The Chambered Nautilus Comparison

Along with the death of a loved one or the loss of a significant piece in one’s life comes a time of mourning. How gradually one heals and recuperates from sorrow is personal and cannot be dictated by another’s schedule. In “Snowbanks North of the House,” one significant component is how Bly uses the natural world to represent the continuation of life after death. “And the sea lifts and falls all night, the moon goes on / through the unattached heavens alone” (Bly 19-20). Nature continues on despite someone’s personal anguish. This poem encourages people to relinquish their agony and to return to normal life because the universe pays no attention to you. Sometimes this is easier said than done, as Gonzalez writes in “1999.” The alleviation of despair is not immediate following loss. As shown in this poem, even years after a tragedy, there are lasting effects on people. The speaker tells of the years that have passed since the sibling’s death. “Then the year / my stomach hurt all year, & then / the year no one spoke of you” (Gonzalez 15-17). The speaker explains that as the years pass, people begin to accept the reality of the death and recover. However, the speaker has a sorrowful tone about him or her. After all the years that have gone by, the speaker continues to feel grief and is heartbroken over the death. The speaker is frustrated that no one else seems to reciprocate the

The final stanza revolves around the nettles retorting to the father’s attacks. In the first line, the father is shown to give the nettles a funeral. This shows the father ending the troubles caused by the nettles. With effective choice of words, the poet describes how the ’sun’ and ‘rain’, representative of nature and its power, finally help the nettles grow. The word ‘recruits’ shows the enemy army was returning and regrouping. Furthermore, the word ‘tall’ depicts the nettles being stronger and healthier than before and their readiness for the battle. The final line states that the son would be hurt by the nettles soon and again. While problems won’t wane with time, despite all of the father’s efforts, the son will have to find a way to learn to adapt to the renewed struggles in his life.

The poems ‘Manhunt’ and ‘Nettles’ both explore pain however both poems explore it in different ways. The poem Nettles explores the hurt of a young boy who has been stung by nettles and his father’s emotional reaction of it. Whereas Manhunt explores the physical and emotional pain caused by war.

Death is something that at some point will come to each of us and has been explored in many forms of literature. “The Raven” and “Incident in a Rose Garden” are two poems that explore common beliefs and misconceptions about death. Though both poems differ in setting, tone, and mood there are surprising similarities in the literary tools they use and in the messages they attempt to convey. The setting and mood establish the tone and feel of a poem. In “The Raven” we are launched into a bleak and dreary winters night where a depressed narrator pines for his dead girlfriend.

| The two poems clarify the value of life through both active and passive roles. In "Fox in a tree stump" an active role is portrayed which gives the reader a strong affect on how much the victim who has their life threatened, values life. The passive role, as in "Domesticity of giraffes", gives the reader a strong affect of the value of life on the observer's perspective in watching the actions of the victim.

He pictures the chambered nautilus in different places of an ocean. One time it swims on a surface of beautiful reefs; next time it is on the surface of an ocean with sea-maids, and next time it is inside of sunny gulfs. The word choice of Holmes in this stanza is very brilliant, and it helps a reader to imagine all of the places where nautilus dwells. He uses such words as “sweet summer wind,” “unshadowed main,” “gulfs enchanted,” and “rise to sun” to create very happy and bright image of nautilus and its life. The author also uses metaphors to describe nautilus itself. Holmes calls this creature “ship of pearl” (most likely because of its colorful shell) and “venturous bark” because he wants a reader to picture this animal as the one that likes adventures and constantly moving. A bark (small ship) is a perfect word to describe, traveling, motion, and adventures. Holmes creates all these positive images in a head of a reader because he tries to make a contrast in events between second and first

“Ozymandias”, “To Autumn”, and “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” all are widely-read poems written by the Romantic poets Shelley, Keats, and Wordsworth, respectively. In all of these poems, the passage of time inexorably leads to the death of man-made creations. Also, natural emotions and living things experience the cycle of life and death, but escape the permanent death experienced by unnatural things. In short, man-made things are impermanent, while natural things are immortal.

