Author Theodore Roethke was a very profound poet. Most of what he wrote about somehow related to his arduous childhood. Roethke was a very intelligent teenager often reading in his free time. He grew up on a Twenty-Five acre green-house with his father and uncle. Whenever he was only fourteen his father passed away from cancer, and his uncle committed suicide. Suffering from loss and abandonment in the beginning of his life, Roethke found comfort in his peers. Roethke decided to earn his degree in teaching and poety as a young adult. “Root Cellur” a poem by Roethke is a poem about the struggle of life. In the root cellar the reader can infer that life is present. Although, everything in this cellar is old and disgusting, it continues to strive, find new ways to survive and reproduce. The plants in the cellar are determined to survive and will stop for nothing. The mood is inspiring, the plants have nothing in their favor but still work around their problems. This poem's theme is the celebration of life and how wonderful and at times strenuous it can be. The plants are struggling in the cellar. Even though it is expected of them to die without much sunlight and nutrition they continue, just like humans would for their lives. …show more content…
Roethke uses imagery to demonstrate the vast amount of activity within the root cellar.
There are organism's growing stronger each day, “Nothing would sleep in that cellar, dank as a ditch” (1). Many of the plants in the vile cellar were rotting, still they re-produced, “Pulpy stems, rank, silo-rinch” (8). The plant's in the cellar seem to be screaming that they are alive with the smell that they are giving off “Roots ripe as old bait” (7). Although, a cellar is dark and cold the plants within are over populating the root cellar. Everything in the cellar is alive and thriving, “Even the dirt kept breathing a small breath”(11). Roethke uses the last line about the dirt to describe how determined the organisms in the cellar are to
subsist. Roethke demonstrates the struggle of life in his poem “Root Cellar”. Even though many will encounter great trials and feel alone and in the dark, it is important to go threw every possible measure to withstand. Roethke's background contributes to the peom's theme, the will-power to survive in unbelievable circumstances, having a rough childhood the remarkable poet was still willing to search for a better way to live, similar to the plants in this poem.
The tree “swings through another year of sun and leaping winds, of leaves and bounding fruit.” This sentence evokes images of happiness and serenity; however, it is in stark contrast with “month after month, the whip-crack of the mortgage.” The tone of this phrase is harsh and the onomatopoeia of a “whip crack” stirs up images of oppression. The final lines of the poem show the consequences that the family accepts by preserving the tree—their family heritage. When the speaker judges the tree by its cover she sees monetary value, but when she looks at the content in the book she find that it represents family. Even though times may be tough for the family, they are united by memories of their ancestors.
When he was fifteen years old his mother died from appendicitis. From fifteen years of age to his college years he lived in an all-white neighborhood. From 1914-1917, he shifted from many colleges and academic courses of study as well as he changed his cultural identity growing up. He studied physical education, agriculture, and literature at a total of six colleges and universities from Wisconsin to New York. Although he never completed a degree, his educational pursuits laid the foundation for his writing career. He had the knowledge of philosophy and psychology. He attempted to write when he was a youth, but he made a choice to pursue a literary career in 1919. After he published Cane he became part of New York literary circles. He objected both rivalries that prevailed in the fraternity of writers and to attempts to promote him as a black writer (Clay...
Updike, John. "A&P." Thinking and Writing About Literature. Ed. Michael Meyer. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2001. 981-86. Print.
The first stanza incorporates a lot of imagery and syntax. “A toad the power mower caught,”(line1). The use of syntax in the very first sentence is to catch the reader’s attention and to paint an image for them. The stanza goes on to talk about how the toad hobbles with it’s wounded leg to the edge of the garden, “Under the cineraria leaves”(line4). The speaker uses the word cineraria, which is similar to a cinerarium, a place where the ashes of the deceased are kept. By using this, the speaker further illustrates the death of the toad. “Low and final glade.”(Line6) this line is like a metaphor for the dying toad, the final rest for the toad could be the final glade. In the first stanza it seems as if the speaker is making fun of the dying toad saying the garden sanctuaries him as if he were a person. The opening line even seems a bit humorous to the reader. The following stanzas also have a tone of sarcasm.
The author somewhat implicates feelings of resentment fused with a loving reliance with his father. For example, the first two lines of the poem read: "The whiskey on your breath/ Could make a small boy dizzy;" (Roethke 668). This excerpt appears to set a dark sort of mood for the entire rest of the poem. By the first two lines, the reader may already see how this man feels about his father's drunkenness. It seems as if Roethke has preceded his poem with this factor in order to demonstrate the resentment that he feels toward his father.
“For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck, For the sun to rot, for the trees to drop.” The men hanging to wither and rot for no reason other than ignorance, greed and prejudice. “A strange and bitter crop.”
John Updike was an American novelist, poet, short story writer, art critic, and literary critic. He was born on March 18, 1932 in Reading, Pennsylvania. Some of his most acknowledged pieces are his famous Rabbit, Run series, the first of which was published in 1960. During the semester, we read one of his short stories, “My Father’s Tears” which followed Jim Werley, as he shares the impacts his fathers have made on his life. Furthermore, I decided to go on and read two more of his short stories, “A&P” and “Here Come the Maples”. Updike’s writing style is unlike that of many other writers. Although the three stories are all very different, they share similarities through Updike’s unique style of writing that is shown in each of his short stories.
