The Prodigal Essay

In “The Outsiders”, the speaker of the novel is a fourteen year-old fellow named Ponyboy who is the narrator and the youngest member of the greasers. S.E. Hinton wrote the novel in the 1960s in Tulsa, Oklahoma during the time of class struggle in society. The novel was intended to relate to young teens and adults who have experienced the troubles and unfortunate situations in the story. The author is referring to the poor and their daily struggles. The author explains the harshness of the greaser’s life and shows empathy for them. The author tells the truth as it is and doesn’t blur the reality. The author wants the audience to understand the predicaments and relate to it. “The Outsiders” by S.E. Hinton is a fiction novel that represents social

In Julia Alvarez’s poem “On Not Shoplifting Louise Bogan’s The Blue Estuaries”, the poet uses poetic devices to convey the speaker’s discovery of a poem that catches her attention so much that she feels a rush of excitement that wants to hold on to as long as she can. She discovers about herself how captivated she can be from a poem and how she would even shoplift to keep the rush. The exciting tone is revealed through the entrancement of the girl.The smooth, calming imagery shows how impacted she was by the poem and how uncertain she was about her situation. The selection of detail shows how the book was unique and how she eventually saw who she was becoming.

Small details are instrumental in seeing the bigger picture. This is apparent when reading “The Fish” by Elizabeth Bishop. Most often the reader experiences visual imagery in poetry. In this poem the reader encounters visual, auditory, and sensory imagery. “The Fish” is filled with minute details that paint a picture for the reader. With each new element that is introduced, it becomes easier to visualize the fish. The speaker is able to show the reader the beauty as well as the ugliness of this creature with her vivid imagery. The imagery used is so distinct that the reader can envisage being the fisherman and catching this fish. Another important element involved in this poem is irony.

“Fear has two meanings-forget everything and run or face everything and rise. The choice is yours”(Quotations and Quotes). Johnny Cade chose to forget everything and run, but soon realized running didn’t help him forget the past. In The Outsiders, Johnny goes through the heroic journey by the fact that he faces a harsh reality that brings him to committing an act he never thought he would, which in the end led him to becoming a hero. His story starts with tragedy and ends with it as well. The tragedy he faced, gave him strength.

In the romantic era, British authors and poets focused on nature and its influence. Two of those poets, Charlotte Smith and William Wordsworth, wrote many pieces on the beauty of nature and their personal experiences with the beaches of England. In “Far on the sands” and “It is a beauteous evening,” Smith and Wordsworth describe their respective experiences on the shore at sunset. Both authors use structure, theme, allusions, and imagery to effectively convey their perceptions of nature. While the sonnets share a setting and the topics of nature and tranquility, Smith’s has a focus on introspection and Wordsworth’s is centered around religion. These have different focuses which achieve different effects on the reader.

The poem, “Gospel” by Philip Levine gives a vivid description of what the narrator sees around them. The narrator focuses their description on nature. They make many references to types of plants like lupine and thistles. Throughout the poem, nature can be seen as and abstract creature. Nature is giving and lively. The conflict in the poem is between the speaker and nature. The narrator tries to show how nature can give nice outdoor views and how the earth gives people a place to walk on while people give nothing back to nature. Levine’s speaker uses repetition and comparisons to show how nature is constantly pleading for the narrators attention yet they cannot offer anything to the relationship they have with nature. The poem slowly evolves

Analyzing different mediums can enhance an individual’s overall appreciation and understanding of a particular idea or story. While analysis of a painting can reveal the mood of the artwork, an analysis of a poem can reveal the author’s tone. Much more then that, analysis provides an opportunity to explore each work in an attempt to understand human nature through each author’s perspective. While exploring the painting “Ulysses and the Sirens” by J.W. Waterhouse and the poem “The siren song” by Margaret Atwood, a universal truth presents itself. While the painting focuses on the thematic idea of Odysseus being stubborn while his men care for his safety to get home, the poem holds a different view. In contrast, the thematic statement from the poem discusses the idea that the Siren hates singing and being in a bird suit, but is asking for help but it’s still tempting to hear the song. Although differing in point of view, both the painting and the poem explore an aspect of human nature that are relevant to society today. There are two different authors for the painting and the poem. However, the two are different when compared to each

How many problems could a greaser in the 1960’s gone through, and how bad could they have been “ The Outsiders”? The author S.E. Hinton had a very strong connection with this book because she wrote at the age of 15 and was there in the middle of the conflict with the greasers and Socs. She also based the characters in the book off of real people.The name of this book is The Outsiders and was written by S.E. Hinton.The main characters in this book are Ponyboy Johnny and Dally and also includes the rest of the gang. The Outsiders is a book about two boys who are a part of a greaser gang. They get jumped by Socs Johnny kills one of them runs away and ends up dying but Pony end up having a better life.In the book The Outsiders Ponyboy runs into some problems with the law, his friends, and family. Even Though he goes through these things, the novel shows how problems can make you stronger.

