ABCTE ELA Works

The Tyger

(Songs of Experience) Au.wrote *** during his more radical period. He wrote most of his major works during this time, often railing against oppressive institutions like the church or the monarchy, or any and all cultural traditions - sexist, racist, or classist - which stifled imagination or passion.

London

(Songs of Experience) so why write children's poems during a time of political and cultural crisis? That's a complex question, but lucky for you, we've got answers. First, Blake, like many other poets of his age (Wordsworth especially) was fascinated by children—their undistorted, pure vision of the world was admirable, something to emulate. In a way, writing poems for them (or at least in the style of poetry aimed at them) was Blake's way of trying to influence the next generation / is a very sneaky, and very dark, poem. There's nothing about how great the Thames looks at night, nothing about England's rich literary history. Nope. The poem is all about dirt, filth, disease ("plague"), prostitution, child labor—basically everything that Blake felt was wrong about his city.

The Little Black Boy

(Songs of Innocence) A black child tells the story of how he came to know his own identity and to know God. The boy, who was born in "the southern wild" of Africa, first explains that though his skin is black his soul is as white as that of an English child. He relates how his loving mother taught him about God who lives in the East, who gives light and life to all creation and comfort and joy to men. "We are put on earth," his mother says, to learn to accept God's love. He is told that his black skin "is but a cloud" that will be dissipated when his soul meets God in heaven. The black boy passes on this lesson to an English child, explaining that his white skin is likewise a cloud. He vows that when they are both free of their bodies and delighting in the presence of God, he will shade his white friend until he, too, learns to bear the heat of God's love. Then, the black boy says, he will be like the English boy, and the English boy will love him. / heroic quatrains, which are stanzas of pentameter lines rhyming ABAB. /This poem centers on a spiritual awakening to a divine love that transcends race. The child's mother symbolizes a natural and selfless love that becomes the poem's ideal.

The Chimney Sweeper

(Songs of Innocence) Chimney sweeping was a nasty business, and the children who worked as chimney sweepers didn't bathe very often (usually just once a week), which means they were probably often covered in soot / William Blake's certainly were. The dicey dangers and widespread injustice of the chimney-sweeping profession really stuck in his craw, so much so that he wrote not one, but two poems called ***

The Cherry Orchard

(comedy play, 1904) - comedy, with some elements of farce, though Stanislavski treated it as a tragedy - aristocratic Russian actress who returns to her family estate (which includes a large and well-known cherry orchard) just before it is auctioned to pay the mortgage - theme: the effect social change has on people; identity and subversion

A Midsummer Night's Dream

(comedy, 1595) It portrays the events surrounding the marriage of Theseus, the Duke of Athens, to Hippolyta. These include the adventures of four young Athenian lovers and a group of six amateur actors (the mechanicals) who are controlled and manipulated by the fairies who inhabit the forest in which most of the play is set. The play is one of Shakespeare's most popular works for the stage and is widely performed across the world. themes: carnivalesque, love, problem with time, loss of individual identity, ambiguous sexuality, feminism

A Raisin in the Sun

(domestic tragedy, 1959) A black family's experiences in the Washington Park Subdivision of Chicago's Woodlawn neighborhood as they attempt to "better" themselves

No Exit

(existentialist play, 1944) - It is a depiction of the afterlife in which characters are punished by being locked into a room together for eternity -Hell is other people

Pied Piper of Hamlin

(narrative poem, 1842) - playfulness. It uses a delightful and simple rhyme scheme, and the length of each stanza varies so that the story's rhythm is constantly changing. - first moral is: "If we've promised them ought, let us keep our promise." - second moral appears in the penultimate stanza: "Heaven's gate/Opens to the rich at an easy rate/As the needle's eye takes a camel in!" A paraphrase of the Biblical verse that makes wealth and holiness mutually exclusive, this poem suggests that concerns with worldly goods - money and power - will pollute a person

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

(novel, 1876). Bildungsroman, Picaresque. id. He skips school to swim and is made to whitewash the fence the next day as punishment. He cleverly persuades his friends to trade him small treasures for the privilege of doing his work. He then trades the treasures for Sunday School tickets which one normally receives for memorizing verses consistently, redeeming them for a Bible, much to the surprise and bewilderment of the superintendent who thought "it was simply preposterous that this boy had warehoused two thousand sheaves of Scriptural wisdom on his premises—a dozen would strain his capacity, without a doubt."

On first Looking into Chapman's Homer

(poem, 1816) The author has wide experience in the reading of poetry and is familiar with Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, but not until now has he had the special aesthetic enjoyment to be gained from reading Homer in the translation of George Chapman. For him, the discovery of Homer as translated by Chapman provides an overwhelming excitement. / It is brilliant testimony of the effect of poetry on the author, he was delighted with the vigorous language of the Elizabethan; to him, Chapman spoke out "loud and bold." / It is a window into the ambitions of a hopeful young man, who lived just long enough to leave us with some of the greatest poems in the English language.

The American Scholar

(speech, 1837) - invited to speak in recognition of his groundbreaking work Nature, published a year earlier - We are all fragments, "as the hand is divided into fingers", of a greater creature, which is mankind itself, "a doctrine ever new and sublime." - An individual may live in either of two states. In one, the busy, "divided" or "degenerate" state, he does not "possess himself" but identifies with his occupation or a monotonous action; in the other, "right" state, he is elevated to "Man", at one with all mankind

Divinity School Address

(speech, 1838) - It address was influenced by his life experiences. The author was an ex-Unitarian minister, having resigned from his ministry at Second Church, Boston, in 1832. He had developed philosophical questions about the validity of Holy Communion, also called The Lord's Supper.

Julius Caesar

(tragedy, 1599) Brutus speaks more than four times as many lines, and the central psychological drama of the play focuses on Brutus' struggle between the conflicting demands of honor, patriotism, and friendship.

Hamlet

(tragedy, 1602) - tragic flaw: inability to act. By examining his incapability to commit suicide, his inability to come to terms with killing his mother, putting on a play to delay killing Claudius and the inability to kill Claudius while he's praying, we see that Hamlet chooses not to take action- Set in the Kingdom of Denmark, the play dramatises the revenge Prince Hamlet is called to wreak upon his uncle, Claudius, by the ghost of Hamlet's father, King Hamlet. Claudius had murdered his own brother and seized the throne, also marrying his deceased brother's widow. - play was famous for its ghost and vivid dramatisation of melancholy and insanity - Drama should focus on action, not character (Aristotle). Here S. reverses this so that it is through the soliloquies that the audience learns Hamlet's motives and thoughts.

Waiting for Godot

(tragicomedy, 1953) - Vladimir and Estragon, wait for the arrival of someone named Godot who never arrives, and while waiting they engage in a variety of discussions and encounter three other character - encounter religious, philosophical, classical, psychoanalytical and biographical - especially wartime - references - open to a variety of readings

Poor Richard's Almanac

(yearly publ. 1732-1758) - popular books in colonial America, offering a mixture of seasonal weather forecasts, practical household hints, puzzles, and other amusements. - P.R.A was popular for its extensive use of wordplay, and some of the witty phrases coined in the work survive in the contemporary American vernacular.

Lapis Lazuli

***** is a kind of a precious blue stone. The **** referred to in this poem was given to Yeats on his seventieth birthday (as a present) The poem opens with a description of the war phobia and panic that gripped Europe during the period 1935-1939....What they wanted at the time was not art but something strong and stringent to prevent a Second World War is descending upon them. If it was not done disaster will overtake them and the country will be ruined. However the poet is impatient with such folk and the aggressive crudity of the verse in the first lines expresses his impatience.

The Mill on the Floss

is definitely author's most autobiographical novel, something that helps to set it apart from her other works. In fact, The *** is often compared to Charles Dickens's autobiographical David Copperfield./ Maggie, after all, never runs off (permanently) with the man she loves. In a lot of ways, Maggie is sort of the alternate-universe ***. She's the version of Eliot that didn't break off with her family and strike out on her own. So while *** provides some really cool insight into ***'s own life, it may be more interesting for the ways that is doesn't directly reflect **'s actual life. / .l

Dockery and Son

it is about the speaker, who is a typical persona of Philip Larkin. Larkin's stock persona is someone unsuccessful in love, someone whom life has passed by. It is frequently a mistake to confuse the persona with the poet, but with Larkin one usually senses there is no great gulf between the two. / The poem begins with a conversation between the Dean and the speaker, who is revisiting his college. Typically, only the Dean is directly quoted, not the speaker of the poem. The Dean happens to mention ****, who is younger than the speaker and whose son is now a student at this same college. The quoted conversation fades as the speaker remembers how he once had to explain his " 'version' of 'these incidents last night,' "—had to explain, as a student, disruptive behavior to the very man with whom he is now reminiscing. Time has passed; the speaker finds his old room, but the door is locked. He departs unnoticed on a train. On the train, he starts to think about ****. He estimates that ****must have had a son when he was about the age of twenty. Then he tries to remember exactly who ****was. When he is about to reach a conclusion which threatens to be a commonplace—"Well it just shows/ How muchHow little"—he falls asleep. Even contemplating how time has passed unheeded, a life slept through, causes him to sleep through more time.

Wuthering Heights

love is incestuous, psychologically damaging, manipulative, violent, digs up your corpse when you die, and wants to be haunted by your ghost forever and ever: pervasive opinion im ***/ revolves around the passionate and destructive love between its two central characters, Emily Brontë's headstrong and beautiful Catherine Earnshaw and her tall, dark, handsome, and brooding hero/devil, Heathcliff.

Dover Beach

lyric poem 1867. Some of its passages and metaphors have become so well known that they are hard to see with "fresh eyes". *** begins with a naturalistic and detailed nightscape of the **** in which auditory imagery plays a significant role ("Listen! you hear the grating roar"). The beach, however, is bare, with only a hint of humanity in a light that "gleams and is gone". Reflecting the traditional notion that the poem was written during Arnold's honeymoon, one critic notes that "the speaker might be talking to his bride". retreating action of the tide. He hears the sound of the sea as "the eternal note of sadness"

Thanatopsis

1821, poem. The speaker talks nature's ability to make us feel better. He tells us that nature can make pain less painful. It can even lighten our dark thoughts about death. He tells us that, when we start to worry about death, we should go outside and listen to the voice of nature. That voice reminds us that we will indeed vanish when we die and mix back into the earth. The voice of nature also tells us that when we die, we won't be alone. Every person who has ever lived is in the ground ("the great tomb of man") and everyone who is alive will be soon dead and in the ground too. This idea is meant to be comforting, and the poem ends by telling us to think of death like a happy, dream-filled sleep. - blank verse, enjambment

Young Goodman Brown

1835, takes place in Puritan New England, as is the case with many of Hawthorne's other works. "Young Goodman Brown" depicts the inner struggle experienced by the title character to maintain his religious faith. Simultaneously, he must call into question the "goodness" and piety of his fellow townsfolk, including even his wife.

Lady Lazarus

A complicated, dark, and brutal poem About suicide and resurrection, after all—it would be a huge mistake to ignore Plath's actual poetry. Plath's legacy endures because her poems are awesome, tragic, completely bizarre, perverse, and heartbreaking all on their own and all at the same time, / Its tone veers between menacing and scathing, and it has drawn attention for its use of Holocaust imagery, similar to "Daddy." The title is an allusion to the Biblical character, Lazarus, whom Jesus raised from the dead. / By describing dying as an art, she includes a spectator to both her deaths and resurrections. Because the death is a performance, it necessarily requires others. In large part, she kills herself to punish them for driving her to it. The eager "peanut-crunching crowd" is invited but criticized for its voyeuristic impulse

The History of the Peloponnesian

A historical account of the **** (431-404 BC), which was fought between the Peloponnesian League (led by Sparta) and the Delian League (led by Athens). The author's account of the conflict is widely considered to be a classic and regarded as one of the earliest scholarly works of history. The History is divided into eight books. - More recent interpretations that are associated with reader-response criticism, the History can be read as a piece of literature rather than an objective record of the historical events. This view is embodied *** as "an artist who responds to, selects and skillfully arranges his material, and develops its symbolic and emotional potential."

Mac Flecknoe

A literary takedown of Thomas Shadwell, an imaginative and hilarious satire extraordinaire. ncredibly rich, expertly crafted work of satire, layered in so much irony, sarcasm, and wit that you forget at times he's even joking. Epically ironic, the poem pretty much carved out its own genre: the mock-epic, or mock-heroic. The author exposed Shadwell for what he was: a bad writer with bad taste, who would do anything for the cheap laugh. - heroic couplets (rhymed couplets of iambic pentameter). melodramatic diction , irony, parody. References to the classics, including to numerous Greek and Roman stories and myths and the Bible.

Signs and Symbols

An elderly, poor Russian émigré couple intend to pay a birthday visit to their son. He is institutionalized in a sanitarium, diagnosed as afflicted with referential mania. It is an incurable disease in which the patient imagines that everything that happens around him is a veiled reference to his personality and existence. / The central thematic question this story asks is whether one is necessarily demented to conclude that nature and society are hostile to humankind. Although the son is certifiably deluded, the real world presented by the narrator and observed by the parents is fully consistent with the boy's vision of it

The Bear

Faulkner's best-known and most highly regarded story; it takes its place among his wilderness narrative. The work symbolizes the destruction of the wilderness. It is also concerned with the mythic initiation of a boy, young Isaac (Ike) McCaslin, into manhood. In the later versions, Quentin Compson as narrator is dropped in favor of omniscient narration, and "the boy" becomes Ike.

Volpone

Great satirical verse comedy Volpone. It achieves the mastery of purpose claimed by the playwright and reflects his devotion to classical theories, but it remains a distressing comedy that defies easy interpretation. The play's predication is, however, quite simple. **** and his servant Mosca pretend that *** is dying and encourage Venetian fortune hunters to vie for ****'s favor in hopes of being named his heir. / Themes: Appearances and Reality, class conflict, deception

To His Coy Mistress

Have you ever felt like you were racing against the clock? The speaker of the poem expresses a similar experience in this angst-y poem, which might just make you feel a little better about things. It's also really funny, when you start to look at it closely / themes: sex, time / Dramatic Monologue, Iambic Tetrameter

The Man Who Would Be King

Henry James called it an "extraordinary tale" and which many critics have suggested is a typical Kipling social parable about British imperialism in India. One critic, Walter Allen, calls it a "great and heroic story," but he says that Kipling evades the metaphysical issues implicit in the story. Although "**** does not contain the philosophic generalizations of Conrad's Heart of Darkness, and is perhaps not as subtle a piece of symbolist fiction, it is nonetheless a coherent piece of fabular fiction carefully constructed and thematically significant. / tone and style are everything in the work. The story focuses primarily on the crucial difference between a tale told by a narrator who merely reports a story and a narrator who has lived the story he tells. / Basic theme of **** which undergirds the social theme of British imperialism, is that of the dichotomy between two different kinds of reality—the "realistic" realm of the journalist who deals with the everyday world of "real kings" and the fantastic, make-believe world of Dravot and Peachey, who create their own fantasy and then live in it.

His Prayer To Ben Jonson

Herrick establishes Jonson as a saint figure. Because individuals were encouraged to pray to saints for protection and intercession, that metaphor allowed Herrick to depict Jonson as not only a mentor, but also a type of divine inspiration. In three simple four-line stanzas composed of rhyming couplets, Herrick extends his use of figurative language (figure of speech) to great effect. / The speaker emphasizes that poetry is not created in a vacuum, as poets require inspiration for their spiritual endeavor. Some critics propose that Religion, as Herrick uses it here, may equate to the sacred nature of an oath, which would allow the poet to repledge his loyalty to his departed mentor. /A psalter is a book containing the Psalms, or lyrics, from the Bible, used in worship. That Herrick's Psalter will include Ben Jonson extends the metaphor of worship and praise connected with religious ritual. Herrick sought to exalt Jonson through his personal art, the highest honor a poet could offer.

The Odyssey

Home, wandering, and fidelity. The title of The *** has given us a word to describe a journey of epic proportions. Throughout his travels, ***' central emotion is loneliness. / Cunning and disguise ***' most prominent characteristic is his cunning; Homer's Greek audience generally admired the trait but occasionally disdained it for its dishonest connotations. ***' skill at improvising false stories or devising plans is nearly incomparable in Western literature /Women as predatory It is little wonder Odysseus fears Penelope's lapse into infidelity: women are usually depicted, if anything, as sexual aggressors in The ****. Circe exemplifies this characteristic among the goddesses, turning the foolish men she so easily seduces into the pigs she believes them to be, while Calypso imprisons Odysseus as her virtual sex-slave.

The Master and Margarita

satire of the Stalin period in the Soviet Union, . Bulgakov was one of the victims of the censorship, and even wrote a letter to Stalin asking to be allowed to leave the country because he could not survive if he could not write. Instead, Stalin reassigned him to the Moscow Art Theater, where he spent the end of his life as an assistant director and literary consultant

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

stablishes the setting firmly in Arthurian Britain by means of a lengthy description of the legendary history of Britain. Britain is a land of great wonders and strife, but King Arthur has established a court of utmost nobility and chivalry, peopled with the bravest knights and fairest ladies. This story begins at a lavish New Year's celebration in Camelot, King Arthur's court./A rich description of the celebration follows, where the poet carefully conveys luxurious details of decoration and attire. / fit neatly into the genre of the medieval romance, a French poetic form which had great influence in England beginning in the middle of the twelfth century

Brave New World

Individuality is a thing of the past, babies are created in test tubes, and everyone lives in a caste society of clones and "Alphas."The story follows Bernard Marx, an Alpha who just can't manage to fit in. In this future of genetic modification and strictly stratified society, Bernard is as close a thing to an individual you'll encounter. The only problem? Being an individual is so 2000s in this society / mportant questions about individuality, human nature, and the downfalls of technological advancement. The novel is frequently compared to a much later novel, Orwell's 1984, because the two tackle similar dystopian subject matter, only in different lights.

Come in

It begins admiring the beauty and simplicity of natural elements yet leads us into wisdom and meaning. The poem is about the contrast of nature as well as the general darker and lighter side of life,on a more metaphysical level. Evidence that the place is not suiting for a person is the description of the woods, being dark and lament. / For me, the poem's meaning is spiritual and alludes to individual discernment and prayer /The message to take away from the poem is that we must allow our mind and spirit to wander to the woods-wander to that place which is lamentful, dark and mysterious, the unknown

Winesburg, Ohio

It begins with a sketch about the concept of the grotesque / ost of the characters of **** are grotesque, or distorted, in some way. Like the carpenter, each seems eager to tell someone about himself and each of them often chooses young George Willard because he is a writer of sorts.

The Ransom of Red Chief

It can be summed up in one short phrase that has been the downfall of everday men and great empires alike: "It seemed like a good idea at the time." / In the story, two small-time, two-bit criminals—Sam and Bill—whip up a wicked plot to kidnap a kid to rustle up an extra couple thousand dollars.

In a Station of the Metro

It is an exercise in brevity. / The author had been reading short Japanese poems called haikus, and he figured he would try to adapt this form to his vision in the metro. The result, which was published in 1913, is one the most famous, influential, and haunting works in modern poetry. Themes" natural world / realsm

Red Badge of Courage

It is considered one of the most accurate portrayals of the physical and psychological effects of intense battle. This book covers just two days of a heated battle between the Union and Confederate soldiers during the American Civil War. The novel traces the emotional trajectory of one young recruit, Henry, as he strains to cope with all of the feelings and behaviors of which he is guilty. ***is a master of creating vastly realistic scenes of combat and death, and of the strange and varied emotions that accompany these experiences

Aeneid

the big three epic poems: the Iliad and the Odyssey by Homer, and the **** by Virgil. These poems are centered on the famous Trojan War and its aftermath. If you want to get even more precise, you could say that the three epics are connected because the first half of Virgil's poem (Books I-VI) is modeled on the Odyssey, because it deals with the hero's travels, while the second half (Books VII-XII), which deals with warfare, is modeled on the Iliad. / themes: fate and free will, power

Bel-Ami

It is the story of an intriguer who climbs to a position of wealth and power by publishing the story of his first wife's disgrace and later cheating her of part of her fortune. The unscrupulous parvenu and the women he dupes are among the masterpieces of characterization produced by the French realistic school

Channel Firing

It might be read as a fairly straightforward and unrelentingly serious condemnation of humankind for continuing to make war, a judgment coming from within a Christian perspective. The moralizing figure of the poem, God, cannot be taken seriously, however, or at least not entirely so. Ultimately, He is an unattractive figure / It is interesting to note Hardy's handling of place names in the last stanza. They are arranged so as to have the sounds of the guns carry not merely inland through space but also backward through time. The reader moves from Hardy's century to the eighteenth century, the period when Stourton Tower was constructed. The reference to that edifice moves the reader back even further, for it commemorates an event of the ninth century. The mention of Camelot carries the reader still further back

Paradise Lost

It opens with Satan on the surface of a boiling lake of lava in Hell (ouch!); he has just fallen from Heaven, and wakes up to find himself in a seriously horrible place. He finds his first lieutenant (his right-hand man), and together they get off the lava lake and go to a nearby plain, where they rally the fallen angels. They have a meeting and decide to destroy Adam and Eve (God's children and precious science experiment) in order to spite God. Satan volunteers for the job and leaves Hell to go look for Adam and Eve...As for Adam and Eve's punishment, God makes them leave the Garden of Eden. He also introduces death, labor pains, and a bunch of other not-so-fun stuff into the world. Before they leave Paradise, however, God sends the angel Michael down to give Adam a vision of the future. After his history lesson, Adam and Eve leave the Garden of Eden in what is one of the saddest moments in English literature./ themes: fate and free will

The Raven

It's a lyrical narrative poem about a student who goes crazy questioning a bird about his lost love Lenore and only ever getting one answer: "Nevermore.By the end of the century, it would be translated into almost every European language. It became the most popular and famous lyrical poem from America. / themes: madness, the supernatural / Rhyming Trochaic Octameter

Song of Myself

It's all about me, myself, and I. In the first line, It takes guts to write a long epic poem about yourself, and Whitman was nothing if not gutsy / it represents a huge break from the formal traditions of the past. Whitman wrote his verses without a regular form, meter, or rhythm. His lines are highly rhythmic, and they have a mesmerizing chant-like quality. Few poems are as fun to read aloud as this one./ you might wonder why Whitman is so eager to be friends with, literally, every single person he has ever met. It might help to remember that the poem was written only a few years before the outbreak of the Civil War, and Whitman viewed friendship as the last hope to save a fractured union.

