Set in modern time, the play Haiku written by Kate Snodgrass is a thirty-minute drama with themes of unconditional love and deception, in the play Haiku, the audience looks on the life of a mother and her two daughters. In the play, the mother, Nell, is described as a woman in her 50’s who has been taking care of her daughter Louise, who is in 20’s and has some form of autism (possibly Tourette’s). During her time taking care of Louise, Nell discovers that sometimes Louise is more present, and when so, she is able to communicate with Nell by reciting haikus. After allowing this to go on for three years, Nell’s other daughter Billie comes to visit. During this visit, Billie is told the truth about her sister and how she has episodes of normalness …show more content…
However, once the lights change everything goes back to normal. Giving the play a sense of mystery: is Louise actually getting better, or is Nell only imagining her daughter getting better? The mood for the play for myself is between mystery, as the audience wonders if Nell is telling the truth, and melancholy when Billie is trying to see what Nell is telling her about her …show more content…
Nell is an older woman who during her whole life has had to help her autistic daughter Louise, however, by doing this she believes that she is the only one can really help Louise. This is seen whenever the flashbacks happen, and Billie is trying to put makeup on Billie. Seeing this Nell gets angry and states, “ For the final time, do not take it upon yourself to teach her. You leave that to me, or you can leave this house!”(page 28-29) this could be seen as Nell being overprotective about Louise, and only sees herself as the rightful person to take care of Louise. I would describe Nell as being well kept, with possibly a few messy strands of hair and minimal makeup. I think this because, for the last few years she has been losing her eyesight and with the amount of work she has to put in to keep Louise from hurting her and herself, Nell would not have the time to take care of herself as much as should. Nell also seems to have a large bruise on her wrist, stated in the intro before the script starts (page 7). This bruise is presumably from an episode from Louise (page 16). Now Louise, on the other hand, I would describe as a blank template. Looking from the flashbacks, I wouldn’t put Louise in any type of heavy makeup (page 28-29), since she has a disability and is constantly taken care of I do not think that she would have any type of makeup other than a basic
The characters address the audience; the fast movement from scene to scene juxtaposing past and present and prevents us from identifying with particular characters, forcing us to assess their points of view; there are few characters who fail to repel us, as they display truly human complexity and fallibility. That fallibility is usually associated with greed and a ruthless disregard for the needs of others. Emotional needs are rarely acknowledged by those most concerned with taking what they maintain is theirs, and this confusion of feeling and finance contributes to the play's ultimate bleak mood.
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.
In the world of teenagers everything seems to come and pass by so quickly. For instance the beginning of senior year. In Spite of being happy and excited were also generally nervous and anxious to see what our future holds. As senior year comes to an end, It then becomes as temporary as the summer sun but also the boundary of our life before we enter adulthood. Even then our future is still undefined.
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...
The purpose of this essay is to analyze and compare and contrast the two paired poems “My Last Duchess” by Robert Browning and “My Ex-Husband” by Gabriel Spera to find the similarities presented within the pairs. Despite the monumental time difference between “My Last Duchess” and “My Ex-Husband”, throughout both poems you will see that somebody is wronged by someone they thought was a respectable person and this all comes about by viewing a painting on the wall or picture on a shelf.
Throughout the poem, Brooks uses wealth imagery to show how when exposed to the unpleasant reality of poverty, the affluent, although well-intentioned, will refuse to help those in need. In the beginning of the poem, Brooks descriptively describes the wealthy women in Ladies’ Betterment League. While creating an image of these women, Brooks states that the women “are full,/ Sleek, tender-clad, fit, fiftyish, [and] a-glow..." (14-15) These well-off women who make up the Ladies’ Betterment League use their money to keep themselves well-fed, clean, and healthy. In fact, these fortunate women possess an excess of money to spend on themselves. The use of the words “full” and “tender-clad” create an image of comfortable, wealthy women who use their immense amount of wealth to
Ryan Mecum the man behind two genius haiku books made it seemingly easy to help me decide my feelings for vampire and zombie haiku. I am disgusted. These books make the attempt to humanize these monsters, and in that attempt I nearly vomited.
