Both Shangren’s Peach Blossom Fan and Neruda’s “I’m Explaining a Few Things” deal with the consequences of war and the impression it leaves on even those who wish nothing to do with it: the lovers in Peach Blossom Fan or the poet Neruda in his poem. In both stories, the subjects are preoccupied with their own lives and interests; the two main characters of the Peach Blossom Fan, Hou Fangyu and Li Xiangyun are entranced in their “young passion”, “so fine that they think of nothing else” (29), but they are soon forced to abandon their love as war rips the two apart while Neruda’s poem focuses on the author’s poems of “poppy-petalled metaphysics” and tales of “lilacs”, “rain”, and “bird In both of these two stories, the main characters seem to …show more content…
Li Xiangjun had the misfortune to fall in love with Hou Fangyu who opposed via letter Zuo Liangyu and his command over the rebellion, forcing Hou to enter into hiding and leave Li behind. Li then attempts suicide to avoid being taken as a courtesan, asking herself how she could “ever betray Hou Fangyu” (36), her one true love. Just as Li was endlessly loyal to her lover, Hou, Neruda holds this same loyalty to the country of Spain. Despite not even being Spanish or spending most of his life in the country, Neruda speaks of the country with a sort of reverence, exclaiming that from “broken Spain” will rise a resistance to the “bandits” which brought the country to its knees. Rather than using the self-defeating action of suicide as Li did, Neruda translates his love into anger. In Neruda’s words, every slain child is a “rifle with eyes”, every “crime” is a bullet. When the war takes away Li’s lover, she locks herself in her house and avoids the world, and when war takes away Neruda’s beloved Spain, he implores others to take up arms and fight back, illustrating their different approaches and outlooks on their respective …show more content…
Moving to Spain, Neruda found love for the country as purely as one may love another person- he speaks as proudly as a local of the bounty of Spain, its “palpitating bread”, “frenzied ivory of potatoes”, and “wave of tomatoes rolling down to the sea” and of the “feet and hands swelled in the streets” selling these goods. This “measure of life” emphasizes the character of the country he calls home and his love for it, making its destruction all the more heart-rending in his eyes. Suddenly, he writes, it all erupted in flames. “Bonfires leapt out of the Earth, devouring human beings” as Francisco Franco and his troops took away the country he loved so dearly. Pablo Neruda is to Spain as Li is to Hou. Having his house and the roots he hoped to grow there destroyed mirrors the Peach Blossom Fan’s separation of the two lovers; out of loyalty for Hou, Li attempts suicide and out of loyalty for Spain, Neruda implores people to engage in righteous struggle and fight back the fascist invaders. The “house of flowers” Pablo worked to grow was demolished in an instant, mirroring Hou Fangyu being torn away from Li overnight as he was forced into hiding. Blood stained the streets of Madrid as it stained Li’s fan and suddenly the poems about flowers, rain, and birds Neruda references in the first stanza no longer seem so important, just as at the end of it all, Hou and Li found out
Power and Money do not Substitute Love and as it denotes, it is a deep feeling expressed by Feng Menglong who was in love with a public figure prostitute at his tender ages. Sadly, Feng Menglong was incapable to bear the expense of repossessing his lover. Eventually, a great merchant repossessed his lover, and that marked the end of their relationship. Feng Menglong was extremely affected through distress and desperation because of the separation and he ultimately, decided to express his desolation through poems. This incidence changed his perception and the way he represents women roles in his stories. In deed, Feng Menglong, is among a small number of writers who portrayed female as being strong and intelligent. We see a different picture build around women by many authors who profoundly tried to ignore the important role played by them in the society. Feng Menglong regards woman as being bright and brave and their value should never be weighed against
Paragraph 2 says, “Father knew many people in Santiago, and Neftali could not take the chance that Father would discover he was disobeying him. Besides that, he could not stop thinking about what Father had said - that he was an embarrassment to the family.” He suppressed his dream, trying to hide it from his Father, until one day, he started reading a poetry book. He read about a character named Paolo, and said the name aloud. It didn’t feel right to him, so he translated it into Spanish, getting Pablo. At that point, he made a decision. He would use the name Pablo Neruda as a pseudonym so that his Father wouldn’t know that it was actually Neftali. The next day, Neftali left his home, so that he could go somewhere where he could write freely. Paragraphs 8-11 say, “The following morning, he slowly packed his belongings into a metal trunk: clothes, books, pens, and, of course, something for which he would never be too old - his sheep. He carefully sorted his collections into storage boxes, taking one box with him and taking the other to Laurita’s for safe keeping. He stood in the doorway and handed her the box. “Do not let it go up in flames.” She smiled. “I will guard it with my life.” That night and throughout the next day, he rode third class in a car full of peasants. It smelled of damp wool from rain-soaked ponchos and wet feathers from unhappy chickens that had been tucked into
The Carrillo Adobe is in a dire situation. It has not only fallen into disrepair from the many years of weather and use by so many individuals, but by visitors and citizens have been less that kind and considerate of its age and the prominence that it deserves. After Carrillo’s death her house was given to three of her daughters, Marta, Juana, and Felicidad. Then her belongings were distributed between all of her children. In the first decade after her death her different children each occupied the house at different times. One of her daughters, Juana and her husband ran the home as a tavern. They then converted the adobe into the first post office in the town of Santa Rosa. After her daughters no longer had a need for the adobe it was turned into a trading post where numerous individuals...
