The Passing Of Time In Billy Collins And Once More To The Lake

E. B. White's story "Once More to the Lake" is about a man who revisits a lake from his childhood to discover that his life has lost placidity.  The man remembers his childhood as he remembers the lake; peaceful and still.  Spending time at the lake as an adult has made the man realize that his life has become unsettling and restless, like the tides of the ocean.  Having brought his son to this place of the past with him, the man makes inevitable comparisons between his own son and his childhood self, and between himself as an adult and the way he remembers his father from his childhood perspective.  The man's experience at the lake with his son is the moment he discovers his own

The Past, an ever growing pool of time, is always biting at the heels of a person. It reminds him of what they have done wrong, done right, or when he did nothing. For most people, recalling the past leads to loose ends and blanks where memories should be. No matter how much a person may want to return to the past, it is not possible. It is lost forever. These forgotten moment lead to uncertainties and confusion in the present, and chaos in the future. Forgetting the past leads to spirals, spinning downwards as people look to what they have lost. They retrace their steps hoping to find a sliver of who they are and what may become of them. In the poem, Itinerary, Eamon Grennan shows how an individual searches through his past, but can never return to it. Through the poem and with a personal experience I will explain how individuals deal with uncertainties in their pasts.

In Father and Child, as the persona moves on from childhood, her father becomes elderly and is entertained by simple things in nature, “birds, flowers, shivery-grass.” These symbols of nature remind the persona of the inconsistency of life and the certainty of death, “sunset exalts its known symbols of transience,” where sunset represents time. Both poems are indicative of the impermanence of life and that the persona has managed to mature and grow beyond the initial fearlessness of childhood moving onto a sophisticated understanding of death.

The two texts, "Excerpt from Martin Sloane: A Novel", by Michael Redhill and "Ode to a Box of Tea" by Pablo Neruda have several things in common. These things relate to how the authors of each text talk about their memories and the objects that go along with those memories.

Memory is used as a powerful conduit into the past; childhood experiences held in the subconscious illuminate an adult’s perception. Harwood uses tense shifts throughout her poetry to emphasise and indicate the interweaving and connection the past and the present hold. By allowing this examination of the childhood memories, Harwood identifies that their significance is that of an everlasting memory that will dominate over time’s continuity and the inevitability of death.

First off, “Once More to the Lake” and “Forgetfulness” each utilize nostalgic diction in order to generate the theme of annihilated time. In “Once More to the Lake,” the narrator takes his son to a lake in Maine that he always went to as a child. Throughout the story, he mentions how he sees himself in his son, hence getting him caught up with how quickly time flew by. In more detail, he chooses specific words to describe these feelings, such as “sustain the illusion” (White 2) and “revisit old haunts” (White 1). By using these specific words to explain his experience with his son, it makes it seem both natural and unnatural, similar to the passing of forgotten time. Moreover, these specific

Additionally, the diction and devices found in both “‘Once More to the Lake”, and “Forgetfulness” helps to show how time is moving and how it affects people. The poem states, “... the memories you used to harbor decided to retire to the southern

First and foremost, authors E.B. White and Billy Collins both use exceptional repetition to portray the themes of their writings “Once More to the Lake” and “Forgetfulness”. In the essay “Once More to the Lake,” the main character expressed his connection to the lake from a young age. Later in life he brings his son and begins to be at a loss for his identity while being at the lake. Similar in theme, the poem “Forgetfulness” is a tale describing the loss of parts of one’s life that used to be known, much like identity loss. Repetition is a major key in both texts for pushing the theme of identity loss. During “Once More to the Lake,” E.B White experienced many moments that

“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” Even we live in the moment. It’s also a scene of crossings, bridging past and present. People struggle ahead but often obsess themselves with the past and present.

In both “Forgetfulness” and “On Turning Ten,” Billy Collins writes in free verse, allowing him the creative freedom to convey his thoughts without the constraints of regular meter and rhyme. Consequently, the speakers of both poems are able to reflect in a stream of consciousness style in order to authentically convey their emotions in regards to the passing of time and the fading of memories. Using free verse, the speakers of “Forgetfulness” and “On Turning Ten” focus on the concept of forgetting, ultimately arguing that remembering would be a much better alternative.

These thought invoking expressions have long demonstrated human kind’s ability, or lack there of, to deal with loss. From Edgar Allen Poe’s The Raven, to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s The Cross of Snow, loss is a topic humans can relate to on the deepest level, as it is something that we all must face. Frankenstein and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, two widely celebrated novels, are both are influenced by the theme of loss

“One of the saddest things in life, is the things one remembers” (Agatha Christie). In Joyce Carol Oates’s novel, We Were the Mulvaneys, the speaker, Judd Mulvaney, reflects on his childhood and realized that death will claim his family members as it will claim him in old age. The qualities of nature and the instant heartbeat of the past helped characterized Judd that death will come no matter how hard you try to protect the ones you care about. Throughout the passage, the setting takes place in an earlier time indicated by the use of past tense verbs.

Loss, wastefulness, and regret are not words that anyone wants to hear. While reading the works of F. Scott Fitzgerald in “Babylon Revisited” and of Ernest Hemingway in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” these three words seem to connect to two stories together. In these stories loss, wastefulness, and regret intertwine in the stories to better explain the struggles that people have to deal with.

Our human condition is defined by mortality, contingency, and discontentment. This reality combined with the new outlooks of relationships between our lives and the objects that surround us in our world, have caused authors in the twentieth century to question traditional Western thought. In Remembrance of Things Past, Marcel Proust extends these comparisons to include one's use of memory and