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Analysis of poems
Analysis of poems
Story of william wordsworth poem surprised by joy
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The Relation of Thought and Emotion in William Wordsworth’s Surprised by Joy
Dr. Branson's comments: This essay was written in response to an explication exercise in a course designed to introduce students to the fundamentals of the English major. It demonstrates not only excellence as an explication, but also as an interdisciplinary application of psychological theory to literary analysis.
In the sonnet "Surprised by Joy," William Wordsworth relates an episode of his struggle to cope with the death of his young daughter. That this elegiac poem, written to express grief, begins with joy is a testament to its emotional complexity. Although the poem's emotions range between exposing extremes, the thoughts of the narrator remain stable. As he relates his experience, he looks back with an unfaltering conviction that nothing but sorrow must result. Cognitive psychology's concept of dissonance provides a useful insight into the relationship of thought and emotion in the sonnet. According to dissonance theory, when thoughts and emotions seem to contradict each other, a state of anxiety, called cognitive dissonance, will result. This anxiety motivates attempts to achieve stability by restoring the unity of thought and emotion~ In accord with the cognitive viewpoint, this sonnet differentiates between two types of emotions: those that are independent of conscious thought and are characterized as transient, instinctive, and arousing, and those that comply to conscious thought and are characterized as permanent, orderly, and tranquil.
"Surprised by Joy" is a Miltonic sonnet with the turn occurring roughly in the middle of the first line of the sestet. Wordsworth uses the sonnet form to create tension in the octave and resol...
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... The narrator's progression from instinctive to thought-based emotion is the central event in the poem. The psychological struggle that this progression represents concludes in a defeat. The joy and love that initially overtake the narrator can be seen as a sign that he is ready to abjure his grief-ridden thoughts and recognize a lingering spiritual bond with his daughter. He instead rejects these impulses. Thought is the component of our internal environment that we can directly control, and with it we can actualize or suffocate emotions. The narrator uses his thoughts to reject joy and accept sorrow. In this way, he perpetuates his grieving in the face of impending happiness.
Work Cited
Wordsworth, William. "Surprised by Joy." The Norton Anthology of Poetry. Ed. Margaret Ferguson, Mary Jo Salter, and Jon Stallworthy. 4th ed. New York: Norton, 1996.
Updike, John. "A&P." Thinking and Writing About Literature. Ed. Michael Meyer. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2001. 981-86. Print.
The Kyoto Protocol was created to reduce the amount of greenhouse gas emissions that are affecting Earth. The project is extremely expensive and lacks effectiveness. The protocol may benefit the world in the far future, but it is not worth a country going poor. Also, if tackling the issue involves the cooperation of our entire earth, developing countries should not be excluded. The Kyoto Protocol raises many concerns, and if something is going to impact our economy so greatly, it should not raise any concerns and should be foolproof. In order to demonstrate the lack of effectiveness, the economic consequences must first be discussed.
Although the little girl doesn’t listen to the mother the first time she eventually listens in the end. For example, in stanzas 1-4, the little girl asks if she can go to the Freedom March not once, but twice even after her mother had already denied her the first time. These stanzas show how the daughter is a little disobedient at first, but then is able to respect her mother’s wishes. In stanzas 5 and 6, as the little girl is getting ready the mother is happy and smiling because she knows that her little girl is going to be safe, or so she thinks. By these stanzas the reader is able to tell how happy the mother was because she thought her daughter would be safe by listening to her and not going to the March. The last two stanzas, 7 and 8, show that the mother senses something is wrong, she runs to the church to find nothing, but her daughter’s shoe. At this moment she realizes that her baby is gone. These stanzas symbolize that even though her daughter listened to her she still wasn’t safe and is now dead. The Shoe symbolizes the loss the mother is going through and her loss of hope as well. This poem shows how elastic the bond between the daughter and her mother is because the daughter respected her mother’s wish by not going to the March and although the daughter is now dead her mother will always have her in her heart. By her having her
In addition to, revolutionizing characters, Stan Lee made many of his comic books intricate and interesting compared to simple boring comic books in the past. His intricate comics had to do with his...
