The Surprise Party In Jane Kenyon's 'Surprise'

I Swear, It’s Not What It Looks Like: Denial, Selective Perception, and Fear of Betrayal in Jane Kenyon’s “Surprise” Television psychologists and pop culture self-help gurus tell us that marriage is hard work; marriage is compromise; marriage is a choice between being right, and being happy. All of these statements are true. What these experts don’t tell us, however, is that marriage is also about putting on blinders, or looking on the bright side, or one of a hundred other trite phrases to

serial killers and didn’t even know it. The wife in the poem may not be afraid that she married a killer but she is definitely worried about not knowing her partner. Jane Kenyon in her poem Surprise uses selective perception, the double, and projection to show the wife’s fear of betrayal. A literary device used in Jane Kenyon’s poem is selective perception .The first instance of selective perception is in the first two lines of the poem when the narrator says, “He suggests pancakes at the local

Relationships can be like a pack of wolves. There is an alpha and an omega, always a type of power structure. Jane Kenyon explores about this in her poem with the different roles the male and female take within in their relationship. She reveals how a power shift come about and the way in which each person in the relationship acts to accommodate it. “Surprise” In her poem “Surprise”, Jane Kenyon uses yonic and phallic symbols, regression, and the double to reveal the power dynamics within the relationship

ECS8C_C01.qxd 22/10/2007 11:54 Page 597 CASE STUDIES ECS8C_C01.qxd 22/10/2007 11:54 Page 598 ECS8C_C01.qxd 22/10/2007 11:54 Page 599 Guide to using the case studies The main text of this book includes 87 short illustrations and 15 case examples which have been chosen to enlarge specific issues in the text and/or provide practical examples of how business and public sector organisations are managing strategic issues. The case studies which follow allow the