The Confusing Writing Style of John Berryman’s Dream Songs
John Berryman presents an interesting and somewhat confusing grouping of stories in his first twenty-six Dream Songs. The six line stanzas seem to reveal the dreams that Berryman has. The poems are written with poor grammar and have a very random rhyme scheme. They perplexed me greatly reading through them, as they seemingly have no order or plot.
Beginning with the rhyme scheme of The Dream Songs, Berryman seems to follow no specific order. In the 8th song, Berryman uses the pattern abcabc, but in the 11th song he uses abccda throughout the three six-line stanzas. In many of the other sections he does not follow one pattern through all three stanzas. Also in some of them it seems as though he uses slant rhyme, using words that do not exactly rhyme but have strongly related sounds. One example of this slant rhyme occurs in the 5th song; “while the brainfever bird did scales; / Mr Heartbreak, the New Man, /come to farm a crazy land;/ an image of the dead on the fingernail” (7). With this example scales and fingernail and man and land present words that do not completely rhyme. Berryman’s random use of rhyme scheme correlates to the randomness of the entire work of the first section of his dream songs.
The language that Berryman writes with in The Dream Songs also serves to complicate the work. He goes back and forth in using African American slang language and inverted English. He writes; “The enemy are sick, / and so is us of, Often rising trysts, / like this one, drove he out” (12). This phrase makes no sense grammatically and presents quite a challenge for the reader to paraphrase. Berryman also throws in an occasional phrase in another language, as he does in the 12th song; “Tes yeux bizarres me suivent” (14). This example just provides one more way in which Berryman makes his writing difficult to get through and even more difficult to understand.
Rhymes are two or more words that have the same ending sound. Songwriters and poets often times use rhymes to help their piece flow better, or keep the audience or readers engaged. Billy Joel’s song “We Didn’t Start the Fire” is filled with rhymes, with a rhyme in almost every single line: “Brando, the King and I, and the Catcher In The Rye / Eisenhower, Vaccine, England’s got a new Queen / Marciano, Liberace, Santayana goodbye” (line 6-8). Billy Joel uses the rhymes to move from one topic to the next, and the song is even in chronological order from 1950 to 1989. The rhyme schemes of the song are end rhymes as well as perfect rhymes. On the other hand, the poem is completely free verse, or without a single rhyme. This makes the poem less artistic and harder to remain engaged and interested. In addition to rhyming, allusions are another way of displaying artistic
For the characters in Of Mice and Men, dreams are useful because they map out the possibilities of human happiness. Just as a map helps a traveler locate himself on the road, dreams help Lennie, George, and the others understand where they are and where they’re going. Many dreams in the work have a physical dimension: Not just wishes to be achieved, they are places to be reached. The fact that George’s ranch, the central dream of the book, is an actual place as opposed to a person or a thing underlines this geographical element. Dreams turn th...
In Langston Hughes’ poem, the author gives us vivid examples of how dreams get lost in the weariness of everyday life. The author uses words like dry, fester, rot, and stink, to give us a picture of how something that was originally intended for good, could end up in defeat. Throughout the play, I was able to feel how each character seemed to have their dreams that fell apart as the story went on. I believe the central theme of the play has everything to do with the pain each character goes thru after losing control of the plans they had in mind. I will attempt to break down each character’s dream and how they each fell apart as the play went on.
A person looks at his hand; the palm facing up and forms his hand into a claw. He pays particular attention to his fingers and the feel of the tendons, ligaments, and muscles as he forms a claw. He imagines that this is happening to him over time. He has no control over it and cannot stop it. Unlike people with Dupuytren’s disease, he can straighten out his hands. I struggle with Dupuytren’s condition in both of my hands.
American Massive Business Hack: This is considered to be one of the largest hacking ever in which hackers stole 160 million credit and debit card numbers and targeted 800,000 (Beekman). This massive attack which happened over eight years ago hit lot of companies including NASDAQ. Some of these companies include 7-eleven, J C Penny, Hannaford, Hartland, Jet Blue, Dow Jones, Euronet, Visa Jordan, Ingenicard etc. Over seven years, five Russian and Ukrainian used sophisticated hacking techniques to compromise millions of credit card numbers and bank details. This isolated and unexpected operation spanned across the world and resulted in at least $300 million dollar in losses to organizations as well as individuals. The cyber attacks occurred between 2005 and 2012, and many of them were carried out in 2008 and...
Neiman Marcus Group Ltd, which owns high-end retailer Neiman Marcus and discount retailer Last Call, has faced a public relations crisis in the past 12 months. The company, founded in Dallas, Texas, in 1907, has stores in 20 states and attracts customers with a high disposable income. The organization discovered in mid-December that they had fallen victim to a security breach. Approximately 1.1 million customer cards used from July 16, 2013 to October 30, 2013 were vulnerable to malicious software installed to Neiman Marcus’s system. An investigation discovered that 2,400 different customer cards were used fraudulently as a result of the breach.
