Robert Lowell’s “Skunk Hour” is an irony of the disorder of the social order that is altered by the poet’s overwhelming depression translated in his passage, “I myself am hell; nobody’s here” (Lowell 1946 lines 35-36). As a result, it is very possible to see the speaker admits that he is ill. “My mind’s not right” (Lowell 1946 line 30). This poetry technique uses a dark and strange theme throughout the stanzas. “Only skunks that search in the moonlight for a bite to eat. They march on their soles up Main Street” (Lowell 1946 lines 37-39).This half of the poem is far more descriptive of what the skunks do at night. The author creates an uneasiness feeling in his passages that are consistent with depression fuelled, and exaggerated gloomy
It is repeatedly obvious that they serve a purpose to reinforce both crucial themes of the previous sections. The skunks, for all their mixture of energy and life into the scene, sustain the general image of decay and neediness.
The concluding impression is of a somewhat grim unhappiness in which nature and the waste of civilization have sunk into a sort of weary balance. Lowell’s personification of skunks helps to strengthen this as their humanization helps the audience understand their social meaning. They also represent Lowell’s own personal issues demons that is embodied by his insecurities which is documented in the second section of this short story. This humanization of one’s own emotional issues and view are not common in Lowell’s poems. However, the speaker is just representing how sad his soul is. This is similar to the representation of his issues in “Skunk Hour”. Lowell’s short story is a mixture of emotions and sadness and filled with an expression of his depression. The “Skunk Hour” uses many different poetic techniques to support its themes, many of which appear regularly in Lowell’s works, others are distinctive to “Skunk Hour” as it was written at a particularly turbulent time in his life, and therefore is not tell-tale his
The first two lines of the poem set the mood of fear and gloom which is constant throughout the remainder of the poem. The word choice of "black" to describe the speaker's face can convey several messages (502). The most obvious meaning ...
The author illustrates the “dim, rundown apartment complex,” she walks in, hand and hand with her girlfriend. Using the terms “dim,” and “rundown” portrays the apartment complex as an unsafe, unclean environment; such an environment augments the violence the author anticipates. Continuing to develop a perilous backdrop for the narrative, the author describes the night sky “as the perfect glow that surrounded [them] moments before faded into dark blues and blacks, silently watching.” Descriptions of the dark, watching sky expand upon the eerie setting of the apartment complex by using personification to give the sky a looming, ominous quality. Such a foreboding sky, as well as the dingy apartment complex portrayed by the author, amplify the narrator’s fear of violence due to her sexuality and drive her terror throughout the climax of the
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”
Alan Shapiro is a poet whom uses the sorrowful tragedies that occurred in his lifetime and turns them into beautiful poems in which he greatly expresses through his poetry. Most of his poems symbolize either a type of sorrow or tragic death, and the expressions used throughout his poetry make it noticeable that Alan Shapiro endured a life of hardship and tragedy. While Shapiro was growing up he lost his brother and his sister in which the poem “Sleet” by Alan Shapiro beautifully encompasses his feeling of grief and sorrow due to the loss of his siblings.
Fifteen years separate Washington Irving’s short story “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” with Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story, “Young Goodman Brown.” The two share an eerie connection because of the trepidation the two protagonists endure throughout the story. The style of writing between the two is not similar because of the different literary elements they choose to exploit. Irving’s “Sleepy Hollow” chronicles Ichabod Crane’s failed courtship of Katrina Van Tassel as well as his obsession over the legend of the Headless Horseman. Hawthorne’s story follows the spiritual journey of the protagonist, Young Goodman Brown, through the woods of Puritan New England where he looses his religious faith. However, Hawthorne’s work with “Young Goodman Brown” is of higher quality than Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” because Hawthorne succeeds in exploiting symbols, developing characters, and incorporating worthwhile themes.
In the first chapter of his book “The Midnight Hour: American Studies in a Moment of Danger” American Studies author George Lipsitz offers a critique of nationalistic political nature from a Marxist perspective . In this essay, I will offer my own critique of the arguments raised by him throughout the chapter. Furthermore, I will also offer insight regarding my thoughts of how the ideas of Lipsitz are pertinent to the practice of American Studies. Lipsitz's central argument in the first chapter of his book asserts that the globalization of various economic aspects (transportation, distribution, consumption etc.) transform the political nature and culture of the nations involved. The transformation in question here is from a nationalistic
The Disillusionment of Ten O'Clock, what a time of night! "The houses are haunted by white night-gowns." Everything is the same from one house to the next. Not only does Wallace Stevens hint at the Disillusionment of Ten O'Clock, he also brings forth feelings of loneliness and despair through his select use of neutral diction. Stevens emphasizes neutral diction using parallelism and repetition, the sameness of the syntax, and an ironic change in wording. Nevertheless, the emotion of the poem is only brought about by Stevens' specific use of neutral diction.
