idek

641 Words2 Pages

B. “A Considerable Speck” is a poem written by Robert Frost that encourages readers to establish their own perspective and form their own collective opinions. Through a three stanza couplet rhyme, Frost explores what at first seems to be a speck of dust. It is upon closer observation that he realizes that the small speck is in fact a living mite, one with intelligence and a mind of its own. In fear of dying, the mite runs across the page despite Frost’s attempting to stop it with a “period of ink”. It then continues to erratically run across the expanse of the paper until coming to a stop due to wet ink. The movement of the writer’s pen is terrifying to the little mite who recognizes that it must simply accept fate, which is left to the poet’s discretion. The second and third stanzas justify why the poet saves the mite, noting that he disagrees with the notion of helping others in order to seem munificent and “collectivistic regimenting love”. He describes saving the bugs life as his own personal decision explaining that he feels sympathetic towards the bug’s constant fears and wishes it may find peace. Despite its minute size, the bug is intelligent and relevant, intriguing both Robert Frost and its readers. C. “It paused as with suspicion of my pen, And then came racing wildly on again To where my manuscript was not yet dry; Then paused again and either drank or smelt-- With loathing, for again it turned to fly” In “A Considerable Speck”, Frost utilizes personification of the bug in order to establish symbolism. He describes that it is “suspicious” and pauses until it returns to “drank or smelt” allowing readers to develop the theme that often, it is imperative for individuals to establish their own opinion through experienci... ... middle of paper ... ...st display of mind”. E. Metacognitionists everywhere will rejoice at Frost’s perspective on life. It is never evident as to what the mite or the paper truly stands for, however, the world is seen from a unique perspective for the duration of the poem. Instead of the everyday environment, readers notice a stark mite against a blank paper and relate situations from their own lives. Frost tends to write about nature and this poem follows his usual writing style with added satire in mocking individuals who do not think for themselves. He recognizes the regimental ways of modern society and calls for individuality, originality, and simple uniqueness that has always driven creativity. “A Considerable Speck” simply transforms readers to consider the world from an alternate view. It is this ability of Frost that makes him one of the most recognized poets of the century.

Show More
Related

  • A Comparison of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and Dead Poets Society

    2168 Words  | 5 Pages

    Selected Poems by Robert Frost, New York: Barnes and Noble, 2001 3.Graham, Judith, ed. Current Biography Yearbook Vol. 1962, New York: The H.W Wilson Company, 1993 4.Kesey, Ken. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, New York: Penguin Group, 1962 5.Weir, Peter. Dead Poets Society, 1989

    Read More

  • The Poet With His Face In His Hands By Mary Oliver Analysis

    991 Words  | 2 Pages

    Therefore, Oliver’s incorporation of imagery, setting, and mood to control the perspective of her own poem, as well as to further build the contrast she establishes through the speaker, serves a critical role in creating the lesson of the work. Oliver’s poem essentially gives the poet an ultimatum; either he can go to the “cave behind all that / jubilation” (10-11) produced by a waterfall to “drip with despair” (14) without disturbing the world with his misery, or, instead, he can mimic the thrush who sings its poetry from a “green branch” (15) on which the “passing foil of the water” (16) gently brushes its feathers. The contrast between these two images is quite pronounced, and the intention of such description is to persuade the audience by setting their mood towards the two poets to match that of the speaker. The most apparent difference between these two depictions is the gracelessness of the first versus the gracefulness of the second. Within the poem’s content, the setting has been skillfully intertwined with both imagery and mood to create an understanding of the two poets, whose surroundings characterize them. The poet stands alone in a cave “to cry aloud for [his] / mistakes” while the thrush shares its beautiful and lovely music with the world (1-2). As such, the overall function of these three elements within the poem is to portray the

    Read More

  • Water Symbolism In The Gangster We Are All Looking For

    856 Words  | 2 Pages

    While staying at Mel’s home, the adolescent female narrator personifies the butterfly paperweight. The life cycle begins with the narrator “hearing” the butterfly sounds, and believing the butterfly is alive. The butterfly mirrors the narrator’s feelings of alienation and immobility amongst her ‘new family’ in America. She is convinced the butterfly is alive, although trapped inside thick glass (le 25). The thick glass mirrors the image of clear, still water. To the adolescent girl, the thick glass doesn’t stop the sounds of the butterfly from coming through; however, her father counteracts this with the idea of death, “…can’t do much for a dead butterfly” (le 31). In order to free the butterfly, the narrator throws the disk at a cabinet of glass animals, shattering the paperweight, as well as the glass animals. The shattering of the glass connects to the shattering of her being, and her experience in fragility. The idea of bringing the butterfly back to life was useless, as the motionless butterfly laid there “like someone expert at holding his breath or playing dead” (le 34). This sense of rebirth becomes ironic as the butterfly did not come back to life as either being reborn or as the manifestation of a ghostly spirit; instead its cyclic existence permeates through the narrator creating a transformative

