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Essays on symbolism in literature
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“Total Eclipse” by Annie Dillard is about the Eclipse she witnessed in 1979.Annie travels with her husband to central Washington to see the eclipse. She recalls her time in the hotel with the clown painting and describes her personal experience. She describes what it was like during the eclipse, after the eclipse, and how she felt about the eclipse. I assume that her message in the essay is her experience during the Eclipse and metaphorical references about the eclipse. She conveys ideas and feelings using words that provoke emotion with the reader. Dillard creates meaning behind the Eclipse and what Eclipses symbolize. She talks about how it felt during the eclipse in which she said in the essay, “We saw the wall of shadow coming, and screamed
The window view also appears to look at solar/lunar eclipse. According to NASA, it seems to appear that there was both a solar and lunar eclipse that occurred in the month of October in 1995. Although, both occurs only took place in the Eastern side of the world. Moreover, the window is shown to be surrounded by a white sheer curtain. All aspects of this painting seem to represent who the artist is as a person; a feminist Chicana who often depicts a magical realistic realm in her paintings. In this essay, I will be discussing the feminist aspect, religious elements, and Chicano content Patssi Valdez explores in her work of art titled October/ Octubre.
In Annie Dillard’s, “Water of Separation” a chapter from her book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, the chapter marks a year since Annie Dillard began living at Tinker Creek. By utilizing personal anecdotes and allusions, she reveals her reflection of the past year at Tinker Creak. The personal anecdotes and allusions give the entire chapter a tone of candid.
In “God in the Doorway,” Annie Dillard conveys a shift in her perception of God by associating fearful childhood experiences with her current interpersonal relationship with God. Santa Claus appears in Dillard’s doorway on Christmas Eve and as a young girl Dillard reacts in fear of a powerful, omniscient god-like figure and runs away. (M.S. 1) Dillard later realizes Miss White, her elderly neighbor, dressed-up as Santa Claus intending to shape a loving relationship with Dillard. Miss White attempts to form a bond with Dillard again and focuses a ray of sunlight on her hand with a magnifying glass and burns her causing Dillard to run from her again. Dillard associates the actions of Miss White to her perception of God as wrathful
When I was sixteen, I performed on the stage of Carnegie Hall. This is a very special memory to me. New York will always be in my mind because of that experience. What makes a place live on in one’s mind? The essay, Untying the Knot, as well as other selections from this unit demonstrate how experiences can make certain places live on in our memory.
The use of symbols sets the tone of the piece. She personifies the rain in, “But the rain/ Is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh/ Upon the glass and listen for reply.” She makes t...
It's about sunlight. It's about the special way that dawn spreads out on a river when you know you must cross the river and march into the mountains and do things you are afraid to do. It's about love and memory. It's about sorrow. It's about sisters who never write back and people who never listen.” -pg. 85
As she sat at her work table she, “was drawn away,” by the screeching sirens outside her window. In this example, the author uses the word “was” as an indicator of her recollection of the events of that evening. The way they quickly grasped her attention reveals how focused she was on these specific occurrences surrounding her. We also notice how she is reflecting on the bad things that happen in society, yet we find ways to overcome them in order to continue to live our lives. In the following paragraphs, we see the judgment she has towards people who fail to consume themselves within the events happening around them. More specifically, we see her judgment towards the young man across the street who is so dedicatedly working on his table and in fact she wonders why he takes, “all those pains to make it beautiful?” She fails to understand his outlook on life by presenting us with a rhetorical question that she herself could not answer in the very moment. She fails to understand why and how a person can cherish life so deeply when his surroundings consist of nothing but chaos. As we continue to read through her essay we come across a moment that changes her perspective on the idea that people can quite possibly live a life that is consumed in something they love rather than the fear of
The confronting theme of life is shown through poetic techniques in the poems, Pieta and November. The cycle of life is shown through Pietà and November in two different ways. The child’s life is unfortunately cut short as it, ‘only [lives] one day.’ Whilst in November, the subject of the poem is about a Grandmother who is at the end of the cycle of life. This is unlike the baby in Pietà who is not able to live, or have a chance of living a long life. This may cause the audience to ponder about the purpose of life. Armitage uses consonantal alliteration and visual imagery, in ‘sun spangles,’ to symbolise that, ‘the only thing you can get, out of this life,’ is the beautiful happy moments. This logic is true for many non-believers as the purpose of life is unknown to them and the only positive reason for life is by creating happy memories.In November,the last moments of life are shown through the enjambment and flow. The audience is involved with the journey of bringing the woman to the hospital as if you are, ‘with your grandma taking four short steps to [your] two.’ This is effective as the audience can put themselves in the place of the narrator in the story.This is unlike Pieta which is written in past tense and is not able to put themselves in the place of mother but the audience is more sympathetic towards the mother and her loss of her child.
The story of this poem tells about a young boy that is lured in by the sensuousness of the moon, and then dies because of his own desire for her. The symbolic meaning is much more hidden and disguised by the literary elements of the poem. The storyline and aspects of the literal story add meaning when searching for the figurative meaning. The warning learned from this poem is that infatuation with anything can lead to a downfall. The moon seemed to offer a comfort that attracted him, but it was only a disguise to lead him to death. The passion the young boy felt for the moon can easily be modified to describe the passion a person can feel for anything. The young boy saw safeness in the moon that brought him closer to her. Any obsession will seem to offer the same comforts that the young boy also saw, but this poem warns that death can always disguise itself.
