Prior To This Class, I Have Never Heard Elizabeth Bishop’S

      The Victorian form of inquiry coexisted with a desire toward repairing the weakening foundations of faith.  "I write so/of the only truth-tellers now left to God,/The only speakers of essential truth/Opposed to relative, comparative/and temporal truths/...while your common men/lay telegraphs, gauge railroads, reign, reap, dine/ and dust the flaunty carpets of the world/...The poet suddenly will catch them up/With his voice like thunder, - 'This is soul/This is life...(Longman p.1872 lines 858-862,869-875).  Elizabeth recognizes the transition of her society and wonders aloud if they have all missed the point entirely.  She is arguing, in a sense, for sense and for the need to remain accountable to something outside ourselves.

I sat there in my room with tears flowing down my blush pink cheeks. Wondering what was wrong with me, as a salty tear ran along my dried out chapped lips. I thought to myself,” Why am I so miserable? What did I do to deserve this? How am I going to escape this life?” I started to ponder that this was the end of my life, this is how I was going to be, sorrowful. At the lowest point of my life, mother came barging through the door with the look of cavernous concern on her face. She knew that it was time for something to be done, whether I agreed or not.

Throughout the essay “New Perspective” by: Janice E. Fein, she explores in immense detail how she suffered as a child who grew up with a mother that was very ill. She explains the hardships she underwent and expressed how she felt “cheated in life”. As a small child she could only remember her mother walking her to kindergarten once, as she describes in the essay, but after that she could only remember her mother laying in a “massive” and “ugly” hospital bed. As a child, its difficult sometimes to understand and grasp complicated situations like this. Most of the time children only hold one perspective of things, their own. Fein discusses the impact her mother’s illness had on her childhood and how it taught her later on in life when she became

Despite the use of humor, the speaker of “Forgetfulness” establishes both a melancholic and deeply reflective tone in order to analyze both the inevitability of forgetfulness and the heartache that comes with it. Employing humor, Collins appeals to his audience and conveys the universal experience of forgetting memories as you grow older, “well on your own way to oblivion where you will join those / who have even forgotten how to swim and how to ride a bicycle” (18-19). The speaker humorously contradicts the old bicycle cliché that states that once you learn how to ride it, you never forget. According to the speaker, however, you do forget. And if you can forget how to ride a bicycle, you can certainly forget everything else. In no time, you will be blindly sinking into oblivion, and there is nothing you can do to stop it. On the surface, the speaker’s musings appear quite humorous. However, Collins’ words reveal an undeniable truth about the human condition -- that growing older and forgetfulness are inevitable. The speaker continues to emphasize this idea by comparing life itself to an individual trying to remember a book they once read:

Elizabeth Bishop’s poem First Death in Nova Scotia follows a small girl who is introduced to the concept of death for the first time through her cousin, Arthur. Even though the narrator is just a child who is experiencing death for this first time, she is extremely perceptive of her surroundings. The details and language the girl uses to describe the situation illustrates the difficulty the girl is having coming to terms with the idea of death, while also confusing her throughout the poem. The important concepts of death, grief, and loss of innocence are conveyed by Bishop through the encounter the girl is having with death. Bishop’s theme in the poem seems to be that death can be extremely sorrowful yet hard to understand and as such, people deal with these feelings in different ways, even children. The narrator, being a small child, naturally uses distractions in her surroundings and her figurative language to start to understand death at the end of the poem.

As the poem progresses, the misplaced or forgotten items become concepts such as names and ideas, and therefore carry more of an impact. For example, forgetting someone’s name, however not uncommon, can be associated with feelings of embarrassment from the forgettor, and annoyance from the forgotten when they discover that they were not important enough to be remembered. The speaker simply shrugs off these losses because “None of [them] will bring disaster,” as mentioned in line 9. Emotion, often associated with memories is introduced in line 10 when the speaker announces, “I lost my mother’s watch.” An item such as a mother’s watch holds sentimental value, unlike the previously mentioned keys; however, the speaker repeats, “I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster,” (line 15) indicating that the watch was merely a material possession crowded with memories. At this point, the reader recognizes the feeling of missing something associated with greater losses of objects and ideas the speaker regards with more emotional attachment.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder: there can be many different perspectives seen in a poem. One individual could read a poem as depressing and another can perceive it as a new beginning. One’s views rests on individual perspectives. For example, Edgar Allen Poe’s writing is dark and controversial. In my essay I will argue that Poe was not in his right mind and he was driven mad with evidence throughout his short story “The Tell-Tale Heart”.

