Still Life In Landscape Sharon Olds Analysis

These two poems are written by poets with completely different social statuses. This differing factor leads to two completely different perspectives on the

Sharon Olds was born on November 19, 1942 and raised in Berkeley, California to a strict, religious family. Her father was abusive and her mother was not protective; so much of her early life became characterized by extreme restrictions. After earning her BA from Stanford and her Ph.D from Columbia, she began writing poetry free of traditional conventions. Thus, she was able to develop her own poetry style and explored personal topics from family life to more taboo subjects such as sex. Across all subjects, her poetry is known for its accessibility to all audiences and its raw, honest storytelling.

Sharon Olds was born in San Francisco on November 19, 1942. At age fifteen, she was sent to a boarding school in Massachusetts. Many of her poems focus on difficult childhood and the body. As Olivia Laing, literary critic of several literary novels and publications, says, “The physical body is a document of being, physical experience is the primary mode of forming, and physical contact is the primary human relationship.” Like Whitman, Olds celebrates the body in its pleasures and pains. She is a contemporary poet who focuses on autobiographical poems mostly of sexual or violent nature and personal experience. She particularly resonates with women readers and women’s connections with family members and lovers of the past and present through physical, sexual, and emotional means. She writes frequently about her sadistic, alcoholic father and victimized mother. Her dysfunctional family plays an enormous role in her poetry, especially in “The Day They Tied Me Up.” This poem is inspired by true events and the feelings and emotions felt by the poet during a memorable aspect of her childhood.

Winter is a very interesting person to say the least. A reader will easily forget that she is just 16 years old. She is the poster child for a parent’s worst fears of how their children will turn out. She has no respect for herself. She started to have sex at a very young age and used her body to get what she wanted from men.

However, “After Making Love in Winter” had a totally different mood and storyline than “First Thanksgiving”. Sharon Olds took this story and used it to describe what a sexual encounter was like and the emotions that came along with it. She used a woman who was experienced sexually, but did not care that she was actually committing a sin and actually embraced what came from these type of acts. This woman went through a spiritual journey trying to pin point what it was really like for her following this sexual act between her and a man. The poem started off with the speaker describing how her body felt using the terms “flying rapidly without moving and slowly I cool off” (Poetry Foundation Editors) speaks to how her adrenaline was rushing and she was not really calm. She seemed to be very overwhelmed with this at first and uncomfortable, but her tone began to change through the experience. Once they actually committed to the sexual act that was when the speaker relaxed and enjoyed what was happening to her. She spoke of when their bodies touched it felt like “blooms of fire” which could state of how well their sexual

Major events in a person’s life have a long lasting impact on them and help them to become the person they are today. These events help provide them with inspiration for their art. Artists and poets alike use their own lives as inspiration for their works. Sharon Olds is no exception to this statement. Sharon Olds is one of the nation’s finest contemporary poets, and in order to see why Sharon Olds’s poetry is so profound, it is necessary to understand the events that shaped Sharon Olds as a person herself. These events are all featured in the majority of her writings. Sharon Olds’s strong Calvinist upbringing, her divorce, and her alcoholic father are all mirrored in her poetry.

Sharon Olds is an American poet who wrote about her family experiences, abuse, and sexual encounters. Olds offered powerful images of love and life in both the “First Thanksgiving” and “Still Live in Landscape” poems. These poems are tremendously similar in many ways, however, Olds includes one key difference which sets the two poems apart.

¨Those Winter Sundays¨ by Robert Hayden and ¨Snapping Beans¨ by Lisa Parker are two different narrative poems that share the same theme. Similarly both poems consist of a speaker being affected by the relationship they have with their elders. In ¨Those Winter Sundays¨ the speaker tells us about his hardworking father who takes care of his kids even though he may come off as a harsh father. The speaker of ¨Snapping Beans¨ is a granddaughter who discusses about the change that she is going through but is afraid to tell the person that raised her. Therefore this essay compares the two poems with respect to the speaker's feelings and morals.