When reading a story or a poem, readers tend to analyze, and develop their own opinions. Any content an author or poet produces is up to the reader to question, and identify what the story is trying to say. The point that I am stating is that, stories are like maps that we readers need to figure out. We have to find the starting point, and get to the destination of our conclusion, and the thoughts we have about the story or poem. In the stories that we have read so for throughout the semester, they all have different messages of what they are trying to convey to the reader in a way that can be relatable. Among all the author’s and poet’s works we have read, I have enjoyed Theodore Roethke’s poems. Roethke has developed poems that explore emotions that readers can relate to. I would like to explain and interpret the themes that Theodore Roethke expresses in the poems “My Papa’s Waltz”, “The Waking”, and “I Knew a Woman”.
“The Black Rat” explores the days during and after World War Two. It also honours Iris’s father as a war hero. The poem has described how the soldier lived during the war and the effort he demonstrated when fighting for his land. The phrase, “He lived in a tin hut with a hard dirt floor. He had bags sewn together that was his door,” gives the reader an
This blues poem discusses an incredibly sensitive topic: the death of Trethewey’s mother, who was murdered by her ex-husband when Trethewey was nineteen. Many of her poetry was inspired by the emotions following this event, and recounting memories made thereafter. “Graveyard Blues” details the funeral for Trethewey’s mother, a somber scene. The flowing words and repetition in the poem allow the reader to move quickly, the three-line stanzas grouping together moments. The poem begins with heavy lament, and the immediate movement of the dead away from the living, “Death stops the body’s work, the soul’s a journeyman [author emphasis]” (Tretheway 8, line 6). Like the epitaph from Wayfaring Stranger, Trethewey indicates that the dead depart the world of the living to some place mysterious, undefined. The living remain, and undertake a different journey, “The road going home was pocked with holes,/ That home-going road’s always full of holes” (Trethewey 8, line 10-11). Trethewey indicates that the mourning is incredibly difficult or “full of holes”, as she leaves the funeral and her mother to return home. ‘Home’ in this poem has become indicative of that which is not Trethewey’s mother, or that which is familiar and comfortable, in vast contrast to the definition of home implied in the
Richard Wilbur's recent poem 'Mayflies' reminds us that the American Romantic tradition that Robert Frost most famously brought into the 20th century has made it safely into the 21st. Like many of Frost's short lyric poems, 'Mayflies' describes one person's encounter with an ordinary but easily overlooked piece of nature'in this case, a cloud of mayflies spotted in a 'sombre forest'(l.1) rising over 'unseen pools'(l.2),'made surprisingly attractive and meaningful by the speaker's special scrutiny of it. The ultimate attraction of Wilbur's mayflies would appear to be the meaning he finds in them. This seems to be an unremittingly positive poem, even as it glimpses the dark subjects of human isolation and mortality, perhaps especially as it glimpses these subjects. In this way the poem may recall that most persistent criticism of Wilbur's work, that it is too optimistic, too safe. The poet-critic Randall Jarrell, though an early admirer of Wilbur, once wrote that 'he obsessively sees, and shows, the bright underside of every dark thing'?something Frost was never accused of (Jarrell 332). Yet, when we examine the poem closely, and in particular the series of comparisons by which Wilbur elevates his mayflies into the realm of beauty and truth, the poem concedes something less ?bright? or felicitous about what it finally calls its 'joyful . . . task' of poetic perception and representation (l.23).
Robert Frost is regarded as one of the most distinguished American poets in the twentieth century. His work usually realistically describes the rural life in New England in the early twentieth century and conveys complex social and philosophical themes. But his personal life was plagued with grief and loss, which is also reflected in his poems and the dark energy distinguishes Robert Frost’s poems, frequently conveyed in the use of lexical words like dark and its derivatives or synonyms, woods, snow, night, and so on. (Su, Y)
The poem concerns a bus traveling to Boston through the landscape and towns of New Brunswick. While driving through the woods, the bus stops because a moose has wandered onto the road. The appearance of the animal interrupts the peaceful hum of elderly passengers' voices. Their talk—resignedly revolving itself round such topics as recurrent human failure, sickness, and death—is silenced by the unexpected advent of the beast, which redirects their thoughts and imparts a "sweet sensation of joy" to their quite ordinary, provincial lives.
Life and death are two things that we as humans must all face. The road from one to the other, from life to death, is a long and at times, both joyous and painful one. Robert Frost’s poems are a prime example of these times and trials. The poems I chose for this paper highlight them, and with Frost’s allegory, they present a sort of silver lining to the string of dark and dreary words he’s pieced together for these poems. The depressing tone to the poems “Acquainted with the Night”, “Nothing Gold Can Stay”, and “Stopping by the Woods on a Snowing Evening” could be attributed to the death of many of Frost’s family members, and how despite this he overcame it all, and at the end of his life, was a successful writer. These poems to not go into great explanation of the details of Frost’s life, however, I believe that they are representations of the things path that he’s walked, and how he viewed his actions and death in general.
Both poets present readers with characters questioning the apparent transience of nature. Whitman's young girl weeps to see the black "burial-clouds that lower victorious soon to devour all," (line 12) just as Stevens' young woman is saddened "when the birds are gone, and their warm fields/Return no more" (lines 49-50). These characters, unable to grasp the entirely of the cycle of mortality, are dismayed by earthly loss they continually observe.