In “Traveling through the Dark” by William Stafford and “Woodchucks” Maxine Kumin, man vs. natural death situations are present. Both poems share some similarities and differences. In “Traveling through the Dark”, the speaker is compassionate and considerate towards the dead deer and whose main goal is to get it off the road to prevent future deaths. However, in “Woodchucks” the speaker shows violence in killing the woodchuck, to the point of killing the whole bird family. In both poems by William Stafford and Maxine Kumin, the poets each emphasize different attitudes toward animals; Stafford showing compassion while Kumin shows vengeance, through the use of vivid imagery, explicit diction, and metaphors.

In his piece, “The Chambered Nautilus”, Holmes chooses the nautilus as a metaphor for the soul for many reasons. Human beings must continue working hard in order to grow spiritually and develop one’s soul, just like a nautilus who keeps on building new levels of his shell. Secondly, the spiral shape of the nautilus represents the idea the humans do not have a limit in terms of their spiritual growth. Thirdly, just as the nautilus’s progression of new levels of his shell only gets bigger, a person must only work on and achieve greater levels than they had in the past in order to grow and expand his soul.

Life and death are leaves us with an known and unknown that are unavoidable. In the poem “Nothing Gold Can Stay” by Robert Frost symbolism, rhyme, and allusion are used to describe not only nature’s life cycle but the human life cycle as well. The allegory “Used to Live Here Once” by Jean Rhys uses symbolism and motif to deliver a story of a woman who has died but is unaware that she has actually passed away. Even though both of these pieces of literature utilize similar elements that symbolize the human life cycle in their writings they are very different in nature, and the poem “Nothing Gold Can Stay” leaves you with an actual reality of all beings lifecycles and the allegory leaves you with imagination only.

The first poem is ‘Book Ends’. This poem shows us how the death of the

When studied along, the two poems greatly juxtapose each other. Beach burials convey the significance of time and that it should not be taken for granted, whereas Country downs display the lack of interest towards it and the minimal impact it has on people. As

The novel “Moby Dick” by Herman Melville and the poem “The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge has one characteristic in common, the deep concern for nature, which is not merely as a source of pleasure, but as a noble divine influence on man. Also because of this concern with nature, a tendency of idealize the un-spoilt countryside and prefer it to town. The book talks about a man named Ishmael who goes for a vacation to get away from his unexciting life but his journey becomes adventurous and he learns to appreciate nature. The poem talks about a mariner who never appreciated nature before but while he is at sea he encounters so much hardship that makes him appreciate nature. The poem and the book they have so much in common in terms of what the poet and the novelists went through.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Lord Byron’s “Darkness” both show the contrast between movement and stillness. The authors use this contrast to convey the central idea that one needs to let things go in order to truly live. Both poems tell a story of a ship that gets stuck, one ship is able to continue moving and one ship is left to rot. This is representative of when people are unable to move on and their entire being revolves around what they can’t get over. Letting go is crucial to moving on and staying alive.

I will be comparing excerpts from ‘The River Merchant’s Wife: A Letter’ by Li Po and “The Death of the Ball-Turret Gunner’ by Randall Jerrell. The speakers in each excerpt are creating serious and solemn dream-like worlds that convey their misery over being abandoned to suffer impending death alone. Imagery in both excerpts is used differently to describe death as being either immediate as in Jarrell’s poem or approaching as in Li Po’s. The major difference between the speakers in each excerpt is the use of alliteration;.the speaker in Jarrell’s poem uses assonance and consonance effectively to carry the emotional load created by the dark imagery, however, a loss in translation must be considered with regard to the speaker’s voice n Li Po’s poem. Both excerpts utilize a fractured form to allow for the imagining of their life outside of the world depicted by their words while maintaining the impact of the existence loneliness in their life and the misery of dying alone.