The Sensitive Plant By Percy Bysshe Shelley

A weak and deprived plant lingers on the fine line between life and death. The menacing trees of the forest have stolen all the resources that allow its survival. The plant’s roots were pushed to the top of the soil, causing it to lose access to the hidden resources deep within the soil. Other plants pushed the plant’s fragile roots away from sustenance, engendering the plant’s withering structure. Once, the plant was a strong flower, thriving within the forest, but now it is a ghastly representation of its former glory. The plant was abandoned by the rest of its species, and forced to live in agony for the rest of its life. Society shuns those it deems sinful. In his novel The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne compels the reader to understand

The nature around them is symbolic of their emotions and mental states. For example, the weather turned stormy when Victor’s mood worsened (ch. 10). Victor also feels that nature, “gives wings to the soul and allows it to soar from the obscure world to light and joy.” (ch.10) Nature has a calming and peaceful effect on both of them when they are not in good mental health; using nature to clear their minds. It is not surprising that Mary Shelley wrote this during the period of transcendentalism. In this time period, books like Walden by Henry David Thoreau highlighted the importance of nature. These similarities in how they interact with nature show their deeper similarities in mentality.

We can see Bryant’s view in “Thanatopsis” as he believed that nature could comfort an individual at the face of death. Similarly, we see Lowell’s view in “The First Snowfall” is that nature can comfort those in despair after a lost of a loved one. While in “The Tide Rises and The Tide Falls” Longfellow expresses his view on nature as he believed it could also comfort those who have fallen. In the period of Romanticism, many author explored the value of nature keying in its comforting effects on any individual. They express nature’s selflessness in its ability to comfort at any given moment. Nature time and time again has proven its self to comfort those in time of despair in various situations even at the face of

In Toni Morrison's novel Beloved, each character holds a special connection to trees and each places different meaning in them. The motif of trees and plants represent a calming force, escape from hardship, and circle of life that can heal the wounds of slavery. Paul D and Sethe are two characters in particular who place unique meaning in plants and use them as a way to escape their painful memories and the horrors of slavery.

Although everyone is their own individual, society determines who is considered “normal.” In Flowers for Algernon, Charlie Gordon struggles to fit in with the people around him because of his mental illness. Elie Wiesel faces the same struggles while trying to survive in a concentration camp in Night. Charlie and Elie have both been challenged by the concept of identity. In Flowers for Algernon and Night, these characters have faced many conflicts including not having their identity accepted by society, having insecurities about their identity, and being mistreated based on their identity.

“The Wisdom Of Shelley” by George Elliott Clarke is a beautifully written poem with a darker meaning. There are many interesting things hiding within the poem but there are a few specific ones I will mention. First, there are many different poetic devices used within this short poem. This includes imagery, similes, and repetition. Second, the symbol of this poem is the rose which is mentioned a few times throughout the poem. Third, the theme for “The Wisdom Of Shelley is deception. Each of these points contributes to my understanding of the poem in its own way.

One of the points that is consistently brought up in Toni Morrison’s Paradise is that of the all black town “Ruby”. Paradise uses the setting of Oklahoma to discuss how many black towns are shaped by past history and religion. While the town in this novel is fictional, there have been real all black towns in the United States, and it seems that these towns influenced many aspects of the town Ruby, which is why it is so easy to imagine that the story could actually be real. Many authors have written in general about the novel, and specifically about the town within it.

Worst yet, the metaphor underscores the patriarchal ignorance that leads to much female oppression. Within the poem, Piercy uses and extended metaphor which compares men to a gardener, which outlines the damaging effects of patriarchy. Using an cynical tone, Piercy makes her opinions toward patriarchism known. A malicious tone can be observed within lines such as:

When John Steinbeck 's short story "The Chrysanthemums" first appeared in the October 1937 edition of Harper 's Magazine (Osborne 479), Franklin D. Roosevelt had just been reelected president. The country was recovering from the Great Depression, unions were developing, and child labor in manufacturing was terminated (Jones 805-6). The first female cabinet member in American history, Frances Perkins, was appointed the Secretary of Labor (Jones 802). She was one of the few women in her time to gain equality in a male-dominated society. For most women, liberation was a bitter fight usually ending in defeat. In "The Chrysanthemums," this struggle for equality is portrayed through Steinbeck 's character Elisa Allen. According to Stanley Renner, "The Chrysanthemums" shows "a strong, capable woman kept from personal, social, and sexual fulfillment by the prevailing conception of a woman 's role in a world dominated by men" (306). Elisa 's appearance, actions, and speech depict the frustration women felt in Steinbeck 's masculine world of the 1930 's. "Steinbeck 's world," observes Charles A. Sweet, Jr., "is a man 's world, a world that frustrates even minor league women 's liberationists" (214).