Atwood’s “Death of a Young Son by Drowning” perfectly grasps the life-altering heartbreak that occurs after the loss of a child by utilizing literary devices such as imagery, personification, simile, and metaphor. In the poem, an image of a voyage is used to characterize a child’s journey from life to death. “The dangerous river”, is used as a metaphor to describe the birth canal which the child victoriously navigates, but after embarking upon the outside world, the child goes into a “voyage of discovery” (4) that results in his death in the river. “On a landscape stranger than Uranus” (14) emphasizes the estrangement felt by the mother without having any knowledge of the environment. Comparing it to Uranus she describes it to be just as strange as a another planet. In the ninth stanza, the mother reminisces the death of her child as she says, “My foot hit rock” (26) which is a representation that she has hit rock bottom and her life will now never be the same. The final simile of the poem, “I planted him in his country / like a flag” (28-29) identifies the relationship between the dead child and the land. It ties the mother to the land in a way that had not been thought of, a way that is fraught with grief. An extended metaphor is developed throughout the poem, comparing the experience of giving birth that the character had, to a river and its contents. It helps to understand the different stages of birth by expressing the hurricane of emotions, and incidents that occurred with the use of waves expressing times of difficulty and pain.

Roethke describes Jane in terms of flowers and birds; he reveals her joy and sadness through natural things. These earthly things also reveal the speaker's sadness at Jane's death. Jane's lost presence and Roethke's sorrow receive expression through the concrete world.

In Julia Alvarez’s poem, On Not Shoplifting Louise Bogan’s The Blue Estuaries, she is able to use imagery, specific selection of detail and tone in order to convey the speaker’s discovery. Throughout this poem, the speaker is meerely in a bookstore and comes upon a book, “Your book surprised me on the bookstore shelf- swans gliding on a blue black lake.” There is a clear use of imagery when the speaker describes what the book looks like, “the swans posed on a placid lake.. Blurred underwater sinking to the bottom,” you can clearly imagine what it is that the speaker tells readers about what they are reading, they say “words rose, breaking the surface, shattering an old silence.”

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.

In “To Paint a Water Lily”, Hughes illustrates the process of an artist observing nature at a pond and painting a lily. While the speaker thoroughly observes all kinds of scenes in the pond, the painter only focuses on the lily. At the end of the poem, the painter resolves on painting only the lily, ignoring the other aspects of the pond. The speaker critiques the painter’s lack of attention to the surrounding and the desire to capture only the beautiful part of the pond. The poem contrasts the beauty and the violence created by the creatures around the lily and conveys that the calm appearance of the pond is not necessarily the reality.

This poem seems like it means more, but it reveals less and less meaning in the man’s life and death. The reader wants his life to have meaning or a lesson, but it does not. The poem does not give us the satisfaction of a conclusion that gives the man’s life real meaning. It just sputters out, and blabs empty words. The poem continually means less the further it goes and after his death. It just becomes emptier and emptier like the man’s life. The reader expects that the ending would have a serious discussion of what the man’s life meant, but there is nothing. Usually, there is some final line in most poems that gives the reader closure and drives us to the ending. Instead, we have words that do not mean anything and get in the way like “pow, awk, and bop” (34-35). “Big dipper” and “summer rain” sound like song lyrics but they are given no meaning or context (34-35). The last line repeats the word “bong” that sounds like a ring of church bells to signify his death (36). Even in end, the man gets no name as the bell

Pastoral poetry is a lyric poem that idealizes nature while criticizing urban life.These two pastoral poems are example of the contrast between the easygoing countryside and the hustle bustle of a city. In the famous pastoral poetry, “The Passionate Shepherd to his love,” the Shepherd happily describes the beautiful natural image of a perfect life. He wholeheartedly believes that love is always joyful and nothing can ruin the serenity. This poem is criticized for its deluded perspective by the Nymph in a taunting way. She mocks his fantasy life that has everlasting flowers, melodious birds and finest wool gown. The Nymph’s view on her ideal love is infinite, nonmaterialistic and realistic which contradicts the Shepherd’s view on ideal love—youthful, acquisitive, and blinding; these incompatible views tear a relationship into pieces especially when the problem is addressed in a cynical tone.