A Case Study of One Student’s Approach to Reading The Divine Image
Hypothesis
When Marielle, an English 2 student, was given a series of critical thinking tasks, her first response to the poem, “The Divine Image,” by William Blake changed as she followed the direction of each task and built on her previous understanding of the poem. I describe her responses to the eight learning paper tasks and her dissection of the poem for hidden meanings.
The Tasks and Various Interpretations
For each learning paper, Marielle was given eight different ways to interpret
“The Divine Image,” by William Blake. Learning paper 1 asked her to read the poem out loud, write down any ideas that came to mind, then write a summary of what the poem was about. She familiarized herself with the poem when she asked questions such as “Do these words contradict each other?” and “Who is they?” This was her interpretation:
I interpret this songs to be a message. The speaker is trying to express the message that man always pray to the Divine God for Mercy Pity Peace or Love. This song applies all of the qualities of mercy pity peace and love to have a human characteristic. [I have not corrected Marielle’s grammatical or spelling errors because she was asked not to revise her responses.]
She feels all humans have these characteristics of Mercy, Pity, Peace and Love. So when praying, one prays for these characteristics because one feels it is necessary. These were the main points that Marielle emphasized. She concluded: “I feel that this song may be able to be interpreted in many ways but when I read I may have received a different message than others.” She views poems as having various meanings that a reader reveals by absorbing a message...
... middle of paper ...
...pretation of a poem and she realizes that “as I completed the Learning Papers and studied different method of understanding the poem I began to enjoy the poem.” She receives self – gratification, responding to her feelings about the poem.
The Divine Image
To Mercy Pity Peace and Love,
All pray in their distress:
And to these virtues of delight
Return their thankfulness.
For Mercy Pity Peace and Love,
Is God our Father dear:
And Mercy Pity Peace and Love,
Is Man his child and care.
For Mercy has a human heart
Pity, a human face:
And Love, the human form divine.
And Peace, the human dress.
Then every man of every clime,
That prays in his distress,
Prays to the human form divine
Love Mercy Pity Peace.
And all must love the human form,
In heathen, turk or jew
Where Mercy, Love & Pity dwell.
There God is dwelling too.
Nearly everyone is familiar with the character of Christ. While understandings of Christ as a figure of faith may vary, he is universally recognized as a historical figure. The world knows that Christ was called “Son of God,” he called people to love, and he died a painful death on the cross. He has become such an important figure that images of him show up frequently in literature. Thomas Foster, author of How to Read Literature Like a Professor, outlines a wide range of characteristics common in Christ-like figures. In his list of descriptors, Foster suggests characters might be Christ figures if they have wounds reminiscent of the crucifixion, suffer in agony, or are self-sacrificing—and this is only the beginning of his list (126). Readers repeatedly identify Christ figures in literature, both because of the well-known characteristics Foster describes in his chapter on Christ figures and because readers find them through their own understandings. In Yu Hua’s
For example, one line, “Soon our pilgrimage will cease; Soon our happy hearts will quiver, with the melody of peace,” which is saying that one day we will die, and you can’t stop that. “Lay we every burden down; Grace our spirits will deliver, and provide a robe and a crown,” also reveals that you should appreciate what we’ve had, and what was given to us. This song is telling you, in every line, that you can’t live forever, but appreciate what you have, while you
Small regions within an instellar cloud about a fraction of a light year across begin to collapse under their own gravity. As the collapse continues, the center of this core region becomes denser and denser climbing from only 100 atoms per cubic centimeter to millions of atoms per cubic centimeter and higher. As it collapses, whatever very slight rotation it originally had gets amplified so that it spins faster and faster. Although the gas falling along the axis of the collapsing cloud feels nothing more than the gravitational force of the central core, along the equator of the object, centrifugal forces due to its spinning become so strong that they strengthen the collapse along this direction. The cloud collapses into a flattened disk with ...
...leted of its nuclear fuel and lost its outer layers. When a small to medium (less than 10 solar masses) main-sequence star begins to run out of fuel in its core, the core will begin to collapse where hydrogen on the edges of the collapsed core can be compressed and heated (Chandra 2012). The nuclear fusion of this new hydrogen will create a new gush of power that will make the outer layers of the star to expand out; this is known as the red giant phase. In the red giant phase over millions of years, all of the stars energy supplies are used up leaving behind a hot core that is still surrounded by the expanded outer layers. The outer layers are eventually expelled by stellar winds which end up creating a planetary nebula and the hot core left behind forms a white dwarf star where the pull of gravity is supported by degeneracy pressure (p. 538 Bennett en al. 2013).
The Great Plague was an outbreak that killed a third of population in Europe. It was a scourge that originated in the arid plains of central Asia and traveled along the Silk Road. From then on, fleas living on rats, which were typically found on merchant ships, carried it. There were three types of the plague: bubonic plague, this was an infection of the lymph glands and the symptoms were muscle cramps, fevers, swellings and seizures; pneumonic plague, which was known for coughing, often with blood and the symptoms were fevers, chest pains and shortness of breath; septicemic plague, this plague was an infection of blood, and some of the symptoms were low blood pressure, vomiting, diarrhea, abdominal pain, bleeding fro...
