Many people often live day to day by the saying, “fake it ‘til you make it,” due to lack of confidence in a forthcoming outcome. Having learned from past experiences, these individuals will repeat the phrase over and over, until they have subconsciously compelled themselves to believe that everything will indeed turn out all right. In the villanelle “One Art,” Elizabeth Bishop poses the notion of coping with loss as less complex than most make it out to be. Amidst her ironic explanation to the “art of losing,” the poet struggles with an internal conflict, deliberately suppressing her true emotions on the matter, in efforts to genuinely believe what she is claiming. Bishop delivers her “solution” through repetition, ambiguous diction, an anaphora,
Once in a blue moon, a person will find their soulmate story. The one they’ve adopted as their own. The one they don’t ever want to finish, that they can’t live without. Sometimes, that story doesn’t end the way they want and sometimes that story ends too early leaving them baffled and clueless. “Endings” written by Mona Van Duyn is a poem about a person determined to find the ending of a story they have become extremely attached to. The late writer is known for her examination of the daily lives of ordinary people (Britannica-Mona Van Duyn). It is easy for her to relate to normal people and remind them of the feelings they once had. Duyn’s poem simulates convincing feelings of comfort, desperation and determination using literary devices,
In his poem, ‘Beginning Again,’ Franz Wright uses acute forms of symbolism to convey a collective human desire to become ‘better.’ It is common to have experiences in life where there is a desire, after self-realization, for a new start as a ‘better’ person. In fantasy, an improved version of one’s self would not be plagued with issues, rather they are idealized as being carefree and composed. The idea of future improvement, in combination with the macabre chaos caused by Wright’s use of symbolism, intensify the relatability of the poem.
The writing strategy the author Chineh Okparante uses to convey the central idea is personification. When an individual goes to a negative situation they will try to use different methods to handle the tough situation, for example, the author Chineh Okparante uses a specific phrase such as “my mind struggling to digest the verses” sister Monica not literally digest words or situations the way the digestive system does to food. The mind can process it acknowledges negative situation at its own pace by accepting, forgiving oneself and others in talking about it. Another example states “I've tried to bury the memory of these lessons to act as if they were not part of my reality” and as humans, this is a natural response to negative situations
As human beings we let love and loss affect us in our daily lives, we are prone to let these two affect our emotions. One author who takes us into the story of her life, Jo Ann Beard , wrote “ The fourth state of matter” which describes her unique way of thinking when she is exposed to difficult situations in her life. Beard begins to build her incidents by expressing every little detail and using her emotional appeals. Throughout the essay, Beard uses figurative language and a tone of ambivalence to thread the concerns in her life and appeal to the reader's emotions.
One Art by Elizabeth Bishop is a poem that explores loss in comparison to an art; however, this art is not one to be envied or sought after to succeed at. Everyone has experienced loss as the art of losing is presented as inevitably simple to master. The speaker’s attitude toward loss becomes gradually more serious as the poem progresses.
To overcome temptations from an opposing society, Emily Dickinson suggests in "The nearest dream recedes, unrealized.”, that man should attempt to mimic nature to achieve spiritual satisfaction.
He begins by saying that though one allows people to view what he feels, each individual will always be alone. This causes each person to isolate himself in hopes of protection, but each individual can become vulnerable in a split second. Doyle says, “You can brick up your heart as stout and tight and hard and cold and impregnable as you can and down it comes in an instant…” (Doyle). The author wishes to show that each person can only be stoic for so long. Each person is only capable of building up a facade for so long before it comes crumbling down. One will always have a capacity of what he can take because of the his weakness at heart. A person may desire to be viewed a certain way, but cannot ignore that he holds a limit before turning
We are all on a visual journey to our true selves, and every song and painting, every friend every enemy, another brick on the path; another thistle in the bush. Ours is a visceral journey, and some would compare life and it’s relation to the living as to the swelling of a wave and it’s lone rider. An instance of adrenaline and then we drown, we are helpless in
Throughout their lives, each and every person will endure struggles. While these can vary greatly, each must be handled in the proper way. When it is time to face the music, some people opt to face it head on, while others choose to take them step by step. Over the course of his battles with marital and financial issues, John Cheever, author of many short stories and longtime partner of the The New Yorker decided instead to push these issues out of his mind. By utilizing self-delusion he, like many of his characters, were able to cope with the ever changing world around them, but ultimately leading to bigger problems in the future. Therefore, John Cheever’s inner conflictions in the midst of his struggles with marriage and finances are mirrored in the actions and words of his characters and the themes which his stories portray.