Author’s Techniques: Rudolfo Anaya uses many Spanish terms in this book. The reason for this is to show the culture of the characters in the novel. Also he uses imagery to explain the beauty of the llano the Spanish America. By using both these techniques in his writing, Anaya bring s the true culture of
In his poem, “Notes from the City of the Sun”, Bei Dao utilizes obscure imagery consistent with the Misty Poets and veiled political references to illustrate the struggles in Chinese society during the Cultural Revolution. The poem is sectioned into fourteen short stanzas containing imagery that are symbolic of the cultural hegemony in China under the rule of Mao Zedong. Bei Dao, born Zhao Zhen-kai, is an anti-revolutionary poet and one of the founders of a group known as the Misty Poets. The Misty Poets wrote poems that protested the Cultural Revolution led by Mao Zedong. Therefore, a lot of Bei Dao’s poems speak out against the Cultural Revolution and the restrictions that it placed on any form of art. Bei Dao’s poetry is categorized as “misty” because of the ambiguity in its references to Mao Zedong and the Cultural Revolution. An obscure imagery that occurs twice in “Notes” is the sun imagery. Another imagery that depicts the injustice of the Cultural Revolution is the description of freedom as scraps of paper. In the poem, Bei Dao also equates faith to sheep falling into a ditch; this is a depiction blind faith during the Cultural Revolution. The purpose of this essay is to analyze how Bei Dao’s use of the Misty Poet’s ambiguous imagery and implicit political context in the poem “Notes from the City of the Sun” to illustrate the cultural hegemony in China under Mao.
The true beauty that war can hold despite its cruel nature is revealed in the poetry written later in the war. Guilaume Apollinaire’s poem “Gala” compares the burst of “two star shells” to a pink rose (5). The rose metaphor carries throughout the poem.
War is a brutal, bloody battlefield from which no one returns unscathed. Nonetheless, there are those who believe war to be a glorious honor, a bedtime story filled with gallant heroes, a scuffle fought an ocean and several countries away. In “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” by Ambrose Bierce and “August 2026: There Will Come Soft Rains” by Ray Bradbury, the authors seek to convey the devastation that comes from romanticizing war by using impersonal and ironic diction.
In every story, there is a protagonist and an antagonist, good and evil, love and hatred, one the antithesis of the other. To preserve children’s innocence, literature usually emphasizes on the notion that love is insurmountable and that it is the most beautiful and powerful force the world knows of, yet Gen’s and Carmen’s love, ever glorious, never prevails. They each have dreams of a future together, “he takes Carmen’s hand and leads her out the gate at the end of the front walkway… together they… simply walk out into the capital city of the host country. Nobody knows to stop them. They are not famous and nobody cares. They go to an airport and find a flight back to Japan and they live there, together, happily and forever” in which their love is the only matter that holds significance (261). The china
Federico García Lorca’s poem “La casada infiel” depicts the story of a gypsy who makes love to a married woman on the shore of a river. When looking deeper into the poem, Lorca appears to provide a critical observation on the values of the conservative society at the time in which he lived. The woman, at her most basic reading, is treated as an object, elaborating on the sexist values in society at the time. Lorca addresses issues of sexism as well as issues of sexuality within society mainly through the poem’s sexist narrative voice, objectification of the female character and overriding sense of a lack of desire throughout the poem. His achievement to do so will be analysed throughout this commentary with particular attention to Lorca’s use of poetic techniques such as diction, personification and imagery.
