The Fish By Rita Dove

Survival. As a famous saying goes, “Sometimes even to live can be an act of courage.” Survival is not something most Americans think of first thing in the morning. For some humans in the world, surviving is the most difficult task to complete in their daily life; one reason being poverty. For Nat Hocken, it isn’t poverty that made it difficult for him to survive; it is birds. Birds are known to have a predominantly positive connotation such as innocence, beauty, gentleness, nobility, and good omen. In the story “The Birds,” the author Daphne Du Maurier creates birds that are evil, violent, ferocious, and savage creatures that are apparently hungry for humans. Nat, living on a small farm, being physically disabled has to survive on his

Amy Tan’s short story, Fish Cheeks, outlines the general idea of self-acceptance. As the narrator, fourteen year old Tan declares her love for her minister’s son, Robert, who unlike herself, is “as white as Mary in the manger” (Tan 1). This crush is anything but healthy, primarily because Tan is reluctant to reveal her true self to him. This hesitance she portrays is strikingly recognizable in the teenagers of today’s world. Amy Tan 's story, "Fish Cheeks," is significant to the adolescents of today 's society through the overall structure, quality, and applicability of the piece as the struggle to accept oneself as an individual is still as present as it ever was.

No matter in what perspective we see it, wilderness offers us a refuge that we can use to escape the cares and troubles of the world, in which our past has trapped us

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.

The short story “Greasy Lake” by Tom Boyle is about a young man and his friends who thought they were some real bad characters. The main character and his two friends got into a series of events that started with almost killing a young man for no reason, to almost raping a young woman which made them reconsider how they wanted to live the rest of their adolescent life. During that night, the narrator underwent a series of events that caused the destruction of his mom’s car and the shattering his self-image. Throughout the short story “Greasy Lake”, you can find points that Boyle’s use of the first person colors the story in some situations while causing bias views to show though in others.

The Canadian novel ‘Crow Lake’ by Mary Lawson, published in 2002, was awarded in Canada as First Novel Award in the same year it was published and won the McKitterick Prize in 2003. The author Mary Lawson was born and brought up in a small farming community in southern Ontario. After graduating from McGill University, she moved to England in 1968. She still lives there with her husband and sons, though she returns to Canada every year. The story took place in a small town called Crow lake in northern Ontario. In this book Kate Morrison, the main character, leads the reader through her journey for healing from past mistakes dealing with her family. At the beginning, Kate who is seven, and her siblings Luke, Matt, and Bo, experienced a tough time surviving after their parents were killed in a car crash, which impacted them for the rest of their lives.

“Introduction to Poetry” and “Traveling Through the Dark,” are poems written by Billy Collins and William Stafford. The poem’s, “Introduction to Poetry”, main conflict is a teacher who tries to get his students to read and appreciate a poem, but what all the students only care about is figuring out what it means. The conflict is highlighted through the many uses of metaphors to help us understand how he wants the students to look and decipher a poem and how they only focus on finding the meaning instead of taking their time to listen and see the art of poetry. William Stafford’s poem, “Traveling Through the Dark,” describes a driver’s dilemma of deciding whether to throw a dead pregnant deer into the river, or leave it laying on the road where it can cause an accident. In both poems, the use of literary devices such as metaphors, personification, imagery, and diction are effective in making and building up the conflict and reaching the resolution.

Throughout the course of history, human nature has embraced conformity and being average. However, human nature expresses itself in a variety of ways and these differences make everyone an individual. Civil rights activists have recently made a strong effort to encourage people to embrace and express their differences. The recent push for a more open society has resulted in both backlash and acceptance. Kay Ryan explores what being an individual means and the choices we can and cannot make about ourselves in her poem “The Turtle”. She uses the turtle, an often ill-suited creature in regard to survival, to contradict the common misconception that people can choose their sexuality. Kay Ryan, an open lesbian, often uses poetry to express her position on particular subjects in regard to sexual orientation.

Poetry has a role in society, not only to serve as part of the aesthetics or of the arts. It also gives us a view of what the society is in the context of when it was written and what the author is trying to express through words. The words as a tool in poetry may seem ordinary when used in ordinary circumstance. Yet, these words can hold more emotion and thought, however brief it was presented.

The concept of evolution has always fascinated me; I was amazed that single celled organisms from many years ago are the reason I’m here today. While I recognized that our ancestors went from a simplistic organism to fish, to mammals, and so on, the details of how each step occurred in our history never really gets mentioned in the evolution section of our general biology courses. I chose to read Neil Shubin’s Your Inner Fish because I wanted to know the transition of our ancestors in greater detail. I also thought that the book would elaborate on some of the topics discussed in our evolutionary anatomy class and help put them in perspective. Prior to reading the book, I expected it to be very dry – simply explaining evolutionary concepts in

The poet we will be analyzing in this essay is the poet Earl Birney. He was born in Calgary, Alberta, and raised on a farm in Erickson, near Creston, British Columbia. He was born on 13 May 1904 and died on the 3 September 1995. The two poems we will be looking at today are the poems Bushed, and The Bear on the Delhi Road. These poems demonstrate how nature is both beautiful and dangerous at once and all we can do is watch. Through the next couple of paragraphs, we will look at examples and quotations from the poems to further understand this message in his poems.

Poetry is used to tell a story. Within that story, authors often use literary devices to evoke the emotions and the interest of the reader. Through the use of vivid imagery and metaphors, Elizabeth Bishop utilizes the power of observation in her poem The Fish to find beauty in something that isn’t traditionally beautiful. Born in Worcester, Massachusetts, Elizabeth Bishop was an only child. After her father passed away when she was only eight months old, her mentally-troubled mother was left alone to raise her.

On the other hand, in Marianne Moore’s poem Poetry, she believes that a good, genuine, poem shouldn’t be so complex and hard to understand. She thinks a poem needs to openly state its theme, to help readers understand and appreciate what they’re reading. “The same thing

A pleasure for two alike, is no longer a pleasure when forced on one by the other. This is sex. In John Donne’s poem, “The Flea,” poetry is used to express the power of persuasion. Reverse verbal psychology and poetic expression are the ultimate tools used by Donne to validate sex as being better than murder.

In the article” we are from wilderness” by Chrisna Byck the author believe that humans have evolved with the wilderness just as we have evolved living in cave. She argues that as we evolved as a society we are becoming distant and starting to lose the connection we have with the wilderness because of technology. Therefore, we do not see the important of the wilderness and how valuable it is to us. I absolutely agree with Byck I believe our generation do not play much attention to nature because we are occupied with other things. In addition, I believe that Byck life Journey in the article show the reader about how the beauty of nature is far beyond the expression of words because of her lack of worlds to describes the beauty of what she sees.