    Read More

  • An Analysis of Wilbur's Mayflies

    1584 Words  | 4 Pages

    Richard Wilbur's recent poem 'Mayflies' reminds us that the American Romantic tradition that Robert Frost most famously brought into the 20th century has made it safely into the 21st.  Like many of Frost's short lyric poems, 'Mayflies' describes one person's encounter with an ordinary but easily overlooked piece of nature'in this case, a cloud of mayflies spotted in a 'sombre forest'(l.1) rising over 'unseen pools'(l.2),'made surprisingly attractive and meaningful by the speaker's special scrutiny of it.  The ultimate attraction of Wilbur's mayflies would appear to be the meaning he finds in them.  This seems to be an unremittingly positive poem, even as it glimpses the dark subjects of human isolation and mortality, perhaps especially as it glimpses these subjects.   In this way the poem may recall that most persistent criticism of Wilbur's work, that it is too optimistic, too safe.  The poet-critic Randall Jarrell, though an early admirer of Wilbur, once wrote that 'he obsessively sees, and shows, the bright underside of every dark thing'?something Frost was never accused of (Jarrell 332). Yet, when we examine the poem closely, and in particular the series of comparisons by which Wilbur elevates his mayflies into the realm of beauty and truth, the poem concedes something less ?bright? or felicitous about what it finally calls its 'joyful . . . task' of poetic perception and representation (l.23).

    Read More

  • Death Of The Moth Rhetorical Analysis

    1636 Words  | 4 Pages

    She describes the September morning as “mild, benignant, yet with a keener breath than the summer months.” She then goes on to describe the field outside her window, using word choice that is quite the opposite of words that would be used to describe a depressing story. She depicts the exact opposite of death, and creates a feeling of joy, happiness, and life to the world outside her room. After this, she goes into great detail about the “festivities” of the rooks among the treetops, and how they “soared round the treetops until it looked as if a vast net with thousands of black knots in it had been cast up into the air”. There is so much going on around her that “it was difficult to keep the eyes strictly turned upon the book.” Descriptions like these are no way to describe a seemingly depressing story about a moth, but by using these, joyful descriptions, Woolf connects everything happening outside to a single strand of energy. These images set a lively tone for the world around her, and now allow her to further introduce the moth into the story.

    Read More

  • Abolishment Of Conformism In Kate Chopin's The Awakening

    1127 Words  | 3 Pages

    The first words of the book convey a parrot that spoke “a language which nobody understood”, and Edna’s husband “had the privilege of quitting [the parrot] when [it] ceased to be entertaining” (11). In the same light, Edna speaks of and wishes for a life that nobody apprehends. Her husband also possesses the moral, objectifying liberty to quiet Edna when she did not provide leisure, as one can turn off a song once it grows into a tedious nuisance. A further exemplification comes about when Old Monsieur Farival, a man, “insisted upon having [a] bird. . . consigned to regions of darkness” due to its shrieking outside (42). As a repercussion, the parrot “offered no more interruption to the entertainment” (42). The recurrence of the parrot evolves Edna’s state of stagnance as a consequence of being put to a halt by others despite her endeavor of breaking free. Ultimately, as Edna edges out towards the water to her death, a bird is depicted with “a broken wing” and is “beating the air above, reeling, fluttering, circling disabled down, down to the water” (159). This recurrence parallels the beaten bird to a suffering Edna. She has “despondency [that] came upon her there in the wakeful night” that never alleviates (159). Dejection is put to action when Edna wanders out into the water, “the shore. . . far behind her” (159). Motif of birds articulates her suicide by its association with

    Read More

  • Analysis Of Robert Frost Acquainted With The Night

    912 Words  | 2 Pages

    Robert Frost is regarded as one of the most distinguished American poets in the twentieth century. His work usually realistically describes the rural life in New England in the early twentieth century and conveys complex social and philosophical themes. But his personal life was plagued with grief and loss, which is also reflected in his poems and the dark energy distinguishes Robert Frost’s poems, frequently conveyed in the use of lexical words like dark and its derivatives or synonyms, woods, snow, night, and so on. (Su, Y)

    Read More

  • Robert Frost’s, “Design”

    1068 Words  | 3 Pages

    ...ed by many scholars as his best work. It is through his awareness of the merit, the definitive disconnectedness, of nature and man that is most viewable in this poem. Throughout this essay, Frosts messages of innocence, evil, and design by deific intrusion reverberate true to his own personal standpoint of man and nature. It is in this, that Frost expresses the ideology of a benign deity.

