The Curse of the Orange Tree and the Artist
"In a Green Night" by Derek Walcott is a poem about the conflicting feelings of life. "In a Green Night" focuses on the ever-present threat of death, and how our lives revolve around the inevitability of death. Through metaphors, paradoxes, and repetition, Walcott exemplifies the hopelessness and glory that occur when an artist realizes that, in his quest for creating the perfect piece of art, he is ultimately growing closer to death--just as an orange tree grows closer to death as it produces its magnificent fruit.
The key to "In a Green Night" lies in the metaphor that Walcott uses; human thought and creativity are compared to an aging orange tree. An orange tree produces oranges just like an artist produces art. Both living things are in immediate danger of losing their lives without producing something meaningful. An orange tree's life can be short-lived, with few opportunities to produce its beloved fruit. An artist's life may follow this same road; the artist may have only a very short time to produce his own masterpiece. As the orange tree and the artist come into the prime of their life, they also begin to die. Walcott uses this metaphor beautifully, without ever actually comparing the two objects directly.
The second device that Walcott uses in "In a Green Night" is the paradox. A paradox is a statement that first seems to be contradictory or absurd, but it turns out to make perfect sense. The first place that Walcott uses a paradox is in the title of the poem. "In a Green Night" appears to contradict itself. Nights are usually described as "dark," or "obscure," or oftentimes they even symbolize death. By using the word "green" Walcott makes a very bold stat...
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...ted fables now/That her last season's summer height/Bends from each overburdened bough" (1-4). A fable is a short narrative that exemplifies a moral principle of human behavior. The tree tells a fable, using her overburdened boughs to represent how producing art can be a burden for an artist. These first lines introduce the fable, while the final lines tell the moral of the story--creating the ultimate paradox. The second line of the stanza says: "Proclaims that fable perfect now" (30). The tree shows its connection with humans perfectly through its sad story of its doomed life.
"In a Green Night" by Derek Walcott is a poem that looks simple on the outside. Through metaphors, paradoxes, and repetition the poem tells a fable. The poem tells the fable of an artist burdened with his ability to think and create which becomes both his doom and his glory.
This is a figure of speech which takes on animals, ideas, abstractions and inanimate objects with human form, character or sensibilities. It is representing imaginary creatures or things as having human personalities, intelligence and emotions. In the poem ‘ALL THAT TIME’, in stanza one the poet has given the trees the human character of embracing each other and leaning on each other. The poet also describes one of the trees upright one which is also a human characteristic.
While thinking of death, thoughts of grief, despair and worry arise. Perhaps this is a product of the darkness often times portrayed of death from contemporary literature, movies, and music. Movies such as “Schindler’s List” and music such as Neil Young’s “Tonight’s the Night” are just a few examples of entertainment that show the darkness and finality of death. These forms of medium only present the idea, as no one who wrote them actually experienced death and therefore the dark thoughts associated with it are ambiguous. In “712 (Because I Could not Stop for Death)”, poet Emily Dickinson also shows the darkness associated but she has a different view of death. She writes from the standpoint of a narrator
Fitzgerald makes this very peculiar image of a green light. These scenes of color imagery indicate that the color green is significant in this passage. “… I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes—a fresh, green breast of the new world.” Fitzgerald is conveying the image of the conquest of the Dutch in the new world. He states that green was widely seen across the continent meaning trees. The color green is revealed as a light, which Gatsby used to watch at the night to demonstrate his desire and want for Daisy. “I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock.” The image of the green light was Gatsby’s desire to reunite with Daisy and it was also a sign of hope that Gatsby had by looking off into the water to see the other
The implication of the color green was most abundant in chapter sixteen, where Hawthorne used much description to depict the dreariness within the woods, yet adding a sense of security to it all. 'Here they sat down on a luxuriant heap of moss, which, at some epoch of the preceding century, had been a gigantic pine, with its root and trunk in the darksome shade…'; (177) There is, apparently, plenty of references to the color green. Not only does green represent nature in general, its reference to the forest is also the very depiction of freedom. Nobody watches in the woods to report misbehavior, thus it is here that people may do as they wish.
A few symbolisms in novels are as memorable as the green light in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Shining at the end of Daisy’s dock, it is close enough to be seen, but too far away to be reached. Still, Gatsby, an eternal optimist, stares at it at night, as if it showed him that all his far-away dreams were about to come true. The green light in The Great Gatsby is symbolic of hope, a source of inspiration, and a representation of the American Dream to Gatsby and to the novel’s readers.
“Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter–tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther… and then one fine morning–so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” This quote ends Fitzgerald’s novel by coming back to the symbol of the Green Light. After the horrific events that occurred at the end of the novel the meaning of the green light was realized. The green light symbolizes Gatsby’s inability to repeat the past, and the everyone's inability to repeat the past as a whole. The green light also symbolizes other things. When Gatsby is seen reaching out towards the light, the light green light symbolizes Gatsby’s hopefulness that he could repeat the past. Although in the end, Gatsby’s effort to repeat the past was futile.
The color green can signify many things in the every day life, people may think of it as “go” or as something positive. F. Scott Fitzgerald is an author known to use a lot of symbolism in his writings. In his famous novel, “the Great Gatsby”, Fitzgerald uses the color green to represent various things. His use of the color green represents mostly what Gatsby desires most in life, but he also includes it to represent little things that need thinking to figure out.
More than death itself, Harwood’s poetry shows how many people fail to accept death. Their belief in immortality and fear of the end is also potrayed in Nightfall. Although when the subject of the poem is death, the words describe life, as if reluctant to face up to reality. The images are of suburbs, lights, birds and trees. Even with so many experiences, many of us will forever be ignorant seems to be the truth ringing perpetually though Harwood’s verses.
Frost is far more than the simple agrarian writer some claim him to be. He is deceptively simple at first glance, writing poetry that is easy to understand on an immediate, superficial level. Closer examination of his texts, however, reveal his thoughts on deeply troubling psychological states of living in a modern world. As bombs exploded and bodies piled up in the World Wars, people were forced to consider not only death, but the aspects of human nature that could allow such atrocities to occur. By using natural themes and images to present modernist concerns, Frost creates poetry that both soothes his readers and asks them to consider the true nature of the world and themselves.
"John (Anthony) Burgess Wilson." DISCovering Authors. Detroit: Gale, 2003. Student Resources in Context. Web. 11 Mar. 2012.
The night is a symbol for dark moments of solitude during the speaker’s life. Through being “acquainted with the night” (line 1), the speaker is saying that he is familiar with darkness, proving how symbolism brings out a detached tone with the help of diction, saying that isolated darkness is something the speaker experiences regularly. The exertion of the night as symbolism creates an image for readers to realize that Frost did not actually mean nighttime in his poem; he used the night as symbolism to provide deeper insight and bring the image of our own dark times to describe as “the night”(line 1) just as the speaker of “Acquainted With the Night” did. Symbolism goes on to present itself in line 2, the “rain” is used as a symbol for tears and melancholy. The rain was not meant to be read literally, but rather symbolically as tears, or times of mourning over the harsh struggles in life, just as the speaker did when he “walked out in rain and back in rain” (line 2) meaning he walked into and out of life’s struggles. If the weather is cold and rainy, no one goes outside because of the gloomy clouds and cold rain. Similarly, no one reached out to the speaker in “Acquainted With the Night” during his gloomy periods of “rain”(line 2) or sadness, which expresses
The green light signifies Gatsby’s hopes and dreams. Nick thinks back to when Gatsby observes the green light across the bay from West Egg and says, “Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us” (180). The “orgastic future” represents the American dream in which everyone has the equal opportunity to live in prosperity and happiness through hard work and success. Gatsby’s dream is full of potential, but the memories in his past end up against him and his potential diminishes as his life
The conceit in line 8, “like an iceberg between the shoulder blades” (line 8), illustrates the briskness death emanates whilst taking the life from the warmth of your body. This ice and fire comparison coaxes the reader to pursue the unwelcoming thought of death as the adverse path to travel by. By no means does Oliver attempt to romanticize the idea of a brief and painless endeavor. Furthermore, the recurrence of cessation illustrated by the “hungry bear in autumn” (2) simile suggests the seasonal regularity death’s toll takes on the living. The presence of frequency characterizes the shift in forbearance to the acceptance of the inevitable. Oliver is caught up in reminiscent thought as she employs worldly imagery to describe life. For example, in lines 15-16 Oliver writes “and I think of each life as a flower, as common / as a field daisy.” This line stands out in the fact that it represents the first occurrence of communal thought. Describing each life as a “flower” in a “field” suggests that life is supposed to be about the people whom you surround yourself with, and less about the solidarity that stems from the notion of darkness. Oliver’s implication of poetry and down-to-earth imagery captures not only the progression of thought, but also her feelings towards the concepts of life and
This poetic device aided the reader to visualize not only how silent and dead the leaves were, but also to perceive the atmosphere of the poem. In the poem “Time Does Not Bring
The first stanza opens up with saying how the speaker was young and did not have a care in the world. The first line talks about him relaxing under an apple bough, which is an apple tree. He also goes on to explain in line two that he is as “happy as the grass was green” (2), which