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Narrative literacy essays for english
Narrative literacy essays for english
Narrative literacy essays for english
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The Fish is a narrative monologue composed for 76 free-verse lines. The poem is constructed as one long stanza. The author is the speaker narrating this poem. She narrates a fishing experience. The author is out in a rented boat on a body of water, presumably a lake. She tries to describe the fish to the fullest, which appears to be the purpose of the poem, without saying either the specie or an approximate age. The narration gives the impression that the fish is slightly old. There are a number of reasons as to why that fish got caught by the author, including time of day, the weeds weighing it down, fish’s age, and the fact that it has been previously caught five times.
This poem is full of visual imagery; one can imagine being the speaker, staring at the fish on the hook. The fish’s brown skin, shapes on his scales, the tiny white sea-lice, the green weed, the blood flowing from his gills, his entrails, and his pink bladder all describing the fish’s body. This allows the reader to imagine as if the fish was in their hands. She not only illustrates the fish as a whole but also ge...
In fact, the fish story has become a metaphor reflecting the technique used by Finney for expressing the difficult thing beautifully, to compress a poem choosing what should be kept in a poem and what should be thrown away (Finney, “Interview with: Nikky Finney”), to express whatever difficult feelings she has without much noise or rage. Finney sees activism as a basic part of her work.
The book has vivid imagery making the reader imaging as if her or she was their right beside him in his whole investigation. Such as “In the winter of 1978, through, a fierce blizzard hit southern Connecticut. Temperatures were often below zero and at one point it snowed for thirty-three hours straight. Perhaps it was the cold that killed the fish, or the copper sulfate I helped the caretaker drag through the pond the previous summer to manage the algal blooms, or maybe even the fishermen id noticed trespassing on the estate one day, scoping out my grounds. But whatever caused it, after that never again did I spot a living fish in that pond again.”(Greenberg 12-13). This quote shows how good his imagery, tone, and diction is, when I read it all I could think of is that storm and the pond. The author has an excellent writing style and keeps the reader wanting more. Even though the book has a lot of good things for it the only thing I would tell the author would to give more connections of him to the story. It says “The transformation of salmon and sea bass from kingly and holiday wild fish into everyday farmed variants is a trend that continues with different animals around the globe.”(Greenberg 195). In every chapter about each of the fish it gives some connections to him but it would make it even
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,
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
Bishop's initial description of the fish is meant to further develop this theme by presenting the reader with a fish that is "battered," "venerable," and "homely." Bishop compares the fish to "ancient wallpaper." Even without the word ancient preceding it, the general conception of wallpaper is something that fades into the background. One is not supposed to take much notice of it. To add to this impartial picture, the fish is brown, the signature color of dullness. "Shapes like full-blown roses stained and lost through age" (lines 14-15) further cement the image of something with little time left. Fully bloomed roses conjure the image of a flower whose petals are at t...
In “Pike”, Hughes likes to use colors and measurements to describe what the pike looks like and the scenery. In the first line Hughes writes "Pike, three inches long, perfect"(line 1). Already the reader has a rough image of what the fish looks like. In the second stanza he writes, "A hundred feet long in their world"(line 7), this lets the reader visualize that the pike is the biggest fish in the water. In stanza 3 Hughes desc...
The speaker from the first stanza is the observer, someone who pays closer attention to the entire piece of work, noticing all the details and able to understand the painting as a fluid story and not a snapshot. He is a man with fishing experience. He knows violent the seas and the power nature holds, strong and unforgiving to any individual. The second speaker in the poem is the observer, his voice is heard in the second stanza. He describes the individual looking at the painting as an innocent bystander embracing the art in a museum. The man views the painting, not fully immersing oneself in the complete story of the painting. Instead, he just looks on as a spectator, not fully appreciating the intensity of what he is looking at. Breaking the poem into two stanzas not only allows Finkel to voice two speakers, but also allows him to alternate the tone. The tone of the first stanza with the observer is dark, the speaker describes the events in the painting with a terror, making the painting more realistic with hints of personal experiences. The second stanza is divided into two parts: the first is calm, the onlooker is innocent, gazing at the still image on the canvas, describing the painting at face-value. The latter half of the stanza brings the painting to life. Similar to the first stanza, it transitions back into darkness, a contrast of what the observer views on the
The poems “Sea Rose” by H.D and “Vague Poem” by Elizabeth Bishop were both written by two women who took over the Victorian era. H.D’s works of writing were best known as experimental reflecting the themes of feminism and modernism from 1911-1961. While Bishop’s works possessed themes of longing to belong and grief. Both poems use imagery, which helps to make the poem more concrete for the reader. Using imagery helps to paint a picture with specific images, so we can understand it better and analyze it more. The poems “Sea Rose” and “Vague Poem” both use the metaphor of a rose to represent something that can harm you, even though it has beauty.
