The Nation as One Celebrating the death of a person usually starts with a lamentatious mood and grief. “Celebrating”, perhaps, is a misleading word as in today’s society, celebration is linked with parties and events of fun and joy. In Walt Whitman’s book “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” (“Lilacs”), he describes the “celebration” of Lincoln’s death throughout the country. Whitman conveys the glum mood of America after their beloved president is assassinated and the everlasting grief that follows in (“Lilacs”). The beginning of “Lilacs” focuses on the event of Lincoln’s death and how the country as one handled the news that its dear president is no more. In stanza one, Whitman speaks of mourning, but also mentions the rejuvenation of his mourning: “I mourn’d, and yet shall mourn with ever returning spring” (27). The grief of the individual that is in the process of mourning for Lincoln is clearly seen; he/she not only experience the strong emotion of death, but also the mindset that Lincoln is not coming back, causing he/she to grieve even more. Also, the death of Li...
The essays, “Death of Abraham Lincoln” and “The Timely Death of President Harding”, critique society’s tendency to respect the dead and glorify the presidents’ former lives regardless of their characteristics while living.
The interpretations of what comes after death may vary greatly across literature, but one component remains constant: there will always be movement. In her collection Native Guard, Natasha Trethewey discusses the significance, permanence and meaning of death often. The topic is intimate and personal in her life, and inescapable in the general human experience. Part I of Native Guard hosts many of the most personal poems in the collection, and those very closely related to the death of Trethewey’s mother, and the exit of her mother’s presence from her life. In “Graveyard Blues”, Trethewey examines the definition of “home” as a place of lament, in contrast to the comforting meaning in the epitaph beginning Part I, and the significance
To what extent had the colonists developed a sense of their identity and unity as Americans by the eve of the Revolution?
Throughout the course of history, there have been many civil wars. In those civil wars, many persons fought and died in battles to defend their beliefs. In the aftermath of a major battle, a people’s morale is as shattered and broken as the bodies of those that were slain. Following the battle, a funeral is conducted in remembrance of the deceased. At these funerals a funeral oration is usually given by a well-known domestic public figure, such as when Abraham Lincoln gave his “Gettysburg Address” in 1863 AD and when Pericles gave his funeral oration to Athens in 431 BC. These speeches were made not only to put to rest the souls of the dead and the grief of those who knew them, but to give those people hope that their friends and loved ones did not die in vain and to remind them why their civil war was being fought.
In the eulogy that President John F. Kennedy gave for the lately departed poet, Robert Frost, only three out of the four common elements that Kunkel and Dennis found in eulogies can be found in this specific eulogy. The elements I found in this eulogy are positive reappraisal, praise, and problem-focused coping while self-disclosure of emotion, credibility, affirmation of vivid past relationships, and continuation of interactive bonds could not be found. John Kennedy imminently starts off with a positive reappraisal: “Robert Frost was one of the granite figures of our time in America. He was supremely two things—an artist and an American,” (lines 3-4). Kennedy is telling the thousands listening that Robert Frost not only had a good life but
Imagine that the person you love most in the world dies. How would you cope with the loss? Death and grieving is an agonizing and inevitable part of life. No one is immune from death’s insidious and frigid grip. Individuals vary in their emotional reactions to loss. There is no right or wrong way to grieve (Huffman, 2012, p.183), it is a melancholy ordeal, but a necessary one (Johnson, 2007). In the following: the five stages of grief, the symptoms of grief, coping with grief, and unusual customs of mourning with particular emphasis on mourning at its most extravagant, during the Victorian era, will all be discussed in this essay (Smith, 2014).
Whitman’s approach to poetry is a reflection of his thought. These thoughts are free and wild, and his typical run-on sentences and his endless litanies of people and places represent the thoughts trying to be conveyed. The overall effect of these run-on sentences provides the reader with a feeling of greatness and of freedom. All of the feelings that are evoked from Whitman’s style can be classified as quintessentially American democratic feelings. The belief that Whitman had no style would imply that Americans as a society have no style, a statement that not only Whitman but Emerson and Thoreau as well fought against through their writings. Whitman and Emerson fighting for the same cause is not coincidental, Whitman has often been viewed as the “child” of Emerson, his work being greatly influenced by Emerson. Whitman’s technique of looking at everything as a whole and always opposed to breaking up the whole can be linked to his belief of unity within our country and the reason why he took the Civil War extremely hard and personal.