Death is a topic heavily conveyed in "Before She Died" by Karen Chase; the title is hopeful in it's mention of a time before death, but the poem is not. The presence of autumn is made aware to us, 'all the leaves gone almost from the trees,' (Line 3/4). Autumn in poetry usually has to do with decline and tiredness, this evident with the speaker 'not walk[ing] briskly through [a] field' (Line 4) and having to '[Lean] on [the speaker's dog]' (Line 6/7) for support. Along with the speaker's dog being 'aged' (Line 6), the author conveys a cogitative and somber tone using dark imagery, the depressing 'blue' (Line 6) of the sky and a poisonous 'strand of hemlock' (Line 8) present. Time is a common theme, the speaker mentioning how 'finite these
Yolanda is a young girl from the Dominican Republic. She is not use to Americas antics of war and bombs. In the short story she accounts her first sight of snow for what she thought were bombs, "I looked out the window warily. All of my life i had heard about the hite crystals that fell out of American skies in the winter"(5). The way the poet decribes how Yolanda saw th ice fall out the sky lets us know that snow is something that is unfamiliar to her. Also the way she describes the new vocabulary, "nuclear bomb, radioactive fallout, bomb shelter" (2). This lets us know that the seeting takes place ina time of nuclear warefare and the country is in a state of emergence.
Louise has turned into a little girl that must depend on man to take care of her. Louise pleads with Brently to go to the gardens of Paris. She begs like a child begging for something that is impossible to give. Brently must lock her up in their home to protect her from her curiosity and need to see the world. The filmmakers do not give her the commonsense to realize the dangers she would face in seeing Paris and all the other places she would like to visit. Louise remains the little girl in the flashbacks and Brently has replaced her dead father as the soul keeper of her world. Brently must protect her from the world and herself. She is made to be completely dependent on him from her everyday needs to being her only window into the outside world. There are no female positions of authority in her life. Aunt Joe is left in the background and Marjorie must ultimately answer to Brently. Louise is left to see men as the only authority in her life. She herself as a woman must feel powerless to the will of men. Brently even chooses the destinations of their daily visits to far off and exotic places. These excursions are Louise's only escape. Brently is made to be her captor and savior at the same time. Her fate is completely dependent in his yet she is given no control of either.
Firstly, within this passage, Louise’s internal tension grows as she notices her physical deterioration. The narrator seems to become mindfully
Louise’s fate was tragic. But still I think that it’s better to live an hour of freedom and happiness than to spend an entire lifetime in the shadow of the “gray cloud”. Louise experienced real freedom that meant the absence of her husband’s domination. The irony of life killed her too early, but it seems to me that there is no need to feel pity for her. Even if it was a short hour, it was the time when all her dreams came true. She found the freedom from her husband that her lonely soul was searching for, and just for this we can consider her as a really happy woman.
Did I Miss Anything? is a poem written by a Canadian poet and academic Tom Wayman. Being a teacher, he creates a piece of literature, where he considers the answers given by a teacher on one and the same question asked by a student, who frequently misses a class. So, there are two speakers present in it – a teacher and a student. The first one is fully presented in the poem and the second one exists only in the title of it. The speakers immediately place the reader in the appropriate setting, where the actions of a poem take place – a regular classroom. Moreover, the speakers unfolds the main theme of the poem – a hardship of being a teacher, the importance of education and laziness, indifference and careless attitudes of a student towards studying.
What is poetry? And what makes it different? According to Webster’s Dictionary poetry is described as the art of writing stories, poems, and thoughts into verse. Poetry has many different parts to it that makes it different; for example rhyme, rhythm, and format/stanzas. In poems feelings and ideas are expressed in fewer words and the techniques used in poems are different as well. Another thing that makes poems a little different is that their meanings are a bit difficult to understand and the language seems to be manipulated in; other words, a poet can create a language of their own. The poems of “When we two Parted”, “A Pity, We Were Such a Good Invention”, and “Modern Love” all have the same theme of being broken hearted, but their use of vocabulary’s, emotions, and thoughts are very different allowing the poems to be unique. Therefore, Poems can be interpreted for anyone there is no direct reference as to who. For instance, reading a poem with a known theme and then having the ability to read what the author has written for that theme makes the poem interesting, for their choices of vocabulary and their thoughts are all different.
The poem “Warned’ by Sylvia Stults, first seems to be about the ways human are hurting nature. However, when we look at the poem through the lens of John Shoptaw’s essay “Why Ecopoetry,” we see the evidence that this is an ecopoem and is asking people to take action to protect the environment. The poem is about the destruction of earth. The poet also tries to raises some awareness about the environment. Additionally, the internal meaning of the poem is that we, humans depend on the world’s resources, therefore we should take care of the natural world.