People choose to live their lives their own way and some of these people end up unhappy, and feel that their life is not worth living. The choice a person makes on how they want to live their life, ultimately determines their future. A person should choose to live in an illusion which leads to hope, rather then reality which leads them to despair. The musical play "Man of La Mancha", written by Dale Wasserman, is a perfect example of this because in the play, there are characters who live in illusion and characters who live in reality. Illusion leads a person to hope, and hope gives a person something to live for. One persons hope can inspire another to change and to believe. Reality can lead a person to despair, which can lead that
Modernism was a time of questioning what the future awaited and viewing said future through pessimistic/disillusioned eyes. In all the books we’ve read in class, the unknown was always something to be afraid of, and that fear has caused several paralyses of characters in which they never change their lives, they stay fixed. For example, in Joyce’s Dubliners, all the characters exhibit a form of epiphanies in which the characters are faced with a sudden betrayal of their inner thoughts our have moments in which something in their lives becomes very clear, but then it becomes their choice if they want to change their lives. One of the stories in Dubliners, is “The Dead”, in which the story is told by many different characters but perhaps the most main character is Gabriel Conroy. He is a man, in which he believes himself to be intelligent, but is socially awkward, he wants to be a confident and dominant man but in reality he has such a paralytic self-conscious that he comes off as pompous and patronizing. This self-consciousness that manifests itself in indecision for Gabriel is also seen in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” by Eliot. In this poem, J. Alfred is a man trying to reveal and discuss things in his life he has never done before. In doing so, his indecision comes from a very vulnerable place in which he tries to explain why everything is the way it is. This is why Gabriel and Alfred are an excellent choice to demonstrate the indecision that plagues Modern
Losing a Grip on Sanity Everyday, from dawn until dusk, roughly 350 million people struggle with grasping their sanity, which is a psychological condition commonly referred to as depression and anxiety. Many writers have tried to bring the experience of losing a grip of one’s mental state into their writing. In the poem “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain” by Emily Dickinson, the speaker of the poem exposes the reader to the speaker’s deteriorating mental condition. Dickinson writes about an incoherent mental condition in a very coherent manner.
Emily Dickinson effectively captures human suffering in its rawest form. In comparison to her other works, Dickinson’s “After Great Pain, a Formal Feeling Comes” may be her most discomforting work. The piece is dismaying in that it forces the reader to unwrap our darkest emotions: sadness, anguish, and anxiety. While other poets speak of the joys of love or the finality of death, Dickinson unravels the emotional wounds inflicted upon humanity by grief, heartache, and loss. In the piece, Dickinson painstakingly takes the reader through the process of dealing with our often ignored emotions.
My once stagnant legs began to buckle and quiver, descending my knees towards the coarse particleboard of the barn floor. I felt helpless and cognitively muddled. If it were possible, to have someone of a third party vividly paint a mural of my being and emotional experience in the rain the night before, and replicate the same style of brush stroke depicting my dejected state in the barn the following morning, not only would the vibrancy and swirls of the watercolor differ, one would not believe that they were viewing the same man within a twelve hour interval of time. I hoped to understand my current situation of regretful truth, where I’d realized my emotional instability, by trying to rationalize my transitions, or how I’d shifted throughout my time in the quaint, little village I called home. I transitioned with ease, without recoil, from an apathetic recluse, to a triumphant conqueror of emotional restriction, to a melancholic man who thinks himself into psychological catastrophe all within a twenty-four hour time frame. In the open field the night before, I believed myself to be rid of emotional baggage, such as the type I was displaying on the barn floor that day. Perhaps my strain and grief were not meant to subside just yet; perhaps I needed to understand in its entirety why my mind naturally steers itself down this path of anguish so that I could understand others in order to be of aid. It didn’t make any sense to me. How could a human being experience such a slew
Through denial, mourners are able to offset tragedy by insisting their loved one passed away happily. In “War” the fat traveller deceives himself to believe that his son died “satisfied”, since he “ended his life in the best way he could have wished” (1371). Not only does the fat traveller avoid mourning for his son, he also believes that dying in war for one’s country is a patriotic and satisfying way to die. He fails to see the horrors of war, dismissing tragedy as patriotism through his false illusion. Similarly, Julian’s mother creates an illusion regarding her socio-economic status. She lives in the past, referencing her family’s old history to