While Virginia Woolf’s “The Death of the Moth” and Annie Dillard’s “Living Like Weasels” both use animals as a symbol of life to share their viewpoint of life, Woolf uses sad and sympathetic tone and usual description of a typical autumn morning and Dillard uses cheerful and positive tone and almost dreamlike description of a beautiful summer evening to convey that people should live their lives the way they choose, since death is inevitable anyway.
Both authors, Woolf and Dillard, choose animals in their essays as a symbol of life. Woolf’s moth “was little or nothing but life” (194) with “enormous energy of the world had been thrust into his frail and diminutive body” (194). In the story, it represents the way how people fight their whole
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life against death, not winning that struggle though. At the same time, Dillard’s weasel lives his life “open to time and death painlessly” (2). By drawing the parallel between living creature and human’s life, these writers draw a picture of their understanding of life that is pure for the readers' perception. One of the main methods that authors use in their works to absorb the reader is the imagery.
In the beginning of “The Death of the Moth” Woolf describes ”a pleasant morning, mid-September, mild, benignant” (193), the usual autumn day, with regular work on the field, rooks on the tree tops that looked like “a vast net with thousands of black knots” (194). The picture is calm, but rooks, symbol of death, bring dark color to it. Gradually, with the development of the events, when death starts winning over moth’s struggle to live, the image changes, “work in the fields had stopped” (195). Like in the slow-motion picture, everything becomes stiff. Woolf uses words “still”, “indifferent”, “impersonal” to increase a sense of despair. Author uses such an imagery to empower the hopelessness of the moment and to make the reader feel the futility of the life and death struggle.
In opposition to Woolf’s imagery, Dillard in her story “Living Like Weasels” describes a bright colorful summer evening. The picture is almost magic. Reader clearly can imagine himself/herself sitting there on the tree trunk next to the author staring at the lily pads “tremble and part dreamily over the thrusting path of a carp” (Dillard 1). By drawing this gorgeous picture, Dillard evokes pleasant feelings in the readers and gives them a believe that life is beautiful and fulfilled with
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joy. Tone of the essay is very important to evoke certain feelings in the readers. In her essay, Woolf resorts to a melancholic, even a sad tone. Watching the moth and its unsuccessful attempts to get out of the windowpane to where life goes on, Woolf feels towards him “a kind of pity” (195). The word “pity” pops up in the work constantly, which puts reader into sympathetic mood. Then, describing the moth’s last effort to escape from the glass trap and her useless try to help it, Woolf uses a helpless tone. As well as the moth, she gives up. There is no way one “had any chance against death” (Woolf 195). These words evoke a hopeless feeling that there is no way out, no matter how hard we try. Dillard’s essay, unlike Woolf’s, is written in a positive tone. She is surprised and absolutely happy to see the weasel for the first time in her life. Dillard says that it was “a bright blow to the brain, or a sudden beating of brains, with all the charge and intimate grate of rubbed balloons” (2). It seems like everything around them lights up, the world is beautiful and they are in the center of it. The cheerful tone, that author uses to depict her meeting with the weasel, makes the reader feel excited as well. By using techniques that were described earlier, Woolf conveys her main argument.
No matter how hard we fight, death always wins. Like the moth in the story, people struggle with something all their life long, but at the end they all are facing the death. It’s an inevitable fact: “death is stronger than I am” (196), Woolf states. Basically, she says that we are choosing how to live – fighting or not, with someone’s help or without – the end is the same. It is pessimistic, but it’s the sad truth of life.
In opposite to Woolf, Dillard says that “even death, where you are going no matter how you live, cannot you part” (3). She suggests to live the way we want, “yielding, not fighting” (Dillard 3), just like weasel lives his life following the instincts. Life doesn’t have to be complicated, and it’s our choice to make it easier. The only thing people should do: seize the life and live it fully.
Although, each author uses different imaginary and word choice to create a totally different tone between these two works, both Woolf and Dillard bring up the message: the death is impossible to escape, so people should live their lives the way they choose to live – fighting or not – the result is always the same. Using hopeless tone, Woolf shows that fight is useless and it just accelerates the arrival of death. Dillard, by using cheerful tone, shows that life could be much easier and enjoyable when we stop fighting and start living according our needs. The last point of destination is always
death, but the way we live our lives is in our hands.
In Dillard’s essay, she writes of her life alone and then skips over to a moth that she saw fly into a flame on her own free will. The way that Dillard describes the moth is almost like the way someone would describe a dream or a fantasy. She depicts the moth as “golden” and her wings like the wings of angels. These depictions draw a vivid image of the moth and how she looks while she is being burned alive. As compared to Dillard’s descriptions, Woolf paints a strong picture for the reader but does it in a different fashion. The way that Woolf describes the moth she encounters is much more precise. She uses a form of concrete imagery that excites the logical part of the brain. Sh...
