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To an athlete dying young by a. e. housman
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To an athlete dying young by a. e. housman
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"To an Athlete Dying Young" is one of Housman's regularly anthologized poems. Its peaceful, despairing tone, its topic of the solace of death, and its effortlessness of structure and style join to make the poem an exemplary festival of discharge from the challenges of life. In this short requiem, composed upon the passing of a youthful, praised competitor, Housman progresses the thought that it is obviously better to kick the bucket in one's prime, while one can be associated with his or her energetic achievements, than to wind up decrepit, overlooked, disregarded, or supplanted in the recollections and hearts of one's townspeople. With the run of the mill confined, perceptive tone regularly utilized by Housman, the speaker hails the dead youth
The poem “Moco Limping” by David Nova Monreal is about a man who has very high hopes for his dog. He wants him to be heroic and a leader but is disappointed when he doesn’t live up to those standards. He thinks his dog is clumsy and stupid. The poem “Oranges” by Gary Soto is about a boy who was walking with the girl he had a crush on down to a drugstore. He spends a nickel and an orange to buy her chocolates. These poems, “Moco Limping” and “Oranges” have different tones that the authors expressed using different word choice in the beginning of the poems, but become similar at the end.
First of all, the speaker starts her poem personifying death as a kind gentleman who comes to pick her up for her death journey. It is obvious if the reader looks at “He kindly stopped for me” (2). T...
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,
“As I Lay Dying, read as the dramatic confrontation of words and actions, presents Faulkner’s allegory of the limits of talent” (Jacobi). William Faulkner uses many different themes that make this novel a great book. Faulkner shows his talent by uses different scenarios, which makes the book not only comedic but informational on the human mind. As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner is a great book that illustrates great themes and examples. Faulkner illustrates different character and theme dynamics throughout the entire novel, which makes the book a humorous yet emotional roller coaster. Faulkner illustrates the sense of identity, alienation, and the results of physical and mental death to show what he thinks of the human mind.
In “Football Dreams” by Jacqueline Woodson, the message that any dream can come true if you put the work in is supported by the structure of the poem. The structural elements that are most impactful are repetition and the title. While she talks about her father’s dreams at the beginning. Later towards the end of the poem, she starts to explain how they came true. “My father dreamed football dreams, and woke up to a scholarship at Ohio State University” (10-12). The repetition is “dreams” and “football” which tells the audience that her father dreamed of playing football and he put in the effort and got a “scholarship at Ohio State University.” The title “Football Dreams” is the repetition
Baron Wormser dramatizes the conflict between player and player in his poem titled,“In Baseball.” Particularly as the conflict relates to the poet’s conception of success and how it is attained and determined. Wormser uses imagery and certain expressions to convey hardships and triumphs of everyday life. In addition, the poet continuously contemplates the notion that every moment leads to a certain fate as well as how every action reveals a new facet of someones personality.
"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.
To an Athlete Dying Young is a poem filled with many different elements that A.E Housman was able to spin into a telling of both sorrow and a kind of awkwarning in light of a death of a young star runner. The different literary elements made this poem come alive and made the connections more relevant for modern time.
The constant process of life and death, driven by an indestructible progression of time, explains the attitude of carpe diem expressed in three poems focused on human love being a fickle matter. Within the poems “To His Coy Mistress” by Andrew Marvell, “To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time” by Robert Herrick, and “Youth’s the Season Made for Joys” by John Gay, the concept of how a shy attitude towards the inevitable end of all life is exposed as an inherently useless view. Nevertheless, though their primary themes and ideas of this constant procession of time are obviously expressed, the manner in which they do this, through figurative language and imagery, is the main point in which each of these three poems can be contrasted and examined
Life after death is a controversial subject and is touchy for people because of its controversy, many believe in an afterlife while others do not. These ideas influence how the poem “Is My Team Plowing” by A.E. Housman is perceived by the reader; they either believe that the soul cannot pass on happily until the worries of the troubled soul are calmed or if they do not believe then they will see the poem as a dead man wishing that he lived on. Life through death is the major theme in the poem as the first narrator is dead but talks to the second narrator who is alive in order to find out how the world has changed without the first narrator living to see it. The first narrator uses metaphors to hide his worries and to allude to his death.
“A Story about the Body”, a prose poem by Robert Hass, is literally about a man who supposedly loves a woman but then finds out about her health conditions and then changes his mind. This poem, when I read it, was more like a short story than a poem. The poem uses imagery and a variety of adjectives which allow the reader to put themselves in the story as if they were watching it happen.
Love is a strong feeling of affection. Grief is an intense sorrow, especially caused by someone 's death. Poets, Seamus Heaney and Elizabeth Barret have conveyed the theme of grief through their poems, “Grief” and “Mid-Term Break”. Poets, Christopher Brennan and Christopher Marlowe have conveyed the theme of love through their poems “Who Ever Loved That Loved Not At First Sight” and Because She Would Ask Me Why I Loved Her”. All poets study these terms using similar techniques such as, imagery, simile, personification etc. to explore the ideas about the nature of grief and love.
Many people find it hard to imagine their death as there are so many questions to be answered-how will it happen, when, where and what comes next. The fact that our last days on Earth is unknown makes the topic of death a popular one for most poets who looks to seek out their own emotions. By them doing that it helps the reader make sense of their own emotions as well. In the two poems “Because I Could Not Stop for Death” by Emily Dickenson and “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night” by Dylan Thomas, the poets are both capturing their emotion about death and the way that they accepted it. In Dickenson’s poem her feelings towards death are more passionate whereas in Dylan’s poem the feelings
Katherine Philip’s “Epitaph,” written in a couplet form, is memorializing her firstborn son who only lived less than six weeks after he was born. In this poem Katherine Philips is desperately trying to renew her faith in life, but she is struggling to do so because of the death of her son. She is attempting to justify the loss of her child, but is also questioning whether there is even a reason for hope. “What on earth deserves our trust?” If you cant trust anything then you have to rely on faith. Even things that we know as certain, like the sun rising in the morning, Katherine seems to not trust, “And so the Sun if it arise…” The “if” implies such a strong sense of doubt that it clearly emphasizes Philip’s struggling attempt to renew her faith in life.
Images of people dying young are viewed by many as one of the most tragic and inescapable fates imaginable. People aspire to live long and fruitful lives and would be quite appalled to have a premature death viewed in such a positive manner. However, in Alfred Edward Housman’s “To an Athlete Dying Young” the reader is given just that, an unconventional and oddly justifiable outlook at a young man dying an early death. This theme of short-lived fame during life (and even after death) is clear throughout the piece. It is necessary to be able to distinguish and understand this theme in order to comprehend the poem’s meaning. Throughout his work, Housman employs several prominent types of figurative language as well as archetype to develop his theme of fleeting glory.