Wait a second!
More handpicked essays just for you.
More handpicked essays just for you.
To the university of cambridge poem analysis
After twenty years of literary analysis
Literary analysis help
Don’t take our word for it - see why 10 million students trust us with their essay needs.
Recommended: To the university of cambridge poem analysis
Sitting on the bed. Legs crossed. Trance-like state. Staring at the wallet. Spreading them out. Organizing them. Staring at them. Staring at them. Staring at them. Ears ringing. Moving without knowing it. Hands shaking. Picking one up. Staring. Can’t look. Closing my eyes. Taking it. Sipping water. Swallowing. Opening my eyes. Repeat. One by one. Can’t think about it. Keep going. One by one. Keep going. None left. None left. Finishing final notes. Sending her my goodbye. Finally telling her I love her. Already hazy. Nothing is real. My eyes close. Nothing is real. I’m sorry. Goodbye
No one thought I’d survive it. I did. A crazy amount of opiates mixed with barbiturates; I planned and planned. Waking up in a daze, unable to talk, unable to walk, everything shaking. Blood pressure too low to take a sample, drifting in and out of consciousness. On breathing machines, ready to be intubated at any minute, mother and father watching their child die; I remember none of it.
…show more content…
What I do remember, I wish I could forget.
The years and years and years of overwhelming anxiety. The isolation, the apathy, the learned numbness. Experimenting with restricting and purging, self harm. Avoiding schoolwork for years, starting to fail all my classes after being told I was ‘way too advanced to ever get a B’. Staring at my homework, staring at my homework, staring at my homework, going numb and wanting to scream because I couldn’t do it. Maybe I knew the material, maybe I didn’t, I couldn’t do it and I didn’t know why, my parents didn’t know why, no one knew why, why, why all of this was happening to
me. Deciding that year was the last, planning for months. The rush I got from buying the pills. The only good type of anxiety I’d ever felt. I cracked. Pictured my parents finding my cold body in the bed, mother crying and yelling, father throwing himself on top of me, trying to turn back time; I was okay with it. I pictured her seeing my final words, reading my note, whispering ‘I love you too’ to an audience who couldn’t hear it; I was okay with it. I cracked and everything that mattered in my life, all the reasons I was keeping myself alive for so long, were meaningless. Nothing was real. I was a teenage nihilist, deciding the meaning of life in my free time instead of going out with the friends I didn’t have. I decided there was none. I don’t see a point in living. Life is meaningless, everything is made up, and people are just self-righteous, floating molecules that think the universe is able to acknowledge their existence. Life is meaningless. But, do I need meaning to do something? Do I disappear if I recognize the futility of life? No. Everything is trivial, pointless, needless, life is meaningless and I want to succeed. My brother breaking down in front of my mom, our mom, his mom, crying about all the things he never said. The four and six year olds, the three year old twins across the street wondering what happened to their babysitter. Friends that were no longer friends thinking about how far things drifted and what went wrong. No longer okay with it. The depression, the anxiety, the OCD, the unstable mood, the self-hate; they all still exist. I won’t pretend they don’t exist for the sake of getting into college, won’t pretend I’m perfectly okay, won’t spew the cliche essay I think you want to hear about how I’ve had a rough life but life is a journey and I’m on a road to a better future and everything’s okay. It's not. Life sucks. Life sucks, and I want to try. Life sucks, and I want it to continue. Life sucks, and that’s okay.
Kim Addonizio’s “First Poem for You” portrays a speaker who contemplates the state of their romantic relationship though reflections of their partner’s tattoos. Addressing their partner, the speaker ambivalence towards the merits of the relationship, the speaker unhappily remains with their partner. Through the usage of contrasting visual and kinesthetic imagery, the speaker revels the reasons of their inability to embrace the relationship and showcases the extent of their paralysis. Exploring this theme, the poem discusses how inner conflicts can be powerful paralyzers.
In Drea Knufken’s essay entitled “Help, We’re Drowning!: Please Pay Attention to Our Disaster,” the horrific Colorado flood is experienced and the reactions of worldly citizens are examined (510-512). The author’s tone for this formal essay seems to be quite reflective, shifting to a tone of frustration and even disappointment. Knufken has a reflective tone especially during the first few paragraphs of the essay. According to Drea Knufken, a freelance writer, ghostwriter and editor, “when many of my out-of-town friends, family and colleagues reacted to the flood with a torrent of indifference, I realized something. As a society, we’ve acquired an immunity to crisis. We scan through headlines without understanding how stories impact people,
This darkly satiric poem is about cultural imperialism. Dawe uses an extended metaphor: the mother is America and the child represents a younger, developing nation, which is slowly being imbued with American value systems. The figure of a mother becomes synonymous with the United States. Even this most basic of human relationships has been perverted by the consumer culture. The poem begins with the seemingly positive statement of fact 'She loves him ...’. The punctuation however creates a feeling of unease, that all is not as it seems, that there is a subtext that qualifies this apparently natural emotional attachment. From the outset it is established that the child has no real choice, that he must accept the 'beneficence of that motherhood', that the nature of relationships will always be one where the more powerful figure exerts control over the less developed, weaker being. The verb 'beamed' suggests powerful sunlight, the emotional power of the dominant person: the mother. The stanza concludes with a rhetorical question, as if undeniably the child must accept the mother's gift of love. Dawe then moves on to examine the nature of that form of maternal love. The second stanza deals with the way that the mother comforts the child, 'Shoosh ... shoosh ... whenever a vague passing spasm of loss troubles him'. The alliterative description of her 'fat friendly features' suggests comfort and warmth. In this world pain is repressed, real emotion pacified, in order to maintain the illusion that the world is perfect. One must not question the wisdom of the omnipotent mother figure. The phrase 'She loves him...' is repeated. This action of loving is seen as protecting, insulating the child. In much the same way our consumer cultur...