In her essay “Living Like Weasels,” Annie Dillard reflects on an encounter she had with a weasel at a pond near her home. This encounter was brief but nevertheless important as it sparked the question “Who knows what [the weasel] thinks”? As Annie ponders this question, we are presented with a comparison between the complex life of human beings and the simple life of weasels. We can find examples of contrast throughout this essay. For instance, Annie describes the pond she visits by the “55 mph highway at one end, and a nesting pair of wood ducks at the other.” Annie describes the landscape further in the fifth paragraph when she says, “Under every bush is a muskrat hole or a beer can”. This contrast between human decision making and
This essay was depressing, but also impressive. There are two characters, and as I mentioned, one is the sympathetic one and the other is the empathetic one. In the essay, It Will Look Like a Sunset by Kelly Sundberg, she takes the disturbing moments of her life, gets a handle on them, and puts them together to create a sense of literature with language and style. She was married, and it was once a love story, like most. But, she then explains why she stayed and endured years of emotional and physical abuse from her husband, Caleb. The first paragraph of the essay starts off beautifully. It says, “I was twenty-six, having spent most of my twenties delaying adulthood, and he was twenty-four and enjoyed reputation as a partier. The pregnancy was a surprise, and we married months later.” (Sundberg, 208) And following that later on, “We didn’t want a church wedding, but our families insisted. Faith was what made marriage sacred. Faith was what kept people together.” (Sundberg, 209) The author creates a connection between her life, faith, and marriage. Expressing that having confidence in her marriage and having trust kept them together. Her pregnancy was a surprise and that also kept them together. Faith is the connection between God and herself. Sundberg mentioned that her and her husband were together two years before he started to abuse her. With him first pushing her against the wall, then two years later, he hit her. Following a year later, he hit her again. Her argument was that her husband wanted to change, so he attended therapy and anger management. Nonetheless, that did not help
Before I got my eye out and we grow accustomed to the dark are 2 poems written by Emily Dickinson.The 2 poems are about the light and dark we grow accustomed to the dark is about how Emily Dickinson use to being in complete darkness before I got my eye put out is a poem about a blind women's desire to utilize her vision once more.
In Annie Dillard’s essay “Living Like Weasels” she tells us about an encounter she had with a weasel. When meeting the weasel, she begins to appreciate and admire their way of life, and how different it is from ours, how they live purely out of necessity, while we live by choice, bias, and/or motive. She questions the way we live our lives and makes us consider how different our lives could be if we only had one thing we live for, or in her words, “...stalk your calling in a certain skilled and supple way, to locate the most tender and live spot and plug into that pulse” (98). I personally do not believe that living like a weasel is the best way for a human to lead their lives for it is too restricting and does not sound as liberating as Dillard
The poem “Happiness” is about the speaker’s morning routine and the sight of two boys delivering newspaper. The feeling of happiness is exemplified through various figurative languages such as personification and symbolism. An example of symbolism is when the narrator states, “So early it’s still almost dark out” (Carver, line 1). With subtle detail, the speaker states “almost dark out” which implies that the sun is barely rising; this faint morning light represents the upcoming happiness that the speaker feels. Another example of Carver using symbolism to
Virginia Woolf, English novelist, essayist, and critic has beautifully portrayed the natural phenomenon of eclipse. She has also enlightened the importance of the sun. She has narrated the essay dramatically and has regarded sun as an actor that was going to come on the stage to perform as if a drama was going on. The sky served as a stage. She has made the scene vivid and ravishing by the usage of colors, images and similes. The way she has described it is so highly coloured and realistic that the readers visualize the eclipse to be occurring before their eyes. People were anxiously going towards a hilltop from where all would view the sun with reverence. People had gathered on the hilltop and stood in a straight line that it seemed they were statues standing on the edge of the world. As the sun rose, clouds glowed up. Light gleamed and peered over the rim of the clouds. The sun raced towards the point where eclipse had to take place. But the clouds were impeding it. The sun with a tremendous speed endeavoured to escape the mist. At some point it came forth then again was shrouded by the fleecy clouds. The sun then appeared hollow as the moon had come in front of it. A substantial proportion of the Sun was covered and the loss of daylight became noticeable. The writer has efficaciously described the sun’s efforts to break free from the cloudy hurdle. She has continuously personified sun as it was putting its best efforts to make its face appear before the world. The clouds were stifling the sun’s speed. The sanctified twenty-four seconds had begun but still the sun was entrapped and was striving to disencumber itself from the clump of clouds. “Of the twenty-four seconds only five remained, and still he was obscured.” The time of the eclipse was passing and it seemed that the sun was losing. It was continuously obliterated by the clouds. The colours of the valleys seemed to disappear. Everything was fading as ‘All the colour began to go from the moor.’ The colours were changing, “The blue turned to purple, the white became livid as at the approach of a violent but windless storm. Pink faces went green, and it became colder than ever.” The light and warmth were vanishing.