In the excerpt of Night, it states, “Dozens of starving men fought each other to the death for a few crumbs.” (Wiesel 105) This describes fear because to imagine that food is more important than one's’ life is scary to think about. People wanting to kill each other just to eat something is hard to think about. In the poem, “I Never Saw ANother Butterfly” it states “Butterflies don’t live in here, In the ghetto”(Friedman 16-17) This is an example of fear because this quote gives a sense of eeriness to the setting and it describes when he realizes that things will never be the same again. It also symbolizes he won’t just never see another butterfly but his home, family, and life will never be the same ever again. With death being inevitable not only would you be scared you would also be
...ty of hope in life. Wiesel and Doctorow express this necessity through the stories of Elie and Blue and the trials and tribulations they endure. Through their suffering and destruction Elie and Blue search for meaning, and in the end the reader learns the conclusion of their search. Elie and Blue discover that even in the destruction of hope and the exposure of the futility of life, one’s hope must evolve and adapt in order for to continue to have meaning in existence. But evolution to what end? For hope evolves only to be destroyed. The final destruction being death: an acceptance of the futility of life, yet still a creation of hope that others might learn this truth.
In the story “The Death of the Moth,” Virginia Woolf illustrates the universal struggle between life and death. She portrays in passing the valiance of the struggle, of the fight of life against death, but she determines as well the futility of this struggle. Virginia Woolf’s purpose in writing was to depict the patheticness of life in the face of death. Woolf’s conclusion, “death is stronger than I am,” provides the focus of her argument. Throughout the piece, she has built up her case, lead to reader emotional states its concept of the power of death. The piece would begi...
Therefore, Oliver’s incorporation of imagery, setting, and mood to control the perspective of her own poem, as well as to further build the contrast she establishes through the speaker, serves a critical role in creating the lesson of the work. Oliver’s poem essentially gives the poet an ultimatum; either he can go to the “cave behind all that / jubilation” (10-11) produced by a waterfall to “drip with despair” (14) without disturbing the world with his misery, or, instead, he can mimic the thrush who sings its poetry from a “green branch” (15) on which the “passing foil of the water” (16) gently brushes its feathers. The contrast between these two images is quite pronounced, and the intention of such description is to persuade the audience by setting their mood towards the two poets to match that of the speaker. The most apparent difference between these two depictions is the gracelessness of the first versus the gracefulness of the second. Within the poem’s content, the setting has been skillfully intertwined with both imagery and mood to create an understanding of the two poets, whose surroundings characterize them. The poet stands alone in a cave “to cry aloud for [his] / mistakes” while the thrush shares its beautiful and lovely music with the world (1-2). As such, the overall function of these three elements within the poem is to portray the
Even though it is a short 16 lines long, Emily Dickenson’s poem “I heard a Fly buzz—when I died—” is full of death and darkness as well as light and life. Throughout the poem, seeing and sight are major topics which serve as a sense of irony for the narrator who is dying. Dickenson is able to describe death in a very vivid and colorful way that makes readers feel as if they are at the bedside of the dying narrator. She is excellent in her use of hidden meanings and references for such a short poem— this is the mark of an exceptional poet .
Both Virginia Woolf and Annie Dillard are extremely gifted writers. Virginia Woolf in 1942 wrote an essay called The Death of the Moth. Annie Dillard later on in 1976 wrote an essay that was similar in the name called The Death of a Moth and even had similar context. The two authors wrote powerful texts expressing their perspectives on the topic of life and death. They both had similar techniques but used them to develop completely different views. Each of the two authors incorporate in their text a unique way of adding their personal experience in their essay as they describe a specific occasion, time, and memory of their lives. Woolf’s personal experience begins with “it was a pleasant morning, mid-September, mild, benignant, yet with a keener breath than that of the summer months” (Woolf, 1). Annie Dillard personal experience begins with “two summers ago, I was camping alone in the blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia” (Dillard, 1). Including personal experience allowed Virginia Woolf to give her own enjoyable, fulfilling and understandable perception of life and death. Likewise, Annie Dillard used the personal narrative to focus on life but specifically on the life of death. To explore the power of life and death Virginia Woolf uses literary tools such as metaphors and imagery, along with a specific style and structure of writing in a conversational way to create an emotional tone and connect with her reader the value of life, but ultimately accepting death through the relationship of a moth and a human. While Annie Dillard on the other hand uses the same exact literary tools along with a specific style and similar structure to create a completely different perspective on just death, expressing that death is how it comes. ...