little house an' a room to ourself. Little iron stove, an' in the winter we'd keep a
"Poetry is the revelation of a feeling that the poet believes to be interior and personal [but] which the reader recognizes as his own." (Salvatore Quasimodo). There is something about the human spirit that causes us to rejoice in shared experience. We can connect on a deep level with our fellow man when we believe that somehow someone else understands us as they relate their own joys and hardships; and perhaps nowhere better is this relationship expressed than in that of the poet and his reader. For the current assignment I had the privilege (and challenge) of writing an imitation of William Shakespeare’s "Sonnet 87". This poem touched a place in my heart because I have actually given this sonnet to someone before as it then communicated my thoughts and feelings far better than I could. For this reason, Sonnet 87 was an easy choice for this project, although not quite so easy an undertaking as I endeavored to match Shakespeare’s structure and bring out his themes through similar word choice.
Did I Miss Anything? is a poem written by a Canadian poet and academic Tom Wayman. Being a teacher, he creates a piece of literature, where he considers the answers given by a teacher on one and the same question asked by a student, who frequently misses a class. So, there are two speakers present in it – a teacher and a student. The first one is fully presented in the poem and the second one exists only in the title of it. The speakers immediately place the reader in the appropriate setting, where the actions of a poem take place – a regular classroom. Moreover, the speakers unfolds the main theme of the poem – a hardship of being a teacher, the importance of education and laziness, indifference and careless attitudes of a student towards studying.
hesis: Spiteful diction is used when describing the speaker’s life, however the tone shifts to something more positive when speaker is describing the story of the man who decides to lead a nomadic life. Although the speaker glorifies the story of man who gave up everything and left, the speaker in the end admits comfort in the security of his established life, suggesting that the uncertainty of a choice can hold a person back from making it, even though it may, in the end, benefit them.
As one grows up and experiences the taste of life, opening one’s eyes to both negative and positive aspects of the world, it is common that one starts to lose their innocence little by little throughout one’s journey. The title of novel, The Catcher in the Rye (1952) by J. D. Salinger, signifies the desires of Holden Caulfield, the narrator, to preserve innocence, and the allusion to the Robert Burns poem “Comin Thro’ the Rye” further emphasizes his desires and also represents his innocence.
The memoir I selected was Everything You Ever Wanted by Jillian Lauren. She describes her troubles as a college dropout, a drug addict, and a harem member; then she talks about how she turned everything around when she married a rock star and adopted an Ethiopian baby boy with special needs. Her tone gives off vibes of strength and courage. All throughout the memoir, she also expands upon her own experiences as an adopted child, and how adopting a child herself (after many failed pregnancy attempts) made her see the world in a new light. To begin, Jillian’s style is very casual.
“The Spring and the Fall” is written by Edna St. Vincent Millay. The poem is about two people, the poet and her significant other that she once had love for. The poem integrates the use of spring and fall to show how the poet stresses her relationship. Of course it starts off briefly by having a happy beginning of love, but the relationship soon took a shift for the worst, and there was foreshadow that there would be an unhappy ending. “I walked the road beside my dear. / The trees were black where the bark was wet” (2-3). After the seasons changed, the poet begins to explain why the relationship was dying, and all of the bad things she endured during the relationship. So, to what extend did the poet’s heart become broken, and did she ever
Hello there my school life is pretty terrible, but I have been seeing what songs fit my life, because a doctor said it would help. The song I found was a song by the Foo Fighters called Monkey Wrench, and I’m going to tell anybody reading this about how it relates to my life. (this feels like a psychiatrist thing). The first set of lyrics have more of a growing up quality to them except for the last line, “What have we done with innocence?” It disappeared with time, it never made much sense.
It was one of the worst experiences I could have ever imagined.I lost my home,my job,I didn't know where I was anymore,and worst of all,I lost my family.I set out to find some survivors,but there were none to be found.All I saw was bodies.Bodies on top of bodies on top of bodies,but no one who survived.I’ve been searching for about two hours,or maybe I was hallucinating from when I was unconscious.I thought to myself “What am I going to do,I’ve got no food,no shelter,or light,and it was starting to get pretty dark.” When I thought all hope was gone,I finally found a group of survivors.
The poem “Warned’ by Sylvia Stults, first seems to be about the ways human are hurting nature. However, when we look at the poem through the lens of John Shoptaw’s essay “Why Ecopoetry,” we see the evidence that this is an ecopoem and is asking people to take action to protect the environment. The poem is about the destruction of earth. The poet also tries to raises some awareness about the environment. Additionally, the internal meaning of the poem is that we, humans depend on the world’s resources, therefore we should take care of the natural world.
Silent as the Dead War, what is it good for? Well, I believe we all came to the same conclusion about 40 years ago. Milla Harrison explores the works of Wilfred Owen and James Fairfax who figured out the futility of war even before that! Ask yourself a question; where would we be today without the thousands of brave soldiers who gave their lives to make yours better? The answer, I believe, is quite clear.
1. THE ROAD UNTRAVELED A strange road it was, People walking with eyes closed, Nobody stopped for the other, They just kept walking down the road. Whistling, a man walked on it,