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Joy harjo poem deer dancer analysis
Joy harjo remember poem analysis
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Reading Joy Harjo's poem was a very emotional experience for me. To me, it was about a woman who was trying to build a life for herself, but it was falling flat. Her dreams were not coming true, and she had come to a point where she had to decide whether to kill herself and end her misery, or pull herself up and begin again, continue living through her shattered expectations. Without getting into personal details, this poem pierced me through the heart. The ambiguous ending drives the point home that there's always a choice. There are always people who want to bring you down, but there are also always people who would support you. The choice lies in the hands of the woman who is dangling.
The interview was interesting, to a lesser degree.
As humans, the journey through life means forming emotional attachments to each other. The first type of attachment we form is with our family. Eventually, people grow older and form emotional attachments to individuals outside the family, as friends. Then later in life, the possibility of developing romantic relationships can arise. However, each person at some point must face the reality that the people they have bonded with will depart this world. Similarly, one must also deal with the new assortment of emotions that follow after a passing or separation. In Lydia Davis’s poem “Head, Heart”, she depicts a conversation between a head and a grief-stricken heart, which represents the internal conflict between logic and emotion following a separation
depressing. It appears that this poem was the reaction of the death of a loved one.
...represent the stages of one’s life. She focuses on the most extreme sense of ends-death, and rejects it as final. What the poem arrived at is that some aspect of life or form of existence continues after death.
The journey in a novel can be accomplished physically, mentally or both as a character portrays aspects of their physical travel as well as traveling to seek or fulfill a goal. In Joy Kogawa’s Obasan, Naomi Nakane narrates her experiences with her family as they suffer prejudice of being Japanese Canadians while traveling to different provinces in attempts of getting away from incrimination of those injustices. It is shown how the constant movement from one place to another throughout Naomi’s life adds to the lack of communication and language their family faces presenting the theme of silence.
Toni Morrison's novel, Beloved, reveals the effects of human emotion and its power to cast an individual into a struggle against him or herself. In the beginning of the novel, the reader sees the main character, Sethe, as a woman who is resigned to her desolate life and isolates herself from all those around her. Yet, she was once a woman full of feeling: she had loved her husband Halle, loved her four young children, and loved the days of the Clearing. And thus, Sethe was jaded when she began her life at 124 Bluestone Road-- she had loved too much. After failing to 'save' her children from the schoolteacher, Sethe suffered forever with guilt and regret. Guilt for having killed her "crawling already?" baby daughter, and then regret for not having succeeded in her task. It later becomes apparent that Sethe's tragic past, her chokecherry tree, was the reason why she lived a life of isolation. Beloved, who shares with Seths that one fatal moment, reacts to it in a completely different way; because of her obsessive and vengeful love, she haunts Sethe's house and fights the forces of death, only to come back in an attempt to take her mother's life. Through her usage of symbolism, Morrison exposes the internal conflicts that encumber her characters. By contrasting those individuals, she shows tragedy in the human condition. Both Sethe and Beloved suffer the devastating emotional effects of that one fateful event: while the guilty mother who lived refuses to passionately love again, the daughter who was betrayed fights heaven and hell- in the name of love- just to live again.
These final words sum up her feeling of helplessness and emptiness. Her identity is destroyed in a way due to having children. We assume change is always positive and for the greater good but Harwood’s poem challenges that embedding change is negative as the woman has gained something but lost so much in return.