It sounds like her father’s death made her angrier at the fact that she is not able to get anything from him anymore. There are several times in the poem when she switches emotions on her father. She forgives him and then is angry again. It’s hard for her because she does not know whether or not she can forgive him, considering all the pain and hardships the family was put through. She tries to justify her father’s actions by blaming his father, but is still angry because her father didn’t help the situation. At the same time, the daughter is almost as upset with her mother as she is with her father when she says “you were each other’s bad bargain, not mine” (Line 21). By the end of the poem, she is able to accept the fact that the broken relationship with her father and content relationship with her mother has to remain untouched. She is able to see that she cannot fully blame her father for being the reason why she is not emotionally content with their relationship. There’s nothing she can do about it now since both her parents are dead, but she is able to let go of it at this
The phrasing of this poem can be analyzed on many levels. Holistically, the poem moves the father through three types of emotions. More specifically, the first lines of the poem depict the father s deep sadness toward the death of his son. The line Farewell, thou child of my right hand, and joy creates a mental picture in my mind (Line 1). I see the father standing over the coffin in his blackest of outfits with sunglasses shading his eyes from the sun because even the sun is too bright for his day of mourning. The most beautiful scarlet rose from his garden is gripped tightly in his right hand as tears cascade down his face and strike the earth with a splash that echoes like a scream in a cave, piercing the ears of those gathered there to mourn the death of his son.
Wordsworth shows the possibility of finding freedom within his poem by choosing to write within the Italian sonnet’s rules. What makes an Italian sonnet unique is the division and pattern of its rhyme scheme. It is usually structured in an ABBA, ABBA, CDE, CDE pattern, and broken into two main parts, the octave (the first eight lines) and the sestet (the final six). The meter of “Nuns” can be labeled as iambic pentameter, yet along with the meter, the poem differs from the norm in two more ways. The first difference is in the rhyme scheme. In a typical Italian sonnet, the sestet follows a CDE, CDE pattern, in “Nuns” however, it follows the pattern CDD, CCD. It’s minute, but adds emphases to the 13th line, which contains the poem’s second anomaly. All the poem’s lines have an ...
...ience the same situation has her father. When she tries to commit suicide she reconnects with the “bag” again, relating to the “a bag full of God”. It is very difficult for her to move on from her deceased father based on the matrimonial mistake. The speaker of the poem could have has Electra complex, which means the daughter is actually in love with the father through childhood. That assumption could relate to the hatred/ love relationship with her father. This then contributes to her inferiority and childish qualities that are emphasized throughout the poem. The tone changed frequently during the poem in order to repress the love for her father. The story is no longer the daughter’s attempt to reunite with and to marry the dead father; it is now the daughter’s wish to overthrow his dominance over her imagination and to “kill” him and the man who takes his place.
Malakoff, David, and Erin Marie Williams. "Q & A: An Examination of the Kyoto Protocol." NPR. NPR. Web. 17 May 2014. .
"The Poetry of William Wordsworth." SIRS Renaissance 20 May 2004: n.p. SIRS Renaissance. Web. 06 February 2010.
Durrant, Geoffrey. Wordsworth and the Great System, A Study of Wordsworth’s Poetic Universe. Cambridge: University Printing House, 1970.
An element of poetry in William Wordsworth's poem, “It is a Beauteous Evening, Calm and Free” is Diction. His descriptive words such as, “beauteous” “calm”, “free”, “breathless”, “adoration”, “tranquility”, “thunder” and “solemn” are words that conjure up a powerful feeling in the readers mind.
Literary criticism is used as a guideline to help analyze, deconstruct, interpret, or even evaluate literary works. Each type of criticism offers its own methods that help the reader to delve deeper into the text, revealing all of its innermost features. New Criticism portrays how a work is unified, Reader-Response Criticism establishes how the reader reacts to a work, Deconstructive Criticism demonstrates how a work falls apart, Historical Criticism illustrates how the history of the author and the author’s time period influence a text, and last of all, Psychological Criticism expresses how unconscious motivations drive the author in the creation of their work as well as how the reader’s motivations influence their own interpretation of the text (Lynn 139, 191). This creates a deep level of understanding of literature that simply cannot be gained through surface level reading. If not one criticism is beneficial to the reader, then taking all criticisms or a mixture of specific criticisms into consideration might be the best way to approach literary
William Wordsworth. “Lucy Gray.” English Romantic Poetry .Ed. Stanley Appelbaum. New York: Dover Publications, 1996. 33 – 4.
In William Wordsworth’s poems, the role of nature plays a more reassuring and pivotal r ole within them. To Wordsworth’s poetry, interacting with nature represents the forces of the natural world. Throughout the three poems, Resolution and Independence, Tintern Abbey, and Michael, which will be discussed in this essay, nature is seen prominently as an everlasting- individual figure, which gives his audience as well as Wordsworth, himself, a sense of console. In all three poems, Wordsworth views nature and human beings as complementary elements of a sum of a whole, recognizing that humans are a sum of nature. Therefore, looking at the world as a soothing being of which he is a part of, Wordsworth looks at nature and sees the benevolence of the divinity aspects behind them. For Wordsworth, the world itself, in all its glory, can be a place of suffering, which surely occurs within the world; Wordsworth is still comforted with the belief that all things happen by the hands of the divinity and the just and divine order of nature, itself.