Elizabeth Bishop is a poet native to Worcester. Her mother was widowed when Elizabeth was merely eight months old, and as a result, slowly fell into a string of mental issues that would cause her to be institutionalized until the end of her life. This resulted in Elizabeth moving in with her grandparents in Nova Scotia at the age of eight before briefly moving back

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.

To start off the analysis, the setting of the entire poem is significant. Though the poem takes place in a house, the atmosphere the house is set in is also important. The month is September which is a month of fall which can be seen as a symbol for decline. It definitely insinuates that the poem is leading towards death. Line 1 has “September rain falls on the house” which gives the feeling of a dark and cold night with a storm on top of that. To further develop that, Bishop gives us the failing light in line 2 to also give us an idea of the grandmother’s struggle. Bishop uses the cyclical theme of changing seasons to show the unending nature of what is transpiring within the

In everyone’s life there is a moment that is so dreadful and horrific that it is best to try to push it further and further back into your mind. When traumatized by death for example it is very natural to shut off the memory in order to self-defense suppresses the awful emotional experience. Very often it is thoughtful that this neglecting and abandoning is the best way to forget. In Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved, memory is depicted as a dangerous and deliberating faculty of human consciousness. In this novel Sethe endures the oppression of self imposed prison of memory by revising the past and death of her daughter Beloved, her mother and Baby Suggs. In Louise Erdrich’s

“Without thinking at all/I was my foolish aunt.”(48-49) , In “One Art” Elizabeth compares herself to her aunt. When her aunt cried out from the dentist office she felt her as a fullish women, but because she is reacting In a similar way to the magazine, she compares her aunts foolishness to her own. It was an unexpected realization that her reactions connected her to her aunt in a way she never felt before in her six years. “Lose something everyday. Accept the fluster/of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.”(48-49), The speaker wants to show us that theres nothing you can do but to accept you will lose things and to not let it get to you. In the poem her losses begin as insignificant objects that can be replaced but then she escalates her poem by significant losses like people, places, and homes. Its as if shes telling you to accept it, but she implicitly is showing us that shes not over her losses. She wants everyone to believe shes fine but we as the readers are not buying it.

Her diction is strong, confident, and unweathering. In the second stanza, the speaker introduces the first item that isn’t difficult to lose and reminds readers of the daily life hassles of finding lost keys. This is the first example of something in life that is easily lost for her. She further backs it up her original statement by saying that their intent is “to be lost” (3), saying that things are meant to be lost, no matter what happens. She instructs the audience to “lose” and “accept” (4), which suggests that she has gone through loss before and it would be better to accept losing things since it would not hurt as much. She then instructs the audience to “practice” (7) losing, so her heart will not be crushed when the audience is accustomed to losing. By line 6, the speaker gets frantic. Her words become careless and the words take a sort of rhythm. She says “losing farther, losing faster”. The alliteration in this line emphasizes how much and how fast she has lost that it is in a place so unreachable at this point. She then loses “places, and names, and where it was [she] meant / to travel” (8-9). She lost more important things, but they were bearable.

Although it appears that her love towards her husband eclipses everything else, Elizabeth ends this poem with the acknowledgement that it's God's will if this perfect love continues after death. This recognition of God's supremacy, typifies the fervent, Christian beliefs which colored and shaped her ideals of love. This poem to me, symbolizes the purest form of love between husband and wife. Although you could argue that it is written from a selfish perspective, in that she only speaks of her love, her feelings-you have to bear in mind that in Victorian society, women lived their lives solely through their husbands.

In 2013, my mother was very ill and had to travel interstate for life saving treatment. It was a very long year, and it forced the development of my independence and self-direction, given my family’s focus on my Mum’s illness.