Falling Snow In Desert Places

Chapter ten of How to Read Literature Like a Professor explains the important role weather plays on literature. For instance, snow is not just snow in a novel. It symbolizes so much more in both positive and negative ways; it is stark, filthy, playful, and clean, and you can do just about anything with it. In “The Dead,” Joyce breaks his main character down until he can look out at the snow, which is “general all over Ireland,” and then the reader realizes snow is like death. It paints the image that “upon all the living are the dead.”

Similarly, Frost also uses descriptive adjectives to portray a significant moment in time, which creates imagery for the reader. In “Stopping by a Woods on a Snowy Evening” Frost uses the rule of three by listing the adjectives “lovely, dark and deep”. This, along with the alliteration in “dark and deep” creates a powerful image of the woods. By doing this, Frost is being metaphorical as the woods themselves represent solidarity and peace “He will not see me here” the personal pronoun “he” meaning society or God. Essentially, Frost is saying that when one steps out of life’s routine, it can be “lovely, dark and deep” which comes across as mysterious and unusual. It could also be said that because the three adjectives used are simple, they can be accessible for anyone to relate to.

In The Outsiders, S.E. Hinton emphasizes on the weather description to lead the readers to foreshadow approaching events. "Ain't you about to freeze to death, Pony?" (Hinton, 47) It was a frigid fall night, the boys were desolate in the local park. Once an author establishes coldness and loneliness, the mood drops to death. According to literary symbolism, in winter, death roams the land, the literary use for the season is generally based on death and deterioration.

One of the more beautiful things about nature is that it is constantly changing and hold so many mysteries that we don’t understand. Each day brings new beauties and scenes that weren’t there yesterday. Having grown up on the east coast might have caused me to have a greater appreciation for all of the seasons, but one of my favorite things about season is being able to witness the changing over form one to the next. How each plant knows that the change is coming and they all magically start to prepare themselves for the new setting they’re going to create. The romantics capture the mysteries of nature in some of the most beautiful poetry. They delve deep into the possible meanings of what nature could be attempting to tell us or simple what they find beautiful about what they see in nature. One piece that stuck with me this quarter was The Snow Storm by Ralph Waldo Emerson. Winter has always been one of my favorite season since I was a little girl and have always anxiously awaited that first snow fall, dreaming of a white Christmas that year. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s The Snow Storm brought back nostalgic memories of snow filled days in my childhood and made me appreciate having actually experienced snow in real life and the beauty

* A Farewell to Arms - Ernest Hemingway uses snow to symbolize safety rather than death because in chapter 2 snow is what stops the fighting that had started in the first chapter.

Throughout the text, Michael mentions the snow. Considering the book’s about a blizzard, that’d be normal, right? However, in my view, the snow symbolizes something, like dreadful times. Scattered around, the context surrounding the snow can be interpreted as how you feel during those times. For example, later in the book, when the students realize just how bad it is, they explain it as, “There was no higher ground, no place left for us to go”(Northrop 158). Here, a relation to people feeling as if there’s nowhere else to go, so they’re trapped in the horrible event occurring can be made. Results tend to be mourning over those poor times in people’s lives. Similarly, Michael connects that to how we view bad situations. Early on in the book, description of the snow is showed as it being “small flakes”, “like grains of sugar… the flakes had fattened up and

The tone of the speaker in "Desert Places" is opposite of "Stopping by Woods", the speaker is much more bothered by his emotions and portrays a deep dark depressing mood. As the snow throws its blanket of whiteness over everything, to the speaker, it is a feeling of numbness. "The loneliness includes me unawares" (line 9). The speaker has lost his passion for life and is also in denial about feeling alone. He is at a stage where he just does not care about too much and he is feeling a bit paranoid. "They cannot scare me with their empty spaces" (line 13). He is saying who cares how I feel; I do not need anyone else. "I have in me so much nearer home/ To scare myself with my own desert places" (line 15-16). The speaker was starting to realize that he had shut himself off to the world. He recognized that this winter place was like his life. He had let depression and loneliness creep in and totally take over like the snow that had crept up on the woods and covered it. If he continues to let these feelings run

Throughout the film ‘Snow Falling on Cedars’ the director Scott Hicks has used symbolism to convey a number of his ideas. He used the fog and snow to symbolise hidden secrets, the sea to represent life and death, and he used the Cedars to symbolise a place of secrecy and protection. By using these three symbols, Scott Hick’s ideas could be conveyed without anything being said at all.

     In the poem Desert Places by Robert Frost, the author describes the scenery in which he came across with. It was on a winter day, and the day was turning into a night. As he went across a field, he saw that the ground was almost all covered in snow. But then he noticed a few weeds and stubble on the ground.

In “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”, Frost describes a thick patch of woods that are a long way from anything. He does not go into great detail describing them, leaving that to the reader’s imagination. He merely describes them as “lovely, dark and deep.” This lack of detail is to help us focus not so much on all the things that are there, as the things that aren’t. He mentions that the horse must be thinking that this is strange to stop here, with no barn near. The only thing that is nearby is nature. The lake is frozen and the trees and ground are covered with snow. During a snowstorm, sound does not travel very well. It is very muddled and muted. The only sounds that are mentioned in the poem are the bells on the horse’s harness and the wind. So, the rider is stopping to smell the roses. He is taking a break from the world around

In the second stanza it is the semantic field of cold: ‘winter’, ‘ice’, ‘naked’, ‘snow’. All these lexical items give us a feeling of cold which evokes loneliness, unknown, fear.

Coupled with his depiction of Dublin’s immobile status through his characters, James Joyce also exemplifies his theme of paralysis through snow. In Daniel R. Schwarz’s psychoanalytic criticism of The Dead, he explains that “the snow imagery focuses our attention on a world outside Gabriel…where as ice, it suggests the emotional sterility of a world reduced to social gestures, empty talk, and loveless relationships” (Schwarz 123). However, I disagree with Schwarz and believe that James Joyce uses snow to symbolically represent the cold and dead Dublin due to its uncertain political period. When Gabriel first enters his aunt’s party, “A light fringe of snow lay like a cape on the shoulders of his overcoat and like toecaps on the toes of his galoshes; and as the buttons of his overcoat slipped with a squeaking noise through the snow-stiffened frieze, a cold fragrant air from out-of-doors escaped from crevices and folds” (The Dead 23). This symbolism comes back at the end of The Dead through Gabriel’s later thoughts on how the snow “was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills…falling upon every part of the lonely churchyard,” and touching both the living and the dead, symbolizing that not only Gabriel, but his entire country, both the living and the lifeless had been united in

In the case of “Snow in Midsummer” we may notice a somewhat paradoxical view on

Robert Frost’s poem “Desert Places” diminishes an overall sense of emptiness to being nothing compared to what he holds within himself through the use of connotative diction. Throughout the poem, the description of a cold, dark night is meant to represent the intensity of the depression that Frost was feeling. In the final stanza, Frost reveals that “I have it in me so much nearer home, To scare myself with my own desert places”, “it” being the darkness previously mentioned in the poem. The “desert places” introduced in the final line are a representation of the dark emotions Frost was experiencing, and

Frost’s use of alliteration, personification, and imagery definitely conveyed the speaker’s attitude towards the woods. The reader believes Frost wrote about the woods to show how peaceful and calming it is in an isolated place such as the woods. Most people live in crowded neighborhoods or over-populated places, but living in a secluded area decreases the stress of others outside their household. Because of how isolated the woods are, they can worry about themselves compared to worrying and stressing on the outside