“A Poem for the Blue Heron,” a free verse poem written by Mary Oliver, focuses on and observes a blue heron making the decision to begin its southern migration. The speaker is awestricken by the pulchritude of the magnificent creature and admires the annual migration it must take to survive. The excerpt from “Cold Mountain”, a historical fiction novel by Charles Frazier, focuses on the discovery of a heron by a girl from across the river. The tone prevalent throughout this excerpt reveals the speaker is impressed by the prodigious stature and sophistication of the bird. The speaker feels the doughty bird deserves respect and sincere reverence. Although the authors develop these attitudes through their own writing styles, many similarities and differences in tone are evident upon analyzing the two literary works.
The two authors use similar techniques to produce homogeneous tones. Each author utilizes a profusion of imagery to create their tone. For example, imagery such as “the heron lifts his long wings leisurely and rows forward” from the poem and “the immense wings soared just a...
In the narrative poem “Cautionary Tale of Girls and Birds of Prey” the author, Sandy Longhorn, tells the story of a young girl who is afraid of a hawk, and her inconsiderate father who doesn’t take her concerns seriously. The story shows how her father is determined to get rid of her fear of the hawk, because he thinks it is both foolish and childish. The daughter very well knows the capability of the hawk, however her father doesn’t acknowledge it until it is too late. In the poem, Longhorn uses alliteration and rhyme to help explore the theme of how being inconsiderate towards others can in the end hurt you as much as it hurts them. The poem takes place on a little farm where the girl and her father live with all of their livestock.
This does not make up for the lack of other poetic elements, and the simplicity of the writing. The differences between the two pieces is still very vass. The two pieces have two totally different objectives, which makes them have different writing styles. Claire Dederer writes “Song lyrics do a fine imitation of poetry, but they’re not quite the same thing. Lyrics are a vessel, designed to hold a singer’s voice.
In his poem “The Great Scarf of Birds”, John Updike uses a flock of birds to show that man can be uplifted by observing nature. Updike’s conclusion is lead up to with the beauty of autumn and what a binding spell it has on the two men playing golf. In Updike’s conclusion and throughout the poem, he uses metaphors, similes, and diction to show how nature mesmerizes humans.
The imagery used in the two poems is very similar at times. Both authors describe to the readers a picturesque view of nature, like plants blooming in the springs. Proof of this is found in “Lone Bather'; : “ is plant with lilies bursting from its heels.'; Similarly, in “The Swimmer'; the first
John Updike’s poem “The Great Scarf of Birds” expresses the varying emotions the narrator experiences as he witnesses certain events from nature. His narration of the birds throughout the poem acts as numerous forms of imagery and symbolism concerning him and his life, and this becomes a recollection of the varying emotional stances he comes to terms with that he has experienced in his life. These changes are so gradually and powerfully expressed because of a fluent use of diction and figurative language, specifically symbolism and simile, and aided by organization.
In Cold Mountain and "A Poem for the Blue Heron", tone is established in a multitude of ways. These two pieces of literature describe the characteristics and actions of a blue heron, both aiming for the same goal. However, Charles Frazier and Mary Oliver approach their slightly differing tones employing organization, metaphoric language, and diction.
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
The writer of this poem is Gil Scott-Heron. He was born in Chicago, but spent his childhood in Jackson, Tennessee. Scott-Hereon went to Lincoln University in Pennsylvania because two of the people whom he admired went there. However, he taken a year off to write a novel. The audience for this poem is every person, but the specific audience is the media and the government. This poem is written to the media and the government because of how they did not want to portray African Americans, even though they had a big movement going on. Also, the government was corrupt and treated African Americans as they did not even existed.
Audubon and Dillard’s general outlook of the flocks of birds in flight and how they are affected by their experiences differ. In the end, both writers exhibit their own perception of beauty through their encounter with the birds, although Audubon saw the beauty in factuality, and Dillard saw it in her own interweaved thoughts and emotions.
Since its first appearance in the 1886 collection A White Heron and Other Stories, the short story A White Heron has become the most favorite and often anthologized of Sarah Orne Jewett. Like most of this regionalist writer's works, A White Heron was inspired by the people and landscapes in rural New England, where, as a little girl, she often accompanied her doctor father on his visiting patients. The story is about a nine-year-old girl who falls in love with a bird hunter but does not tell him the white heron's place because her love of nature is much greater. In this story, the author presents a conflict between femininity and masculinity by juxtaposing Sylvia, who has a peaceful life in country, to a hunter from town, which implies her discontent with the modernization?s threat to the nature. Unlike female and male, which can describe animals, femininity and masculinity are personal and human.
...ings that can be seen in the use of word painting in the first stanza on the words “flight and falling” and “to carry a man up into the sun.” While the similarities between the pieces are fleeting both are able to take advantage of imitative polyphony and word painting to tell the same story in very unique and different ways.
Kelly, Joseph. The Seagull Reader Poems Second Edition. New York: W.W Norton and Company, 2001.
The poetry by these two poets creates several different images, both overall, each with a different goal, have achieved their purposes. Though from slightly different times, they can both be recognized and appreciated as poets who did not fear the outside, and were willing to put themselves out there to create both truth and beauty.
Both poems where written in the Anglo-Saxton era in Old English and later translated into English. As well as both poems being written in the same time period, they are both elegiac poems, meaning they are poignant and mournful.
“A Bird came down the Walk,” was written in c. 1862 by Emily Dickinson, who was born in 1830 and died in 1886. This easy to understand and timeless poem provides readers with an understanding of the author’s appreciation for nature. Although the poem continues to be read over one hundred years after it was written, there is little sense of the time period within which it was composed. The title and first line, “A Bird came down the Walk,” describes a common familiar observation, but even more so, it demonstrates how its author’s creative ability and artistic use of words are able to transform this everyday event into a picture that results in an awareness of how the beauty in nature can be found in simple observations. In a step like narrative, the poet illustrates the direct relationship between nature and humans. The verse consists of five stanzas that can be broken up into two sections. In the first section, the bird is eating a worm, takes notice of a human in close proximity and essentially becomes frightened. These three stanzas can easily be swapped around because they, for all intents and purposes, describe three events that are able to occur in any order. Dickinson uses these first three stanzas to establish the tone; the tone is established from the poet’s literal description and her interpretive expression of the bird’s actions. The second section describes the narrator feeding the bird some crumbs, the bird’s response and its departure, which Dickinson uses to elaborately illustrate the bird’s immediate escape. The last two stanzas demonstrate the effect of human interaction on nature and more specifically, this little bird, so these stanzas must remain in the specific order they are presented. Whereas most ...