The last poem “The Fish” illustrates the sorrow of life itself. The skin, the blood, the entrails, everything of the fish depicts vividly and dramatically. The poet seems to share the same pain with the fish observing the scene and enjoys the detail just like enjoying an artwork. The poet lets the fish go because she is totally touched by the process between life and death; she loves life but meanwhile, is deeply hurt by the life. In the poem, the fish has no fear towards her; the desire to life is in the moving and tragic details when faces the
Throughout the first half of the poem, Bishop describes the fish as an inanimate object, as reflected in her comparisons, which uses objects to describe the fish as shown when she says, “Here and there his brown skin hung in strips like ancient wallpaper…”. (9-11) She chooses a wallpaper to describe the skin of the fish in order to accurately portray its battered and worn state; her decision to compare the fish to an inorganic ...
...m the “battered and venerable and homely” fish is now a decorated war hero who has fought many battles. The speaker always had respect for the fish but at the end her admiration is so outstanding that she feels obligated to honor it. The final declaration is, “And I let the fish go” (76). This is the culmination of all the previous dialogue and shows the speaker’s utmost respect for the fish and how it would be inhumane of her to kill it.
The opening two lines are as simple and clear like a casual conversation. However, the speaker’s use of “sanctuaries” shows his realization of the toad’s unfortunate situation, and words such as “cineraria,” and “ashen” convey a deathly atmosphere. Realizing that any creature can die a tragically, the speaker watches the “rare original bloodshed” flow out; he now sees the importance of this blood. All the descriptive words used in stanza two; “wizening’s”, “banked” and “staring”, shows that the speaker is paying close attention to the toad. This new curiosity leads him to upgrade his use of diction on the “misted and ebullient seas”. The importance of such word choices is that the speaker sees the toad as something precious and respected. These critical words demonstrate the formidable change that the speaker’s attitude has passed
In the poem ‘The Fish’, the use of short lines and the presence of enjambments indicate that the poet, Bishop, is giving her own thoughts. This form of poetry gives the impression that the poet is not simply writing the words on a piece of paper but is rather speaking them out loud. The poem is presented in a way that the audience feels as if the poet was present at the scene and was narrating the events that occurred throughout the poem (Bishop 463). The poem is also written as a single stanza. The decision to write it this way may have been in an attempt to portray the long ordeal that fishermen engage in when fishing. In doing so, bishop is able to prepare the audience for the poem and to make sure that it resonates with the act of fishing itself. The poem is also full of imagery that is extremely vivid in description which help the audience visualize what is being narrated in the poem (Bishop 463). Through the narration, tone and imagery used, the audience is led into creating a bond with the fish. This bond is essential, as it is through it, the audience develops the same admiration towards the fish as the narrator does and appreciates
As we continue reading we see the narrator use "reds and blacks" (29-31) and “pink” (32-33) to describe the fish’s blood and guts, which is
“The fish” by Ellizabeth Bishop and “Out, Out…” by Robert Frost. In the poem “The Fish” and “Out, Out”, both narrators describe nature and his beauty like art. Ellizabeth Bishop begins with a clear description of what happened as the fish was caught. Later on Ellizabeth uses descriptive language to describe the fish. This helps the readers visually imagine what;s going i their head. In “Out, Out”, Frost describes a young boy doing a grown up job. Similarly to Bishop, Frost uses descriptive language to help the readers imagine.