Although the little girl doesn’t listen to the mother the first time she eventually listens in the end. For example, in stanzas 1-4, the little girl asks if she can go to the Freedom March not once, but twice even after her mother had already denied her the first time. These stanzas show how the daughter is a little disobedient at first, but then is able to respect her mother’s wishes. In stanzas 5 and 6, as the little girl is getting ready the mother is happy and smiling because she knows that her little girl is going to be safe, or so she thinks. By these stanzas the reader is able to tell how happy the mother was because she thought her daughter would be safe by listening to her and not going to the March. The last two stanzas, 7 and 8, show that the mother senses something is wrong, she runs to the church to find nothing, but her daughter’s shoe. At this moment she realizes that her baby is gone. These stanzas symbolize that even though her daughter listened to her she still wasn’t safe and is now dead. The Shoe symbolizes the loss the mother is going through and her loss of hope as well. This poem shows how elastic the bond between the daughter and her mother is because the daughter respected her mother’s wish by not going to the March and although the daughter is now dead her mother will always have her in her heart. By her having her
As per the Romantic Movement, emotion and a person’s instinct reigned over order, logic and conscious mind. Felicia Hemans’ Indian Woman’s Death-Song focuses on the strength and power of untamed human emotion rather than logic and conscious thought. The poem itself was inspired by a distraught woman, foreshadowing the intense emotion which is encompassed in the rest of the poem. The canoe the woman is standing in can be seen as a metonym for the woman’s true emotional state. The canoe is described as ‘light’ and ‘frail’ suggesting the woman has no ‘social’ weight behind her emotions and that she is barely holding together. By social weight, the woman has no status or power socially, correlating with the rest of the poem and her feelings towards the treatment of women. The audience knows her actions are extreme and unnecessary, allowing for a better connection to form to her and the morals of the poem. People, particularly women, would understand and empathise with the pain the woman would be feeling knowing that a decision to end a life does not come easily. Furthermore, the diction choices of ‘proudly’, ‘dauntlessly’, ‘triumphantly’ and ‘glorious’ in regards to the woman’s actions contrast to the action itself, they are not words typically associated with murder and suicide. These strong descriptive words further expand on the idea of the woman’s
Every family has secrets. Taboo secrets are typically the one's we'd like to keep hidden the most. Unfortunately, what's done in the dark always finds itself resurfacing to the light. In Allison Bechdel "Fun Home", she recollects the memories that impacted her life the most when she was in the stage of discovering her true self. The memories we remember the most tend to play a major role in our life development. For Allison, one well-kept secret that her father contained well from her, unraveled many memories of the truth that laid before her eyes.
“Happiness” by Jane Kenyon is a poem that uses enhanced language and effective literary devices to elevate Kenyon’s poem above the others on the poetry 180 website. She establishes an allusion to the prodigal son; “... or the way it turns up like a prodigal/ who comes back to the dust at your feet”(2-3). This allows the author to speak to those of a Christian background, but eliminates the poems universality. Furthermore, Kenyon’s use of alliteration when describing the “... clerk stacking cans of carrots”, emphasizes how something so mundane can still bring a person happiness. Similarly, the use of imagery enables the audience to visualize what the author is conveying to create a personal connection. “You made a feast in honour of what/ was
The poet tries to appreciate the people, who are always present when their friends and family are in need. She says that when people are in need of help, and/or suffering, all one needs to do is stick by their side, to give them courage to overcome their troubles.
..., the content and form has self-deconstructed, resulting in a meaningless reduction/manifestation of repetition. The primary focus of the poem on the death and memory of a man has been sacrificed, leaving only the skeletal membrane of any sort of focus in the poem. The “Dirge” which initially was meant to reflect on the life of the individual has been completely abstracted. The “Dirge” the reader is left with at the end of the poem is one meant for anyone and no one. Just as the internal contradictions in Kenneth Fearing’s poem have eliminated the substantial significance of each isolated concern, the reader is left without not only a resolution, but any particular tangible meaning at all. The form and content of this poem have quite effectively established a powerful modernist statement, ironically contingent on the absence and not the presence of meaning in life.
Joy Harjo was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma on May 9, 1951 (Napikoski). She is an activistwho fights for Indigenous Cultures, Women, and the Environment. These strong beliefs areevident in her body of work. I will draw parallels between Harjo’s life and three pieces of work –“I Give You Back”, “She Has Some Horses”, and “Eagle Poem”.In “I Give You Back” (Harjo 477-8) Harjo writes of fear. A collective Fear of IndigenousPeople. Being of Mvskoke, or Creek, and Cherokee descent (Napikoski) she describes many ofthe injustices that were handed to the Indian people. This poem speaks of the horrors the Indianshad to endure when the White Men raided the villages and in the days since. Horrors starvation,raping, and torture. Harjo feels these pains and has
Many times people express their feelings through words others can understand but in the poem, “Lost Soul” by Brianna Alvarez, she expresses her way of feeling and thought through poetic and literary devices. There is a use of imagery and the theme to imply heartbreak, suffrage, and hopelessness. The poem express how the speaker wants to be left alone of something or someone that has hurt or is hurting them.
Two brilliant Romantic literary works by William Wordsworth, Ode: Intimations of Immorality from Recollections of Early Childhood and I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud, express in captivating detail the unforgettable joy one experiences in their lifetime. This joy can never be erased from memory, nor destroyed by present or future evils. The joy communicated in these stories conveys a sense of peaceful bliss that gives the reader a sense of inner harmony in the speaker’s soul. This peaceful certainty makes the reader believe that the speaker is content in his inner being in whatever may happen, for the joy he has found can never be taken from him. And though his memory is calloused with the pain and sufferings experienced on Earth, the delight that he had once experienced overshadows the darkness so that what shines within him is unforgettable joy!