Zhao Zhenkai also known as Bei Dao is a Chinese born in Beijing, China. He’s one of the most outstanding, extraordinary and distinguished Chinese poet of his generation. By many, he’s seen and considered as one of the major writers in modern China. Bei Dao which literally means “Northern Island” is the pen name of this Chinese poet and he’s won copious international awards for his poetry, he’s been nominated severally for the Nobel Prize in literature and he’s an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and letters. He’s also an author of short stories. He’s known through his writing as a critical thinker who creatively constitute a driving force culture and he’s seen as a pervasive, Insuppressible media machine that is incessantly grinding lives into story lines and human voices into carefully gleaming sound bites. Bai’s poetry core concern at this time is a solicitation for the reimposition of personal space and life’s ordinariness against a general indigence of humanity in china for the past ten years. Bai has written many poems which challenge the issue of a corrupt society, abuse of power and bloody landscape of the fascist dictatorship in China. Some of Bei Dao’s books of poetry and essay include, Blue house (2000), Unlock (2000), Midnight Gate (2005), The August Sleeper (1988), Old Snow (1991) and at the Sky’s Edge Poems (1991-1996) and untitled.
Even if we have a lot of knowledge, any inexperience we have can have consequences in the present situation. The book The Crucible embodies ignorance and the unknown: people rely on someone who has intel instead of distrusting them because nobody knows what is going on. Before delving deep into the philosophical explanation, let’s explain the book first. The Crucible is written by Arthur Miller and published in 1953, it’s about a close-knit religious community in Salem, Massachusetts that delved into hysteria after a rumor about witches lurking about in their haven. Once the rumor became more popularized throughout the Salem community, witch-bounty hunters from New York came to assess the situation.
As the couple waits between two destinations, Barcelona and Madrid, they are trapped in limbo "between two lines of rail in the sun"(142). The station, placed between the two lines of rails, suggest the two directions the couple may go - toward Madrid and the abortion or away from Madrid and to a family scenario. The landscape describes the conflict, both barren and fruitful. Alongside of one rail line long, white hills stretch across the horizon, the country before them "brown and dry" (143). In stark contrast to the desolate landscape of the hills, the other flank is lush and green, with "fields of grain and trees [running] along the banks of the Ebro" (145). This scenic dichotomy comes to embody the girl's sentiments regarding the abortion: the hills are barren, representing her life if she submits to her partners expressed desires and goes through with the abortion; while th...
The poem “Exile” by Julia Alvarez dramatizes the conflicts of a young girl’s family’s escape from an oppressive dictatorship in the Dominican Republic to the freedom of the United States. The setting of this poem starts in the city of Trujillo in the Dominican Republic, which was renamed for the brutal dictator Rafael Trujillo; however, it eventually changes to New York when the family succeeds to escape. The speaker is a young girl who is unsophisticated to the world; therefore, she does not know what is happening to her family, even though she surmises that something is wrong. The author uses an extended metaphor throughout the poem to compare “swimming” and escaping the Dominican Republic. Through the line “A hurried bag, allowing one toy a piece,” (13) it feels as if the family were exiled or forced to leave its country. The title of the poem “Exile,” informs the reader that there was no choice for the family but to leave the Dominican Republic, but certain words and phrases reiterate the title. In this poem, the speaker expresser her feeling about fleeing her home and how isolated she feels in the United States.
The novel is set, roughly, in the period from the late 1870s to the 1930s in an unnamed city on the Caribbean coast of Colombia where death is everywhere in the form of cholera, the fatal and infectious disease of the small intestine. The symptoms of cholera include rapid heartbeat, lethargy, pallor, and sleeplessness. The symptoms of being in love are very similar, and Garcia Marquez argues that in extreme cases, unreturned love can be as painful and deadly as cholera. As a matter of fact, throughout the novel, we witness numerous times when victims of one, are often mistake...
Pablo Neruda is from Chile and gives a voice to Latin America in his poetry (Bleiker 1129). “The United Fruit Co.,” the poem by Pablo Neruda that will be analyzed in this essay, is enriched with symbolism, metaphors, and allusions. These allusions have great emphasis to the Christian religion, but some allusions are used to evoke negative emotions towards the United States (Fernandez 1; Hawkins 42). Personification and imagery along with onomatopoeia and metonymy are also found in “The United Fruit Co.” Neruda’s use of these literary devices makes his messages of imperialism, Marxism, and consumerism understandable (Fernandez 4). In this essay each of these literary devices with its proper meaning will be further analyzed in the hope of achieving a more complex understanding of Neruda’s message.