This cyber crime is a security threat that not only affects businesses, but also everyone that has access to the World Wide Web whether it is via computer, laptop, smart phone or notepad. In order to achieve a successful breach, criminal masterminds often attempt to illegally gain access to the business through multiple targets while combining them with vulnerability tools via web access, e-mail, and even social engineering. In the recent breach to the retail store Target Inc. it was discovered that over 110 million consumers’ credit cards and personal information were exposed to attackers. Several months earlier, programs with malware-laced email phishing codes were sent to Target employees via an HVAC firm which could have been the culprit that infected Target’s point-of-sale systems. According to Fox Business, the attackers used the information gathered and gained access to additional network resources which led to the $200M breach and left the cyber door wide open to future infiltration.
During the 2013 holiday season, Target was involved in a major credit card hacking scheme which affected millions of consumers. There were approximately 70 million customers that had their debit and credit cards compromised. The company announced that hackers somehow manipulated the payment system and stole debit and credit card data. The hackers were able to retrieve consumer names, card numbers, expiration dates, and the three digit security code on the back of the cards (Kassner, 2014). While the breach may not have given hackers access to customers personal banking and credit card accounts, it created a great risk for identity theft and the possibility for the hackers to use the information and create accounts in the consumer’s name.
In Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, in the post-apocalyptic world that the man and the boy live in, dreams begin to take on the form of a new “reality.” As the novel progresses, the man’s dreams, initially memories remnant of his pre-apocalypse life, become “brighter” as the boy’s dreams become darker and nightmarish. Through the use of color and distinct language, McCarthy emphasizes the contrast between reality and dreams. The man’s reliance on bad dreams to keep him tied to the harsh reality alludes to the hopelessness of the situation; he can never truly escape. McCarthy suggests that those who strive for a life that no longer exists are deluded with false hope. Having dreams is a natural human tendency, but in a world that has become so inhumane, the man can’t even afford to retain this element of being human. The loss of the past is a concept that the characters living in this ashen world struggle with, and McCarthy presents memory as a weakness to be exploited.
Cyberspace has become an increasingly attractive hunting ground for criminals, activists and terrorists motivated to make money, air their grievances, cause disruption or even bring down corporations and governments through online attacks. One of the most significant data breaches in recent years has been the successful theft of 143 million customer records from Equifax. This was a cyber crime with devastating consequences due to the type of personally identifiable information stolen and its effect on the credit markets. A study independently conducted by Accenture estimates the increased cost of cyber crime to be more than US$17 million in 2017 in the financial services, utilities and energy sectors (Accenture Report,
Their customers no long trusted Sony with their unsecure computer systems and stopped using their services. Furthermore, Sony Pictures Entertainment’s Web Site was also hacked and drained of personal information on its several million customers, in addition to 75000 “music codes” and 3.5 million coupons. Customers became infuriated and not only did many of them disassociate themselves from Sony, but users personally hacked into Sony’s computer system with no intention so steal or corrupt, but to prove that Sony’s lack of security is a threat to its company and to all their customers. For Sony, without its data, it cannot proceed in future initiatives until the problem is resolved which costed them $170 million and 4 weeks to recover just the PlayStation system alone. This is a major downplay for
In 1951 Langston Hughes wrote the poem “dreams”. In this poem Langston Hughes is trying to emphasize the importance of having and following your dreams and their ability to empower, strengthen and sustain an individual's life. Through the use of personification, metaphors, and refrains he accomplishes his purpose of showing us a life without dreams is empty.
Dreams are central to human identity, they give lives a purpose, something to aspire to. These dreams are often lost in explanation and many writers have aimed to give life to a dream in writing. Langston Hughes does this brilliantly in the works As I Grew Older, Mother to Son, and Dreams. All three of these poems have a common use of powerful figurative language to communicate meaning.
As dreams and wishes are made countlessly, only a handful of them come true without work or effort being made into them. However, the mindset that dreams can true with only a wish will cause people to believe they do not need to try for their dreams to come true. In my sonnet, “Dreams”, I write about dreams are being made, however multiple people are disappointed when their aspiration do not become reality. I state how dreams linger in many minds throughout the day, however they continue to stay as dreams due to no one working at them. In my poem, “Dreams”, I use multiple forms of figurative language and the structure of the sonnet to express the idea that dreams and wishes need to be worked for in order to be granted.
In 2013, 13.1 million people were fraud victims (Collins-Taylor, 2014). The number of victims of identity theft has increased by 500,000 consumers in the last year yet the actual amount of money stolen has dropped from an all-time high in 2004 of $48 billion to $18 billion in 2003. When identity thieves do successful steal an identity they are three times as likely to use the stolen information to purchase gift cards (Collins-Taylor, 2014), this will allow the thieves to secure more money that is less traceable from individuals than if they were to attempt to open a credit