An Analysis of the Poem Buffalo Dusk
The main topic of this short poem is the connection between the extermination of the buffaloes, and the extermination of those that saw the buffalo, namely Indians. It also alludes to the Europeans that came to the Americas, charging across the country in the same fashion that the buffalo charges across the land, trampling and killing the luscious green pasture. The poem includes many poetry instruments such as metaphor, repetition, imagery, and alliteration.
The title itself, “Buffalo Dusk”, implies the gradual and expected death of the buffalo, due to the cyclical nature of the universe. The setting of the sun often inspired death to the early man, but also renewal, rebirth. The buffalo, an entity subjected to the same laws as everything else, is doomed to have a birth, climax, and death, just like the day itself. The notion of a cyclical universe is also expressed in line 6, where the heard of the buffalo is described as “a great pageant of dusk”, or a glorious and intentional march towards death.
When writing about the stampeding buffaloes, the author thought about the immigrants of the United States, and how they charged across prairies and mountains across the land, from east to west, trampling everything in their paths. This is accentuated by line 5, which describes the buffalo’s pos...
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...e a loud drum, as alliteration of words like “pawed”, “prairie”, “pageant” accentuate peaks in the poem. This has the purpose of emphasizing the imagery, stimulating the reader to form a picture. Lines 1 and 7, and 2 and 8, repeat. This, again, points out the author’s intention. The beginning is the same as the end. The middle is always unpredictable, but the beginning always coincides with the end, again emphasizing the unstoppable cycle of life and death. The poem ends as it started, a mild statement, but very poignant.
Right now, the middle of the poem is the people of the United States, and all civilization. The beginning was predictable. It all started in earnest, with birth to a new people and new ideas. The end is just as predictable as the beginning however, and it is bound to come.
Kim Addonizio’s “First Poem for You” portrays a speaker who contemplates the state of their romantic relationship though reflections of their partner’s tattoos. Addressing their partner, the speaker ambivalence towards the merits of the relationship, the speaker unhappily remains with their partner. Through the usage of contrasting visual and kinesthetic imagery, the speaker revels the reasons of their inability to embrace the relationship and showcases the extent of their paralysis. Exploring this theme, the poem discusses how inner conflicts can be powerful paralyzers.
Hämäläinen goes on to explain that his purpose is to trace and analyze the contradictions of the Plains Indians’ horse culture, rather than just condemning it as something baleful, which many historians tend to do. Hämäläinen also refutes the common eastern farmer-western nomad manner of analyzing Plains equestrianism, in which there is “a tendency to cast the villagers as cultural reactionaries who failed to embrace the liberating powers of equestrianism and, locked in space and time, were crushed by the double invasion of the aggressive nomads and the encroaching Americans,” (Hämäläinen, 2) and instead proposes that Plains horse culture is understood from a latitudinal --rather than longitudinal-- viewpoint, since horse culture spread from the south, northwards. It is also explained that the latitudinal spread of equestrianism gave rise to the creation of markedly diverse horse cultures, vary...
Rohrbough, Malcolm J. Days Of Gold: The California Gold Rush And The American Nation. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. eBook (EBSCOhost). Web. 26 Mar. 2014.
As most folks do, when I think of the term “Gold Rush”, it conjures up images of the West! Images of cowboys and crusty old miners ruthlessly and savagely staking their claims. Immigrants coming by boat, folks on foot, horseback, and covered wagon form all over the US to rape and pillage the land that was newly acquired from Mexico through the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo… California. But let me tell you about a gold rush of another kind, in another place, even more significant. It was the actual first documented discovery of gold in the United States! Fifty years earlier…in North Carolina!
Although the text and painting have different backgrounds, they are both similar a different in many ways. Both the text and the painting challenge the relationship between land uses, background of ancestors, and power. The painting and essay display similar expressions of darkness to light. The mountains represent the downfall of Native Americans fore fathers being forced westward out of their land (Seattle, 55).
How would feel to be a multimillionaire in just a couple years, but you have to get the Klondike in Alaska. Many people took this challenge either making their fortune or coming up more broke than they already were. The Klondike Gold Rush played a major role in shaping peoples lives and a time in American history. My paper consists of 3 main topics: first, what people had to go through to get there; second, the harsh conditions they had to endure when they got there; and lastly, the striking at rich part or if at all they did get rich.