    Read More

  • Tensions in Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

    929 Words  | 2 Pages

    The poem as a whole, of course, encodes many of the tensions between popular and elite poetry. For example, it appears in an anthology of children's writing alongside Amy Lowell's "Crescent Moon," Joyce Kilmer's "Trees," and Edward Lear's "Owl and the Pussy-Cat." Pritchard situates it among a number of poems that "have ... repelled or embarrassed more highbrow sensibilities," which suggests the question: "haven't these poems ['The Pasture,' 'Stopping by Woods...,' 'Birches,' 'Mending Wall'] been so much exclaimed over by people whose poetic taste is dubious or hardly existent, that on these grounds alone Frost is to be distrusted?" The views represented--and the representations of the poem itself, affiliated with the work of Dickinson, Longfellow, Dante, and the Romantics--range from emphasis on its gentility to its modernist ambiguity. Nevertheless, more than one critic underscores its threat to individualism, its "dangerous prospect of boundarilessness," which suggests the masculine conception of poetic selfhood with which the poem is commonly framed.

    Read More

  • The Intricate Meanings of Robert Frost 's Poetry

    777 Words  | 2 Pages

    ...to be. The characters of which Frost’s poems are about paint clear pictures of what he anticipates that the readers will get out of the poems. The characters could be nature, animals, or people that are used as symbols. The poems are always understandable, even if there is not a clear plot within the poem.

    Read More

  • Nature in Robert Frost's Poems

    1636 Words  | 4 Pages

    strengthens his viewpoint and regards Frost as ―one of the most intuitive poets [. . . h]e sees

    Read More

  • The Dark Side of Robert Frost’s Nature

    2355 Words  | 5 Pages

    Richardson, Mark. The Ordeal of Robert Frost: The Poet and His Poetics. Urbana: University of Illinois, 1997. Print.

    Read More

  • Robert Lee Frost: The Most Influential American Poet of the Twentieth Century

    1411 Words  | 3 Pages

    Oglivie, John T. “From Woods to Stars: A Pattern of Imagery in Robert Frost’s Poetry.” Contemporary Literary Criticism. Ed. Jean Stine. Vol. 26. Detroit: Gale Research, 1983. Print.

    Read More

  • Life and Death in Poetry

    2084 Words  | 5 Pages

    Life and death are two things that we as humans must all face. The road from one to the other, from life to death, is a long and at times, both joyous and painful one. Robert Frost’s poems are a prime example of these times and trials. The poems I chose for this paper highlight them, and with Frost’s allegory, they present a sort of silver lining to the string of dark and dreary words he’s pieced together for these poems. The depressing tone to the poems “Acquainted with the Night”, “Nothing Gold Can Stay”, and “Stopping by the Woods on a Snowing Evening” could be attributed to the death of many of Frost’s family members, and how despite this he overcame it all, and at the end of his life, was a successful writer. These poems to not go into great explanation of the details of Frost’s life, however, I believe that they are representations of the things path that he’s walked, and how he viewed his actions and death in general.

    Read More

  • Robert Frost's Life and Accomplishments

    980 Words  | 2 Pages

    Robert Frost, known for being a Modernist American poet was said to have hidden the pain of his private life through his writing career. He shared many ideas and was barely given credit for any of it during his lifetime. However, the nation mourned when “the most beloved poet of the century” passed away. (Greiner 94-95). After his death, the nation was then able to study and understand Frost’s life and the reasoning behind his poetry. Frost was set on making a difference in poetry as he once expressed, “I expect to do something to the present state of literature in America” (Greiner 95). The poem, “Putting in the Seed” written by Frost himself, expresses one of his common themes in his poems, nature. Being recognized as an American poet till after death, Frost has impacted poetry in a way that may not exist if it was not for him. Throughout his life he overcame many hardships through writing, which he used as therapy. This astounding author left the impression of creativity at its finest.

    Read More

More about idek

Open Document