special meaning, bringing their daughter into the circle of death and rebirth.