The first stanza describes the depth of despair that the speaker is feeling, without further explanation on its causes. The short length of the lines add a sense of incompleteness and hesitance the speaker feels towards his/ her emotions. This is successful in sparking the interest of the readers, as it makes the readers wonder about the events that lead to these emotions. The second and third stanza describe the agony the speaker is in, and the long lines work to add a sense of longing and the outpouring emotion the speaker is struggling with. The last stanza, again structured with short lines, finally reveals the speaker 's innermost desire to "make love" to the person the speaker is in love
The self- examination part of her religion part comes into play because this poem was very long and confusing; much like how I believed her life was. She had rheumatic fever and through out her life she suffered from periods of fatigue and faced death eight times by giving birth to eight children. I think that she wrote the poem to represent her life she felt that her life was very long and drawn out. She also saw that there were a l...
was filled with angels. Even his parents notice that he was different than his other peers, but they tried to dishearten him by lying that he must be daydreaming. In addition, he loved to paint from his early childhood; he attended a drawing school and his parents taught him how to read and write at home. One of Blake’s assignments, when attending art sch...
This reaction from the blue poetry book shines a light on the power of literature- what occurred after she had read the first lines altered her state of mind,.
1. What does this statement mean to you: On page 51 Coates said, “the craft of poetry….what my mother taught me all those years ago – the craft of writing as the art of thinking.” What personal experiences have you had to illustrate this point?
A star begins as nothing more than a very light distribution of interstellar gases and dust particles over a distance of a few dozen lightyears. Although there is extremely low pressure existing between stars, this distribution of gas exists instead of a true vacuum. If the density of gas becomes larger than .1 particles per cubic centimeter, the interstellar gas grows unstable. Any small deviation in density, and because it is impossible to have a perfectly even distribution in these clouds this is something that will naturally occur, and the area begins to contract. This happens because between about .1 and 1 particles per cubic centimeter, pressure gains an inverse relationship with density. This causes internal pressure to decrease with increasing density, which because of the higher external pressure, causes the density to continue to increase. This causes the gas in the interstellar medium to spontaneously collect into denser clouds. The denser clouds will contain molecular hydrogen (H2) and interstellar dust particles including carbon compounds, silicates, and small impure ice crystals. Also, within these clouds, there are 2 types of zones. There are H I zones, which contain neutral hydrogen and often have a temperature around 100 Kelvin (K), and there are H II zones, which contain ionized hydrogen and have a temperature around 10,000 K. The ionized hydrogen absorbs ultraviolet light from it’s environment and retransmits it as visible and infrared light. These clouds, visible to the human eye, have been named nebulae. The density in these nebulae is usually about 10 atoms per cubic centimeter. In brighter nebulae, there exists densities of up to several thousand atoms per cubic centimete...
... song represent the lack of power or control the lovers have on external jurisdiction. The powers of fate and fortune also dominate this scene as discussed above.
Poetry is a craft of near-paradox. Poets often say that they aim to encase the abstract within the concrete, describe without adjectives or adverbs, and expound upon concepts with the utmost concision. To meet these formidable challenges, they keep several important literary devices at their disposal, one of which is the conceit. Commonly defined as an elaborately extended metaphor, the conceit often allows poets to capture complicated ideas through comparison with images closer to readers’ everyday experiences. If the concept that the poet wishes to illustrate comes from the theological or philosophical fields, figurative language like the conceit can rescue the poet from didacticism as well as opacity. “On a Drop of Dew,” a short poem by the metaphysical poet Andrew Marvell, employs the conceit for just this purpose. Marvell’s use of the conceit allows him convey the Christian story of the human soul in his poem with subtlety and simplicity, from its birth in heaven through its placement on earth and eventual reunion with God in heaven.
One way that Blake manifests the theme of a man being corrupted though experience is with imagery. For instance, in “The Echoing Green,” Blake creates imagery that portrays children playing “on the echoing green” with their families “sitting under the oak” (10, 13). The imagery paints a picture of a perfect
In order to establish free thought as one of the principal characteristics of his class, Mr. Keating begins the semester by having each student tear from his textbook the introduction, determining the analysis of a Dr. J. Evans Pritchard, Ph.D, on the assessment of poetic value to be absolute “excrement.” After declaring that the students shall once again think for themselves—as if they had ever done so in the first place—the class concludes. He later continues to tell his students that their opinions and perspectives matter and are equal to those of others. His words, in some way or another, affect each of the students over the subsequent weeks; and they, as a consequence, begin to forgo the rules of others for their own. The students, specifically Neil Perry and his study group, begin the Transcendentalist experiment by reconvening the intellectual, albeit illicit, Dead Poets Society, where they read and appreciate the poetic devotions of over five centuries. However, ...