Cooling by Tori Amos
Tori Amos is an unabashedly truthful songwriter and singer who builds her lyrics on personal experiences, uncertainties concerning religion and faith, and an undying desire to get in touch with her inner self. Amos’ song “Cooling” is a biography of one woman’s life from childhood to death, and ultimately the heroic journey for purity. The first stanza of “Cooling” begins with Amos referring to the death of Speed Racer, a cartoon character. This image is essential in creating a childlike innocence shattered by the semi-realistic microcosm of adolescence. Amos, after moving swiftly through childhood and into the teenage chapters of this biography, uses phrases such as “fire thought she’d really rather be water instead” to establish the image of an unhappy teen girl who is willing to change on the turn of a dime to accommodate someone else’s
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During the next few stanzas, Amos creates a character that fights to become a strong, independent woman who can withstand storms and brambles, but is not afraid to deeply, genuinely love another human being. Amos addresses love in a unique and unconquered manner. For example, logical men would look at a small island bearing a single pineapple tree as solitary blemish on the face of the ocean, but Amos sings that “this ocean is wrapped around that pineapple tree,” thus implying that the pineapple tree is commandeering the attention of the seas. She is giving importance to what is otherwise lost in the middle of a great expanse; metaphorically, she is addressing life. In essence, human beings are simple spots on this great expanse of earth, but instead of looking at the human race as a blemish, Amos addresses human life as burning and indispensable. After addressing childhood, young adulthood, womanhood, and the overall importance of life, Amos delves into the chorus of the song that is used to truly establish the
As the first poem in the book it sums up the primary focus of the works in its exploration of loss, grieving, and recovery. The questions posed about the nature of God become recurring themes in the following sections, especially One and Four. The symbolism includes the image of earthly possessions sprawled out like gangly dolls, a reference possibly meant to bring about a sense of nostalgia which this poem does quite well. The final lines cement the message that this is about loss and life, the idea that once something is lost, it can no longer belong to anyone anymore brings a sense...
The song has heavily used imagery when stating “And the Legal pads were yellow, hour’s long, pay packet lean. And the telex writers clattered where the gunships once had been.” This is used to explain his stress of coming back to civilization after war and all the things that once traumatized you are now take place in a different way. The song also uses Social Criticism“And she was like so many more from that time on. Their lives were all so empty, till they found their chosen one.” This is used to say that a female’s life is incomplete until they settle down and marry. Cold chisel has added this in to reconnect with their message to show that women are incomplete without their male counterparts and it makes it hard for both people in the relationship after war because of a miscommunication between love and
It's about sunlight. It's about the special way that dawn spreads out on a river when you know you must cross the river and march into the mountains and do things you are afraid to do. It's about love and memory. It's about sorrow. It's about sisters who never write back and people who never listen.” -pg. 85
An example of the cycle followed by her father, his father, and his father before him is told when Blunt recalls a major blizzard in December 1964 that trapped the family and some neighbors in their small homestead. She unemotionally describes how her father simply proceeded to go through the motions of keeping the pipes from freezing, calmly accepting the fact that he could do nothing as the storm progressed and he could not prevent loss of a of their livestock. Or how when he first ventured out to check on the animals in their nearby barn and nearly lost his way back in whiteout conditions. Later, when the storm passed, she told of playing amongst the frozen corpses of the cattle, jumping from ribcage to ribcage, daring her older brother and sister to cut off pieces of the animals, all with the calm acceptance that this was so normal, nothing strange about it.
At this point of the story it is reflective of a teenager. A teenager is at a time in life where boundaries and knowledge is merely a challenging thing to test and in some instances hurdled. Where even though you may realize the responsibilities and resources you have, there is still a longing for the more sunny feelings of youth.
True, it was a hard decision when I was decided which of my classmatesí papers to choose as ìthe one.î I considered a question when trying to decide. I asked myself, ìWhat purpose this time capsule will serve?î My answer told me that the song inside this time capsule must be one that can still teach a message while telling the future generation something about our time. I believe the culmination to this answer was found in Erin Flanneryís ìBitter Sweet Symphony.î The title is fairly self-explanatory when it refers to the word bittersweet. That is what life is. We canít expect only the good or the bad. Life is a heterogeneous mixture of both. Yet this mixture comes together in a harmonious conglomerate that is altogether something beautiful.
Harper begins the poem by detailing the start of the speaker’s relationship with a man, developing it through the use of metaphor and concrete diction. From the first few lines of the poem, the reader learns that the relationship was destined to be futile through Harper’s use of metaphor: “If when standing all alone/ I cried for bread a careless world/ pressed
These lines demonstrate the stage of adulthood and the daily challenges that a person is faced with. The allusions in the poem enrich the meaning of the poem and force the reader to become more familiar with all of the meaning hidden behind the words. For example, she uses words such as innocence, imprisonment and captive to capture the feelings experienced in each of the stages. The form of the poem is open because there are no specific instances where the lines are similar. The words in each stanza are divided into each of the three growth stages or personal experiences.
