Sudeep Sen’s “New York Times” basically deals with a strong sense of life in New York. This poem consists of thirty lines altogether in six stanzas, depicting a clear description of one’s every day life at a fast pace in the first four stanzas and gradually mellows down to a slower motion, where reflection manages to take place. From the first sentence itself, “Every morning in relentless hurry, I scurry/” there is the sense of hurriedness and swiftness as if “I” is in a rat race. “Scurry” is normally associated with rats, always scamper and in a rush all the time.
Readers have a dramatic image of the fast events that are happening to the persona. This can be witnessed through the “spilled coffee” indicating the lack of time to even stop for a sip of drink or breakfast. In New York, time does not stand still. Since every moment passes in a fast manner, the persona doesn’t even realise “it’s lunch time, and then,/ evening, late,/ being herded home …” mechanically as if he has lost control of his own life. Besides the dictions chosen, Sen uses less punctuation in each line of the first four stanzas to represent the quickness and the rapidity of the persona in the midst of New York City.
Sen also utilises the idea of illusion in his dictions to indicate the speed of the people in this city. This can be seen in line 17, “where walking means/ running, driving means speeding,/” and since time passes in a wink of an eye, persona couldn’t even remember the days in the weekend as Sen states in line 14 – 17, “In this city, I/ count the passage of time only by weekends/ linked by five-day flashes I don’t/ even remember.” Everybody seems to be “speeding in the subway of mute faces/”. Being busy in the city, has transformed people to be so automated, mechanical person with their “mute faces”, no one cares to say hi to each other or even to smile to the person sitting next to you.
However, in the last line of the fourth stanza, “But somewhere, somehow, times takes its toll,/” is seen as the turning point in this poem. This sentence is depicting the reflection as if the persona stops to think for a moment.
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”
...he imagery of the more intensely-felt passages in the middle of the poem. Perhaps the poet is like someone at their journey's end, `all passion spent', recollecting in tranquillity some intimations of mortality?
While the poem's situation is simple, its theme is not. Stafford appears to be intimating that life is precious and fragile; however, nothing so clearly discloses these attributes of life as confrontation with death. Furthermore, the very confrontations that engender appreciation of life's delicacies force action-all to frequently callous action.
The article titled "The man with the snow job" appears in the Opinion Pages, The New York Times. Author, Gail Collins, opens her article with the question: “Who is to blame for this weather?” which hooks readers’ attention and makes them curious about what they are going to read. In her writing, Collins talks about the current snowstorm in the United States and how it is used for everyone’s advantage. She also points out how government officials such as Arnold Schwarzenegger, Al Gore, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama use the occasion of snowfall for their own purposes. The author borrows images of global warming effects to discuss some controversial problems in the society these days. She applies the following elements to establish the sarcastic tone throughout her article: hyperbole, metaphor, and simile.
Piercy mentions, “jump into work head first” (2); it illustrates people start the job right away. She shows another example; with “swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight” gives us a clear image of swiftness and energetic power moving forward (4). In spite of hers, in my poem, “stare back at yesterday” means people care about what happened in the past. While they are thinking about the past, they are already left behind by people who already start working. In addition, “roar at the silent movies” provides an image of staying behind or even backward because the silent movies represent the happenings in the past. From both first stanzas, Piercy’s poem delivers us the image of progress whereas my poem shows
In the second stanza, Laurie Lee reintegrates the idea of time passing slowly through the line “taking the village wi...
Just look at the quote I gave you earlier: “Brooklyn, New York, as the undefined, hard-to–remember the shape of a stain.” He sees it as nothing but a stain on the map. He goes on to talk about “…the sludge at the bottom of the canal causes it to bubble.” Giving us something we can see, something we can hear because you can just imagine being near the canal and hearing the sludge bubble make their popping noises as the gas is released. He “The train sounds different – lighter, quieter—in the open air,” when it comes from underground and the sight he sees on the rooftops. Although some are negative, such as the sagging of roofs and graffiti, his tone towards the moment seems to be admiration. In the second section, he talks about the smells of Brooklyn and the taste of food. He’d talk about how his daughter compares the tastes of pizzas with her “…stern judgments of pizza. Low end… New Hampshire pizza. … In the middle… zoo pizza. …very top… two blocks from our house,” and different it was where he’d grown up. He talks about the immense amount of “smells in Brooklyn: Coffee, fingernail polish, eucalyptus…” and how other might hate it, but he enjoys it. In the same section, he describes how he enjoys the Brooklyn accent and the noise and smells that other people make on the streets and at the park across from his house. “Charcoal smoke drifts into the
New Criticism attracts many readers to its methodologies by enticing them with clearly laid out steps to follow in order to criticize any work of literature. It dismisses the use of all outside sources, asserting that the only way to truly analyze a poem efficiently is to focus purely on the words in the poem. For this interpretation I followed all the steps necessary in order to properly analyze the poem. I came to a consensus on both the tension, and the resolving of it.
The subway cart setting is an example of American symbolism. The eerie underground cart is an element of the play’s title; the flying Dutchman’s haunted ship, however, it can also be seen as the illustration of American society. The subway cart is a representation of an enclosed space where people are forced to interact. Regardless of race, gender and social class the urban subway cart is an area of social stimulation. Passengers often enter and ride anonymously, we see in the list of characters “Riders of Coach, white and black” are included in the dynamics of the subway cart set. It is a tight and confined space trapped with a random sampling of people at any given time. Baraka uses this setting as the perfect environment for two strangers to openly interact. A perfectly natural place to meet someone new, like Clay and Lula. A ...
This poem has a deeper meaning than what means the eye at first glance. The ending is interesting and was worth a third and even fourth go over. “So, this can be a defining moment, but not a big question, because no one ever figures those out. Still, one day when someone does, might it not be a person like you staring down a bear looking for lunch?” This could mean several things, but this kept coming to mind. Maybe the answer to life is just to live life. Not to feed in to things that take up time and don’t matter. Life is short and someday you may be the one who is facing the difficult situation. Tilley puts his reader on the spot and asks what would you do in this situation. Also, by stating that it is a defining
In “On the Subway” by Sharon Olds, the author contrasts two divergent people. Olds come to many conclusions as a result of the experience. Sharon Olds utilizes tone, poetic devices such as metaphor, and finally imagery.
This essay is anchored on the goal of looking closer and scrutinizing the said poem. It is divided into subheadings for the discussion of the analysis of each of the poem’s stanzas.
The poem is launched by a protracted introduction during which the speaker indulges in descriptions of landscape and local color, deferring until the fifth stanza the substantive statement regarding what is happening to whom: "a bus journeys west." This initial postponement and the leisurely accumulation of apparently trivial but realistic detail contribute to the atmospheric build-up heralding the unique occurrence of the journey. That event will take place as late as the middle of the twenty-second stanza, in the last third of the text. It is only in retrospect that one realizes the full import of that happening, and it is only with the last line of the final stanza that the reader gains the necessary distance to grasp entirely the functional role of the earlier descriptive parts.
The first passage, extracted from author Charles Dickens’ book Oliver Twist, establishes the meaning of the morning rush to work in the year 1837; Dickens creates this meaning through his specific sentence structure and his continuous use of imagery within the extract. The second passage, extracted from The Buddha of Suburbia, written by Hanif Kureishi, establishes a modern description of the class division created by the city of London; Kureishi creates this meaning with the use of characterization and figurative language. Both Dickens and Kureishi, are able to create a theme of society and class that is accurate with the time period in which each individual passage is written.
In the last line of the second stanza, the subject enters dramatically, accompanied by an abrupt change in the rhythm of the poem: