Lynn Powell’s, “A Scherzo for Sadness” is a poem consisting of nine stanzas that provide a narrative through a series of instances in time through concrete imagery. These particular images vividly display the speaker's emotion, implementing a tangible idea to rather abstract concepts. By performing a deep explication and close reading of the work, a deep-seated recognition of a person's emotions and the effects it has on their understanding of the universe is revealed. Throughout the poem, the speaker displays juxtaposed representations of both joy and sadness, which ultimately opens up to a broader statement about the necessity of these feelings in order to fully experience the world. This is catalyzed by the raised question, “And what, today, …show more content…
A major takeaway is that life should not be forced to be seen in light or dark; people are not shaped pegs that must fit in compatible shaped holes. Instead, people need to be fluid so that the can experience all of life’s episodes to the fullest. By only seeing situations in rose coloured glasses or only view life in dark shades, people lose sight of life's greatest moments and miss out on the experiences that make life worth living. Life does not only consist of opposite types. It should accomplished with the good with the bad, and every experience should be acknowledged to make life worth it, because time on earth is short. By allowing the reader the opportunity to follow the speaker in “A Scherzo for Sadness”, moment of recognition is made through multiple recollections of feelings in in a lifetime. The reader can apply the lesson to their own life and become aware that they can own more than one emotional identity. Looking deeper into the title, “scherzo” literally means, jest, or to make a joke of something. By making a joke of sadness, perhaps Lynn Powell is proposing that there is light in sadness because this emotion is necessary in life in order to fully experience the limited time on earth, and she makes these strong connects
Poetry is a part of literature that writers used to inform, educate, warn, or entertain the society. Although the field has developed over the years, the authenticity of poetry remains in its ability to produce a meaning using metaphors and allusions. In most cases, poems are a puzzle that the reader has to solve by applying rhetoric analysis to extract the meaning. Accordingly, poems are interesting pieces that activate the mind and explore the reader’s critical and analytical skills. In the poem “There are Delicacies,” Earle Birney utilizes a figurative language to express the theme and perfect the poem. Specifically, the poem addresses the frangibility of the human life by equating it to the flimsy of a watch. Precisely, the poet argues that a human life is short, and, therefore, everyone should complete his duties in perfection because once he or she dies, the chance is unavailable forever.
Each literary work portrays something different, leaving a unique impression on all who read that piece of writing. Some poems or stories make one feel happy, while others are more solemn. This has very much to do with what the author is talking about in his or her writing, leaving a bit of their heart and soul in the work. F. Scott Fitzgerald, when writing The Great Gatsby, wrote about the real world, yet he didn’t paint a rosy picture for the reader. The same can be said about T.S. Eliot, whose poem “The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock,” presents his interpretation of hell. Both pieces of writing have many similarities, but the most similar of them all is the tone of each one.
Through an intimate maternal bond, Michaels mother experiences the consequences of Michaels decisions, weakening her to a debilitating state of grief. “Once he belonged to me”; “He was ours,” the repetition of these inclusive statements indicates her fulfilment from protecting her son and inability to find value in life without him. Through the cyclical narrative structure, it is evident that the loss and grief felt by the mother is continual and indeterminable. Dawson reveals death can bring out weakness and anger in self and with others. The use of words with negative connotations towards the end of the story, “Lonely,” “cold,” “dead,” enforce the mother’s grief and regressing nature. Thus, people who find contentment through others, cannot find fulfilment without the presence of that individual.
In “The Flowers,” by Alice Walker, the flowers are used throughout the story to symbolize the beauty and naivety of childhood. In the beginning of the story the author shows the main character Myop walking down a path along the fence of her farm. Myop sees “an armful of strange blue flowers with velvety ridges…” The flowers are bright and colorful, reminding the reader of an innocent type of beauty often associated with them. This suggests the flowers were inserted in the story by Walker to reveal how young and innocent Myop appears to be. Later in the story, after Myop had discovered the dead body of a man who seemed to have been hung “Myop laid down her flowers,”. As Myop put down the flowers she was also putting down the last of her innocence.
Dorothy Parker, an accomplished American poet, exposes the darker side of human behavior through her epigrammatic style of poetry. She believed that a writer must say what he feels and sees. She specialized in the hard truths, particularly about death, in both life and love. Some major motifs present in Parker’s work include loneliness, lack of communication between men and women, disintegration of relationships, human frailties, and the affectations and hypocrisies of a patriarchal society. Parker’s wit is largely autobiographical reflecting the tumultuous years of her youth that included alcoholism, romantic disasters, and attempted suicides. The three poems provided in the text exemplify how Parker utilizes poetic devices such as irony, satire, and sarcasm to address the human frailties involved with searching for meaningful relationships and suicide.
