Seamus Heaney’s “Personal Helicon” reflects on the past, illuminating the clash between innocent curiosity of adolescence and wide-ranging moralities expected of adults. Although the poem lacks extreme, unnecessary sentiment, the speaker manages to personally connect himself with nature in order to create an enjoyable, wistful tone. The poet incorporates intense, powerful vocabulary in order to enhance the lines, which allows the reader to comprehend the recollections with greater illustrations and feel.
Greek mythology considers Mount Helicon a sacred place, which holds strong inspiration. The actual personal Helicon in this poem refers to the wells, signifying a place where Heaney’s poetry may flourish. The symbolic images of wells bring forth the inspiration discovered within the speaker’s own reflection. Personal inspiration leads the speaker towards his current lifestyle as a writer.
Initially, the speaker describes his former fascination with the old pumps and wells. “As a child,” he treasured “the dark drop, the trapped sky, the smells of waterweed, fungus and dank moss” (1,...
The timeline carries on chronologically, the intense imagery exaggerated to allow the poem to mimic childlike mannerisms. This, subjectively, lets the reader experience the adventure through the young speaker’s eyes. The personification of “sunset”, (5) “shutters”, (8) “shadows”, (19) and “lamplights” (10) makes the world appear alive and allows nothing to be a passing detail, very akin to a child’s imagination. The sunset, alive as it may seem, ordinarily depicts a euphemism for death, similar to the image of the “shutters closing like the eyelids”
This poem includes quotes with informal language that children or teens would better understand. It’s narrative-based style is easy to follow, and although the poem covers very basic concepts, it’s message is still communicated subliminally. This particular poem is interesting because it focusses on the universal experience of pain and it’s relation to time. Similar to this is “The Householder”, written in a cyclical style, opening with a “house” and ending with a “home”. With only three stanzas, it is
The death camp was a terrible place where people where killed. Hitler is who created the death camp for Jews. The death camp was used for extermination on Jews. This occurred on 1939 – 1945. The death camps were in the country of Europe. Hitler did all this because he didn’t like Jews and the religions. The book Night is a autobiography written by Elie Wiesel. The poem called First they came for the communist written by Martin Neimoller is a autobiography.
The fertilizer works of Durham’s lay away from the rest of the plant. This this part of the yards came all the “tankage,” and the waste products of all sorts; here they dried out the bones—and in suffocating cellars where the day light bending over whirling machines and sewing bits of bone into all sorts of shapes, breathing their lungs of the fine dust, and doomed to die, every one of them, within a certain time. Here they made the blood into albumen, and made other foul-smelling things into thins still more foul-smelling. In the corridors and caverns where it was done, you might lose yourself as in the great caves of Kentucky. (p. 152)
Seamus Heaney’s poem “Blackberry-Picking” does not merely describe a child’s summer activity of collecting berries for amusement. Rather, it details a stronger motivation, ruled by a more primal urge, guised as a fanciful experience of childhood and its many lessons. This is shown through Heaney’s use of language in the poem, including vibrant diction, intense imagery and powerful metaphor—an uncommon mix coming from a child’s perspective.
This darkly satiric poem is about cultural imperialism. Dawe uses an extended metaphor: the mother is America and the child represents a younger, developing nation, which is slowly being imbued with American value systems. The figure of a mother becomes synonymous with the United States. Even this most basic of human relationships has been perverted by the consumer culture. The poem begins with the seemingly positive statement of fact 'She loves him ...’. The punctuation however creates a feeling of unease, that all is not as it seems, that there is a subtext that qualifies this apparently natural emotional attachment. From the outset it is established that the child has no real choice, that he must accept the 'beneficence of that motherhood', that the nature of relationships will always be one where the more powerful figure exerts control over the less developed, weaker being. The verb 'beamed' suggests powerful sunlight, the emotional power of the dominant person: the mother. The stanza concludes with a rhetorical question, as if undeniably the child must accept the mother's gift of love. Dawe then moves on to examine the nature of that form of maternal love. The second stanza deals with the way that the mother comforts the child, 'Shoosh ... shoosh ... whenever a vague passing spasm of loss troubles him'. The alliterative description of her 'fat friendly features' suggests comfort and warmth. In this world pain is repressed, real emotion pacified, in order to maintain the illusion that the world is perfect. One must not question the wisdom of the omnipotent mother figure. The phrase 'She loves him...' is repeated. This action of loving is seen as protecting, insulating the child. In much the same way our consumer cultur...
even to work on a farm, you need to have quite a lot of skill. The
Examine how Heaney presents his relationship with his father in Digging and a Follower. In the poem the Follower, the poet admires his father with all. factions. The sex of the sex. The poet, Heaney, describes his father in verse 2, stanza 1.
Homer and Hesiod were well-known epic poets that gave contribution to their culture by writing poetry on the different aspects and views of the Greek world. Homer’s long narrative poems dealt a lot with heroes at war, gods and goddesses involved with humans while Hesiod’s poetry is shorter, having little to do with heroes, and presents the importance of work and morality. Although the two poets have their own unique writing style, there are many differences and similarities in The Odyssey, Works and Days, and Iliad about beliefs in religion, description of women, and function of war.
In this poem, the author tells of a lost love. In order to convey his overwhelming feelings, Heaney tries to describe his emotions through something familiar to everyone. He uses the sea as a metaphor for love, and is able to carry this metaphor throughout the poem. The metaphor is constructed of both obvious and connotative diction, which connect the sea and the emotions of love.
...ttachment or emotion. Again, Heaney repeats the use of a discourse marker, to highlight how vividly he remembers the terrible time “Next morning, I went up into the room”. In contrast to the rest of the poem, Heaney finally writes more personally, beginning with the personal pronoun “I”. He describes his memory with an atmosphere that is soft and peaceful “Snowdrops and Candles soothed the bedside” as opposed to the harsh and angry adjectives previously used such as “stanched” and “crying”. With this, Heaney is becoming more and more intimate with his time alone with his brother’s body, and can finally get peace of mind about the death, but still finding the inevitable sadness one feels with the loss of a loved one “A four foot box, a foot for every year”, indirectly telling the reader how young his brother was, and describing that how unfortunate the death was.
Once the reader can passes up the surface meaning of the poem Blackberry-Picking, by Seamus Heaney, past the emotional switch from sheer joy to utter disappointment, past the childhood memories, the underlying meaning can be quite disturbing. Hidden deep within the happy-go-lucky rifts of childhood is a disturbing tale of greed and murder. Seamus Heaney, through clever diction, ghastly imagery, misguided metaphors and abruptly changing forms, ingeniously tells the tale that is understood and rarely spoken aloud.
Many times poetry is reflective of the author’s past as well as their personal struggles. One struggle that poets write about is of identity and the creation, as well as loss, of individual identities. Using a passage from the essay Lava Cameo by Eavan Boland, I will show how two poets use their craft to describe their struggle with identity. Eavan Boland and Seamus Heaney both write poems which express an internal struggle with roles of identity and how they recreate their roles to fit their needs. Through retrospection and reflection, both poets come to realize that the roles they led as well as those they reinvented have created their own personal identities. Boland, in her essay Lava Cameo, touches on several emotions (loss, despair, etc) and episodes in her life which capture the essence of her identity. It is this notion of individual identity that is a central theme throughout Boland’s essay and some of her poems. Boland, through retrospection and hindsight, has been able to recognize the roles that society has dictated that she follow. These roles were not necessarily created for any rational reason (ex: female role as subordinate and even as marital property). One passage in particular captures the internal struggles Boland has endured. This passage runs from pages 27 to 29 in Boland’s Object Lessons. It begins by saying, "It may not be that women poets of another generation…" and ends with "…but because of poetry."
This is an autobiographical type of poem in which the author, Walt Whitman, is also that persona, who in developing this type of poetic work, and surpasses the traditional limits of the “self.” The captivating and attention-grabbing aspect of the poem is the free verse technique or style, which significantly makes the development of the “self” a calming task while celebrating a personal life. The persona is described as a lover of nature, and incorporates three sections of the self-personality that include “I,” “me,” and the “soul”. Whitman’s use of sexual or bodily imagery and his use of grass as a central image and metaphor create a poem that is bold and uncommon for his era. A unique element of the poem is that the poet declines the basic conventions and rules of poetry. Whitman’s poem doesn’t follow any specific rhyme scheme, nor does it have a particular beat count or structure. Whitman still manages to successfully represent and replicate smooth flowing thoughts and ideas from the mind to the paperwork, making it a revolutionary form of poetry.