John Updike was born in 1932 in Shillington, Pennsylvania, a small town where his father was a high school science teacher. An only child, Updike and his parents shared a house with his grandparents for much of his childhood. His mother encouraged him to write and draw. He received a tuition scholarship to Harvard University where he majored in English. As an undergraduate, he wrote stories and drew cartoons for the Harvard Lampoon humor magazine, serving as the magazine's president in his senior year. Before graduating, he married fellow student Mary E. Pennington. He graduated summa cum laude from Harvard in 1954, and in that same year sold a poem and a short story to The New Yorker magazine (Detweiler 173). The publication of Rabbit, Run increased his reputation as a leading author of his generation. Updike died of lung cancer at the age of 76 in 2009 (Achievement.org). In four of John Updike’s short stories the relationships between the men and women reveal the male characters’ desires in intimacy.
writes about his life and how difficult school and learning to read was for him.
John B. Updike is a novelist, poet, short story author, playwright, children’s book author, literary critic, art critic, and essayist. Updike is one of the world’s most versatile, serious, and prolific writers. Though his writing style and subjects vary greatly, he is committed to addressing the moral, social, and cultural conditions of his generation. Updike was born on March 18, 1932 and raised in a small town by the name of Shillington, Pennsylvania, right outside of Reading. He lived there as an only child, until the age of thirteen. As he grew older, he attended Harvard University, where he majored in English and contributed to and later edited the Harvard Lampoon. In 1955 he married his first wife Mary Pennington, with whom he had his four children. After the first marriage was dissolved, he married Martha Bernhard in 1977. They were happily married and lived in Beverly Farms, Massachusetts, until his death on January 27, 2009, from lung cancer. Throughout his life he wrote more than 50 books and short stories, one being “Trust Me.” “Trust Me” was written in 1987 and was one of John Updike’s primary works.
India in 1956 and then moved to the USA in the 1960s. She now lives in
John Updike occupies a unique position in the annals of American literature. He gave an extra-ordinary dimension to the banal and mundane aspects of life which delineated with feline accuracy. In his prodigious output encompassing varied genres, he relentlessly pursued the dialectics of discontentment, conflict, waste, sorrow, and fear juxtaposed by the antithetical elements of contentment, resolutions, economy, happiness and love, which invest his writings with a rare dynamism that accounts for his commercial popularity. The variety of his oeuvre is so diverse that it can be christened the literary Wall Mart. In long line of novelists who mirrored the society of their times, John Updike was one. Born in Pennsylvania, U.S.A in the year 1932,
This spiritual epitaph is laced with imagery; painting an extremely vivid picture given the details about her image. Roethke associates the deceased with elemental aspects of nature--the plant tendrils, the pickerel smile, trembling twigs, whispers turning into kissing etc. His lines create an amazingly tranquil atmosphere. Her voice is described as if it were perfectly toned; touching everyone that crosses her path of wind.
As The Waste Land begins, Eliot enters into the barren land, which the audience journeys across with the author through the course of the poem. "The roots that clutch" immediately evoke a feeling of desperation. Roots in the rocky soil Eliot describes are a base from which to grow; just as roots in plants gain nourishment from soil, these roots "clutch" infertile ground, desperately seeking something to gain from nothing. The question "what branches grow" suggests skepticism as to life's ability to survive in "stony rubbish," the waste that offers no forgiveness.
The theme of love is a prevalent one in many poems. A universal feeling, love is inevitably present in the works of quite a few poets, even those whose subject matter would not seem to include this theme. In Roethke's "The Apparition" , the pervading theme of love will be discussed. Theodore Roethke's love poem "The Apparition", is quite a different matter. There could not possibly be any mistaken sentiment in this work. Roethke's poems were generally sincere and direct. "The Apparition" is no exception. It tells of love and love lost all in one fell swoop, and there can be no mistaking the passion Roethke meant in this poem. The following lines illustrate this point well: "…Who took my heart, whole, / With a tilt of his eye,/ And with it, my soul,/ And it like to die." Anyone can tell that these are the words of a lovestruck soul. In the next stanza, though, the writer has already been heartbroken: "I twist, and I turn,/ My breath but a sigh./ Dare I grieve? Dare I mourn? / He walks by. He walks by." The writer apparently believed in falling in and out of love fairly quickly. The first two stanzas of the poem show a person who falls in love at the mere sight of someone walking by. The last stanza finds that same person at the point of being traumatized simply because the walker has gone on, supposedly to bigger and better things than the writer. This poem illustrates the sincerity and directness with which Roethke crafted his works. Its content cannot be confused with some emotion other than love and/or infatuation. Indeed, the poem's message is clear: love may come swiftly, and the chance to love may be gone before it was ever even realized. Roethke, in his obvious unique style, has sufficiently conveyed to the readers his interpretation of love and of being in love.