The tone of Listening to grownups quarreling, has a completely different impact. When reading this poem, the reader has a more sad outlook on the thoughts of this author’s memories. Whitman uses ...
Thus, Moonlight Shadow can be viewed as Yoshimoto’s literary commentary on the motif of shared grief. Through two polar reactions to the death of a partner, Yoshimoto depicts how individuals naturally react radically and negatively, yet groups of people sharing and accepting their grief tend to be more affirmative,
In her poem entitled “The Poet with His Face in His Hands,” Mary Oliver utilizes the voice of her work’s speaker to dismiss and belittle those poets who focus on their own misery in their writings. Although the poem models itself a scolding, Oliver wrote the work as a poem with the purpose of delivering an argument against the usage of depressing, personal subject matters for poetry. Oliver’s intention is to dissuade her fellow poets from promoting misery and personal mistakes in their works, and she accomplishes this task through her speaker’s diction and tone, the imagery, setting, and mood created within the content of the poem itself, and the incorporation of such persuasive structures as enjambment and juxtaposition to bolster the poem’s
In her story “Currents” Hannah Vosckuil uses symbolism, and a reverse narrative structure to show the story of how unnamed sympathetic and antagonistic characters react differently to a traumatic event. Symbolism can be found in this story in the way that Gary does not mind sitting in the dark alone at the end of the day as well as how both of his girls are affected by the symbolism of hands. One holding a boy’s hand for the first time and the other becoming sick after seeing the dead boy’s hand fall off the stretcher. The sympathetic and antagonistic manner of these characters is shown when both girls are told by their grandmother that they must return to the water to swim the next day. The grandmother sees this simply as a way of encouraging them and keeping them from becoming afraid of the water. However, the girls see this as a scary proposition because of what had happened, showing the grandmother as an antagonist character to the little girls.
In life all humanity faces a struggle or heartbreak that seems almost impossible to make it through. In the poem Everybody Has a Heartache the author Joy Harjo discusses and introduces the opinion that everyone faces a heartache or blues. The author goes into detail about the different kinds of heartbreak that goes on in a variety of peoples’ everyday life. This poem was very interesting to me because the author chose very diverse and out of the normal heartbreaks for her characters to face rather than the normal heartbreaks that everyone can see. The author used several literary devices to establish an emotional connection with the readers.
During the process of growing up, we are taught to believe that life is relatively colorful and rich; however, if this view is right, how can we explain why literature illustrates the negative and painful feeling of life? Thus, sorrow is inescapable; as it increase one cannot hide it. From the moment we are born into the world, people suffer from different kinds of sorrow. Even though we believe there are so many happy things around us, these things are heartbreaking. The poems “Tips from My Father” by Carol Ann Davis, “Not Waving but Drowning” by Stevie Smith, and “The Fish” by Elizabeth Bishop convey the sorrow about growing up, about sorrowful pretending, and even about life itself.
In “Tradition, Modernity, & Postmodernity in Symbolism of Death”, Abby Collier argues that the symbolic representation of death has been redirected to a individualized representation of the deceased from a traditional representation, influenced by the social and cultural ways of dealing with death. The article discusses the evolution of the cemetery as social records, community and a postindustrial record, focusing on the transformation of the gravestones and memorialization of individuals through symbolic imagery. Collier insists that over the three distinct eras traditional, modern and postmodern, the symbols remain the same, while size, material and finish of gravestones differ.
Lullaby, by Leslie Marmon Silko, is a story about and old, Navajo woman that is reflecting on some of the saddest events in her life. Lullaby shows how the white people have damaged the Native American life style, culture and traditions. Loss and symbolism are two major themes in this story.
Letting go of childhood memories that hold such deep remorse for how a person life structure is develop provides evidence of past hardship. In the poem “The Minefield” written by Diane Thiel, provides an outline of Wartime tragedy that leads to haunting memories. The speaker in poem is a young man who witness a tragedy of an extreme event during War, when even simply playtime for children required caution of dangerous surrounding. For instance, the speaker elaborates on the meaning of one word minefield, which in this poem has a double meaning from war an emotional distress. In the short stanzas of the poem, many symbol share a link between each other with reference of memories of dark images that linger on throughout the tone of the speaker. The dark images is the base of the poem, which several outcomes of distressful behavior and unresolved memories make for an interesting story from the mind of the speaker. Therefore, no one should go through life with
We’ve all wondered and wracked our brains over the questions and nature of humankind, to which we have no true and final answers: how every moment lived and this moment you live right now, will simply be a memory, the daunting inevitability of death, life’s transience, the irreversibility of time, the loss of innocence with ages…it is in the human condition to question such things; and this mutual similarity in wonder, to me, is beautiful. I intertwine these universal topics into my poetry, particularly Father & Child and the Violets, to transcend time and provide meaning to a range of different contexts, whilst reflecting my own context and values.