The youth that society nurtures for the advancement of the future are the impression of innocence, and are unknowing the issues that affect society. Randall utilizes symbolism throughout the poem to outline the girl as part of this collective youth model. The reader sees many examples of symbolism in the fifth stanza. An example of this device is “Her dark night hair” (line 17). The effect of this line is to depict the girl as being young and full of life, as the reader envisions the “dark night” colour of the young girl’s hair as being the colour of a long tunnel which signifies the girl’s long future ahead of her. This shows how young these activists are, and communicates to the main idea of youth being involved in the present for their society’s future. Another instance is seen in the same stanza, describing the girl as “rose petal sweet, and drawn white gloves” (lines 18-19). The effect o...
"When I was little I would think of ways to kill my daddy." [P.1], says eleven-year-old Ellen. Thus the young narrator begins her life-story, in the process painting an extraordinary self-portrait. “Ellen Foster” is a powerful story of a young girl growing up in a burdensome world. As one reads this work presented by Kaye Gibbons, a chill runs down their back. Ellen, the main character is faced with a hard life dealing with endless losses, with the deaths of both her parents and her grandmother being included. Why would one get a chill you wonder? This individual has thoughts and feelings that many have never experienced and cannot express. Ellen is merely a child no older then the age of ten but if not knowing this fact, readers would think she was an aged woman who has lived their life sufficiently.
He has grown up in the backwash of a dying city and has developed into an individual sensitive to the fact that his town’s vivacity has receded, leaving the faintest echoes of romance, a residue of empty piety, and symbolic memories of an active concern for God and mankind that no longer exists. Although the young boy cannot fully comprehend it intellectually, he feels that his surroundings have become malformed and ostentatious. He is at first as blind as his surroundings, but Joyce prepares us for his eventual perceptive awakening by mitigating his carelessness with an unconscious rejection of the spiritual stagnation of his community. Upon hitting Araby, the boy realizes that he has placed all his love and hope in a world that does not exist outside of his imagination. He feels angry and betrayed and comes to realize his self-deception, describing himself as “a creature driven and derided by vanity”, a vanity all his own (Joyce). This, inherently, represents the archetypal Joycean epiphany, a small but definitive moment after which life is never quite the same. This epiphany, in which the boy lives a dream in spite of the disagreeable and the material, is brought to its inevitable conclusion, with the single sensation of life disintegrating. At the moment of his realization, the narrator finds that he is able to better understand his particular circumstance, but, unfortunately, this
No poet does a better job of stressing the abruptness of death as Frost in his poem, “Out, out –”. Death is the one of the more central themes among most works of art and normally befalls on the speaker’s loved one. In this case, “Out, out –” is about an innocent boy who accidentally severs his hand with a buzz saw; the entire scene and the family’s reactions described by an observer. Throughout the poem, Frost finds creative ways to intensify the boy’s death and readers may wonder why he focuses on such a heavy and distressing issue. Every verse builds up upon one another, sometimes enjambed together with a variety of figurative language, until the boy succumbs to his injury. By combining an irregular form of iambic pentameter with dark symbolism, Frost captures the inevitability of death and its cruel, unpredictable appearances.
Preventing and protecting children from enduring adulthood demonstrates this innocence through the pond and Holden’s desire for being a “catcher in the rye”. When Holden questions Horwitz about the ducks, Horwitz replies, “…the fish… live right in the goddam ice. They get frozen right in one position… Their bodies take in nutrition and all, right through the goddam seaweed and crap that’s in the ice. They got their pores open the whole time” (75). The freezing pond resembles moral progeny. Their mortality is perpetuated, because they are frozen into place. The fish represent Holden for his preservation on naiveté, because he is stuck in the pond of purity for loathing fraudulent people. Being fastened in a pond of pureness relates to being saved from adulthood by maintaining the mortality of children. While Phoebe and Holden have a conversation about what Holden likes, he remarks, “… I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff—I mean...
Vine Deloria, author of The World We Used to Live In, not only introduces his readers to indigenous Native American spirituality and traditional practices including ceremonies but also brings several important ideas of native spirituality to the forefront. He discusses the importance of having and maintaining a relationship with mother earth and all living beings; an interconnectedness with nature in all forms that is crucial to the understanding and practice of Native American spirituality. Dreams and visions were discussed as an important form of communication in indigenous spirituality. The important relationships with animal and plant spirits are discussed. The concept of power and what is considered power in Native Spirituality. Deloria talks about the importance of place in indigenous spirituality. It is believed that power and wisdom rests in places. The landscape holds memories of all that has ever happened. Through all the aspects Deloria discusses in his book, readers get a clear view and better understanding of Native American spirituality through various accounts of different tribal activities and interviews from both emic and etic perspectives of culture. By using a wide range of research, Deloria does a fairly good job of remaining unbiased which is a difficult thing for anyone to do.
Adolescence, the period of life involving the transformation from a teenager into an adult, is a vital time in one’s life where many begin to unearth who they are and the very things they desire as they transition into the adult world. In J.D. Salinger’s timeless American novel, The Catcher in the Rye, the main character Holden is a downhearted teenage boy struggling to leave his childhood behind in transition to the phony adult world he despises in order to explore universal themes including the phoniness of the adult world and the loss of innocence that is associated with the transition into adulthood. Through Salinger’s abundant use of symbolism, the reader is able to analyze Holden, his struggles, and angst towards change as he transitions into the adult world so that one is able to come to a deeper understanding and comprehension of the themes explored.