The poetry is a unique way to express the feelings, tell the story or just entertain others. It has been around for a long time. It was developing and expanding throughout the civilized man-kind life. There are many topics discussed using poetry, but some of them are mostly preferable. For example, God, nature or relationship are the things that are often seen in the ancient poetry as well as a modern poetry. George Soutar claims that the Greeks were moderns in their thought that nature is wholly indifferent to man. This view handicapped the introduction of external na-ture as an emotional element (Kofoid 73). The truth is that the poetry primarily draws connec-tions between human existence and the outside world. In the poem, the nature can be introduced as a person’s world or as an outside world. “Lake Ice” by Sara Quinn Rivira is a tiny story that, actually, holds a lot of information about the protagonist and her “first marriage” experience. The poem focuses on the nature introduced as a person’s world where the protagonist is shown as

A point of commonality is found between these two writes from a female’s poetic perspectives. Susan Wheeler and Sharron Olde write about an experience with a gender bias. Wheeler uses setting and imagery to set up her theme that shares an experience of what being Frosted could be like and how the voice in her poem experiences it. She defines a quintessential standard that is becoming of her readers. What is not known is if this is the experience of the writer or a viewed experience she was writing? When examining "After Making Love in Winter" by Sharron Oldes, it is clear to be an experience that she is writing. Although Sharron also uses setting and imagery in setting up her theme, it is distinctly known in the first line use of the word “ I " that she is revisiting and telling of personal life experience. Both Sharron and Susan capture the essences of the human experience in these poems. The sources of from which they derive there thematic statements could not be more different. Dissimilar styles and diverse executions add their poetic works as prodigies to cornucopia postmodern

Within many poems in “Experience” images of religion are juxtaposed to those of “dew” which represents materialism. This is used to show the corruptness of the images of the Church and religion as being simple and ever-present. Throughout the “songs of Innocence” there are not many ongoing themes, there is only one on-going theme, that of the Church being ever-present. In “Experience” many other themes are present, such as materialism, giving a more complex image.

The imagery in “Sex Without Love” is strong. In the beginning of the poem she describes the act, “Beautiful as dancers, / gliding over each other” (Lines 2-3). This phrase sheds a positive light on the act and possibly attracts readers towards this act. It is almost as if Olds longs to perform this sexless act herself. The idea that this act is “beautiful” is soon abandoned in the lines to follow. Olds says they are “like ice-skaters / over the ice” (Lines 3-4). This makes a cold image in the reader’s mind. This is the first time Olds compared this loveless act to being cold. These dancers and ice-skaters are no more than performers, trying to complete a task or put on a show. When Olds uses the metaphor of, “faces / red as steak, wine, wet as the / children at birth whose mothers are going to / give them away” (Lines 5-8). This portrays an image of someone who is giving up the most important part of childbirth, keeping and loving your child. This relates right back to sex without love because the two partners are not getting the most important thing out

Poets use many ways when they want to communicate something using poems. Poems are used as a means of passing ideas, information and expression of feelings. This has made the poets to use the natural things and images that people can relate with so that they can make these poems understandable. The most common forms of writing that are used by the poets are the figurative language for example imagery and metaphors. In addition, the poets use the natural landscape in their attempt to explore the philosophical questions. Therefore, this essay will explore the forms that have been used by the poets in writing poems using the natural landscape. The essay will be based on poems such as ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’ by

The two poems of “The Passionate Shepherd” and “The Nymph’s Reply” show contrasting views on love, nature, time, and the material world. “The Passionate Shepherd” shows more about a positive and naive view while in contrast, “The Nymph’s Reply” is more about a negative and realistic view. The shepherd gave details that idealized the natural world while the nymph criticized his ideal world.

Time and form, are perhaps the two things that mankind had tried to control since the dawn of time. However, it has always been a struggle to achieve such thing, since both are natural forces that we cannot control, nor can we create out of thin air. It is time that has been guiding many of the landscape architecture projects and is what we have been taught in school to make a project that will deal with time. A project that will remain the same or changed according to what we want with time. In addition, Form has been a natural force that has giving us a fundamental shapes that we can use to create projects and define the space that we want to use in a project. So what do these two supernatural forces have in common? It is to understand