The relationship between life and death is explored in Woolf’s piece, “The Death of a Moth.” Woolf’s own epiphany is presented in her piece; she invites her reader, through her stylistic devices, to experience the way in which she realized what the meaning of life and death meant to her. Woolf’s techniques allow her audience to further their own understanding of death and encourages them consider their own existence.
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).
In literature, themes shape and characterize an author’s writing making each work unique as different points of view are expressed within a writing’s words and sentences. This is the case, for example, of Edgar Allan Poe’s poem “Annabel Lee” and Emily Dickinson’s poem “Because I could not stop for Death.” Both poems focus on the same theme of death, but while Poe’s poem reflects that death is an atrocious event because of the suffering and struggle that it provokes, Dickinson’s poem reflects that death is humane and that it should not be feared as it is inevitable. The two poems have both similarities and differences, and the themes and characteristics of each poem can be explained by the author’s influences and lives.
She describes the September morning as “mild, benignant, yet with a keener breath than the summer months.” She then goes on to describe the field outside her window, using word choice that is quite the opposite of words that would be used to describe a depressing story. She depicts the exact opposite of death, and creates a feeling of joy, happiness, and life to the world outside her room. After this, she goes into great detail about the “festivities” of the rooks among the treetops, and how they “soared round the treetops until it looked as if a vast net with thousands of black knots in it had been cast up into the air”. There is so much going on around her that “it was difficult to keep the eyes strictly turned upon the book.” Descriptions like these are no way to describe a seemingly depressing story about a moth, but by using these, joyful descriptions, Woolf connects everything happening outside to a single strand of energy. These images set a lively tone for the world around her, and now allow her to further introduce the moth into the story.
Though these authors looked like twins lived during the same era, examining their literature demonstrates that they had little influence on one another. The parallels between Dickinson and Poe include their dark Romantic subject matter, though Dickinson is considered a Modernist, and their use of first-person narrators who display drastic psychological states under the presence of death. Aside from these indistinct similarities, they have many differences in how they write about life and death. In “Because I could not stop for Death,” Dickinson characterizes mortality as a guide to the afterlife, while Poe portrays death as intimidating in “The Tell-Tale Heart” and like a thief in “Annabel Lee.” In addition to this, Poe’s illustration of nature in “The Raven” is also darker than Dickinson’s view in “Nature is what we see.” Dickinson believes nature is godlike and shows more of a Romantic view of nature than Poe, who uses symbols of birds to connect the outdoors with mortality. When considering these works, Poe is a more dark, Anti-Transcendentalist writer compared to Dickinson. Further, he writes short stories and poems that horrify the reader while Dickinson writes dynamic, unorthodox poetry that is difficult to compare to other writers. The eccentric minds of these authors is ultimately expressed in their provocative literature that continues to influence writers
Overall, dwell on this process of changing throughout the poem, it can be understood that the poet is demonstrating a particular attitude towards life. Everyone declines and dies eventually, but it would be better to embrace an optimistic, opened mind than a pessimistic, giving-up attitude; face the approach of death unflinchingly, calmly.
The extensive descriptions of Mrs. Dalloway’s inner thoughts and observations reveals Woolf’s “stream of consciousness” writing style, which emphasizes the complexity of Clarissa’s existential crisis. She also alludes to Shakespeare’s Cymbeline, further revealing her preoccupation with death as she quotes lines from a funeral song. She reads these lines while shopping in the commotion and joy of the streets of London, which juxtaposes with her internal conflicts regarding death. Shakespeare, a motif in the book, represents hope and solace for Mrs. Dalloway, as his lines form Cymbeline talk about the comforts found in death. From the beginning of the book, Mrs. Dalloway has shown a fear for death and experiences multiple existential crises, so her connection with Shakespeare is her way of dealing with the horrors of death. The multiple layers to this passage, including the irony, juxtaposition, and allusion, reveal Woolf’s complex writing style, which demonstrates that death is constantly present in people’s minds, affecting their everyday
Woolf, therefore, takes advantage of the lyrical short stories’ structure to create a liminal space that both breaks through barriers to form a unified, impressionistic world and to emphasize the imposing negative aspects of such a transitory structure. As a result, Woolf prompts the reader to question whether the liminal space created within the short story is positive in its ability to unite nature and human or negative in its apparent unsustainability. Regardless, the form and structure of the short story are pivotal in Kew Gardens. Without the liminal space of the short story, it is questionable if Woolf could have succeeded in creating the unstable, yet peaceful, world in Kew Gardens.