The Native American Indians had no beasts of burden, no plows, no wagons, no means of transportation, and no way to move heavy objects other than by their own power. The Europeans brought over horses, oxen, donkeys, and camels. Horses became very valuable to the Native Americans. For the hunter-gatherers or nomads, the effect was beneficial because the horse enabled them to cover great distances, and hunters could locate and kill the bison more easily. H...
In 1839 a man by the name of John Sutter arrived in California. Sutter appeared to be somewhat of a drifter, and had failed to establish himself before arriving in California. However, in the land of great promise, he planned to establish an empire for himself. Sutter was granted eleven square leagues, or 50, 000 acres, in the lower Sacramento area. This was a common land grant for the times. Sutter got to work and began to improve his land. He went on to build a fort, accumulated over 12,000 cattle and hired hundreds of workers to hel...
All in all, the treatment of the American Indian during the expansion westward was cruel and harsh. Thus, A Century of Dishonor conveys the truth about the frontier more so than the frontier thesis. Additionally, the common beliefs about the old west are founded in lies and deception. The despair that comes with knowing that people will continue to believe in these false ideas is epitomized by Terrell’s statement, “Perhaps nothing will ever penetrate the haze of puerile romance with which writers unfaithful to their profession and to themselves have surrounded the westerner who made a living in the saddle” (Terrell 182).
There are 15 million more people living in poverty than in the year 2000. Moreover, America has become a low-wage nation. The median paying job in the country now pays about $35,000 a year for a full-time job. It is barely more than it paid in 1973. With the salary being $35,000 it has people in America living in poverty because that amount of salary isn’t even enough to even live in a one bedroom house. It maybe is enough for one person, but for a person who has a family, it sure isn’t. In most cases in America, many families don’t have both parents. Single mothers were and are in trouble, with a poverty rate in excess of 40 percent. With this being said single mothers are the ones who are being affected and who are one of the cases that live in poverty. They live in poverty due to being the only ones that are bringing money into the households and with their salary being $35,000 is not enough to provide for themselves along with their children. Family structure plays a big role in poverty. “The poverty of single mothers with children at home, of all races, is the highest among demographic groups, higher than any minority or age group.” states Edelman, Peter. (2014). During the great recession when many single mothers were living off of food stamps and they soon destroyed the legal rights of benefits the Food stamp
The Great Plains were once home to a wide variety of nomadic Indian tribes. These tribes relied on buffalo for food, clothing, weapons and shelter. Eventually people from the east decided to move west with the hopes of securing new land and making more money. Buffalos became the pioneers’ source of food and fun. The settlers left the landscape littered with the decomposing remnants of their prey. Due to the mass hunting of buffalo, their population vastly decreased. In the image from Harper`s Weekly, the audience can see a white buffalo hunter, who is in the process of skinning his prey. This picture illustrates certain praised virtues and stereotypes of the American West.
At darn on the second of August 1990, while all the Kuwaiti citizens were sleeping Iraq entered Kuwait and conquered it with a hundred thousand Iraqi soldiers (2). It took merely hours for the Iraqi force just to invade Kuwait completely (2). The troop started camping in every part of Kuwait territory (3).
Western Medieval Europe and the Byzantine Empire were originally part of the Roman Empire. It was not until the Middle Ages, they started to become very different even though they shared several common traits. The Byzantine Empire had surpassed much of Western Europe by the 300's, not only in trade and economics, but also in politics even while both argued over religion.
Pre-invasion Iraq reflected the views and policies of its leader, Saddam Hussein, who made his first political appearance as a supporter of the Ba’ath Party. He was jailed in 1967 for this, and after his escape quickly rose to power within the faction. (Saddam Hussein Biography, 2008) Saddam became known for his political talent and progressiveness, and soon became a popular politician. After working on extensive unification and expansion efforts for the Ba’athists, the man rose to vice chairman of the Revolutionary Command Council. Faced with a tremendous amount of religious, racial, social and economic divisions, Saddam launched a campaign of total control to bring about stability.
The concept of eugenics has to do with the belief or practice of improving the genetic quality of the human race (“Eugenics” 2010). The concept was first introduced by Francis Galton, a researcher who wished to apply Darwin’s theory of evolution to the human race. Much like many endeavors that start off with good intentions, the results of applying this concept in real life were gross crimes against humanity. The eugenics movement in the early 20th century perverted the original concept by employing morally objectionable techniques including forced sterilization, marriage restrictions, segregation, internment camps, and genocide (Black 2012). In War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race, Edwin Black discusses the root of the eugenics movement in the United States of America and how this ultimately influenced the horrifying actions taken by the Nazis in pursuit of the pure Aryan race.