Comparing Dillard's 'Sonnets To Orpheus'

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Anthony Duong Mrs. Lasseigne English II H 28 March 2024 Unit 3: Celebrating Change “Life isn’t about waiting for the storm to pass, it's about learning how to dance in the rain” - Vivian Greene. The poem, “Sonnets to Orpheus” by Rainer Maria Rilke, regards the idea of accepting change and transformation. Throughout the excerpt, it touches on internal and external changes. It encourages the strive for change while also referring to the positive side of it. Additionally, the essay, “Total Eclipse” by Annie Dillard, recounts her own experiences with the 1979 solar eclipse. Dillard writes to convey the sensational feeling she felt and its epoch effects. While both texts explicitly explicitly explicitly explicitly explicitly explicitly explicitly …show more content…

It was going to be a good one. The sun was going, and the world was wrong. The grasses were wrong; they were platinum. The hues were metallic and the finish was matte. The hillside was a 19th-century tinted photograph from which the tints had faded” (Dillard 5). Here, Dillard recounts her life-changing experience by creating a flow of short and long sentences. Because of her writing style, it helped strengthen the idea of how changing her experience was eye-opening. Furthermore, Dillard incorporates comparisons to create imagery within her essay. “In the black sky is a ring of light. It was a thin ring, an old, thin silver wedding band, an old, worn ring. It was an old wedding band in the sky, or a morsel of bone” (Dillard 8). She compares the appearance of the solar eclipse to the band of a ring. Her description produces a more in-depth feeling rather than her stating how the sun glimmered around the rims of the moon. This amplifies the idea that witnessing a solar eclipse is a life-changing event. Both texts, “Sonnets to Orpheus” and “Total Eclipse,” reveal that change can be a good thing. They both push for the pursuit of change and how incredible change can be by using

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