One of the 20th century’s most important and influential modernist poets was Hilda Doolittle, more commonly known as H.D. While other artists struggled to find a new mode of expression, H.D. found imagism and created intense poems delving into very specific depictions. In “Sheltered Garden,” H.D. employs intense imagery using nature in order to put forth an opinion or viewpoint, which is also highlighted by another poem titled, “Sea Rose.” By analyzing these two poems, one can more fully comprehend the modernist movement/mentality and how H.D. shaped her own form of poetry. In “Sheltered Garden,” the poet uses the image of a garden to not only push against society’s constraint of women, but also its imposed ideas of beauty, creating tension between the natural and the unnatural.

Mary Oliver’s “The Summer Day” is one of her many romantic styled poems in her poetic career. This poem gives a message to the reader of what kind of relationship with nature she has, which brightens her qualities of being an isolated and quite person as she spent her time in nature. This short free verse poem does not have any rhyme or stanzas, but uses repetitive use of imagery. This use of imagery gives the poem irony that allows the reader, in some context, to connect to what Oliver is seeing and writing about in nature. Also, she follows the idea which everything in nature has a purpose and everything has a use for others. Oliver’s love of nature is supported through this poem by using this style, of use of imagery, in which she writes. This poem gives the reader a sense of evaluating his or her life with nature. “The Summer Day” supports this idea as stated before, that everything in nature has a purpose and everyone can connect to nature, she did this by asking theoretical questions about creation, alluding to three different types of

By analysing the structure (shift from external to internal landscape), language (tenses, pronoun), and presentation of the experience of seeing the daffodils, I seek to demonstrate that feelings of the sublime are only evoked when the narrator’s imagination participates in the scene he has internalized in his memory. While the first three stanzas exemplify a merely physical stimulus and response mechanism to nature, the last stanza shows how active poetic imagination enables man to recreate and amplify emotions encountered, thus resulting in feelings of the sublime. Why does the observer not recognise the ‘wealth’ the scene brings in that moment? How does poetic imagination connect the physical eye and the inner eye to allow for sublime, transcendental experience? Hess argues that the poem “depend[s] for [its] power on the narrator’s ability to fix a single, discrete, visually defined moment of experience in his mind, to which he can later return in acts of private memory and imagination” (298). An example of the recapturing of emotions is seen where “gay” (I. 15) is recaptured as “pleasure” (I. 23) at the end. Active imagination, which draws inspiration from memory of the initial encounter, is now a permanent possession that

In the second stanza, the poem compares his love to a plant that does not bloom. The flowers are hidden deep within the plant. The text is expressing that while most would not appreciate a flower that does not bloom, the love described here goes far beyond that of anyone else’s. Inner beauty is admired. The narrator is not ashamed of his love. Yet, he feels as though he cannot compare her to anything of this world. He is entirely consumed by the spirit within her.

The poem begins with a man going to “turn the grass”. In this time period grass was cut using a scythe in the early morning, while grass was still wet. After this was done another laborer had to scatter the grass to let it dry. As the other laborer is going out to the field, there is no one else around him, he is completely alone, until a single silent butterfly crosses paths. The worker witnesses the butterfly looking for flowers, and eventually finds a gathering of them, which amuses the author. The author begins to ponder what was going through the other workers head to make him decide to leave the flowers intact. He begins to sense the beauty that the other worker must have felt when he left the flowers

The beauty of nature is often overlooked and underappreciated in today’s society. The neglect and lack of respect given to such a beautiful creation by members of society is widely reflected in Romantic poetry. The romantic era began in 1798, where writers such as William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge expressed their opinions and feelings towards nature. Overall such writers typically express a positive outlook on the natural world around them, however some stray the other way. Specifically Coleridge and Wordsworth began to express the feeling of disconnect towards nature. Both writers began to feel as though they could not understand nature and cannot connect with the beauty it gives off as expressed in poems such as “Dejection”, “London 1802”, and “Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey”. Not only did some of these writers begin to feel a disconnect but a select few also begin to feel as though people are disrespecting the balance of nature and are trying to disrupt the balance and manipulate it. Writers such as Mary Shelley, author of the novel Frankenstein, expresses the concern of people taking the laws of nature and twisting them. Writers and people living during this time period not only express an appreciation for nature but also the truth about the human relationship with nature. The relationship between humans and nature is on of mistreatment.