One would expect that social equality would just be the norm in society today. Unfortunately, that is not the case. Three similar stories of how inequality and the hard reality of how America’s society and workforce is ran shows a bigger picture of the problems American’s have trying to make an honest living in today’s world. When someone thinks about the American dream, is this the way they pictured it? Is this what was envisioned for American’s when thinking about what the future held? The three authors in these articles don’t believe so, and they are pretty sure American’s didn’t either. Bob Herbert in his article “Hiding from Reality” probably makes the most honest and correct statement, “We’re in denial about the extent of the rot in the system, and the effort that would be required to turn things around” (564).
As John Savage articulates, “Nothing costs enough here,” in Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) of bottled automata, where maelstroms of soma-ingesting, Malthusian orgies casually toss human life about (239). Nothing is dear when the freedom to choose disappears because individuals “don’t know what it’s like being anything else” (74). Removing choice is simply a method of brainwashing that only subdues human nature for the short-run. Consider Sigmund Freud's views of private property:
Whitman in 1865 wrote an elegy for President Lincoln entitled "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd." The "Lilacs" elegy is an outpouring of the deep sense of loss that Whitman felt after the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln. The President's death was a great shock to the poet; it overwhelmed him in a very personal way. Whitman recognized Lincoln's excellence and importance.
A nation, as defined in Webster’s Universal College Dictionary, is “a body of people, associated with a particular territory, that is sufficiently conscious of its unity to seek or to possess a government peculiarly its own.” This definition is correct, but leaves so much unsaid. The word nation is actually derived from the Latin word natio that means birth. It represents the beginning of something. London had a miraculous “birth” in the year 0. This corresponds to the Virgin Mary giving birth to Jesus. When people speak of “country (nation) matters”, another Latin term comes into play, with matter meaning mother. A country must have a mother as a mother gives birth, which links back to a nation meaning birth. Now that the definition and meaning of a nation are provided, a common question comes to mind. What makes a territory a nation?
“Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” is a poem composed by Thomas Gray over a period of ten years. Beginning shortly after the death of his close friend Richard West in 1742, “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” was first published in 1751. This poem’s use of dubbal entendre may lead the intended audience away from the overall theme of death, mourning, loss, despair and sadness; however, this poem clearly uses several literary devices to convey the author’s feelings toward the death of his friend Richard West, his beloved mother, aunt and those fallen soldiers of the Civil War. This essay will discuss how Gray uses that symbolism and dubbal entendre throughout the poem to convey the inevitability of death, mourning, conflict within self, finding virtue in one’s life, dealing with one’s misfortunes and giving recognition to those who would otherwise seem insignificant.
Funeral Blues by W. H. Auden is a short poem that illustrates the emotions that he is dealing with after the love of his life passes away. The tone of this piece evokes feelings that will differ depending on the reader; therefore, the meaning of this poem is not in any way one-dimensional, resulting in inevitable ambiguity . In order to evoke emotion from his audience, Auden uses a series of different poetic devices to express the sadness and despair of losing a loved one. This poem isn’t necessarily about finding meaning or coming to some overwhelming realization, but rather about feeling emotions and understanding the pain that the speaker is experiencing. Through the use of poetic devices such as an elegy, hyperboles, imagery, metaphors, and alliterations as well as end-rhyme, Auden has created a powerful poem that accurately depicts the emotions a person will often feel when the love of their live has passed away.
Jencks, C., 2014. La Strada Novissima: The 1980 Venice Biennale. Available at: http://www.domusweb.it/en/from-the-archive/2012/08/25/-em-la-strada-novissima-em--the-1980-venice-biennale.html [Accessed 22 May 2014]
The birth of an American nation began with the establishment of various colonies along the east approximately next to the abundant Atlantic Ocean. The colonies can be divided into 4 units. The colonies that settled in the New World were New England, Chesapeake, Middle Colonies, and the Carolinas. The European immigrants thought themselves as being the first inhabitants of the new nation, but were faced with a reality that Native Americans were already settled in the land. What was to come was years of hardship and war.