The Pomegranate

As she passes the ruins she recreates the pleasant things that had been there. Despite the reasonable arguments that her goods belonged to God and whatever God does is just, there is in the poem an undercurrent of regret that the loss is not fully compensated for by the hope of the treasure that lies above. (84)

Contrast is one of the artistic techniques of composition poem at all levels – structural, semantic, compositional, ideological and aesthetic. The girl performs a ceremony in honor of St. Agnes, which, according to legend, should help her to dream her betrothed. Like Shakespeare's Romeo, a boy secretly sneaks into the castle of his beloved, both of them are united, and together they secretly leave the castle at stormy night. The tender is replaced with a tempest, quietness with loudness and the world of two people is changed by the world of lovers against the world. Like Shakespeare, in the history of Porphyro and Madeline the fantasy is mixed with reality, it is adorned with a passion for life. On the one side, there is a beauty of women, lovemaking, moonlight, refracted through the bright colors of stained glass, aroma of overseas fruit and treats. Meanwhile, the reality is symbolized in the poem with a life and horrors of feasting

The confessional mode of poetry delves into the inner struggles of the persona as she seeks creative independence, free from the constraints of her role as mother and daughter. The juxtaposition between the two settings, “the lit house and the town,” symbolises the persona’s desire for isolation as she contemplates her filial responsibilities relative to an innate desire for solitude, “wanting to be myself alone.” Dobson’s biblical allusion to Peter’s betrayal of Jesus in “Three times I took that lonely stretch,/ Three times the dark trees closed me round” utilises anaphora to indicate her prolonged attempts to embrace her creative potential. Writing in a period of social and gender re-evaluation during the 1960s, Dobson gives us insight into the way women were struggling to balance career against the patriarchal expectations of motherhood. The night, free from daily pressures metaphorically “absolves me of my bonds” creating a lighter sense of being, which is reinforced in the synecdoche “only my footsteps held the ground.” However, the use of conduplicatio in “One life behind and one before” represents her feeling of entrapment, as he remains in a conflicted state. The emotive language in “cut off… from love that grows about the bone” captures the confronting nature of her discovery by examining the

One of the things that is so fascinating about poetry is that it allows readers to discover and sometimes challenge and channel their emotions as well as their understanding. A poem’s words as well as its structure can reveal many things to its intended audience. In “Myth” by Natasha Trethewey, the poems form is just as important as the words she writes, becoming a map for the journey Trethewey takes, using transitions to take us from one place to another. The nature of the poem therefor becomes multifaceted, as it encourages the reader to think about the speaker’s words and use of form and structure she uses to craft this epic story. Using form as a tool, Trethewey is able to use structure as a way to guide us as readers and the speaker across the conscious and unconscious thoughts and dreams the speaker faces in this story.

In this poem, symbolism is used to help reader’s find deeper meaning in the little things included and show that everything comes back to the father’s fear of the child he adores growing older and more independent. “In a room full of books in a world of stories, he can recall not one, and soon he thinks the boy will give up on his father.” This sentence makes a reader assume that the story the five year old so

The narrator's vision of her ancestors expanding a plentiful life is emphasized with the picturesque “blue fields…with leaves and vines and orchards.” This then strikes the narrator with the realization that cutting down the tree would be a betrayal to their ancestors, their dreams and the demise of the heritage of the

Into this atmosphere of spiritual paralysis the boy bears, with blind hopes and romantic dreams, his encounter with first love. In the face of ugly, drab reality-"amid the curses of laborers," "jostled by drunken men and bargaining women"-he carries his aunt's parcels as she shops in the market place, imagining that he bears, not parcels, but a "chalice through a throng of foes." The "noises converged in a single sensation of life" and in a blending of Romantic and Christian symbols he transforms in his mind a perfectly ordinary girl into an enchanted princess: untouchable, promising, saintly. Setting in this scene depicts the harsh, dirty reality of life which the boy blindly ignores. The contrast between the real and the boy's dreams is ironically drawn and clearly foreshadows the boy's inability to keep the dream, to remain blind.

In the books Candide, The Glass Menagerie, Their Eyes were Watching God, and My Name is Asher Lev written by Voltaire, Tennessee Williams, Zora Neale Hurston, and Chaim Potok, they are all discernibly different stories, yet they all appear to share the common theme of perseverance in varying degrees to find that happiness is not always awaiting them. I have found that the various symbolic language combined with each author’s different style of writing not only makes each story unique, but they also affect each reader’s perceptions.

The early learning processes of the young are potrayed more adequately in the poem Father and Child where an older child, this time a girl at a rebellious age, experiments with the constraints of authority in an attempt to seek control for herself. This experimentation leads to an important discovery in her life; death is real and unclean. Just like The Glass Jar, the allusions to nature show the certainly of change and setting the tone for the events.

However, some scholars view the poem as only a depiction of a mother’s love for her daughter and the daughter’s ignorance towards it. In “This Mother’s Day Remember the Radiance that Set the World in Motion” by Marilyn Shroer, Shroer argues that the poem serves as an extreme warning from mother to daughter and embodies how mothers give advice today. In Shroer’s perspective, “Persephone, Falling” represents a mother’s cautionary tale. While the poem does show a cautionary tale, Shroer lacks the modern meaning Dove incorporates into the poem. Additionally, the article “A Mother Passes on More than Her Genes” by Lee Sharkey expresses the same analytical viewpoint. Sharkey suggests that “Persephone, Falling” embodies the common feminine relationship of mother and daughter that precedes any presence of men, leading to the mother desiring to protect the daughter. Nonetheless, the daughter still desires to expand relations beyond the mother’s knowledge, which, as evident in Persephone’s tragedy, ends in horror (Sharkey). Sharkey seems to present the daughter as ignorant and culpable, and while the poem does exemplify victim blaming, the poem ironically uses the victim blaming to criticize society. Both Sharkey and Shroer, argue the poem only relays a maternal message. Conversely, Dove critically alludes to societal boundaries within her introduction in Mother Love: “The cycle between Demeter and Persephone is ‘betrayal and regeneration’ and the sooner is ideal since the mother-goddess, daughter-consort and poet- are all struggling to sing in their chains” (Insert). Contradictory to the opinion of Shroer and Sharkey, the key ideal for Dove not only is to demonstrate the protection in mother-daughter relationships, but also to

When she first talks about winter, she says that “Thus in winter stands a lonely tree,” (9). When referring to winter, it is the season of death. The speaker is realizing that her days left is slowly approaching an end. She then turns and references summer, “I only know that summer sang in me” (13), and “that in me sings no more” (14). As she is talking about summer, she is also talking about her memories of herself when she was young. This corresponds with the seasons because in summer things are new and want to be experienced however, in winter this is the season when everything is dying and no one wants to be a part of it. The speaker can feel this happening to herself because she sees herself as winter, and she longs to be like summer again. In the summer stage of her life, she is youthful, and she has men aching to be around her. However, now that she has approached the winter stage of her life she is feeling strong feelings of regret. Thus, this shows how she feels about herself by showing how she talks about winter and summer and how it compares to the sorrow in her life

Duality occasionally results as the cause for suffering, while it is a product of the mind, it can often revolve around condemnation and the fear of judgement. Sylvia Plath’s poem, “Two Sisters of Persephone” illuminates the idea of the duality that exists within a woman’s personality. The title “Two Sisters of Persephone” suggests that there are two sisters being described in this poem, when in reality, Plath allures the reader by revealing that the two designated qualities actually deal with the two lives that Persephone endured as the Goddess of the Spring and the Queen of the Underworld. Plath conveys the concept of dualism through the purposeful use of structure, and depicting imagery to illustrate the contrasting lives of the renowned deity, Persephone.

Secondly the Pomegranate tree can be seen as a symbol of Amir and Hassan friendship, childhood innocence and shelter. The tree is presented to the reader in two different states. When the tree appears in the first part of the story, in chapter 4, the tree is shown as being fruitful and blooming with ‘blood red’

This strong metaphor compares the narrator to the elephant who feels their fate is death. The third part of line 4 is the fine timbers that directly relate to the house previously mentioned. The purpose of the house fortifies the idea that what’s inside is of value. The house is nothing without its fine timbers and it is merely for protection and shelter. Just like a pregnant woman is for her unborn child. The fifth line represents the rising loaf like a child growing inside a womb. It is a pun on a familiar saying to pregnancy of a bun in the oven. “Money’s new minted in this fat purse” plays with the idea that the purse has no great value in itself but contains valuable things inside. Line 7 explores the narrator’s feelings towards having a child. She feels like “a means”, as if she is just a way for the baby to be born. As a mother she is just “a stage” and a platform but not a performance. She is “a cow in calf,” where many cows are separated from their offspring and have little to do with their mum. The final lines seem to break away from the rest of the poem and have a tone of darkness. After eating “a bag of green apples” one might feel sick especially since green apples are considered sour. The fruit is also unripe, signifying that the narrator is not ready to have a baby. Another point that can be found is that it is easy to see the resemblance of this line and Eve from the Bible. Eve was tempted to eat an apple and was cursed with the

In other words, the assumed unfaithfulness of his wife, will wreak havoc, like a galactic body. This is a bizarre comparison—a wife and her alleged infidelity to a planet in outer space that will destruct in the name of vengeance. As bizarre as it is, it accomplishes the task of enhancing the dichotomy of what is real and what is a fabrication of imagination. Art, in “The Winter’s Tale” is not merely expression but creation over nature. As his paints a dramatically depressed view of reality, it becomes clear how his perception of what is actually in nature has been heinously corrupted because of a search for truth predicated on validating flippant worries. He carries on: “To mingle friendship far is mingling bloods. I have tremor cordis on me. My heart dances, but not for joy, not joy.”, showing the extent to which he cannot see the truth—what is actually present in nature, but also how manically crazed he is. For example, Leontes seems to think nothing is odd about calling his son into speak to him, and merely asking, “Mamillius, art thou my boy?”. His tone here is light, and conveys this idea that not only is what he asking logical and understandable but normal. It speaks volumes to art’s influence on Leontes to make him so selfish and wrapped up in his own desperate story.