Of Mice and Men

Killing. Violence. Swearing. Brothels. Racism. Sexism. The book's ending is beyond sad, and might be considered an endorsement of euthanasia. Not to mention, its message isn't exactly full of praise for the American way of life./ Set in the American West during the Great Depression, two main characters, George and Lennie, embody the American struggle to survive the Depression—and capture the isolation and suffering that exist even in the land of opportunity. Despite its filthy-for-the-time language and a real downer of an ending, the book was popular right away, even being chosen as a Book-of-the-Month Club selection before it was published

Mirror

the narrator is a wall mirror in what is likely a woman's bedroom. The mirror is personified Further, while it does not offer moral judgment, it is able to observe and understand its owner (the woman) as she grapples with the reality of aging.The subjects are time and appearance / The mirror is well aware of how important it is to the woman, which evokes the Greek myth of Narcissus, in which a young man grows so transfixed with his own reflection that he dies./ melancholy and even bitter poem that exemplifies the tensions between inner and outer selves, as well as indicates the preternaturally feminine "problem" of aging and losing one's beauty.

Sonnet 97

the poet expresses his love towards a young man. It is the first of three sonnets describing a separation between the speaker and the beloved. My separation from you has seemed like winter, since you give pleasure to the year

To An Athlete Dying Young

the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat/ about death, but it's also about fame. Like death, fame is nothing new, but we never seem to get tired of it. / Elegy in Rhymed Quatrains/ heavy doses of alliteration and consonance.

A Noiseless Patient Spider

themes: isolation, spirituality / Even though it's only ten lines long, it picks up a lot of the big themes in author's writing / " In spite of that creepy association, though, this poem shows Whitman in his prime.

White Fang

Love of the wilderness, his insight into human nature, and his borderline racism against Native Americans, London tells the story of a wolf pup born in the wild and run through the mother of all ringers (and the ringer of all mothers). / the great challenges of life, how harsh and scary Mother Nature can be, the ways humanity either does better than nature or much, much worse. Sometimes, it takes an animal to show us what animals we can be. Or how much better we can be than animals.

Essay on Man

Pope's principle for understanding man is the Great Chain of Being, which orders all creation according to God's will. The disorders which man sees in the universe are actually parts of some larger perfection which man's limited knowledge cannot perceive. Man's prideful speculations, not the external universe, are the cause of his misery. Within man himself, there is also an order based on the workings of self-love (the faculty of desire) and reason (the faculty of judgment). Right living depends upon the two working in harmony, since neither is good or evil in itself. Rather, good or evil arises out of their proper or improper use.

The Minister's Black Veil

Reverend Mr. Hooper incites town gossip when he starts wearing a mysterious ****. He refuses to tell anyone why he's wearing it, and the townsfolk begin to think less of his character because of it. In the end, he dies without anyone knowing his reasons for donning the ***. / As the story progresses, the exact meaning of the veil as a symbol becomes clear/ . At the end of the story, as he lies dying, the Reverend Mr. Hooper says that he sees a veil on all the faces of those who are attending his deathbed. In this way, the major theme of the story is developed; that is, it is suggested that everyone wears a black veil, that everyone has a secret sin or sorrow that is hidden from all others.

My Kinsman, Major Molineaux

Robin, a youth of barely eighteen, arrives in colonial Boston by ferry one evening. In search of his relative, ***, Robin ventures through town inquiring about his kinsman's whereabouts, but is met by hostility and derision from all the townspeople, who imply that he is unwelcome and should return home, their responses laced in threats./ Offended by what he deems an incompetent and impolite reception, Robin continues on, meeting, throughout the night, a number of curious characters that demonstrate a multiplicity of faces, attitudes, and voices. He is told by a devil-faced man to wait beside a church for his kinsman to pass. While waiting, Robin is joined by a kind stranger who keeps him company and listens to his story./The sound of a mob emerges; Robin sees a stream of people led by the devil-faced man, and his uncle in the middle. Tarred and feathered, the Major is humiliated by the crowd, but even more dejected upon seeing Robin. Robin, swept up by the tumult of the crowd, joins the crowd in laughing at the disgraceful display./ As the crowd moves on, a disillusioned Robin entreats his companion to help him leave the city. The companion, however, suggests that Robin stay in Boston and seek fortune without the help of ****

Sonnet 130

Satirizes the concept of ideal beauty that was a convention of literature and art in general during the Elizabethan era.

The Count of Monte Cristo

Secret islands, dashing adventure-seekers, fistfuls of poison, serious disguises, Italian bandits, intricate prison escape strategies, Romeo-and-Juliet-like love scenes, and more. This novel is about a sailor named Edmond Dantès (think the Dread Pirate Roberts from The Princess Bride) who is betrayed by three men, two of whom are jealous of his fiancée and of his success. Dantès spends fourteen years in Chateau d'If (a hardcore prison) for a crime he has not committed, and then he spends many years after that seeking revenge on these three dudes.

Little House on the Prairie

Series of American children's novels written by *** based on her childhood in the northern Midwest during the 1870s and 1880s. - **** series is based on decades-old memories of Laura Ingalls Wilder's childhood in the northern Midwest region of the United States late in the 19th century. The books are narrated in the third person with Laura Ingalls as the central character and protagonist, and are generally classified as fiction rather than as autobiography in libraries and bookstores. The writing of the books was a tense but ultimately effective continuing collaboration between mother and daughter, with Wilder writing the books and her daughter editing them

Sonnet 71

Shakespeare's sonnet cycle has overarching themes of great love and the passage of time. In this sonnet, the speaker is now concentrating on his own death and how the youth is to mourn him after he is deceased

Sonnet 29

Speaker bemoans his status as an outcast and failure but feels better upon thinking of his beloved. typical Shakespearean sonnet form, having 14 lines of iambic pentameter ending in a rhymed couplet.

Barn Burning

Ten-year-old Colonel Satoris "Sarty" Snopes lives with his father, a nasty drunk who relishes burning down the barns of employers who have crossed him.

The Rape of the Lock

The Rape of the Lock. They cut off a lock of your hair. Long, funny, famous poem, / They used ***as we do, but it could also refer to the act of seizing or taking anything by force / Pope was ambitious for this kind of celebrity and eager to advance his career, so he took the request to write this poem about what happened between two personal friends as an opportunity to show off his education and his considerable talent with meter, rhyme, and allusion.

Harlem

The author asks a very important question about dreams and about what happens when dreams are ignored or postponed. He wonders if it dries up like a raisin in the sun, or if it oozes like a wound and then runs. It might smell like rotten meat or develop a sugary crust. It might just sag like a "heavy load," or it might explode. /Free Verse, Irregular Meter

The Snow Man

The author asks himself what is reality? and answers that is basically what you make of it. Sure, there are trees and cars and buildings and mountains—there's no debate about that—but how you see them, what you bring to them, and how they're real to you is entirely up to... you. That's what *** is all about. The speaker of this poem holds two realities in his hands—the reality of winter (cold, bare landscapes that are nothing more than landscapes), and the reality we create when we bring our own perspective (miserable wind, bitter cold etc.). /. There's no snow man here. In fact, there's practically nobody in the poem at all. Wallace Stevens has been called a poet of ideas, after all.

A Good Man is Hard to Find

The author saw all of her fiction, certainly including this story, as realistic, demandingly unsentimental, but ultimately hopeful. Her inspiration as a writer came from a deeply felt faith in Roman Catholicism, which she claimed informed all of her stories. She wrote, "The stories are hard but they are hard because there is nothing harder or less sentimental than Christian realism" (source: The Habit of Being, p. 90). A recurrent theme throughout her writings was the action of divine grace in the horribly imperfect, often revolting, generally funny world of human beings, a theme very much present in "****his story affords perhaps the best place to start in exploring the work of this rather eccentric, certainly unique literary voice. / Many readers and critics found them consistently "grotesque" in their depiction of debased, repulsive (and usually unsympathetic) characters and their at times spectacular displays of violence or cruelty. Some appreciated them as comedies for this reason, while others reacted with disgust

Paul Revere's Ride

The author wrote this poem to tell a story and inspire Americans (particularly Northerners). He wanted to remind them about the importance of unity and courage when faced with danger and he used the Revolution for his example. It worked pretty well, judging by the popularity this poem has had./ Regular Rhyme, Varied Meter / It would be tough to yell those lines, but you can feel the quiet danger in them. Hear those b sounds: "black," "bends," "bridge" and "boats"? Don't they sort of explode quietly from your mouth? We won't push this too hard, just think about the image and sound of distant thunder, coming closer and closer.

That the Relish of Good and Evil Depends in a Great Measure upon Opinion

The diversity of opinions men have towards things supports the argument that supposed evils are not innately evil but only evil because some men judge them to be evil. For example, the majority of men regard death, poverty, and pain as the chief evils of the world, yet there are men who endure patiently and even seek out all these supposed evils.

Candide

The literary force of nature behind ***: white-hot wit that lampoons everything in their path, acerbic observations of an intellectual. / Nothing is safe from the scathing commentary au. delivers in this novel—not power, wealth, love, philosophy, religion, education, or, most significantly, optimism. But this isn't a dull treatise or an angry screed. Instead, it's an adventure story that follows the (totally insane) antics of ***, a wide-eyed, innocent boy who's totally besotted by a super-hot girl.

The Great Gatsby

The problem is, author didn't see the Jazz Age as all about hip music and sparkly clothes. He associated the entire period with materialism ("I want things! Lots of things!") and immorality. For many of the post-World War I era's newly wealthy, materialism and immortality were the name of the game. The novel's star is Jay ***, a young, rich man in love with a society girl from his past. A girl who, as it happens, is married to someone else. / is swaddled in Fitzgerald's simultaneous embrace of and disdain for 1920s luxury. Since Fitzgerald did indeed partake in the Jazz Age's decadent high life, it's not surprising that the details of the setting and characters make *** a sort of time capsule of the 1920s. ***is taught all over the world partly because it's a history lesson and novel all rolled into one delicious wrap of intrigue.

Two Tramps in Mud Time

The question of respect for one's own needs despite an apparent selfishness is raised in this poem / One issue in this poem, then, is simply that of selfless giving up as opposed to keeping something for oneself. It is a question relevant to the artist's need to hoard himself as opposed to his human obligation to give himself; ," this poem too asks how far one is supposed to go in self-sacrifice, how one is to draw the line between personal rights, property, or needs and some other's right to make a claim on his sympathy, to make him feel guilty, or to make him give up something that he need not have given up.

The World is Too Much with Us

The speaker claims that our obsession with "getting and spending" has made us insensible to the beauties of nature. "Getting and spending" refers to the consumer culture accompanying the Industrial Revolution that was the devil. oint is that our obsession with "getting and spending" has made it impossible for us to appreciate the simple beauties of the world around us.

The Flea

The speaker uses the occasion of a flea hopping from himself to a young lady as an excuse to argue that the two of them should make love. Since in the flea their blood is mixed together, he says that they have already been made as one in the body of the flea. Besides, the flea pricked her and got what it wanted without having to woo her. The flea's bite and mingling of their bloods is not considered a sin, so why should their love-making? - The author here makes use of the wit. Here he demonstrates his ability to take a controlling metaphor and adapt it to unusual circumstances. "***" is made up of three nine-line stanzas following an aabbccddd rhyme scheme. - The poet, however, is quick-witted enough to turn her argument back against her: if the death of the flea, which had partaken of just a tiny amount of their life-essences, is virtually no problem, despite his pretended fear, then any fear she might have about her loss of honor is equally a "false" fear

Safe in their Alabaster Chambers—

The theme of the poem is that a person's belief in the resurrected Christ turns death into a friend that receives the faithful departed into homes of stone (alabaster, line 1) with satin ceilings and quiet bedrooms (chambers, line 1), the Christians loyal to Christ rest in eternal peace and serenity, undisturbed by all that happens around them: the movements of the sun, the laughter of the wind, the buzzing of bees, the chirping of birds. .......Extraordinary political events in the world of the living—including the downfall of kingdoms and empires—do not resonate with the sleepers. Their souls are attentive now only to the supernatural. .......Are they already in paradise—that is, are their alabaster chambers a metaphor for heaven? Or, as line 3 suggests, are they awaiting the resurrection of their bodies? Either interpretation suffices. The point is that they have died in God's good graces; they need no longer undergo earthly pain and suffering. They have eternal bliss. / Alliteration alabaster chambers (line 1) Anaphora Metaphor Metonymy Diadems drop Use of diadems (crowns) to represent rulers Personification and Metaphor Personification: Metaphor:

Root Cellar

The theme of the poem is the speaker's celebration of the hardiness and determination of life forms—however small or ugly or insignificant—to survive and generate progeny even in unfriendly environments. .One can interpret the theme as applying to anything that struggles fiercely to survive: a country in turmoil, a race of people facing prejudice, a religious movement, a company in financial trouble, an endangered species of animal, a revolutionary idea, a scientific theory, a political party, and so on. / .Although there is no rhyme scheme in the poem, two lines (4 and 5) do rhyme. Moreover, some words echo the sounds of previous words. For example, stinks echoes chinks, roots echoes shoots, ripe echoes like, rich echoes ditch, rank echoes dank, mold echoes old, planks echoes rank and dank, and life echoes ripe./ alliteration gives the poem rhythm and oomph. The following rendition of the poem highlights alliterating sounds. /Assonance : Even the dirt kept breathing a small breath./ Hyperbole: Even the dirt kept breathing a small breath./ Metaphor: Bulbs broke out of boxes hunting for chinks in the dark (Comparison of bulbs to creatures that hunt) / Simile: Shoots dangled and drooped, (snakes)

The fish

The work is popular because it avoids the surrealism that makes puzzling some of the other poems published in *** collection. It is devoted in large part to a description of a --that the narrator catches and, in the last line, lets go. The moral suggested is somewhat closer to the surface than is usual for Bishop; in addition, the slight but undeniable sententiousness of the narrator may make it easier for the reader to identify with him or her than with the less characterized and virtually invisible narrators of many of Bishop's other poems. - themes: the integration of subjective and objective observation, an almost feminist definition of victory, and the active involvement of the reader in the experience recreated in the poem.

Tess of the d'Urbervilles

The world's most jacked-up novel about a girl who gets raped and impregnated by her fake cousin, buries her illegitimate baby semi-illegally, gets spurned by her new husband because she tells him she was raped, stabs the guy who raped her... and gets arrested at Stonehenge.... and then gets hanged. / The author's willingness to challenge contemporary views of sexual morality and marriage made many of his novels super-controversial when they first appeared.

The House on Mango Street

The writing is simplistic enough for younger readers to understand, while at the same time sophisticated enough to keep the interest of writers and literary scholars. Impressive, huh? And guess what? The author did that on purpose. / But just because her writing is easy to understand doesn't mean that it's boring or simplistic - pick up **** and you'll notice that each sentence is carefully crafted to evoke emotion, beauty, or even just the pleasure of sound. It's kind of like reading a poem that tells a story

Main Street

This book is all about exploring the ways that people try to cope with unsatisfying lives. / the story of an ambitious and intelligent young woman who gets married and moves to the small town of Gopher Prairie, Minnesota. She moves to the town with dreams of transforming it into a sort of modern utopia. But there's just one problem: everyone else in Gopher Prairie likes the ugly old town just the way it is.

Babbitt

This is a book for the rebels, the slackers, the artists, the daredevils, and any kid who has fled (or is dying to flee) the 'burbs. It's about George ***, who has always done everything he's supposed to do and finds himself, as a result, miserable. / It makes the American Dream look like the American Nightmare. It makes living in suburbia sound like living in prison. It makes doing the right thing and saying the right thing sound like... the wrong thing. If being bad feels pretty good, ***shows us that being good can feel pretty freaking bad.

Theme for English B

When **** writes this poem, which is told from the point of view of a young black student, he's connecting an individual's struggles with the struggle of an entire race/ he poem is a powerful look at how a black student might relate to (and not relate to) his white professor. The greatness of this poem, though, is that it goes beyond the question of race: it applies to any human being who has ever wondered about the nature of his or her own identity. / But throughout the poem, this page for his *** class, there's a sense of irony and sarcasm. In an age of rampant discrimination, how can a page of writing be true and meaningful for both a black student and a white professor? Is truth warped by racism? The speaker concludes be acknowledging that that professor is "somewhat more free" than he is. /A Free Verse, Stream of Consciousness Convo

The Stranger

a man loses his mom, murders a dude on a beach, and is sentenced to death/ an absurdist novel about a bonafide weirdo named Meursault. This charming guy shoots and kills a man, Johnny Cash-style, just to watch him die./ But this ain't just a feel-bad book about a cold-blooded seaside murder. Camus uses all the events leading up to the shooting (and Meursault's subsequent trial, and prison sentence) to explore issues of meaning and meaninglessness in life. In other words, Camus's book is about Philosophy with a capital P.

The Lady with the Little Dog

a tale of two lovers who carry on an affair while both married to other people, is one of his most famous short stories. / is in many ways a typical *** tale. It reflects the style and literary preferences of the author who, having written over 200 stories in his career, had certainly established a status quo. In accordance with his typical manner, the story breaks many of the rules of storytelling, particularly when it comes to plot and conclusion.

Encouragement

about a male/female relationship. The speaker is a woman who loves a man, but he is reticent about his feelings. The flow of conversation never misses a beat. Personality and desire place you in the presence of a very intimate and bold revelation. This poet has class and style. talent.

Lord of the Flies

an allegory about either the inherent evil of man, or psychological struggle, or religion, or human nature, or the author's feelings on war (*** was in the Navy during WWII), or possibly all of the above. / themes: primitivity, civilization, innocence

Sonnet 65

an influential poem on the aspect of Time's destruction.

Casey at the Bat

baseball poem written in 1888 by Ernest Thayer. First published in The San Francisco Examiner it was later popularized by DeWolf Hopper in many vaudeville performances. It has become one of the best-known poems in American literature. The poem was originally published anonymously

The Faerie Queene

epic adventure, some battles, romance, morality, religion / **** was author's attempt to write the ultimate poem of his time celebrating both his beloved Queen Elizabeth I and his beloved country, England.

Faust

explore the themes of philosophy, religion, politics, culture, and literature, as well as what these meant in the context of an enlightened age. In this story, ****is not a magician but is, instead, an academic who has reached the limits of learning and knowledge. He seeks a fuller life and to know about nature and the universe. Through a wager with the Devil, he hopes to take advantage of a life beyond his study and see the answers that the universe might provide to him. / tragedy. This tragic context is seen most clearly through the love story between ***and Gretchen

This is Just to Say

has all the high drama of a soap opera with its juicy, shocking confession: The speaker has eaten all the plums! / themes: the home, guilt, choices

The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus

(1588) - The legends that quickly accrued around them—that actual devils once appeared on the stage during a performance

Speech at Virginia Convention

(1775) **** implores his countrymen to declare war against the British. He thinks of colonial rule as a kind of enforced subjugation. He declares, "I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!" In his speech, Henry points to the presence of British soldiers in the colonies, asserting that they're not there for the protection of the colonists. They're there to enforce British colonial rule. He insists that the colonies have already been subjugated and that the only way to free their country is to start a revolution. He then famously declares, "I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!"

The Swiss Family Robinson

(1812, novel) a Swiss family shipwrecked in the East Indies en route to Port Jackson, Australia

The Diary of Anne Frank

(1944 published) She wrote of her very close relationship with her father, lack of daughterly love for her mother (with whom she felt she had nothing in common), and admiration for her sister's intelligence and sweet nature

Oedipus at Colonus

(401 BC) The play describes the end of Oedipus' tragic life. Legends differ as to the site of Oedipus' death; Sophocles set the place at Colonus, a village near Athens and also Sophocles' own birthplace, where the blinded Oedipus has come with his daughters Antigone and Ismene as suppliants of the Erinyes and of Theseus, the king of Athens

Oedipus Rex

(429 BC) - Of his three Theban plays that have survived, and that deal with the story of Oedipus, Oedipus Rex was the second to be written. However, in terms of the chronology of events that the plays describe, it comes first, followed by Oedipus at Colonus and then Antigone. - Oedipus has become the king of Thebes while unwittingly fulfilling a prophecy that he would kill his father, Laius, and marry his mother, Jocasta Oedipus Rex is regarded by many scholars as the masterpiece of ancient Greek tragedy

The Histories

(440 BC, book of history) considered the founding work of history in Western literature - Record of the ancient traditions, politics, geography, and clashes of various cultures that were known in Western Asia, Northern Africa and Greece at that time.Although not a fully impartial record, it remains one of the West's most important sources regarding these affairs. Moreover, it established the genre and study of history in the Western world (despite the existence of historical records and chronicles beforehand).

Antigone

(441 BBC) - In the beginning of the play, two brothers leading opposite sides in Thebes' civil war died fighting each other for the throne. Creon, the new ruler of Thebes, has decided that Eteocles will be honored and Polyneices will be in public shame. The rebel brother's body will not be sanctified by holy rites, and will lie unburied on the battlefield - themes: Civil disobedience, Natural law and contemporary legal institutions, Fidelity, Love for family

On Creativity and the Unconscious

important essays on the many expressions of creativity—including art, literature, love, dreams, and spirituality. This diverse collection includes "The 'Uncanny,'" "The Moses of Michelangelo," "The Psychology of Love

When Malindy Sings Analysis

inspired by Dunbar's mother's constant singing of hymns and Negro spirituals. In particular, ****attributes the powerful melody and unmatchable phrasings to particular natural gifts of black singers. the meter and rhyme are regular, as are the quatrains that make up the poem. Furthermore, ****is quite adept at creating images and imparting feeling through his use of sensory detail, talents he would continue to employ and capitalize upon in succeeding works.

I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud (Daffodils)

Very cheery. In very plain language, it describes how the speaker's loneliness is cured by a field of *** It is typical of ***'s revolutionary style of writing poetry in ordinary, everyday language.

Dulce et Decorum Est

Vibrant imagery and searing tone make it an unforgettable excoriation of WWI, and it has found its way into both literature and history courses as a paragon of textual representation of the horrors of the battlefield. It was written in 1917, the poem paints a battlefield scene of soldiers trudging along only to be interrupted by poison gas. One soldier does not get his helmet on in time and is thrown on the back of the wagon where he coughs and sputters as he dies. The speaker bitterly and ironically refutes the message espoused by many that war is glorious and it is an honor to die for one's country./The poem is a combination of two sonnets, although the spacing between the two is irregular. It resembles French ballad structure. The broken sonnet form and the irregularity reinforce the feeling of otherworldliness; in the first sonnet, Owen narrates the action in the present, while in the second he looks upon the scene, almost dazed, contemplative. The rhyme scheme is traditional, and each stanza features two quatrains of rhymed iambic pentameter with several spondaic substitutions.

Speech at Rochester

(1852) speech at an event commemorating the signing of the Declaration of Independence, it was biting oratory, in which the speaker told his audience, "This Fourth of July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn." And he asked them, "Do you mean, citizens, to mock me, by asking me to speak to-day?" - probably the most moving passage in all of Douglass' speeches."

Adonais

(1821, pastoral elegy) Literarily speaking, the function of pastoral poetry is reflexive in that it uses older traditions to make complex emotions seem simpler. Mourning John Keats' death. 55 Spenserian stanzas. The mood of the poem begins in dejection, but ends in optimism—hoping Keats' spark of brilliance reverberates through the generations of future poets and inspires revolutionary change throughout Europe. Adonis is the stand-in for Keats, for he too died at a young age after being mauled by a boar. In Shelley's version, the "beast" responsible for Keats's death is the literary critic, specifically one from London's Quarterly who gave a scathing review of Keats' poem "Endymion"

How do I love thee?

(1845, sonnet) the intense love she felt for her husband-to-be, poet Robert Browning. The octave draws analogies between the poet's love and religious and political ideals; the sestet draws analogies between the intensity of love she felt while writing the poem and the intensity of love she experienced earlier in her life. Then it says that she will love her husband-to-be even more after death, God permitting. - themes: love, admiration, identity, communication. The speaker in "How do I love thee?" is determined to carry her love for "thee" beyond the grave, as long as God lets her. In fact, something as violent and destructive as death will only heighten her passion - she hopes!

The Communist Manifesto

(1848 political pamphlet) summarises Marx and Engels' theories about the nature of society and politics, that in their own words, "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles". It also briefly features their ideas for how the capitalist society of the time would eventually be replaced by socialism.

Civil Disobedience

(1849, essay from the book Walden). "That government is best which governs least." The author argues that individuals should not permit governments to overrule or atrophy their consciences and that they have a duty to avoid allowing such acquiescence to enable the government to make them the agents of injustice. He was motivated in part by his disgust with slavery and the Mexican-American War (1846-1848). Theme: A man has an obligation to act according to the dictates of his conscience, even if the latter goes against majority opinion,

On Liberty

(1850, philosophical work) ethical system of utilitarianism to society and the state. Mill attempts to establish standards for the relationship between authority and liberty. He emphasizes the importance of individuality. - The ideas presented in *** have remained the basis of much liberal political thought. It has remained in print continuously since its initial publication.

The Prince

(1532, book) first works of modern philosophy, especially modern political philosophy, in which the effective truth is taken to be more important than any abstract ideal. It was also in direct conflict with the dominant Catholic and scholastic doctrines of the time concerning politics and ethics. - The descriptions within *** have the general theme of accepting that the aims of princes—such as glory and survival—can justify the use of immoral means to achieve those ends:

Henry IV, Part 1

(1597)****Bolingbroke is having an unquiet reign. His personal disquiet at the usurpation of his predecessor Richard II would be solved by a crusade to the Holy Land, but broils on his borders with Scotland and Wales prevent that. Moreover, he is increasingly at odds with the Percy family, who helped him to his throne, and Edmund Mortimer, the Earl of March, Richard II's chosen heir.

Henry IV, Part 2 (1599)

(1599) Rather than a straightforward continuation of the historical narrative, placing more emphasis on the highly popular character of Falstaff and introducing other comic figures as part of his entourage, including Ancient Pistol, Doll Tearsheet and Justice Robert Shallow. Several scenes specifically parallel episodes in Part 1.

Of Cannibals

(1603, essay) describing the ceremonies of the Tupinambá people in Brazil. In particular, he reported about how the group ceremoniously ate the bodies of their dead enemies as a matter of honor. In his work, he uses cultural relativism and compares the cannibalism to the "barbarianism" of 16th-century Europe.

The Tempest

(1610) It is set on a remote island, where the sorcerer Prospero, rightful Duke of Milan, plots to restore his daughter Miranda to her rightful place using illusion and skilful manipulation. He conjures up a storm, the eponymous tempest, to lure his usurping brother Antonio and the complicit King Alonso of Naples to the island. There, his machinations bring about the revelation of Antonio's lowly nature, the redemption of the King, and the marriage of Miranda to Alonso's son, Ferdinand.

Of Miracles

(1748, essay) defined as: "a transgression of a law of nature by a particular volition of the Deity, or by the interposition of some invisible agent." Laws of nature, however, are established by "a firm and unalterable experience"; they rest upon the exceptionless testimony of countless people in different places and times. "Nothing is esteemed a miracle, if it ever happen in the common course of nature. It is no miracle that a man, seemingly in good health, should die on a sudden: because such a kind of death, though more unusual than any other, has yet been frequently observed to happen. But it is a miracle, that a dead man should come to life; because that has never been observed in any age or country."

Autobiography

(1771-1793) - P1 of the Autobiography is addressed to Franklin's son William, at that time (1771) - P2 in 1784, giving a more detailed account of his public library plan. He discusses his "bold and arduous Project of arriving at moral Perfection"

The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

(1776, book of history) - Trajectory of Western civilization (as well as the Islamic and Mongolian conquests) from the height of the Roman Empire to the fall of Byzantium - Style is frequently distinguished by an ironically detached and somewhat dispassionate yet critical tone. He occasionally lapsed into moralization and aphorism

Farewell Address

(1796) declining of the Presidency of the United States," and it was almost immediately reprinted in newspapers across the country and later in a pamphlet form. The work was later named a****" as it was Washington's valedictory after 20 years of service to the new nation. It is a classic statement of republicanism, warning Americans of the political dangers which they must avoid if they are to remain true to their values.

Ode to the West Wind

(1819) The speaker lamenting his inability to directly help those in England owing to his being in Italy. - It expresses the hope that its words will inspire and influence those who read or hear it. - Author wanted his message of reform and revolution spread, and the wind becomes the trope for spreading the word of change through the poet-prophet figure. - Some also believe that the poem was written in response to the loss of his son, William (born to Mary Shelley) in 1819. The ensuing pain influenced Shelley. The poem allegorises the role of the poet as the voice of change and revolution. At the time of composing this poem, Shelley without doubt had the Peterloo Massacre of August 1819 in mind. His other poems written at the same time take up these same themes of political change, revolution, and role of the poet

A Defence of Poetry

(1821, essay) "poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world". *** argued that the invention of language reveals a human impulse to reproduce the rhythmic and ordered, so that harmony and unity are delighted in wherever they are found and incorporated, instinctively, into creative activities: "Every man in the infancy of art, observes an order which approximates more or less closely to that from which highest delight results..."

Speech at Canandaigua

(1857) Most of the address was a history of British efforts toward emancipation as well as a reminder of the crucial role of the West Indian slaves in that own freedom struggle. However shortly after he began, the speaker sounded a foretelling of the coming Civil War when he uttered two paragraphs that became the most quoted sentences of all of his public orations. They began with the words, "If there is no struggle, there is no progress."The general sentiment of mankind is that a man who will not fight for himself, when he has the means of doing so, is not worth being fought for by others, and this sentiment is just. For a man who does not value freedom for himself will never value it for others, or put himself to any inconvenience to gain it for others.

Around the World in Eighty Days

(1873, adventure novel) It was written during difficult times, both for France and for Verne. It was during the Franco-Prussian War (1870-1871) in which Verne was conscripted as a coastguard; he was having financial difficulties (his previous works were not paid royalties); his father had died recently; and he had witnessed a public execution, which had disturbed him

Up From Slavery

(1921 autobiography) personal experience of having to work to rise up from the position of a slave child during the Civil War, to the difficulties and obstacles he overcame to get an education, to his work establishing vocational schools. - He helped black people and other disadvantaged minorities learn useful, marketable skills and work to pull themselves, as a race, up by the bootstraps. He reflects on the generosity of both teachers and philanthropists who helped in educating blacks and Native Americans. He describes his efforts to instill manners, breeding, health and a feeling of dignity to students. His educational philosophy stresses combining academic subjects with learning a trade

The Rocking-Horse Winner

(1926, short story) the story begins, we are introduced to Hester, a woman who lives with her husband, two daughters, and a son in a nice neighborhood./ Hester is dissatisfied with motherhood and feels that she needs more money in order to maintain a more luxurious standard of living. / The children also sense their mother's desire for more wealth. They can hear the house whispering about money./ One day, the son, Paul, asks his mother why they don't have a car of their own like their uncle Oscar. The mother explains that Paul's father has no luck, and is unable to make as much money./ Paul declares that he has luck / theme: family: The mother-son relationship is a mess of unfulfilled desire, anxiety, hostility, and terror; wealth: story about the psychological trauma inflicted by the desperate attempt to keep-up-with-the-Joneses

Civilization and Its Discontents

(1929, psychological book) - Freud enumerates what he sees as the fundamental tensions between civilization and the individual. The primary friction, he asserts, stems from the individual's quest for instinctive freedom and civilization's contrary demand for conformity and repression of instincts. Freud states that when any situation that is desired by the pleasure principle is prolonged, it creates a feeling of mild contentment. Many of humankind's primitive instincts (for example, the desire to kill and the insatiable craving for sexual gratification) are clearly harmful to the well-being of a human community. As a result, civilization creates laws that prohibit killing, rape, and adultery, and it implements severe punishments if these rules are broken

A Bad Day

(1931) is one of a pair of stories (the other is 'Orache') which for Nabokov are unusual in two senses. First, they have the same young boy, Peter Shishkov, as protagonist, and second they are set in pre-revolutionary Russia 'around 1910' (DS, p.44). The impulse behind the stories is quite clearly a combination of evoking the past and making a biographical record of a lost age. This is understandable given the prominence of personal loss in Nabokov's life, but strangely enough the stories seem to suffer because of it.

Analysis Terminable and Interminable

(1937) Freud's clinical legacy, summing up his sense of the potential and the limitations of psychoanalysis as a therapeutic technique. In this book the author's look at therapy's shortcomings and relate Freud's essay to current issues in the theory of technique and to controversies arising from different theoretical perspectives. The introduction provides an overview of the material.

Night

(1960, book) Author's experience with his father in the Nazi German concentration camps at Auschwitz and Buchenwald. In just over 100 pages of sparse and fragmented narrative, the author writes about the death of God and his own increasing disgust with humanity, reflected in the inversion of the parent-child relationship, as his father declines to a helpless state and Wiesel becomes his resentful teenage caregiver. "If only I could get rid of this dead weight ... Immediately I felt ashamed of myself, ashamed forever." In *** everything is inverted, every value destroyed. "Here there are no fathers, no brothers, no friends," a kapo tells him. "Everyone lives and dies for himself alone."

The Clouds

(423 BC, comedy poetry) - considered the world's first extant 'comedy of ideas' and be among the finest examples of the genre - household debts balanced with son's expensive interest in horses.

A Doll's House

(Modern tragedy, 1879) - significant for its critical attitude toward 19th-century marriage norms. - leaving her husband and children because she wants to discover herself. Ibsen was inspired by the belief that "a woman cannot be herself in modern society, - "the need of every individual to find out the kind of person he or she really is and to strive to become that person.

An Enemy of the People

(Modern tragedy, 1882) - Ibsen wrote it in response to the public outcry against his play Ghosts, which challenged the hypocrisy of Victorian morality and was deemed indecent for its veiled references to syphilis - "...many traits of comedy, but it also is based on a serious idea." - Language of comic exaggeration puts into very literal terms the theme of the play: It is true that ideas grow stale and banal, but one may go one step further and say that truths die. There are no absolute principles of either wisdom or morality.

The Sick Rose

(Songs of Experience) It isn't just about a rose that's losing its color. It's about a worm (sometimes read as a symbol of the devil) that (essentially) rapes the rose and destroys it with its "dark secret love." Although Blake thought of innocence and experience as contraries, any attempts to classify innocence as good and experience as bad inevitably fail; sometimes the Songs of Innocence appear innocent and then end up being darker and more complicated upon closer examination. In fact, Blake sometimes moved poems back and forth between the two volumes, a fact which suggests that his vision was much more complicated than the simple word "contraries" implies.

A Poison Tree

(Songs of Experience) It's a poem about anger, revenge, and death / alliteration, anaphora. metaphorical twist, the speaker's anger blossoms into an apple. Yum! At least the speaker's enemy thinks so. One night, he sneaks into the speaker's garden (presumably for a delicious apple snack), but it doesn't work out so well for him. The next morning, the speaker is happy to see that his foe lying dead under the tree that bore the (apparently poison) apple. Not good.

The Lamb

(Songs of Innocence) hey are associated with Jesus Christ, whom the speaker of this poem regards as the savior of the world. / The rhymes are gratingly simple and the speaker repeats himself constantly Blake believed that life could be viewed from two different perspectives, or "states": innocence and experience. To Blake, innocence is not better than experience. Both states have their good and bad sides. The positive side of innocence is joy and optimism, while the bad side is naivety. The negative side of experience is cynicism, but the good side is wisdom./ The logic of "***" is that God creates lambs and that lambs are sweet and gentle, so God must be sweet and gentle. The logic of "The Tyger" is that God also creates Tigers, and tigers are savage and terrifying, so...uh-oh. / the meaning of au's words oftentimes cannot be separated from their visual appearance.

Ah, Wilderness!

(comedy, 1933) - It varies from a typical O'Neill play in its happy ending for the central character, and depiction of a happy family in turn of the century America - The main plot deals with the middle son, 16-year-old Richard, and his coming of age in turn of the twentieth-century America. Sentimental tale of youthful indiscretion

Man and Superman

(drama, 1903) - based on the Don Juan theme - Although Man and Superman can be performed as a light comedy of manners, Shaw intended the drama to be something much deeper, as suggested by the title, which comes from Friedrich Nietzsche's

Long Day's Journey Into Night

(drama, 1941) - premiered in 1956. The title refers to the setting of the play, which takes place during one day. It is semi-autobiographical. - drama. This play portrays a family in a ferociously negative light as the parents and two sons express accusations, blame, and resentment. self-analysis, combined with a brutal honesty

Nature

(essay, 1836) - foundation of transcendentalism -attempts to solve an abstract problem: humans do not fully accept nature's beauty. people are distracted by the demands of the world, whereas nature gives but humans fail to reciprocate - theme: spirituality

Self-Reliance

(essay, 1841) - need for each individual to avoid conformity and false consistency, and follow their own instincts and ideas. - "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines." - analysis into the nature of the "aboriginal self on which a universal reliance may be grounded. / Trust Your Own Inner Voice :Emerson urges his readers to retain the outspokenness of a small child who freely speaks his mind. A child he has not yet been corrupted by adults who tell him to do otherwise. He also urges readers to avoid envying or imitating others viewed as models of perfection; instead, he says, readers should take pride in their own individuality and never be afraid to express their own original ideas. In addition, he says, they should refuse to conform to the ways of the popular culture and its shallow ideals; rather they should live up to their own ideals, even if doing so reaps them criticism and denunciation.

Hymn to Intellectual Beauty

(poem, 1816) It was conceived and written during a boating excursion with Byron on Lake Geneva, Switzerland, in June 1816. The beauty of the lake and of the Swiss Alps is responsible the ruling principle of the universe. - Author's understanding of Beauty as an ideal and universal aspect, as opposed to the common understanding of the word as an aesthetic judgment of an object, was influenced by his knowledge of Plato's writings. However, where Plato believed Beauty should be sought after gradually in degrees until one can achieve true Beauty, the author believed that Beauty could also be found through its earthly manifestations and could only be connected to through the use of the imagination. - The central idea is that there is a spiritual power that stands apart from both the physical world and the heart of man. This power is unknown to man and invisible. The poem's theme is Beauty, the author believed that philosophy and metaphysics could not reveal truth and that an understanding of Beauty was futile. Instead, Beauty could only be felt and its source could not be known

Porphyria's Lover

(poem, 1836) The narrator is a man who has murdered his lover. Highly subjective perspective on a story. In this poem, the irony is abundantly clear: the speaker has committed an atrocious act and yet justifies it as not only acceptable, but as noble. Throughout the poem, the imagery and ideas suggest an overarching conflict of order vs. chaos, with the most obvious manifestation being the way the speaker presents his beastly murder as an act of rationality and love. The clearest example of the disconnect between order and chaos comes in the poetic form. The poetry follows an extremely regular meter of iambic tetrameter (four iambic feet per line), with a regular rhyme scheme. In other words, ***, always a precise and meticulous poet, has made certain not to reflect madness or chaos in the rhyme scheme, but instead to mirror the speaker's belief that what he does is rational.

My Last Duchess

(poem, 1842 ) It belong to the book of poems titled Dramatic Lyrics. ***s most famous dramatic monologueAs the title suggests, in these poems **** experiments with form, combining some aspects of stage plays and some aspects of Romantic verse to create a new type of poetry for his own Victorian age. -The Duke of Ferrara is negotiating with a servant for the hand of a count's daughter in marriage. His tone grows harsh as he recollects how both human and nature could impress her. -Rhymed iambic pentameter lines, like its dramatic setup, remind us of Shakespeare's plays and other Elizabethan drama. But it is about the inner thoughts of an individual speaker, instead of a dialogue between more than one person. Themes: power, jealousy, and madness - To some extent, the duke's amorality can be understood in terms of aristocracy. Another element of the aristocratic life that Browning approaches in the poem is that of repetition

Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister

(poem, 1842) - The poem consists of nine eight-line stanzas and is written in trochaic tetrameter. The plot of the poem centers around the speaker's hatred for "Brother Lawrence", a fellow monk in the cloister. The speaker notes the trivial ways in which Brother Lawrence fails in his Christianity, and then plots to murder, or damn the soul of, Brother Lawrence. However, the poem ends before the speaker can finish, when he is interrupted by the bells proclaiming it is time for vespers.

The Art of Poetry

(poem, 19 BC) Horace advises poets on the art of writing poetry and drama - great influence in later ages on European literature, notably on French drama and has inspired poets and authors since it was written

Pygmalion

(romantic comedy, 1913) -Professor of phonetics Henry Higgins makes a bet that he can train a bedraggled Cockney flower girl, Eliza Doolittle, to pass for a duchess at an ambassador's garden party by teaching her to assume a veneer of gentility, the most important element of which, he believes, is impeccable speech. The play is a sharp lampoon of the rigid British class system of the day and a commentary on women's independence.

England, 1819

(sonnet) The speaker describes the state of England in 1819. The king is "old, mad, blind, despised, and dying." The English populace are "starved and stabbed" in untilled fields; the army is corrupted by "liberticide and prey"; the laws "tempt and slay"; religion is Christless and Godless, "a book sealed"; and the English Senate is like "Time's worst statute unrepealed." Each of these things, the speaker says, is like a grave from which "a glorious Phantom" may burst to illuminate "our tempestuous day."The furious, violent metaphors author employs throughout this list (nobles as leeches in muddy water, the army as a two-edged sword, religion as a sealed book, Parliament as an unjust law) leave no doubt about his feelings on the state of his nation. - Like many of author's sonnets, it does not fit the rhyming patterns one might expect from a nineteenth-century sonnet; instead, the traditional

Ozymandias

(sonnet, 1818) - as a Greek name for the Egyptian pharaoh Ramesses II. - iambic pentameter, but with an atypical rhyme scheme when compared to other English-language sonnets, and without the characteristic octave-and-sestet structure. -explore the fate of history and the ravages of time: that all prominent figures and the empires that they build are impermanent and their legacies fated to decay into oblivion.Theme: contrasting the inevitable decline of all leaders and of the empires they build with their pretensions to greatness.

A Plea for Captain John Brown

(speech, 1859) It espoused **** and his fight for abolition. In opposition with popular opinion of the time, the author painted a portrait of a peerless man whose embrace of a cause was unparalleled. ***'s commitment to justice and adherence to the US Constitution forced him to fight state-sponsored injustice, one he was only affected by in spirit. - Author vents at the scores of Americans who have voiced their displeasure and scorn for ****

Heracles

(tragedy play, 416 BC) - tragedy: While Herakles is in the underworld obtaining Cerberus for one of his labours, his father Amphitryon, wife Megara, and children are sentenced to death in Thebes by Lycus. Herakles arrives in time to save them, though the goddesses Iris and Madness (personified) cause him to kill his wife and children in a frenzy.

Othello

(tragedy, 1603)- The story revolves around four central characters: ***, a Moorish general in the Venetian army; his beloved wife, Desdemona; his loyal lieutenant, Cassio; and his trusted but ultimately unfaithful ensign, Iago. - Iago: archetypal villain. manipulates all other characters at will, controlling their movements and trapping them in an intricate net of lies - the hero: "most romantic of all of Shakespeare's heroes" vs "egotistical".

King Lear

(tragedy, 1606) - It depicts the gradual descent into madness of the title character, after he disposes of his kingdom giving bequests to two of his three daughters based on their flattery of him, bringing tragic consequences for all. Derived from the legend of Leir of Britain, a mythological pre-Roman Celtic king. - Since there are no literal mothers, it could be psychoanalytic interpretation of the "maternal subtext" found in the play. -represents an affirmation of Christian doctrine.

Macbeth

(tragedy, 1606) It dramatises the damaging physical and psychological effects of political ambition on those who seek power for its own sake. A brave Scottish general named ****receives a prophecy from a trio of witches that one day he will become King of Scotland. Consumed by ambition and spurred to action by his wife, Macbeth murders King Duncan and takes the Scottish throne for himself. He is then wracked with guilt and paranoia. Forced to commit more and more murders to protect himself from enmity and suspicion, he soon becomes a tyrannical ruler. The bloodbath and consequent civil war swiftly take Macbeth and Lady Macbeth into the realms of madness and death.

Blood Wedding

(tragedy, 1933) themes: the cycle of life, the progression of time, choice, deception, fate, and nature. The cycle of life and progression of time are illustrated by the simple fact that the entire play is devoted to a wedding. The process of marriage in every culture marks the concrete and tangible evidence of a passage from childhood to adulthood, and a progression through life and time.

Death of a Salesman

(tragedy, 1949) -themes: +Reality and Illusion: uses flashbacks to present Willy's memory during the reality. The illusion not only "suggests the past, but also presents the lost pastoral life." Willy has dreamed of success his whole life and makes up lies about his and Biff's success. The more he indulges in the illusion, the harder it is for him to face reality. Biff is the only one who realizes that the whole family lived in the lies and tries to face the truth. +the American Dream, but everyone in the play has their own way to describe theirs. Willy Loman dreams of being a successful salesman like Dave Singleman. ociety tries to teach that if people are rich and well-liked, they will be happy. Because of this, Willy thought that money would make him happy. He never bothered to try to be happy with what he had

The Return

*** believed that the otherworldly, self-renouncing tendency of monotheistic religions had caused people to ignore the world around them, making them dull and ridden with guilt. / This poem is an expression of this belief in the continuing reality of human-kind's ancient gods. Although these beings, as the poem portrays them, have been defeated, they are by no means dead. In "The Return," Pound, through his persona, calls out to his readers in an attempt to gain their attention: The gods still exist for those who have eyes to see them / elegiac tone: Even as ***reasserts the continued existence of the gods, he acknowledges their lost vitality. / the poem struggles with two contrasting themes: the isolated, forgotten status of the gods in the modern era and the memory of their ancient splendo

The Windhover

*** came up with the idea that every person and object in the world had unique, individual characteristics, which he called the object's inscape (yes, this is a totally made-up word). An object's inscape was held together by a kind of spiritual glue, which he called instress. Getting to know an object's "inscape," according to Hopkins, and showing that "inscape" through words in poetry, was a way of getting closer to God / Speakers eems to be just admiring a bird. Big whoop. But through inscape, instress, sprung rhythm, and a few more poetic tricks up his sleeve, he transforms a simple image of a bird into an intense meditation on religious epiphany. / Petrarchan sonnetrepeated M sounds in the first line of the poem ("I caught this morning morning's minion...") make a kind of humming noise that gets us thinking of the hum of the wind under the ****'s wings / Almost every line has alliteration of some kind ("rung upon the rein;" "wimpling wing"), and the end rhymes all sound similar, too—they all end in -ing. The: Awe and Amazement

Jude the Obscure

*** first got published as a complete novel in 1896, over a hundred years before modern romantic comedies. And Hardy takes risks with the themes of this book that you don't find much in movies now, let alone in novels back then. For its time, *** was incredibly controversial. Hardy's approach to subjects like love, marriage, class, religion, and sex didn't jibe with the views of a lot of The Powers that Be, and some of those Powers weren't above banning or burning the book. / Author could clearly see a lot of issues coming his way that would be huge in the centuries to come. In Jude the Obscure, Hardy tackles the moral and legal status of marriage women's liberation, loss of religious faith, and problems of conformity and social isolation way before most British authors would dare take them on.

She walks in Beauty

*** is an eighteen-line poem, much shorter than au.'s famous narrative poems. But despite its relative brevity, *** has become one of the most well-known and easily recognized poems written by Byron. It was penned in 1814 (before the furor over the breakup of his marriage made him leave England), and published in 1815 in a volume of poems called Hebrew Melodies. As the name of the volume suggests, the poems in that volume were written to be set to music. They were originally set to traditional Jewish tunes by composer Isaac Nathan, but several other composers have attempted it since then as well. Check out the "Best of the Web" section for a few examples. / ABABAB Iambic Tetrameter

The Children's Hour

*** is one of ****most beloved poems, although it has received its fair share of criticism due to its sentimental nature. It concerns a father sitting and working in his study by lamplight at the close of the day who hears his three daughters whispering and plotting to run in and play with him. They do, jumping on him and kissing him feverishly. He plays along and tells them that he will hold them prisoner in the castle dungeon of his heart forever. It is sweet, intimate, and personal; the daughters' names in the poems are those of Longfellow's own children. / Longfellow uses fairy tales and medieval Romances to structure the action of the poem. The speaker refers to his daughters as "banditti," a term for outlaws that originated in Italy and that recalls the roaming gangs of the mountainous regions of Italy and Greece. The speaker's word choice introduces a lighthearted irony and enhances the sense that this is a welcome intrusion

The Fall of the House of Usher

***" a visitor is summoned to the House of *** by his childhood friend. ***sister Madeline dies, but somehow comes back from the grave. The visitor just manages to escape before the house collapses.

They Flee from Me

**** reflects on the sexual culture of Henry VIII's court and the early Renaissance more generally. In the poem, a gentleman considers all the sexual conquests of his past (with particular focus on one unique encounter), and then wonders why it is these previously eager women no longer visit him. Usually, this kind of love poetry focuses on guys chasing and seducing women. In those poems, men have the power, and women are at their mercy. But in Wyatt's poem, this relationship gets turned around and muddled up, leaving our speaker at the mercy of these women. / Iambic Pentameter

Second Inaugural Addresses

1865 At a time when victory over the secessionists in the American Civil War was within days and slavery was near an end, Lincoln did not speak of happiness, but of sadness Some see this speech as a defense of his pragmatic approach to Reconstruction, in which he sought to avoid harsh treatment of the defeated South by reminding his listeners of how wrong both sides had been in imagining what lay before them when the war began four years earlier.

The Wild Swans at Coole

***Park was, and is, a very beautiful place, the kind of place you wish you could visit everywhere or the place where you wish you could retire. There are a lot of turloughs in the area (so-called "disappearing," or seasonal, lakes that are found almost exclusively in Ireland) and, apparently, a bunch of swans. Yeats mentions all these things in this poem, and yet we can't help but feel he is ill at ease, that something is the matter./ eats cannot help but acknowledge that he himself has changed. His heart is more "sore" than it used to be. He's getting older (he was about 52 when he wrote the poem), and he's not as carefree as he used to be. (We're also guessing that he can't benchpress what he used to, either.) Lots of things can change over the course of twenty years, and it can be very hard to accept that fact that, as we get older, we become more conscious of pain, death, sadness, and change—it makes us "sore" and weary. but also the world around him. Yeats wrote the poem toward the end of World War I

the cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls

***ladies believe in Christ and the American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, "both dead." They themselves are also dead, unaware that, above their stuffy rooms and beyond their stuffy lives, the "moon rattles like a fragment of angry candy." Isolated in their artificial world, they engage in meaningless banter, oblivious of the wonders of the natural world within and around them. / Au transforms the fourteen-line poem so that it is neither a Shakespearean nor a Petrarchan sonnet (the two types traditionally associated with this verse form). In the former, sometimes called English, three quatrains, each with a rhyme-scheme of its own, are followed by a rhyming couplet. In the latter, sometimes called Italian, the poem is divided into two sections, an octave and a sestet, each with its own particular rhyming pattern. Cummings uses only the basic structure of the traditional sonnet form—its fourteen lines—and discards virtually everything else, most obviously its disciplined rhyme schemes.

The Flower

***r is considered by many critics to be Herbert's finest lyric. It is an exuberant, joyful poem in which a single image of the spiritual life is expanded with naturalness and elegance that appear effortless. /The speaker celebrates the joy that accompanies the spiritual renewal which follows the times of trial. Though he has experienced this many times, yet each time it happens the joy is as boundless as eve / God's purpose is to show us "we are but flowers that glide", to let us acknowledge our limitation and inconsequence; yet, paradoxically, if we can see this, the reward is great: God "has a garden for us, where to hide". It is those who want more than this, swollen by their arrogance or eminence, who will "Forfeit their paradise by their pride".

Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God

- (sermon, 1741 ) - combines vivid imagery of Hell with observations of the world and citations of the scripture - This is a typical sermon of the Great Awakening, emphasizing the belief that Hell is a real place. Edwards hoped that the imagery and language of his sermon would awaken audiences to the horrific reality that he believed awaited them should they continue life without devotion to Christ. The underlying point is that God has given humanity a chance to rectify their sins.

Batter My Heart

- The author blends elements of the Italian (Petrarchan) sonnet with the English (Shakespearean) sonnet. Here he begins in the Italian form abba abba, but his concluding idea in the third quatrain bleeds over into the rhyming couplet (cdcd cc) that completes the poem. - The speaker asks God to intensify the effort to restore the speaker's soul. Knocking at the door is not enough; God should overthrow him like a besieged town. His own reason has not been enough either, and he has engaged himself to God's enemy. He asks God to break the knots holding him back, imprisoning him in order to free him, and taking him by force in order to purify him. the speaker considers his soul or heart too badly damaged or too sinful to be reparable; instead, God must re-create him to make him what he needs to be. The paradox is that he must be overthrown like a town in order to rise stronger.

Kubla Khan

- The author fell asleep and had a strange dream about a Mongol emperor named Kubla Khan. He dreamed that he was actually writing a poem in his sleep, and when he woke up after a few hours, he sat down to record the dream poem. - its interesting rhyme scheme, variable line lengths, and intense focus on nature, is both a good example of Romantic poetry. - This poem describes Xanadu, the palace of Kubla Khan, a Mongol emperor and the grandson of Genghis Khan. - The speaker then goes on to describe Kubla Khan himself, who is listening to this noisy river and thinking about war. All of a sudden, the speaker moves away from this landscape and tells us about another vision he had, where he saw a woman playing an instrument and singing. The memory of her song fills him with longing, and he imagines himself singing his own song, using it to create a vision of Xanadu. -thems:VERSIONS OF REALITY, Man and the Natural World, time

Nothing Gold Can Stay

- The author had a knack for summing up the whole world in a few elegant little lines. The poem starts by talking about the colors of spring, saying that nature is first gold, then green. Leaves, the poem says, start out as flower buds. But these golden flowers don't stick around for long—they turn green and become leaves. According to our speaker, this natural process is related to the fall of the Garden of Eden, as well as the change of dawn to day. Then the poem wraps itself up, reminding us that the beauty of gold is only fleeting./ Rhyming Couplets of Iambic Trimeter - alliteration, assonance, consonance, and slant rhymes. - themes: Transience, Man and the Natural World, spirituality

Philoctetes

- The play was written during the Peloponnesian War - The concept of having a moral high ground is a key aspect. The play makes the reader question what morality means to each man. Furthermore, the play makes one question the struggle between what is right for the individual versus what is right for the group.

The Good-Morrow

- This poem is about waking up: into a new morning after a sexy night, into true love, and into a spiritual unity with the partner who completes you. Donne's earliest poem. This is not just about bodies; the souls are in on it too. This soulful love is so all-consuming that these lovebirds no longer need the rest of the world. 21 lines, split into three stanzas of seven lines each. Most of the lines have 10 syllables, but each stanza peaces out with one 12-syllaber—just for kicks, giggles, and a little rhythmic variety. That means that 19 lines check in with iambic pentamete

The Sun Rising

- it proclaims to the sun and to the whole world that his love is the center of the universe. tarts out angry at the sun. He feels way too good to be bothered by its shine and tells it to get lost and go bother other, lesser people. He tells the sun that love isn't some slave to the sun's movements or the changing of the seasons, so shove off, thank you very much. He says he's better than the sun, stronger than the sun, even, because he can just shut his eyes and make that bright star disappear entirely. In fact, he's such a big deal that he tells the sun to look around and discover that the whole world resides right there in Donne's bed. telling the sun that he and his lady are all the countries and kings in the world combined, that everything else in the world is just pretending to be them. He ends by pitying the poor old sun and telling it that its job just got easier. Because the whole world now consists of just this one room, the sun doesn't have to travel—it only needs to shine on this couple and everything is bright and peachy.

Of the Education of Children

1545, essay. He does not mention the education of girls. However, Montaigne's advice for educating boys can be applied just as well to the education of girls. His idea of a good well-rounded education was very similar to the education that he actually received. Montaigne was given a good classical education. Montaigne was taught mainly by tutors. He did attend the College of Guienne, but his tutor was with him and guiding him through the whole experience.

A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning

1611***(like all metaphysical poets was a big fan of wild comparisons. The poem is an argument. Donne had the education of a lawyer and was also a famous preacher so most things he wrote had a pretty strong logical, oratorical bent. His argument unfolds as a catalogue of bizarre comparisons. He compares their love to dying old men, earthquakes, stars, gold, and a mathematical compass. It's tricky to follow, but comes together to form a perfect picture of love, love that isn't tied to a person's physical presence, but a spiritual love that can endure even the toughest situations. themes: love, loyalty, lust,

Tom Jones

1749. Funny realism that would influence later writers such as Charles Dickens and Mark Twain. The author wants his novel to be exciting but not too farfetched. He wants to show that novels can be funny, raunchy, truthful, and philosophical at heart. And he wants to prove that you can talk about justice, mercy, and virtue in a book with plenty of random adventures and broad sex jokes./ This novel to try and get some of the snobbery out of fiction-writing. He hates the condescending idea of "low" (or low-brow) fiction, and totally embraces the concept that books should be both instructive and fun to read. Any novel that wraps up its own commentary about censorship on the stage with a plot twist involving a local maid having sex with a wandering clown probably isn't taking itself too seriously.

First Inaugural Addresses

1861, as part of his taking of the oath of office for his first term as the sixteenth President of the United States. The speech was primarily addressed to the people of the South, and was intended to succinctly state Lincoln's intended policies and desires toward that section, where seven states had seceded from the Union and formed the Confederate States of America. Written in a spirit of reconciliation toward the seceded states,

Letter to Mrs. Bixby

1864. To ***, a widow living in Boston, who was thought to have lost five sons in the Union Army during the American Civil War. Along with the Gettysburg Address and his second inaugural address, the letter has been praised as one of Lincoln's finest written works and is often reproduced in memorials, media, and print.

Culture and Anarchy

1869. A study of perfection". He further wrote that: "[Culture] seeks to do away with classes; to make the best that has been thought and known in the world current everywhere; to make all men live in an atmosphere of sweetness and light - The whole scope of the essay is to recommend culture as the great help out of our present difficulties; culture being a pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know, on all the matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world, and, through this knowledge, turning a stream of fresh and free thought upon our stock notions and habits, which we now follow staunchly but mechanically, vainly imagining that there is a virtue in following them staunchly which makes up for the mischief of following them mechanically

The Prince and the Pauper

1881, novel. Twain's first attempt at historical fiction. Set in 1547, it tells the story of two young boys who are identical in appearance: Tom Canty, a pauper who lives with his abusive father in Offal Court off Pudding Lane in London, and Prince Edward, son of King Henry VIII. - criticism of judging others by appearances.

We Wear The Mask

1896. The poem is a reaction to the racial climate of the late nineteenth century. He talks about hypocrisy, deception, and the fact that black Americans often resorted to seeming content with their social circumstances. But behind all that seeming, though, is just a bunch of lies trying to cover up the fact that they were feeling pretty rotten and unable to talk about their feelings in an honest way. The author was one of the first to create a more objective perspective of what was going on in American culture. In other words, he kind of took a step back and looked at things in a less personal, less emotional way, making ****" applicable to all sorts of people and circumstances. By doing that, he opened up the world of poetic interpretation in a much more universal way. - it is a rondeau, formulaic poem. And since itis supposed to be lyrical and memorable we can expect those devices to help amplify the sound even more: consonance, alliteration, allusion: Religious References Jesus Christ (10-11)

The Death of the Hired Man

1914. A farm wife, Mary pleads with her husband, Warren, to take back a former farmhand who has always disappointed him. The farmhand, Silas, is very ill, and Mary is convinced that he has returned to the farm to die. Warren has not seen Silas in his ill state and, still angry over the contract that Silas broke when them in the past, does not want to have Silas on his property. Mary's compassionate urging eventually convinces him, but when Warren goes to get Silas, he is already dead. Characteristics of Frost's poetry, particularly the rural environment, the everyday struggle of the farm couple over their relationship to the farmhand, and the colloquial dialogue. The blank verse form makes the text extremely clear, and Frost even breaks up the stanzas by employing dialogue. / dichotomy between Mary and Warren: Mary follows the model of Christian forgiveness, Warren, on the other hand, does not believe that they owe anything to Silas and feels that they are not bound to help him

After Apple-Picking

1914. At the end of a long day of ****, the narrator is tired and thinks about his day. He has felt sleepy and even trance-like since the early morning, when he looked at the apple trees through a thin sheet of ice that he lifted from the drinking trough. He feels himself beginning to dream but cannot escape the thought of his apples even in sleep: he sees visions of apples growing from blossoms, falling off trees, and piling up in the cellar. As he gives himself over to sleep, he wonders if it is the normal sleep of a tired man or the deep winter sleep of death. / In terms of form, this poem is bizarre because it weaves in and out of traditional structure. Approximately twenty-five of the forty-two lines are written in standard iambic pentameter, and there are twenty end-rhymes throughout the poem. This wandering structure allows Frost to emphasize the sense of moving between a waking and dream-like state, just as the narrator does. The repetition of the term "sleep," even after its paired rhyme ("heap") has long been forgotten, also highlights the narrator's gradual descent into dreaming. metaphorical discussion of seasonal changes and death - Because of the varying rhymes and tenses of the poem, it is not clear when the narrator is dreaming or awake. One possibility is that the entirety of the poem takes place within a dream. Another explanation is that the narrator is dying, and his rambling musings on apple picking are the fevered hallucinations of a man about to leave the world of the living

Birches

1916. When the narrator looks at the *** trees in the forest, he imagines that the arching bends in their branches are the result of a boy "swinging" on them. He realizes that the bends are actually caused by ice storms - the weight of the ice on the branches forces them to bend toward the ground - but he prefers his idea of the boy swinging on the branches, climbing up the tree trunks and swinging from side to side, from earth up to heaven. The narrator remembers when he used to swing on birches and wishes that he could return to those carefree days. / Blank Verse (Mostly Unrhymed, Iambic Pentameter). emphasis on the "sound of sense." For example, when Frost describes the cracking of the ice on the branches, his selections of syllables create a visceral sense of the action taking place:

The Road Not Taken

1916. While "*** is often read as a resounding nonconformist's credo, the poem isn't so sure about its message. In fact, sometimes it flat out contradicts itself. Actually, the poem's ambiguity improves it. 's a reflection on life's hard choices and unknowns. -This poem is made up of four stanzas of five lines, each with a rhyme scheme of ABAAB. The narrator only distinguishes the paths from one another after he has already selected one and traveled many years through life. When he first comes upon the fork in the road, the paths are described as being fundamentally identical. - It is only as an old man that the narrator looks back on his life and decides to place such importance on this particular decision in his life. During the first three stanzas, the narrator shows no sense of remorse for his decision nor any acknowledgement that such a decision might be important to his life. Yet, as an old man, the narrator attempts to give a sense of order to his past and perhaps explain why certain things happened to him. Of course, the excuse that he took the road "less traveled by" is false, but the narrator still clings to this decision as a defining moment of his life, not only because of the path that he chose but because he had to make a choice in the first place

Those Winter Sundays

1975, poem. It is not about race at all. It's a small but powerful poem about a father-child relationship and all the mixed feelings that come with it: love, admiration, fear, misunderstanding, even hate - sonnet.. The poem doesn't rhyme and it's not written in regular iambic pentameter.

Buffalo Bill's

1920, poem. lays with more than one possibility of meaning and attitude of the poet towards the subject, the dead hero, ***. In one sense, the poem is an expression of respect towards the heroic personality of the man. But if we read the poem critically, we sense that the poet is satirizing the traditional heroism of killing the armless and harmless animals with guns, from a distance! The reader is left free to interpret in his own way. - theme of the irony of Cody's unheroic death is also equally true. This is truly a modernist poem in which one and certain meaning is neither intended nor possible. Inconsistent in tone and theme. It begins with a neutral tone, which on a closer attention is actually ironic

Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening

1923. On a dark winter evening, the narrator stops his sleigh to watch the snow falling in the woods. At first he worries that the owner of the property will be upset by his presence, but then he remembers that the owner lives in town, and he is free to enjoy the beauty of the falling snow. The sleigh horse is confused by his master's behavior — stopping far away from any farmhouse — and shakes his harness bells in impatience. After a few more moments, the narrator reluctantly continues on his way / Sixteen lines, there is not a single three-syllable word and only sixteen two-syllable words. In terms of rhythmic scheme and form, however, the poem is surprisingly complex. / The poem was inspired by a particularly difficult winter in New Hampshire when Frost was returning home after an unsuccessful trip at the market. Realizing that he did not have enough to buy Christmas presents for his children, Frost was overwhelmed with depression and stopped his horse at a bend in the road in order to cry. After a few minutes, the horse shook the bells on its harness, and Frost was cheered enough to continue home / Frost's decision to repeat the final line could be read in several ways. On one hand, it reiterates the idea that the narrator has responsibilities that he is reluctant to fulfill. The repetition serves as a reminder,

Fire and Ice

1923. This short poem outlines the familiar question about the fate of the world, wondering if it is more likely to be destroyed by fire or ice. People are on both sides of the debate, and Frost introduces the narrator to provide his personal take on the question of the end of the world. The narrator first concludes that the world must end in fire after considering his personal experience with desire and passion, the emotions of fire. Yet, after considering his experience with "ice," or hatred, the narrator acknowledges that ice would be equally destructive. / Only nine lines long, this little poem is a brilliant example of Frost's concisely ironic literary style. The poem varies between two meter lengths (either eight syllables or four syllables) and uses three sets of interwoven rhymes, based on "-ire," "-ice," and "-ate."

Dust of Snow

1923. d one of the shortest of all, *** One sentence long, it occupies eight short lines and contains only thirty-four words, all but two of them monosyllabic, and all of them part of even a young child's vocabulary. / Much of the effect of this poem derives from its paradoxes or seeming contradictions, the first of which is in the title. Although the phrase "a dusting of snow" is common in weather reports, dust usually calls forth notions of something dirty and unpleasant, quite unlike the dust of snow. It is also paradoxical that the speaker's mood is initially so negative on a presumably fine winter day after a fresh snowfall, that he has so far rued this day.

Our Town

1938 metatheatrical three-act play by American playwright Thornton Wilder. It tells the story of the fictional American small town of Grover's Corners between 1901 and 1913 through the everyday lives of its citizens. Throughout, Wilder uses metatheatrical devices, setting the play in the actual theater where it is being performed. The main character is the stage manager of the theater who directly addresses the audience, brings in guest lecturers, fields questions from the audience, and fills in playing some of the roles. -The play is performed without a set on a mostly bare stage. With a few exceptions, the actors mime actions without the use of props. is response was to use a metatheatrical style. Our Town's narrator, the Stage Manager, is completely aware of his relationship with the audience, leaving him free to break the fourth wall and address them directly. According to the script, the play is to be performed with little scenery, no set and minimal props. The characters mime the objects with which they interact.

In memory of W.B. Yeats

1940, elegy. Most memorable elegy on the death of a public figure. - The poem is organized into three sections and is a commentary on the nature of a great poet's art and its role during a time of great calamity—as well as the ordinary time of life's struggles. - the first, mournful section describes the coldness of death, these conditions symbolize the loss of activity and energy in Yeats' death. - In the second section the speaker briefly reflects on the generative power behind Yeats' poetry. - The third and final part brings the reader back into more familiar territory, with six stanzas of AABB verse, every line in seven-syllable trochaic verse (three long-short feet followed by a seventh stressed syllable).

The Gift Outright

1941.The narrator describes America's history as a nation from the time of the European colonists. Although the colonists owned the land, they could not draw a national identity from it because they were still tied to England. They eventually realized that they were denying their beliefs in freedom and, by embracing the lessons of the land, were able to establish an American identity. In order to accept this gift of identity, the people had to commit many acts of war and mark the land as their own, but the end result was a truly American land. / technically a sonnet, though unusual in this form because of its sixteen lines. It is written in iambic pentameter and free verse. / From one perspective, this poem may seem to be nothing more than a triumphantly patriotic work

The Armadillo

1951, poem. The rejection of romantic gloss in favor of the hard data of concrete reality is a common theme in ****s work. Imagery: the fire balloons and animals that have been brushed by the fire. Together they create a tension that is brought into harmony, if not exactly resolved, in the last quatrain. Despite the beauty of the balloons, in the end the speaker calls them "too pretty" and their mimicry "dreamlike" as if rejecting the poem's initial images. Instead the poem concludes with references to the owls' "piercing cry," the rabbit's panic, and the armadillo itself, weak in its armor, like a "weak mailed fist/ clenched ignorant against the sky!" The impulse to romanticize the picture is revealed in its falsity in the face of the animals' fright.

Little Big Man

1964 novel. Often described as a satire or parody of the western genre, the book is a modern example of picaresque fiction. Berger made use of a large volume of overlooked first-person primary materials, such as diaries, letters, and memoirs, to fashion a wide-ranging and entertaining tale that comments on alienation, identity, and perceptions of reality.

There Was a Child Went Forth

A child went out each day and the first object he saw, he became. That object continued to remain part of him either for a short while or for many years. Such objects as lilacs, grass, morning glories... "these became part of that child who went forth every day, and who now goes, and will always go forth every day." / This poem expresses the poet's identification of his consciousness with all objects and forms, and the list of things which he himself identifies with is large and comprehensive and is a good example of Whitman's catalogs. The continual process of becoming is at the heart of the poem. We become something or grow into something and this is the process of becoming, of change and development. The interpenetration of the child's consciousness and physical phenomena, as shown in this poem, is one of the essential elements of Whitman's thought.

Resolution and Independence

At the heart of the poem is the question of whether the poet will become a responsible human being, independent of others for his own happiness. He realizes that his essential quality of mental or spiritual identity cannot rely upon an external environment for its continuing strength. At first, the speaker feels at one with the happy springtime setting, but when he falls suddenly into despair, he is puzzled into a crisis of confidence in himself. Then, when he has most need, the old man appears as if "by peculiar grace" to serve as an admonishment. / All that occurs in the poem is a consequence of the poet's sense of need, apparently without cause.

The Gulag Archipelago

Au. discusses his own arrest, and at intervals thereafter he refers to his own case and events he observed while under detention important for its relationship with each type of work the author has undertaken, and thus it could be considered as central to his literary endeavors. Explicitly political pronouncements also may be comprehensible largely within the context of his study of the Soviet forced labor system.

Penrod

Au.'s second wife, Susannah, challenged her husband to "write about boys as they really are." She had brought to his attention a British book about student life at Harrow; Tarkington said "no boy ever talked like the puppets in that story." He set out to write realistic stories about boys like his nephews, or like he had been himself. The ***stories were the result. He developed theories on childhood. A child in the course of becoming an adult repeats the history of the human race from savagery to civilization. The period from eight to fourteen years is of pivotal importance in child development, he maintained in an article published in American Magazine in 1925, "What I Learned from Boys." ***, twelve at the time of his appearance in the stories, is nearing the end of this stage. He is essentially savage, but gives indications that this savagery is becoming somewhat tempered.

The Purloined Letter

Auguste Dupin, the coldly logical star detective of three short stories written between 1841 and 1844. Author created a character whose evidence-based detection set the standard for later Sherlockian-style deduction. Author called it "ratiocination," but we can just call it "thinking like a smart person."

Ode on Melancholy

Author contracted the disease from taking care of his beloved brother, Tom, who died a few years earlier. When he found out that he'd gotten tuberculosis, too, he was heartbroken, he fell into a deep depression. Because he thought that he, and his poetry, would be forgotten. / he speaker warns the reader not to try to relieve the pain of melancholy with poisons like "wolf's-bane." Instead, he suggests that the reader contemplate the sad shortness of life. Joy, he says, is always brief, and beauty never lasts forever. Melancholy is always attached somehow to joy and pleasure, since joy and pleasure are always temporary. In order to experience joy, we have to allow ourselves to experience grief and pain.

When You Are Old

Author exhorts his beloved: when you are old and falling asleep by your fire, take down this book, and dream of how you used to be as you read it./Dream of how many people loved you when you were younger. Only one man loved you as you grew older. / The idea of love in age is an ancient one, meant to express the fact that love inheres not merely in youth, but in something deeper and more lasting. Yeats capitalizes "Love," thus personifying the concept, which is is a nod to the poem's 16th century roots. Although monotheism had taken over Europe, Greek and Roman gods were very much a part of 16th century consciousness. Yeats's "Love" is a modernization of the ancient figure, Eros.

Chicago

Because of his crazy diverse careers, au. had a pretty unique view of what it means to be an American, and we see his love for the country that gave him all of his varied opportunities in the poem ***. In some ways, this poem is a love letter to the city itself. It's a poem that acknowledges the bad along with the good, the horrific along with the wondrous, the salacious along with the holy. ***has room for hobos and poets alike, and this is what Sandburg loves about his city.

The Call of the Wild

Buck (dog0 isn't all about the "man's best friend" thing. He's all about making sure to follow its natural instincts doesn't go to voicemail / wild: It means near-starvation, running for hours on end, fighting 'til the death, and sleeping in sub-zero conditions. But it also means total freedom and a life full of thrilling adventure.

Anne of Green Gables

But when these orphan stories were about girls, they had a formula: A female orphan offers a service to someone lonely—a single person or widow.+ She'll clean for them or watch young children, and she might help them with a problem or save them from illness over the course of the story. +The grown-up grows to like her, and at the end, decides to keep her. (Check out a book called Looking for Anne of Green Gables: The Story of L.M. Montgomery and her Literary Classic for more on this.) And one little redhead emerged on the scene to break this formula into smithereens. /***'s the very opposite of a serviceable child. She daydreams, she messes up the housework, and she has a temper. In other words, she's a kid. When Marilla comments on how it doesn't make sense to keep ***because she won't be useful, Matthew counters with, "We might be some good to her."

Gimpel the Fool

By having the protagonist narrate his own story, Singer achieves a mixture of humor, realism, and fantasy; what ***narrates is unquestionably happening, but the interpretation of the events is that of a simple, naïve commentator/ The strong faith, the essential goodness, of the narrator is childlike in its simplicity: He is like a child who does not know how to interpret the incomprehensible things that are told to him by adults. Singer maintains this tone of childlike simplicity by his choice of words and by the unaffected language with which Gimpel expresses his perception of reality.

Just So Stories

Collection of whimsical tales accompanied by the author's excellent pen-and-ink drawings and humorous verse./ Like Aesop's fables, some of the tales in **** anthropomorphize animals to illustrate human virtues and failings. Like traditional folklore and myths, other stories in the collection explain the origins of natural phenomena.

Mont Blanc

Composed under the immediate impression of the deep and powerful feelings excited by the objects which it attempts to describe. Speaker is staring at this giant wonder of nature, and immediately he begins to personify the mountain because otherwise it is too big to understand. He thus draws parallels between its awesome creation and that of his own mind. Shelley brings forth the central problem about comprehending the nature of the "power" of the "everlasting universe of things" by employing the river as a metaphor. - It questions the significance of the interchange between nature and the human mind

Sons and Lovers

Despite being fictionalized, this book is semi-autobiographical. The story centers on the admiration and love that Paul Morel has for his mother, Gertrude—a great woman who ruins her life by marrying a coal miner named Walter Morel, who turns out to be an abusive boozehound. / this novel is heavily influenced by Sigmund Freud's concept of the Oedipus Complex./ Freud also wrote about how sexual desire can get expressed in things that aren't obviously sexual, so Lawrence was able to follow his lead—to broach issues of sexuality in his writing indirectly, back when people were pretty hostile to anything sex-related. Just take a look at some of Lawrence's descriptions of flowers and you'll see what we mean...

Good Country People

Does your mother drive you nuts? Then there's something for you in these short pages. Do you ever wish you could just pack your bags and get the heck out of Dodge? Hulga, our main girl in this story, certainly does. Have you ever tricked someone else out of their fake eye? No? Good on ya. But if you're curious about just who the heck would do such a thing, well, then definitely pick up ****

Frankestein

During the summer of 1816, eighteen-year-old Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin was hanging out in a Swiss lake house with her lover and future husband Percy Bysshe Shelley; famous English poet, Lord Byron; and Byron's doctor John Polidori. (And some others, but those are the important names.) It was a bummer of a vacation, since the 1815 eruption of Indonesian volcano Mount Tambora disrupted weather patterns so severely that 1816 became known as the "Year Without Summer."/ Lord Byron challenged everyone to write the scariest, freakiest, spookiest story they could come up with. Polidori came up with The Vampyre, one of the first sexy vampire stories in the English language. Byron wrote a few fragments. And Mary Godwin had a vision (she claims) that she turned into one of the most famous horror stories in English literature: Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus.

Sister Carrie

Eighteen-year-old *** Meeber is leaving her parents and her small Midwestern town behind. She's on a train headed for Chicago where she's got plans to move in with her big sister Minnie. What's she planning to do there? Well, we don't exactly know that yet... but she'll figure it out. / Her adventure is off to a great start already: Charles Drouet, a traveling salesman with impeccable taste in clothing, flirts with her the whole train ride to Chicago. And once they get to Chi-Town, he makes it clear that he wants to hang out again./ themes: women and femininity, society and class, morality, ambition

Ivanhoe

Everybody read and commented on au.'s books, including Victor Hugo (author of Les Misérables) and Mark Twain. He basically invented the genre of the historical novel. His influence on fiction of the 19th century is impossible to overestimate. /Au. was worried that he was falling into a rut with these Scottish Highland dramas. He didn't want to be boring or repetitive. That's why he set Ivanhoe in 12th century England. ****portrays the legendary thieves Robin Hood and Friar Tuck, who (unlike Scottish outlaw Rob Roy) do not have documented historical proof of their existence. In general, Scott's readers thought Ivanhoe seemed less realistic than Scott's earlier novels, since Scott was not a historian of British medieval history. This criticism continued into the 20th century, when commentator David Daiches wrote, "Scott did not, in fact, know the Middle Ages well and he had little understanding of its social or religious life"

London, 1802

First of all, it's an obvious call for help; the poet, ***, laments the state of England, and expresses his fears about the health of the national character. Second, it's an elegy for John Milton, a great English poet of the 17th century (famous for the super-long and spectacular epic, Paradise Lost). Finally, it's just a gosh darned good old-fashioned sonnet. In just fourteen lines, ****manages to invoke his poetic forefather, sketch out his view of England's character and inhabitants, and demonstrate to us just how skilled he is with rhyme and meter by crafting a gorgeous Petrarchan sonnet. It's also a bold condemnation of the poet's nation and fellow countrymen.

The Relation of the Poet to Daydreaming

Freud's account of daydreaming is the means by which these trances arise. Freud asserts that daydreams are a continuation of child's play. He says that we never really gave up playing, we just took up daydreaming instead, stating that "when we appear to give something up, all we really do is adopt a substitute"

To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time

From the title, we can tell that the speaker is addressing this poem to a group of virgins. He's telling them that they should gather their "rosebuds" while they can, because time is quickly passing. He drives home this point with some images from nature, including flowers dying and the sun setting. He thinks that one's youth is the best time in life, and the years after that aren't so great. The speaker finishes off the poem by encouraging these young virgins to make good use of their time by getting married, before they're past their prime and lose the chance.

Sonnet 106

In old chronicles, there are descriptions of handsome knights and beautiful ladies. Had these writers known the youth, they would have expressed it in their work. In fact, their descriptions are prophecies that prefigure the beauty of the youth. Though they had prophetic power, they did not have enough poetic skill. Even we, though we can see the perfection of the youth, lack the words to praise it

Hap

Hardy's impetus in writing the poem was to explore and explain the reasons for his own suffering. The poet asks this question explicitly at the beginning of the third stanza: "How arrives it joy lies slain . . .?" The problem is not merely that joy is slain but also that pain is plentiful on his pilgrimage of life. Hardy takes up the question of God's existence, or, more to the point, the nature of the relationship between God and humanity. / he sees himself encapsulated by omnipotent cosmic forces described as "some vengeful god," "Powerfuller than I," "Crass Casualty," "dicing Time," and "purblind Doomsters." / English sonnet: Its fourteen lines are written in iambic pentameter/ Hardy's use of the first person leaves no doubt about the poem's existence as a personal expression of the author's own attitudes about and experiences with life, here a certain resigned bitterness attributed to chance or bad luck./ The sonnet is basically constructed around a simplistic metaphor: Life is a pilgrimage through which Hardy journeys, experiencing pain and suffering only. While making this journey, the poet is aware of the existence of God, but he is seemingly unable to determine whether he is a "vengeful" one.

Heart of Darkeness

His works explore the seedy underbelly of imperialism, the move in the nineteenth century for European countries to stake out claim to various far-flung parts of the world. / It is set right after the Scramble for Africa, the period of the late nineteenth century when imperial powers sliced up and doled out Africa like some particularly delicious—and ivory-rich—birthday cake. None of the Western countries really come off looking good in this whole debacle, but Belgium, unfortunately, looks particularly bad. They were after the valuable ivory hidden away in the African Interior, and they weren't afraid to brutalize and oppress the Africans in order to get it. Heart of Darkness follows the disturbing journey of English ivory-trading agent Marlow, who, working for a Belgian company, travels into the jungles of Africa in search of a mysterious man named Kurtz who appears to have (1) become a god-like figure, and (2) gone totally mad.

Love [III]

How ingenious it is to name God, or Christ, simply "Love."/ When the persona protests that he "cannot look on" Love out of his feelings of unworthiness, Love asks the rhetorical question of "Who made the eyes but I?" In that line, the rhyme of "eye" and "I" echo the relationship between "looking" and the purpose of the "eye", drawing attention to the fact that the eyes were made for looking-and in particular, most truly, to look upon the maker of the eyes. The truth of this relationship rings in the rhyme. Love is insisting that this is the relationship the persona was made for. The "marr'd" eyes, before they were marred, were created to look with joy upon God. So in this stanza we delve into the mystery of the relationship between the Creator and the created.

The Last Leaf

In The Last Leaf by *** we have the theme of commitment, sacrifice, friendship, compassion, hope and dedication. Set in the first decade of the twentieth century the story is narrated in the third person by an unnamed narrator and after reading the story the reader realises that Henry may be exploring the theme of commitment. Throughout the story there is a sense that all three painters mentioned Sue, Johnsy and Behrman are committed to something. Sue has a piece to draw and is working on it throughout the story, while Behrman though he hasn't completed his masterpiece remains focused on it. And Johnsy though not painting is committed to dying as soon as the last ivy leaf falls from the vine. By highlighting each characters commitment Henry may also be suggesting that those who live their lives artistically are driven or focused. Unlike the majority of people who may live their lives working nine to five and forget about work as soon as they clock out.

The Barefoot Boy

Imagery "Where the whitest lilies blow, where the freshest berries grow" "With thy red lip, redder still kissed by strawberries on the hill" / Personification "Nature answers all he asks; hand in hand with her he walks, face to face with her he talks" / Metaphor "All too soon these feet must hide in the prison cells of pride" -"Happy if they sink not in the quick and treacherous sands of sin" / Meaning: The poem means that youth is very special and should be appreciated Childhood is free of worry, pain, and sorrow The poet is telling the reader to cherish childhood while one still has it. The poem brings up in the reader joyful and carefree memories of youth. The speaker tells the boy to enjoy childhood while he has it because when he grows up, he will have to deal with worry, pain, and sin Social Context: The antislavery movement had begun during Whittier's lifetime. He founded the antislavery Liberty party in 1840 and ran for Congress

Middle Passage

In **** the author mingles the voices of multiple speakers to depict the voyages of slave traders bringing Africans across the Atlantic Ocean. The central purpose of*** is to record, poetically and objectively, the process of change and the paradox of permanence among all humans: "immortal human wish, the timeless will." The poem does so by using images to illustrate conflicting claims and viewpoints about the slave trade. The nature of exploiters—private, public, religious, and legal—is contrasted with the voices of their victims. "Jests of kindness on a murderer's mouth" assault the concept of moral "human progress" for which the voices are praying.Although the time period of the poem begins in the sixteenth century and its final event occurs in the nineteenth century, "Middle Passage" also reflects a transitory stage in the development of America and African Americans: "weaving toward New World littorals that are mirage and myth and actual shore." The universal quest to arrive safely, in a religious, commercial, private, or public sense, is a recurrent theme in "Middle Passage." By means of this theme, Hayden projects death as an intensification of life. All of humanity is in a middle passage, traveling toward mental, social, physical, and spiritual salvation.

Hard Times

In England, in the middle of the nineteenth century (a.k.a. Victorian times) Charles Dickens was totally fed up with Utilitarianism (he idea that we should set up society to do the greatest good for the most number of people) and Political Economy. But how can anyone tell what the greatest good is? And what happens to the people who aren't part of that "greatest number"? Utilitarian thinkers were threatening to slowly but surely replace older Judeo-Christian ideas of morality with more statistically based explanations of what people should do for themselves, for one another, and for society. Dickens strongly believed that people are individuals and their lives and choices can't be explained by math or logic alone. Also, he was deeply committed to the idea of acting for the sake of others. Self-sacrifice, altruism, generosity, and compassion were all high on his must-do list. He believed that these behaviors would be lost in an economic system that claims that people should act only according to their self-interest. So, in 1854, to point out the dangers of the popular economic theories in his day, Dickens wrote the novel ****

Sailing to Byzantium

In a world full of Modernism, he stuck closely to traditional forms. While contemporary poets like T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound were busy breaking down the entire history of poetic form, Yeats stuck to the classics. He returned again and again to age-old traditional forms (like ballads or Irish folk tales or even, in this case, ottava rima) / He truly believed in the ability of old forms to modify themselves for the new challenges and possibilities of his modern world. In "****," t this was a huge theme in his poetry, as well. Yeats tried to breathe new life into an aging shell. / Summ: the country we were in before pretty much sucked. It's a nice enough place to be if you're young and pretty and perfect, but once you start to show a few wrinkles or some grey hairs, things get ugly fast / themes: transformation, old age

Ode to a Nightingale

In this poem, *** celebrates the ****, a bird with a particularly magical voice./ it's a loaded symbol for Keats because the origins of the *** had been so famously explained in the collection of stories called the Metamorphoses, by the Roman poet Ovid.... Procne into a swallow and Philomela into a nightingale. The irony is that the woman who lost her voice (and her tongue) becomes the bird with one of the most beautiful voices in all of nature./ In this poem, the speaker wishes to flee from the pressures of the world, kind of like how Philomela escapes from her would-be murderer. / Ode in Iambic Pentameter

When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer

In this short but famous poem, **** describes attending a lecture by a really smart astronomer, getting bored, and then going out by himself to look at the stars, as if to say, "I'll be the judge of that." Whitman is a prime example of what the nineteenth-century American philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson called "self-reliance."/ ****is saying that the true way to understand nature is not scientific but intuitive and mystical. The poet can feel and understand the processes of nature when he is experiencing them, but listening to people lecture about them merely makes him "tired and sick.

Mutability

In typical Romantic fashion, a first-person poetic persona compares people to restless clouds. Clouds speed brightly across the sky but disappear at night, presumably like a human life. The persona then compares people to lyres, stringed instruments, that are always playing different tunes based on different experiences. he persona then complains that whether we are asleep or awake, a bad dream or a "wandering thought" interferes with our happiness. Whatever we think, however we feel, "It is the same," meaning that all will pass away and people will change. Thus, the one thing that endures is ****.

Howl

It appears to be a sprawling, disorganized poem. But it's not. It consists of three sections. Each of these sections is a prolonged "riff" on a single subject. You could even think of the poem as three enormous run-on sentences. The first section is by far the longest. He has been a witness to the destruction of "the best minds" of his generation / what destroyed the best minds of his generation? Ginsberg provides the answer immediately: Moloch. In the Hebrew Bible, Moloch was an idolatrous god to whom children were sacrificed by placing them in fire. In other words, not a friendly god./The third section is addressed to Carl Solomon, Ginsberg's close friend from the Columbia Presbyterian Psychiatric Institute. The speaker refers to this psychiatric hospital by the shorter and more evocative fictional name of Rockland / between a Zen-like chant and (quoting a line from Walt Whitman) a "barbaric yawp./ free verse, long lines

Directive

It begins when a self-proclaimed guide meets you at the gate, shows you how to back out of your old crowded life into a past that is a bit blurry with age and weather. He stops to comment on a house and farm and town—none of which are there still. But there's a road etched by wagon wheels and a glacier's chisel, and the coolness of the mountain air, so that's something. When you're passing the relics of an old homestead and the kids' playhouse, things get a little strange, especially since your guide really just wants you to get lost. He takes you beyond the old orchard, beyond the overgrown field, beyond the house and the playhouse, beyond even your own deepest confusion, and there you'll find a watering hole of sorts / blank verse, iambic pentameter / alliteration, repetition, allusion: William Wordsworth's "The World is Too Much With Us" The Holy Grail legend (57) Saint Mark (36, 59) / themes: Melancholy, Mysterious Musings

The Negro Speaks of Rivers

It celebrated the voice and the soul of the black community in a time of great racial intolerance, injustice, and inequality in America. Hughes helped to inspire and unite the black community when their voice was not appreciated by a predominantly white society / connects the soul and heritage of the African-American community to four great rivers in the Middle East, Africa, and America. In this way, the poem charts the journey of African and African-Americans and links this community to the birth of civilization. The speaker tells the tale of freedom and enslavement that his people have endured, and it heralds their wisdom and strength.

Bless me, Ultima

It f ollows the trials and tribulations of Antonio "Tony" Márez as he tries to find his way in the world. He is about to start school, learn a new language (English), meet a whole new group of children, and begin his religious studies as he moves towards taking his First Holy Communion. He's guided on his journey by Ultima, a wise curandera—think part medicine woman, part Episode IV-era Obi-Wan Kenobi. Deep into the family life, religious beliefs, and conflicting pasts of Chicano culture. In the novel, we see the struggle between Spanish heritage and Native American heritage; the desire for the younger generation to be a part of America, while the older generation struggles to hold onto traditions of the past; and a universal story of a young boy taking his first steps towards manhood.

We Real Cool

It has become an example of what can be accomplished in a very short space with simple, everyday language.The poem lists off the thoughts of some young guys playing pool at a pool house. it's actually more complicated than that. In fact, the lines we read are what an outside observer thinks these boys might be feeling. So this observer, our speaker, thinks the boys might have dropped out of school - While many traditional couplets in poetry have a rhyme at the end of the line, this poem takes rhyming to a new level: the couplets rhyme in the middle. - themes: pride, identity, mortality

The Snow-Storm

It implicitly states author's philosophy of the transcendental spirit in the nature. This poem describes very succinctly how the nature's creative force leaves an amazing architectural landscape in just a night's playful work. The snowstorm constructs wonderful structures that civilizations of human endeavor have not been able to achieve. he poem begins by describing the arrival of the snowstorm. It is described in the terms of a victorious march, as if it were an army 'driving over the field'. But the very third line tells us that it is not only the physical and literal snowstorm, but also the manifestation of the creative spirit of the nature, that has arrived: "seems nowhere to alight". And the 'whited' air hides hills and woods, rivers and heaven, and veils the farmhouse. In this there is a suggestion of the superiority of the nature even over what the heaven symbolizes. The onset of the poem conveys breathless speed, but then as the snow itself delays actions, the movement of the verse

A Clean, Well Lighted Place

It is Hemingway's paean to a type of existential nihilism, an exploration of the meaning, or lack thereof, of existence. It clearly expresses the philosophy that underlies the Hemingway canon, dwelling on themes of death, futility, meaninglessness, and depression. Through the thoughts and words of a middle-aged Spanish waiter, Hemingway encapsulates the main tenet of his existential philosophy. Life is inherently meaningless and leads inevitably to death, and the older one gets, the clearer these truths become and the less able one is to impose any kind of order on one's existence or maintain any kind of positivity in one's outlook. The bases of Hemingway's philosophy in this story are existentialism, a philosophical system originated in the 19th century by Soren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche and given full play in the post WWI years by Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus and Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and nihilism, a related philosophical system popularized primarily by Nietzsche. Existentialism derives from the belief that existence is inherently meaningless and that individuals are solely responsible for giving meaning to their own lives

Ships that Pass in the Night

It is a cry for opportunity for all men, regardless of race. This poem directly parallels a passage from Frederick Douglass' autobiography that gives an account of his life as a slave. Both authors look out at the ships that sail by and see hopes for societal changes. Although they both sought change, their aspirations were quite different. Frederick Douglass watched the ships from ashore, wishing for freedom and for slavery to be abolished. **** on the other hand was already a free man. He was on a ship, still more of an opportunity than **** had, yet he was still in search for new opportunities for African Americans. The new opportunities that he seeks are upon a ship somewhere sailing in the dark night and keep passing him by.

Epitaph of a Tyrant

It is a six line poem that incorporates some end rhyme. The rhyme scheme is ABBCAC, wherein line 1 rhymes with line 5; lines 2 and 3 rhyme, and lines 4 and 6 rhyme. The poem consists of one stanza. The poem deals with the thoughts and actions of a tyrant. Typically, a tyrant abuses his power and position of authority. Tyrants like to be in complete control and tend to quash, in a harsh way, any opposition to their policies and programs. In essence, au. in a subtle, understated way is discussing what happens in a society when a tyrant rules a nation. / This poem is saying that the tyrant's way is easy for citizens of the nation to understand - it is his way or the highway. The tyrant understands human behavior and motives and knows that striking fear into the heart of the citizenry is an easy way to control them. People often acquiesce when their lives and livelihoods are threatened. Therefore, the tyrant manipulates and controls people by having strict punishment always hanging over them like the sword of Damocles.

Rip Van Winkle

It is based on local history but is rooted in European myth and legend. / One day *** wanders into the mountains to go hunting, meets and drinks with English explorer Henry Hudson's legendary crew, and falls into a deep sleep. He awakens twenty years later and returns to his village to discover that everything has changed. The disturbing news of the dislocation is offset by the discovery that his wife is dead. In time, Rip's daughter, son, and several villagers identify him, and he is accepted by the others. / Author takes pity on his comical creation, however, and does not punish him. Instead, ***is allowed back into the new society and tolerated for his eccentricities, almost as if he were a curiosity. Rip has slept through vital political, social, and economic changes, including the Revolutionary War, and he returns ignorant but harmless. Irving's suggestion, then, is that Rip is a perfect image of America—immature, careless, and above all, innocent—and that may be why he has become a universal figure.

Spring and Fall

It is full of graceful linguistic flourishes that have come to be the hallmarks of Hopkins's writing / bout contrasts: age and youth, death and life, fall and spring. But more than that, it's about the moment in a child's life when she or he suddenly realizes that childhood doesn't last forever—someday, children grow up, grow old, and die. Wait, are we bumming you out? / The rhyme scheme. It's actually pretty straightforward in this particular poem: AABBCC.../the words "By and by" in line 7 form an internal rhyme with the end rhymes of these lines. What's up with that? Hopkins might want to emphasize those lines in particular. They fall exactly halfway through the fifteen-line poem, and they make a kind of dramatic climax/ neologism/ alliteration

Vanity Fair

Long satirical novel that made fun of the aristocracy and the middle classes: their greed, corruption, and - vanity. / It's the story of two young women whose lives take them in and out of every segment of English society, each of which can be mocked and displayed for laughs in turn. But what's more important than plot is the style of the novel - its bitter and caustic humor. -picaresque

MIss Julie

It is set on Midsummer's Eve on the estate of a Count in Sweden. The young woman of the title is drawn to a senior servant, a valet named Jean, who is particularly well-traveled, well-mannered and well-read. The action takes place in the kitchen of Miss Julie's father's manor, where Jean's fiancée, a servant named Christine, cooks and sometimes sleeps while Jean and *** talk. - One theme of the play is Darwinism, a theory that was a significant influence on the author during his naturalistic period. Two lead characters, Miss Julie and Jean, as vying against each other in an evolutionary "life and death" battle for a survival of the fittest. The character, ***, represents the last of an old aristocratic breed about to die out as well as a characterization of women in modernity, whereas Jean represents one who is clambering upwards, and who is more fit to thrive because he is better able to adapt in terms of the "life roles" he can take on.

Byzantium

It is written after four years of his writing the poem entitled "Sailing to ***". The poem "***" is parallel to "Sailing to ***". Both poems are the poems about escape from a world of flux to the kingdom of permanence. It is a proper presentation of an ideal state beyond life.

Sonnet 147

It is written from the perspective of a poet who regards the love he holds for his mistress and lover as a sickness, and more specifically, as a fever. The sonnet details the internal battle the poet has between his reason (or head) and the love he has for his mistress (his heart).

The Draft Horse

It offers the reader a seemingly simple story of a violent event that takes place during a journey made by a couple of people in a horse-drawn buggy. On one level the poem is simplicity itself, containing no words or phrases that should cause the reader any difficulties. However, when one asks the question: "What does it all mean?" the poem becomes somewhat problematical./ four-line stanzas with an ABCB rhyme scheme. / the imagery here seems to be all negative. There is "a lantern that wouldn't burn", "too frail a buggy" and "too heavy a horse"/ Clearly this is a poem about death, because the horse is killed/ The death that is portrayed is therefore that of comfort and security, which can come suddenly to anyone and leave them with no option other than to rely entirely on their own ability to "walk the rest of the way"

Dover Beach

It opens with a quiet scene. A couple looks out on the moonlit water of the English Channel, and listens to the sound of the waves. Then, all of a sudden it zooms out. And we mean way out. See, the sound of the waves makes the speaker think first of ancient Greece. Then he turns the sound of the surf into a metaphor for human history, and the gradual, steady loss of faith that his culture has experienced. The poem ends on a gorgeous, heartbreaking note, with the couple clinging to their love in a world of violence and fear and pain. / Themes: spirituality, Man and the Natural World

Frost at Midnight

It reflects a love of and longing for Nature, a back-to-the-land ethos, and a mystical sense of religion. / ***is the best of Coleridge's "Conversation" poems. In essence, the "Conversation" poems were poems that took the form of... well, conversations (actually, monologues)—no surprise there. But these poems were radical because, even though they might seem sort of complicated today, they actually spoke to people in a more direct form of language (like Wordsworth's poetry did too): the common tongue./ in the Conversation Poems, Coleridge seems really depressed—having a bad marriage and being addicted to opium can definitely do that to you. But "***" is one of the brighter moments. It's actually fairly optimistic, basically amounting to a prayer and a benediction for his baby son,

Good-bye, proud world!

It reflects his theories about self-reliance, the holiness of nature and solitude, and the decadence of organized society. The youthful poet is eager to leave the sterile, lonely life of the city and return to his family's peaceful "sylvan home."

The Library of Babel

It represents the universe as an infinite library and extends metaphysical implications from there. / he juxtaposition of chance with a determinism directly derived from the notion of chance. The Lottery's ultimate authority comes from its capacity to determine fate, and yet this capacity is based on chance. This means one of two things: either the Lottery does not function by chance and is riddled by corruption, or the corporation of the Lottery is actually no more powerful or important than chance itself. In either situation, the important point to glean from this allegory is the proclivity of society and institutions to capitalize on the nature of life. Chance is an inevitable component of life, whether it is perceived as pure quantum randomness or the will of God too complex for humanity to comprehend or anticipate.

Leda and the Swan

It retells the story from Greek mythology of the rape of a girl named *** by Zeus, the most powerful of the Greek gods. The "twist" of the story is that Zeus is disguised as a ****. The author presents this tale in a relatively graphic way, so modern readers may find the language disturbing. Stories about sex with animals were fairly common in classical societies like Ancient Greece, and the myth of *** and the swan was once well known. After the rape, *** gets pregnant and gives birth to Helen of Troy. According to the story, Helen was hatched from an egg. Helen was the most beautiful woman in the world, and her abduction by a young man named Paris led to the Battle of Troy (Trojan War) / Some critics have interpreted "Leda and the Swan" as an allegory for the "rape" of Ireland by its colonial masters, the British. Other critics have found its depiction of rape to be tantalizing to the point of offensiveness. However you feel about it, there's no denying the beauty of Yeats's words, even if the actions they describe are horrible.

An Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot

It shares the theme common to satirists since the days of the Roman poets Horace and Juvenal: the constant struggle of "good" writers to maintain their standards of artistic achievement and integrity in a world dominated by "bad" writers and their corrupt patrons and sycophants. Pope imaginatively realizes this struggle by guiding readers through a kind of "rogue's gallery": Codrus is a supremely bad writer, Sporus a monster of duplicity and deceit, and Bufo a "patron of the arts" with absolutely no genuine interest in art and artists beyond his own self-aggrandizement. / Effective satire of the kind Pope favored works not so much in calling a fool a fool as in creating a world in which fools show themselves to be fools. Pope is able to create such a world largely through his use of Arbuthnot. As a writer of some talent, but more important as a man of great personal honor and integrity,

The Parable of the Old Man and the Young

It takes the biblical story of Abraham and Isaac and gives it new vitality and resonance in the context of the First World War. / The poem is written in iambic pentameter but uses blank verse rather than traditional rhyme. This metre gives the poem its solemn, preachy quality; it is intended to be a parable and surely succeeds as one. Owen's customary pararhyme pops up here as well ("together, father"). The poem does a good job of hewing to a narrative flow even though it possesses an irregular sound pattern. The language is closest to the text from the King James Version of the Bible. / It is commonly assumed that Abram stands for the rulers of Europe and Isaac is a typical soldier, representative of all the young men slaughtered so such rulers could play out their games of conquest. Rather than slay their own pride, the military machine sacrificed the next generation. Owen's poem may be traditional in its structure, but the seething commentary is certainly not ambiguous. Scholar Andrew Gates writes, "Owen's poem is not one of idealized glory and divine mystery, but an account of true and bitter reality of his day."

The Canterbury Tales

It tells the story of a group of pilgrims (fancy word for travelers) on their way to ***, who engage in a tale-telling contest to pass the time. Besides watching the interactions between the characters, we get to read 24 of the tales the pilgrims tell. And as it turns out, Medieval storytellers had some 'tude. ***likely wrote ****in the late 1380s and early 1390s, after his retirement from life as a civil servant. In this professional life, Chaucer was able to travel from his home in England to France and Italy. There, he not only had the chance to read Italian and French literature, but possibly, even to meet Boccaccio, whose Decameron—a collection of tales told by Italian nobility holed up in a country house to escape the plague ravaging their city—may have inspired the frame story of ****.

From Astrophil and Stella

It tracks the development of a love affair. Over the course of the sequence of poems, the protagonist and narrator Astrophel falls in love with the beautiful Stella, a woman who is virtuous, intelligent, and his idealized partner in life. Most of the sonnets consist of Astrophel as the speaker and Stella as the recipient of his speeches. Because Astrophel is the "author" of the sonnet sequence, we can perceive his inner thoughts and emotions but not much of Stella's. Stella's thoughts and personality are revealed to us only through her actions and occasional speeches to Astrophel. The sonnet sequence would be very different if Sidney had provided a more obvious indication of Stella's feelings. As it is, we partake mainly in just one side of the romance.

The Open Boat

It was around this time (New Year's Eve 1896, to be specific) that author****stepped aboard the steamship SS Commodore, destination: Cuba. Crane was on his way to the island to report on the local uprising against Spain. The thing is, he never made it. Three days into the journey, the ship sank just off the coast of Florida. After the sinking, Crane spent thirty hours adrift at sea in a small lifeboat with three other men. /With little hope of rescue, the four made the decision to try to reach shore on their own. They were successful, but one of the men drowned in the process. Back on shore, Craned realized he needed something to write about since he never made it to Cuba, so he wrote up an account of the ship sinking and his saga getting rescued from the lifeboat, which was published in the New York Press just a few days later, on January 7, 1897

La Belle Dame sans Merci: A Ballad

It was written towards the end of the authors life, after his brother Tom died, but before he found out that he was dying of the same disease. / the speaker comes across a "knight at arms" alone, and apparently dying, in a field somewhere. He asks him what's going on, and the knight's answer takes up the rest of the poem. The knight says that he met a beautiful fairy lady in the fields. He started hanging out with her, making flower garlands for her, letting her ride on his horse, and generally flirting like knights do. Finally, she invited him back to her fairy cave. But after they were through smooching, she "lulled" him to sleep, and he had a nightmare about all the knights and kings and princes that the woman had previously seduced - they were all dead. And then he woke up, alone, on the side of a hill somewhere / Ballad, Iambic Tetrameter Quatrains

The Darkling Thrush

It's the very end of the day. In fact, it's the very end of the year. The countryside is frozen into an icy, unwelcoming landscape. As our speaker stares out into the gloom, he's reminded that everything around him is on the fast track to death and decay. We're not saying that our speaker is a downer. He's just not exactly a "glass half full" sort of guy...Things go from dull and depressing to outright dismal. No life seems to stir. Anywhere...until, that is, our speaker hears the most unexpected sound: a bird singing...Why be joyful when the world is so crummy? Well, that's a good question. In fact, that's exactly the question that our speaker asks himself..Strangely enough, our speaker doesn't even try to figure it out. He's content to know that something out there sees a reason to exist and to be joyful

Mowing

It's very quiet beside the woods where the narrator is mowing his field with a scythe. The scythe whispers back and forth as he works, and he starts imagining what the scythe might be saying. However, he knows perfectly well that there's nothing really going on beyond his own good old-fashioned hard work. It might be fun to imagine that fanciful things might happen when he's out by himself mowing a field, but the reward of his work is honest and true, and that's good enough for him. themes: choices, visions of New England,

Out, Out--

New England night. In 1916, World War One was raging in Europe, but American poet Robert Frost was out of the action, living on a farm in New Hampshire. Out, Out" is the simple, sad story of a young boy who slices his hand off while cutting wood in front of his house..The doctor comes to help, and amputates the hand. He puts to boy under with ether (an early, dangerous form of anesthesia), but the boy dies. The rest of his family moves on. / Blank verse, aliteration

Love That Doth Reign and Live Within My Thought

Love is made human, a character) in the poem. / The object of the speaker's desires sees this on his/her face, and she rejects that love. Then love removes itself from its visible manifestation on the speaker's face and hides in his/her heart. The speaker is hurt by this love, but he/she will not show it. / The poem ends by stating that death brought on by love is sweet. This is all put into martial (military) language. / This is used to show the conflict that love creates within the speaker. Reign, seat (in this context), captive, coward, lord, and banner all add to the idea that the speaker is a kind of soldier being lead by love, and though it may cause him/her pain and though it may bring about his/her death, the speaker won't stop to love. / ****'s translation uses several Petrarchan images that became fashionable in poetic representations of love. The simile of "love as a battlefield," is central to Petrarchanism. Words like captive, arms, banner, and coward create a military confrontation between Love and the beloved woman in which the speaker suffers. The beloved as "cruel fair" is a related Petrarchan idea. The object of affection inspires both desire and terror with her gaze. The lover may feel desire but must refrain from any outward show of it; here, the speaker unfairly suffers the withering gaze of his beloved when in fact it is the personified Love who is boldly showing himself, although the beloved is not likely to accept that excuse./ *** uses fairly regular iambic pentameter in this poem, although some lines begin with a trochee before

Sonnet 116

Love should not stand in the way of "the marriage of true minds", cannot be true if it changes for any reason; true love should be constant, through any difficulties. In the seventh line, the poet makes a nautical reference, alluding to love being much like the north star is to sailors. Love also should not fade with time; instead, true love is, as is the polar star, "ever-fixèd" and lasts forever.

Their Eyes Were Watching God

Love, hate, murder, gossip, travel, politics, poetry, death, and life—Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God has it all. In fact, there's so much in this novel that you'll find yourself wondering exactly how Hurston packed so much into such a slender text / it's about people and love and culture and politics and tradition—in short, it's about what it means to be human / Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison didn't like it. These guys championed social realism over anything that looked remotely like romance...and were probably being pretty stuffy about the fact that Their Eyes Were Watching God is unabashedly carnal. This novel is hot.

Sympathy

Lyric poem, since it gives us a glimpse into the speaker's thoughts and emotions. The speaker starts us off by saying that he knows exactly what a caged bird feels. It doesn't feel good, especially when outside of the bird's cage the sun is bright and a river is flowing and the wind is stirring through the grass. "tetrameter" . However, the last line of each stanza is only three feet long, or a "trimeter." theme: Freedom and Confinement - The speaker tells us that he knows why the caged bird "beats his wing" until they're bloodied against the bars of its cage. there's a lot of alliteration,

Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey

Lyrical Ballads weren't just revolutionary in terms of the language they used; they also changed the whole idea of what poetry could and should be about. Instead of writing about kings, queens, and historical or mythological subjects, Wordsworth and Coleridge wrote most of the poems in Lyrical Ballads about common people, like shepherds and farmers." "***" is a little bit different in that it's about the poet himself, rather than a shepherd or distraught mother, but it is still representative of a lot of the changes Wordsworth wanted to make to the way poetry was written. It's written about common things (enjoying nature during a walk around a ruined abbey with his sister), and it uses a very conversational style with relatively simple vocabulary. It also introduces the idea that Nature can influence, sustain, and heal the mind of the poet. This idea also gets developed in The Prelude, a long, semi-autobiographical poem that Wordsworth worked on in some form for his whole life.

My Lost Youth

Lyrical autobiography. It is about wanting what has already past and no matter how hard we try, we cannot regain what we lost. He describes what Portland, Maine was like during his youth and speaks about the many different sounds and sights where like. He even mentions his early loves and friendships. The repeated phrase, "A boy's will is the wind's will, / And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts." simply means we spend a lot of time thinking about our past when we can't have it./ consists of ten stanzas with nine lines each. Each stanza consists of the rhyme scheme ABAABBCDCE. The last four lines of each stanza are roughly the same with only slight variations. /

The Cask of Amontillado

Montresor describes how he took revenge on Fortunato during a carnival in Venice. Montresor lures Fortunato into the catacombs with a cask of amontillado, and then proceeds to bury him alive. /"The Cask of Amontillado" summary key points: Montresor tells Fortunato he has obtained some rare Amontillado wine and lures him into his cellar. Montresor leads the way into his family catacombs, with the drunk Fortunato following. Montresor chains Fortunato to a wall deep in the catacombs, then bricks up the opening. Fortunato screams for release, but Montresor only mocks him. Fortunato's body remains undiscovered for fifty years.

Daisy Miller

Novella. It was the first work James published which brought about a greater recognition of his witty writing style and narrator obstructed character development/ . His characters before *** tended to be obvious symbolic representations which were slightly too predictable and superficial. However, *** transcended this problem of James, holding symbolic significance but also having a life and substance. / The incongruity between reality and appearance. The idea of subtext is a metaphor for the manner in which the European-American social circle in Europe misunderstands the true character of ***

Rocking Horse Winner

Oedipal drama seasoned with a dash of social commentary and a pinch of the supernatural. It follows the short and tragic life of a boy named Paul, who thinks he has amazing luck after realizing he can predict racehorse winners by furiously riding his rocking horse until he reaches a trance-like state. / It focuses quite a bit on the relationship between a mother and her son. / Just like Lawrence's own experience growing up, *** explores the impact a mother's own frustrations and sense of failure can have on a sensitive and intelligent child who craves her love. / It also explores the tension between what we think and what we feel. In the story, the adults are caught up in what they think they should want: Money, success, nice furniture, stuff like that. They are often described as cold or unfeeling, and obsessed with visible signs of wealth and class position.

Beowulf

Old English epic poem consisting of 3182 alliterative lines. It may be the oldest surviving long poem in Old English and is commonly cited as one of the most important works of Old English literature. Tthe only certain dating pertains to the manuscript, which was produced between 975 and 1025. The poem is set in Scandinavia. ***, a hero of the Geats, comes to the aid of Hrothgar, the king of the Danes, whose mead hall in Heorot has been under attack by a monster known as Grendel. After ***slays him, Grendel's mother attacks the hall and is then also defeated. Victorious, Beowulf goes home to Geatland and later becomes king of the Geats. After a period of fifty years has passed, Beowulf defeats a dragon, but is fatally wounded in the battle. After his death, his attendants cremate his body and erect a tower on a headland in his memory.

Great Expectations

One cold and misty evening, a little boy meets an escaped criminal on the marshes near England's coast / The story of a young blacksmith boy Pip and his two dreams—becoming a gentleman and marrying the beautiful Estella—Great Expectations was serialized from December 1, 1860 until August 3, 1861. With two chapters every week, Great Expectations (and other serialized novels like it) were as close as Victorian England got to Breaking Bad or Mad Men. People waited anxiously every week for the next "episode" to arrive in the newsstands and on the shelves—and you can see why. Dickens was a master of the serialized novel, writing segments full of cliff-hangers and nail-biting action, while remaining true to the novel's overall storyline. His stories worked in pieces and as a cohesive whole—not an easy task. (Just ask J. J. Abrams.) / , it addressed contemporary issues of social justice and inequality. While England was growing rich and powerful in the era of colonialism and the Industrial Revolution, Dickens saw the injustice that ran rampant among the working and lower classes. He documented Britain's underbelly and explored the fight for survival in a time of such wealth.

Madame Bovary

One of the best examples of the Realist novel, and its influence was strongly felt in the decades that followed. In the novel, *** takes us to a level of intimacy and familiarity with his characters that was unimaginable before he came along; even if we don't like the characters or don't think they're doing the right thing, we still feel incredibly close to them / Themes: Dissatisfaction, Freedom and Confinement / The more Emma transgresses, the more beautiful she grows - as though her body responds to the corruption of her soul. Emma's beauty reaches its greatest height at the end of the novel, as she commits her worst crime, suicide. t has to do with her intense connection to her physicality. As Emma delves deeper into her desires, indulging more and more in sensuality, her body becomes far more present, both to us, the readers, and to Emma herself

The Vicar of Wakefield

One of the most beloved and widely-read 18th century English novels. It is also considered a model example of the sentimental novel, one of the era's most popular literary genres. / Goldsmith writes of his protagonist, Dr. Primrose, "The hero of this piece unites in himself the three greatest characters upon earth; he is a priest, an husbandman [farmer], and the father of a family." With Primrose also the narrator, the novel becomes a spiritual autobiography of a Christian hero, whose warning is a Latin epigraph on the title page: "Take heart ye who are miserable; take heed ye who are happy." From this spiritual journey of a fall and a rise, three Christian themes emerge. The first is marriage. Because so much in eighteenth century England depended on rank and station, marrying well was crucial to the hopes of every family. After Primrose loses his money, it becomes hard for his children to marry well, so he relies on farming as a second income to cultivate marriage proposals from Squire Thornhill and Farmer Williams.

Crime and Punishment

One of the most read, most studied, and most (in)famous works of literature in the world. This is a novel all about the vice grip of intense pressures: the pressures of society, of class, of psychology, of morality, of Christianity, and of what it means to be a human in the world. / The scummiest of characters is a little bit angelic, and the most angelic of characters is a little bit scummy. / the characterization in this novel is flat-out genius. After all, it's written by Dostoevsky: a brilliant fiction writer, journalist, and publisher. He also had a gambling problem, suffered from epilepsy, and had constant financial issues. Like the hero of our novel, he spent time in prison in Siberia. He wasn't imprisoned for murder, though, but for being a member of a progressive literary group called the Petrashevsky Circle.

Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking

Out of the ceaselessly rocking cradle of the sea waves, a memory comes back to the poet. He recalls that as a child, he left his bed and "wander'd alone, bareheaded, barefoot" in search of the mystery of life and death. He is a man now but "by these tears a little boy again," and he throws himself on the shore "confronting the waves." He is a "chanter of pains and joys, uniter of here and hereafter," and he uses all his experiences but goes beyond them. / In this experience the boy attempted to fuse the vision of the sea with that of the bird, and this knowledge marked the beginning of the poet in him. The bird, the solitary singer, was a projection of the boy's consciousness. The sea, like the "old crone rocking the cradle," whispered the key word in his ears./ The poem, an elegy, is thought to be based on an intensely personal experience of the poet. just what that experience was is a favorite but fruitless field of speculation for Whitman's biographers. The poem asserts the triumph of the eternal life over death. The meaning of the poem is not stated explicitly, but it springs naturally from a recollection of the narrator's childhood days.

Metamorphoses

Ovid's path to stardom paralleled that of many popular musicians, writers, and filmmakers today: he picked a genre - in his case, love poetry - and stuck to it, working at it and working at it until it was like putty in his hands. "I'd love to show him a thing or two. But how? How?" Then he probably shouted, "I know: I'll write an epic of my own! But not just any old epic - no, this will be a new kind of epic. It won't be one long, boring story, but a collection of many little stories. And it'll be funny, too. I'll call it...Fifteen Books of *** !" And with these words, he stuck that putty on the soles of his sandals, and started bouncing his way up the epic heap.

The Artist of the Beautiful

Owen Warland enjoyed carving intricate figures of birds and flowers and showed mechanical ability. Hence, he is apprenticed to Peter Hovenden, a master watchmaker, with whom, his relatives hope, he will be able to make practical use of his delicate talents. Peter, however, is not impressed with Owen's character. He recognizes his apprentice's considerable talents but senses that Owen does not care to apply them in a conventional way./ Alegory. Each of the characters in the story represents an attitude or principle. Owen embodies the artistic quest. Robert Danforth, strong and earthy, is brute force. Peter Hovenden, who devotes his considerable skill to regulating the temporal world rather than changing it, stands for materialistic skepticism; Annie is the force of love. Each of these last three challenges and threatens Owen, and each is responsible for the destruction of the mechanism in the course of the story. Owen's self-doubt also threatens his success, as indicated by his destroying the artifact after he learns of Annie's engagement when, presumably, he questions the value of his enterprise if it costs him so dearly.

The Scarlet Letter

Passion, wild emotion, and forbidden love. Mid 17th: was a society governed by Puritans, religious men and women who settled at Plymouth Rock, The Puritans left the Church of England because they thought it was getting a little bit too relaxed about things, and they wanted the freedom to practice their own strict form of religion. Set in a deeply religious time and place, the novel is centered around the concept of man's relationship to himself (or herself) and to a Christian God.

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

People tend to think of this novel as a pretty clear case of split personality. But it isn't at all that simple. ---- creates **** so he can have both the respectable lifestyle he's become accustomed to and be a total degenerate in his off hours. He likes being ****. He loves being bad. Ultimately, he loves badness so much that Mr. Hyde takes over. This isn't exactly surprising—****clearly represents the person that ----wishes he could be all the time... if he lived in a world without consequences.

The Man He Killed

The speaker recalls a time when he shot a man in war and realizes that if they had met at a bar instead of on the battlefield, they could have had a grand ol' time. The speaker then goes on to describe how he killed the guy and tries to explain why. But in the end, the speaker doesn't have a good reason for killing the man, because the other man was a complete stranger, and what did he ever do to this guy? /Quatrains of Iambic Trimeter and Tetrameter/ hints of irony/

O Captain! My Captain!

President Lincoln had guided the nation back into safer harbors, and the American people respected him greatly for the clear-headed leadership that he provided. Our man Walt was no exception. Unfortunately, though, Lincoln was assassinated on April 14, 1865, just five days after the Confederate surrender. Whitman, crushed, held vigil as his hero passed away. To mourn the loss of his president, Whitman wrote****/ A sailor sings a song. No, not that song. He's singing a song that praises his captain for leading the ship and crew into the harbor after a long and dangerous voyage—without GPS, even. Everyone's on shore celebrating the safe homecoming, when the sailor notices that the captain is lying dead on the deck of the ship. Not good. While the crowd on the shore is celebrating, unaware of the fallen leader, the sailor walks mournfully upon the deck where the captain has fallen.

Light in August

Published in 1932, William Faulkner's Light in August chronicles the life and death of Joe Christmas, a man of ambiguous racial ancestry. Like The Sound and the Fury, Absalom, Absalom, and As I Lay Dying, Light in August takes place in Faulkner's fictional Yoknapatawpha County (say that five times fast). The so-called Yoknapatawpha novels are linked by their shared location, but they're also linked by certain themes and concerns, such as the legacy of slavery, the persistence of memory, and the South's struggle to come to terms with its defeat in the Civil War, among others.

Preface to Lyrical Ballads

The author explains his theory of poetry. He argues that literary tricks and devices such as personification make it difficult for writers and readers to speak simply and directly about their feelings. He hopes to combat this with his work. *** outlines three principles guiding the composition of such lyrical ballads. First, the poetry must concern itself primarily with nature and life in the country. Second reason for writing lyrical ballads is that they emphasize the status of poetry as a form of art. He intends to enlighten his readers as to the true depths of human emotion and experience. **** argues that good poetry doesn't have to be overly complicated or ornamental in order to capture the reader's imagination. Clean, simple lines are best, in his opinion.

Sonnet 18

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? Part of the Fair Youth sequence (which comprises sonnets 1-126. In the sonnet, the speaker compares his beloved to the summer season, and argues that his beloved is better.

If

The poem is a paean to British stoicism and masculine rectitude; almost every line in each stanza begins with***/ The poem contains a multitude of characteristics deemed essential to the ideal man. They almost all express stoicism and reserve - the classic British "stiff upper lip." In particular, a man must be humble, patient, rational, truthful, dependable, and persevering. His behavior in response to deleterious events and cruel men is important; he must continue to have faith in himself when others doubt him,

Musee des Beaux Arts

So why is Au. such hot stuff? Well, for one thing, he's a jack-of-all-trades. The man turned out poems of all shapes, sizes, and styles - and they were pretty much all readable. *** is an especially great example of his work, though, which is why we're sharing it with you today. For one thing, it's about as simple as a poem can get. Except it's also complex. And emotionally nuanced. Oh, and free-spirited. And politically hard-hitting. In other words, it covers a lot of ground.

Posterity

Some critics have seen it simply as a slashing attack on the emptiness of the literary academic world. The insultingly named American academic Balokowsky / here is an interesting conceit in the idea, in stanza 1, that Balokowsky has even this page — the one on which this poem is printed / We see a certain sympathy with Balokowsky in the phrase 'air- conditioned cell' (3). It is comfortable, but it is nonetheless imprisoning, as is his relationship with his wife's parents (`Myra's folks') [8]) and his need to support his children. / The poem also voices Larkin's ambivalence about his fame. He is characteristically self-deprecating, thinking of his own life as dull

Holy Thursday

Songs of Innocence. the clean-scrubbed charity-school children of London flow like a river toward St. Paul's Cathedral. Dressed in bright colors they march double-file, supervised by "gray headed beadles." Seated in the cathedral, the children form a vast and radiant multitude. They remind the speaker of a company of lambs sitting by the thousands and "raising their innocent hands" in prayer. Then they begin to sing, sounding like "a mighty wind" or "harmonious thunderings," while their guardians, "the aged men," stand by. The speaker, moved by the pathos of the vision of the children in church, urges the reader to remember that such urchins as these are actually angels of God. he children are described as resembling lambs in their innocence and meekness, as well as in the sound of their little voices. The image transforms the character of humming "multitudes," which might first have suggested a swarm or hoard of unsavory creatures, into something heavenly and sublime. The lamb metaphor links the children to Christ (whose symbol is the lamb) and reminds the reader of Jesus's special tenderness and care for children. As the children begin to sing in the third stanza, they are no longer just weak and mild; the strength of their combined voices raised toward God evokes something more powerful and puts them in direct contact with heaven.

Treasure Island

Story for boys; no need of psychology or fine writing" (source). Au.focuses almost entirely on plot in this book, with very little direct exploration of character's psychology or motivations. We don't know what makes Long John Silver a pirate, we just know that he is one - a darned good one - and that's enough to keep the book going.

Everything that Rises Must Converge

Story of mothers and sons on both sides of the black/white divide / she never considered herself liberal or political, she wrote during a time of extreme social change. She was deeply religious when those around her were becoming more and more secular. She managed to incorporate what was going on in the South with integration and civil rights without making it the focus of her writing.

Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802

The poem is remembered not as a biographical record, but as a beautiful depiction of London in the morning, written in plain language that any Englishman could understand. ****apparently wrote the sonnet while sitting on top of his coach. Maybe he was so awed by the city because he didn't live there: he was a country mouse who spent much of his time up in the scenic Lake District of England. When he finally made his way into the city, he was like, "Whoa. This is actually pretty cool."

My Papa's Waltz

The author had a conflicted relationship with his father. He loved the man, but feared him at the same time./ published in the book The Lost Son and Other Poems / ***, though, dealt with the death of his father when he was just fifteen years old; it's probably not coincidental that the speaker of this poem clings on to his father "like death."/ Even in a poem about a memory of a father that should be happy - dancing in the kitchen, making lots of noise, and annoying mom - death and a little bit of violence still creep in. This poem is actually pretty controversial - some people think it's about an abusive, alcoholic father, while others think it's just a happy memory. We guess that the poem is waltzing somewhere in the ambiguity between extremes, so it's up to you to decide how happy this poem really is. / Iambic Trimeter

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

The author is lauded for his total re-envisioning of the novel - and of the world in general / ****really unleashed the massive power of Joyce's innovation and unconventionality upon the literary world. Notably, the novel starts to make use of techniques that would make Joyce famous - and infamous - with Ulysses, such as stream of consciousness narration, interiority (a revealing view of the character's inner workings), and a frank realism that shocked some readers of the time. The novel also introduces us to Stephen Dedalus, who would later be featured prominently in Ulysses. This book is definitely much loved and studied in its own right, however.

The Emperor of Ice-Cream

The author is suggesting that we take a moment to appreciate all of the delicious and fun things that life has to offer without worrying about all of the technical stuff. The technical and serious stuff, according to Stevens, is often silly and not worth fussing over. / The interesting thing about this poem is that all of the delightful language we get occurs during a funeral. Weird? Maybe not. A wise person once said, "You're dead a long time." Those may be depressing words, but the thought is something that we think Stevens would be on board with. Why fret about the fleeting, superficial conditions of existence? We should take a moment to appreciate things for what they are rather than what they seem. In other words, dig the moment and don't fret about appearances too much, because in the end we'll all end up at a funeral / Formally Informal Free Verse

Delight in Disorder

The author presents the theme that beauty is at its most alluring when it is in disarray, like flaming October leaves along a footpath or a "winning wave (deserving note) / In the tempestuous petticoat" (lines 9 and 10). This is a popular theme in literature, as the following quotations—all similar in meaning to Herrick's observation—testify: .......Another way of stating the theme is that imperfections and inconsistencies can enhance the appeal of a person, a place, a thing, an action, or an idea. A single mole on the cheek of a beautiful woman tends to increase rather than diminish her beauty. And graying temples can turn a middle-aged man into a distinguished gentleman.

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufock

The author wrote most of "****" in the years before the start of World War I. At that time, Britain was considered the most modern country in the world.he poem is set in a big, dirty city, and its speaker is a very unhappy man who is afraid of living and therefore bored all the time. War, cities, boredom, and fear: these are all classic modernist themes. huge, life-altering question to ask. - Dramatic Monologue. A good dramatic monologue gradually reveals more and more about the person speaking, without them intending to reveal so much. but looking closer at the poem, you'll find that author is experimenting with all kinds of forms and meters. There are a lot of rhyming couplets, like the first two lines, and the famous verse about the women and Michelangelo. themes: love, time, manipulation

A Modest Proposal

The author's case for cannibalism in *** wasn't for real. A self-appointed shock jock, Au. was just satirizing the stingy British approach to dealing with their Irish subjects. But why, would Au. suggest something as bizarre as chowing down on children? He never shied away from the tough stuff, and in the words of Samuel Johnson, took "delight in revolting ideas from which every other mind shrinks with disgust" (source). In fact, he was perfectly fine with grossing out the literary elite to make his point about the very real problems of famine and overpopulation affecting Ireland.

Gift of the Magi

The author's stories are known for the sentimental warmth that shines through many of them, their playful and optimistic sense of humor, and especially for their twist endings. They're also often written in a uniquely oral style, as if the narrator (or O. Henry himself) were telling you the tale in person. They are perfect for reading aloud.

So We'll Go No More a Roving

The context in which Byron's poem first appeared—a letter that talks about getting tired of things—is a clue to its major themes. At 29, Byron was starting to feel old. He had had just about enough of life in high society at the time, and was ready to chill out a little bit. This is what he means when he says "well go no more a-roving." The nights are great, perfect for going out and getting crazy and having fun, but after a while it gets old. Eventually, it's time to move on to other things, to get more serious, to realize that life isn't gonna last forever. And move on to other things Byron did in the last seven years remaining to him, most importantly to the composition of his greatest work: Don Juan (pronounced "joo-awn"), a satirical masterpiece unfinished at his death.

The Iliad

The interaction between fate and free will A complicated theme, the interaction between fate and free will is present in every book of the Iliad. At times it seems that men have no real freedom. The gods intercede repeatedly, altering events as they please / Pride Pride is a theme of pivotal importance, not only for the Iliad, but for all of Greek literature. Where pride in Christianity is a vice paired off against the central Christian virtue of humility, pride to the ancient Greeks was the source of both ruin and greatness / The pursuit of Glory Closely linked to the above theme, the pursuit of glory is a consuming occupation for Homeric heroes. A Homeric hero wins glory by performing great deeds, the memory of which will outlive him. / The glory of battle and the horror of war Homer has never been surpassed in his ability to portray both the beauty and horror of war. War brings out the best in his heroes, as they tap previously unknown reserves of strength, courage, and loyalty. But war also can bring out the worst in men

Annabel Lee

The last major poem written by ***. ***was also in love with a young woman, his cousin Virginia Clemm, and married her when she was just 13. She had died two years before this poem was written. Whether or not this poem is "autobiographical," we can be sure that Poe knew what he was talking about here. This intense and fascinating poem is one of Poe's most famous. Whether you're an old fan of Poe or brand new to his work, "Annabel Lee" is a really cool example of his unique style and subject matter. / Our speaker wants us to know that his love for *** wasn't just a teenage crush. A little thing like death isn't going to separate him from Annabel Lee. Not even angels or devils could do that. He still sees her everywhere, in his dreams and in the stars. In fact he still loves her so much (here's where it gets really weird) that he goes and lies down with her in her tomb every night. Creepy.

The Soul selects her own Society

The meter of *** is much more irregular and halting than the typical Dickinson poem, although it still roughly fits her usual structure: iambic trimeter with the occasional line in tetrameter /that people choose a few companions who matter to them and exclude everyone else from their inner consciousness) conjures up images of a solemn ceremony with the ritual closing of the door, the chariots, the emperor, and the ponderous Valves of the Soul's attention. Essentially, the middle stanza functions to emphasize the Soul's stonily uncompromising attitude toward anyone trying to enter into her Society once the metaphorical door is shut—even chariots, even an emperor, cannot persuade

Mother to Son

The mother says to her son that life has not been a "crystal stair" - it has had tacks and splinters and torn boards on it, as well as places without carpet. The stair is bare. However, she still climbs on, reaching landings, turning corners, and persevering in the dark when there is no light. She commands him, "So boy, don't you turn back." She instructs him not to go back down the stairs even if he thinks climbing is hard. He should try not to fall because his mother is still going, still climbing, and her life "ain't been no crystal stair." / He structures the poem as a conversation between a mother and her son. It is free verse and written in the vernacular, meaning that it mimics the patterns of speech and diction of conversation. **** then develops the metaphor of a staircase further, as the mother describes the challenges in her life using symbols like tacks, splinters, uncarpeted floor, and dark, unlit corners. She exhorts her son not to turn back, because she never will. / By using the metaphor of the staircase, Hughes alludes to Jacob's Ladder. The Mother character is on a difficult and arduous uphill journey, hoping that if she endures her struggles she can eventually ascend to the highest "Promised Land." Biblical imagery was quite common in autobiographical accounts of slavery and racial injustice during the early 20th Century. The Mother tries to help her son maintain his faith as well, which will help him persevere through life's struggles. The mother's voice in "Mother to Son" is similar to the voice of the poet in "Dreams," who offers advice and hope for any of his readers who might be losing faith.

Acquainted with the Night

The narrator describes his loneliness as he walks the isolated city streets at night.. Even when he makes contact with another person (such as the watchman), the narrator is unwilling to express his feelings because he knows that no one will understand him. - iambic pentameter, with the fourteen lines of a traditional sonnet. In terms of rhyme scheme, author uses the "terza rima" ("third rhyme") pattern of ABA CDC DAD AA, which is exceptionally difficult to write in English. -This poem is commonly understood to be a description of the narrator's experiences with depression. The most crucial element of his depression is his complete isolation. Frost emphasizes this by using the first-person term "I" at the beginning of seven of the lines

Washington Square

The novel focuses on a particular American neighborhood during a precise historical period. Betrayal is perhaps the most dominant theme of the novel. Some characters fear betrayal, others astonished to find themselves betrayed. Dr. Sloper feels betrayed by Catherine, because she is unwilling to follow his advice regarding her engagement to Morris. Home and Domesticity Home is a symbol of tradition, of culture, of family and the past.

My Antonia

The novel takes the form of a fictional memoir written by Jim Burden about an immigrant girl named **** with whom he grew up in the American West / The novel pushed the boundaries of traditional literature. First, its narrative structure is mainly built from episodes and anecdotes rather than a continuous storyline - author thinks nothing of jumping twenty years ahead in between chapters. For this reason, the novel is sometimes considered a modernist work / the characters in the story break from stereotypical gender roles - the women are strong, athletic, and active, while the men are generally passive and weak

i sing of Olaf glad and big

The opening line of *** announces the poet's intention: to sing, to celebrate, the greatness of an individual who bravely defies convention and who heroically dies because of his act of rebellion. ***"warmest heart recoiled at war," so he became a conscientious objector, subjecting himself to cruel harassment at the hands of a "trig westpointer"—a graduate of the United States Military Academy at West Point. Like the Delectable Mountains in The Enormous Room, Olaf stands his ground and announces to his tormentor that he will not kiss the flag that he represents. / Some of the unusual writing techniques normally present in auinclude pun, paradox, inversion of cliché, grammatical turning, and typographical experiments. The purpose of these techniques is their immediacy of effect: Cummings wishes to surprise the reader into a new and unique vision about the topic under discussion./The narrative "i" is in lower case to indicate his own humility, while the importance of Olaf is indicated by the fact that each "I" referring to him is capitalized. / Word choice is yet another indicator of Cummings's refusal to follow the norm. For example, there is formal speech ("being of which/ assertions duly notified," lines 34-35) which is appropriate for legal documents, while there are also colloquialisms such as "yellowsonofabitch." Obscenities seem to be included for shock value, yet there are also archaisms which seem out of place in a modern poem./ Syntactical changes exemplify Cummings's unique approach to poetry. The most obvious is the reversal of the common "noun, verb, direct object" pattern to noun, direct object, verb, or direct object, noun, verb

Parker's Back

The overt religious message presented in "Revelation" is used again by O'Connor in****. This story was composed by O'Connor while she was lying in the hospital a few weeks before her death. The story has the salvation of a hard-drinking, woman-chasing heathen as its main theme. / The symbolic significance of names and name changes in O'Connor's works is one element of the stories which should not be overlooked. Traditionally, it marks the passage from adolescence to adulthood (Timmy becomes Timothy), emphasizes a change in one's view of himself or herself (Joy becomes Hulga), or it indicates a change in the status of an individual (Jacob, the scoundrel who cheats his brother Esau out of his birthright, becomes Israel, one of the ancestors of the House of David).

Song to the Men of England

The people of are doing the real work—but, the speaker asks, are they gaining any benefit from this system? They are not enjoying the fruits of their labor, and the tyrants are taking their wealth. The call is to sow their own seed, weave their own robes, and forge their own arms in their own defense. Otherwise, the people are merely digging their own graves. - Marxist tones: revolution song, a lyric poem that could even be set to music. The structure of four-line stanzas rhyming aabb does give the poem a songlike lyric character. This simple structure and rhyme scheme is less intellectual and more accessible to uneducated people. The diction is less difficult than usual, and the bee metaphor is easy to understand.

The Birthmark

The plot is set in motion when he marries a beautiful young woman, Georgiana, who bears a curious birthmark on her cheek in the shape of a tiny crimson hand. Envious women sometimes say it spoils her beauty, but most men find it enchanting. Aylmer, however, becomes obsessed with the birthmark as the one flaw in an otherwise perfect beauty. When Aylmer involuntarily shudders at the appearance of the birthmark, which waxes and wanes with the flushing or paling of the lady's cheek, Georgiana also develops a horror of her supposed blemish. Aylmer has a prophetic dream in which he seeks surgically to remove the mark, but it recedes as he probes till it clutches at her heart. In despair, Georgiana encourages Aylmer to try to remove the mark, even if it endangers her life to do so.

The Brothers Karamazov

The plot of the novel revolves around the murder of perhaps one of the most despicable characters ever created, Fyodor Karamazov, the father of the Karamazov brothers. This plot serves as the basic architecture for Dostoevsky's philosophy, touching on all the Really Big Questions. Do we have free will? Does God exist? Why do human beings have to suffer? What is the nature of human nature? Are there limits to human reason? Are we bound by moral laws? How do we achieve happiness?/ As a former revolutionary himself, Dostoevsky was sympathetic to the humanistic and progressive goals of the revolutionaries, but skeptical of their methods. In contrast to the revolutionaries, who were influenced by Western European thinkers (such as Karl Marx), Dostoevsky sought to imagine humanistic ideals such as social justice in a conservative, Russian idiom that embraced the Russian Orthodox faith (source).

Among School Children

The poem *** was composed after the poet's visit to a convent school in Waterford Ireland in 1926. This poem moves from a direct consideration of the children to Yeats' early love, Maud Gonne, and then to a passionate philosophical conclusion in which all of Yeats's platonic thinking blends into an exalted hymn of raise to the glory and the puzzle of human existence. / Passionate loves, loving mother and pious nuns all cling to illusions, phantoms pure and simple. Their fondness for cherished images makes them blind to hard and harsh reality. The beloveds are not at all as good and beautiful as they are imagined, sons never as handsome and dutiful as believed or supposed, and the God is in heaven never as just and merciful as generally understood. And yet this worship of images continues unabated. The fact is that the images stand for glorious ideals which are hardly ever attained. These idols mock at all human efforts. They are mockeries of the heart as great philosophers are mockeries of the intellect. None of them can change the facts of life or influence the course of nature.

The Hollow Men

The poem begins with two epigraphs: one is a quotation from Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness remarking on the death of the doomed character Kurtz. The other is an expression used by English schoolchildren who want money to buy fireworks to celebrate Guy Fawkes Day. A bunch of **** are leaning together like scarecrows. Everything about them is dry, including their voices and their bodies. Everything they say and do is meaningless. They exist in a state like Hell, except they were too timid and cowardly to commit the violent acts that would have gained them access to Hell. They have not crossed over the River Styx to make it to either Heaven or Hell. The people who have crossed over remember these guys as "***men." The speaker describes how a "shadow" has paralyzed all of their activities, so they are unable to act, create, respond, or even exist.

The Red Wheelbarrow

The poem describes a red wheelbarrow in the rain. But it is about so much more! Williams wrote it in the amount of time it takes to read the poem/ heavily influenced by Imagism, Dadaism, and Cubism / reflects on how important a certain red wheelbarrow is. This wheelbarrow is wet from a recent rain, and there happen to be white chickens hanging out with the wheelbarrow.

The Drunken Boat

The poem is a narrative. Something or someone, who speaks in the first person, glides down "impassive" rivers to tide water, and then for ten nights (and presumably days) is tossed about by the tumultuous waters of the open sea. The experience is a joyful one, and at the end the speaker has a feeling of freedom and purification. Now begins a new experience, which lasts for months, during which, either in the sea or upon it, the speaker actually sees what other men have thought they glimpsed from time to time -- and there follows a catalogue of the wonders of the sea. But there comes a moment when the "I" who is speaking is tired of, or unequal to the vision, and wishes to return to ordinary life again. Straightway he is at home, looking back upon his experience, and being sorry that he cannot renew it. The only water in Europe which attracts him is the shallow pool where a child (perhaps himself) is sailing a paper boat on a spring evening. But he no longer has the strength, or the courage, to resume his visionary voyage./ onvey the intensity of the boat's emotional reactions to its various experiences. Some of Rimbaud's images, quite simple and conventional, speak to the reader directly with their power and beauty. "Lighter than a cork I danced on the waves,

Whoso List to Hunt?

The poem opens with a question to the reader, asking who enjoys the hunt, and pointing out that the poet knows a worthy hind (female deer). He then continues with a contrast to the excitement of line 1 to say that he is regrettably no longer up to the chase. / ****Wyatt uses the sonnet form, which he introduced to England from the work of Petrarch. / By opening the poem with a question, the narrator challenges the reader. There is an invitation in his words, and the use of an exclamation mark at the end of the first line implies excitement at the idea. As hunting was a popular pastime in the court of Henry VIII, this suggests a poem along the lines of Henry VIII's / themes: lust, rules and order: sexual kind of hunting. Take the whole hunting metaphor; you hunt something with the intention of killing it, dominating it, controlling it. The idea is expressed pretty clearly when the speaker compares hunting the deer to trying to throw a net around the wind. Throw in that whole bit about "do not touch me" and this poem starts to look like a description of frustrated lust. And here you thought it was just about hunting.

Terrence, This is Stupid Stuff

The poem starts out with a jolly (and maybe slightly drunk) guy complaining to a poet named **** about his poems. He makes fun of how serious and sad his poems are, and says they give him "the belly-ache." He'd much prefer, he tells ****, to hear something he could "dance to." In the next section, the poet ****talks back. He tells this guy that if he wants to dance, he'd be better off drinking beer than reading poems. ****is teasing the complainer, saying that he'd better stick to booze if it "hurts to think." He reminds him, though, that even if the world looks better when you're drunk, the feeling never lasts. He backs this up by telling his own story about getting drunk and then sobering up again. So, he suggests, if beer only helps for a while then poetry will be more useful in hard times (and, he reminds this guy, there will always be hard times). To drive the point home, Terence finishes by telling the fable of King Mithridates, who gradually developed an immunity to poison. The idea is that swallowing a little bit of sadness in poetry, a little bit at a time, can make you stronger and more resistant to the pain of life. So poetry really is good for something.

Sonnet 87

The poet admits that he no longer possesses the love of the youth, whose worth is too great for the poet, who could only possess him while the youth did not recognise his own worth. His time with the youth was like a dream of greatness from which he has now woken.Sonnet 87

The Collar

The recurrent topic of Herbert's poems is not perfection but correction. Perfection is unreachable, but constant correction is one of the rules of religious life (and religious poetry) for Herbert. / The speaker protest against the inevitable disappointments, restrictions, and pains of life is one with which most of the readers of this poem can sympathize and identity / most extensive and detailed poem of rebellion. / this poem gives full expression to the speaker's resentment of the pain and rigor of leading a life that is moral and holy. Only after these complaints are freely, almost hysterically voiced is the speaker taught how quickly they can be banished by a patient God who ultimately gives more than he asks.

Ophelia

The six quatrains of five-syllable lines reveal a varying rhyme scheme with the sixth quatrain repeating the first. The claim is that eternity has been rediscovered at the moment the sea disappears in the fading light of day. Eternity is, after all, made up of an infinite number of such evanescent moments. With our soul as witness we must avow that the night into which the sea and sun disappeared is nothing, first, because we sleep through it, unaware that time has passed, and second, because we know nothing of the final night into which we all disappear which is for us a nothingness. The day is on fire with the light of the sun from which no one escapes. The soul wrenches itself free from the emptiness of human praise and the futility of the pitiful bursts of enthusiasm we all share and soars according to its whim anywhere out of this world, in eternity for example. Only in the satiny glowing embers of the sun does Duty find an expression without end, because where the sun is concerned there is no "at last," only a "forever." At that moment there is no hope in life or in religion ... In our human condition and with our knowledge and patience we know that suffering is inevitable and eternal, our life but the moment the sea disappears with the sun in the day of eternity.

The Brain—is wider than the Sky—

The speaker declares that the brain is wider than the sky, for if they are held side by side, the brain will absorb the sky "With ease—and You—beside." She says that the brain is deeper than the sea, for if they are held "Blue to Blue," the brain will absorb the sea as sponges and buckets absorb water. The brain, the speaker insists, is the "weight of God"—for if they are hefted "Pound for Pound," the brain's weight will differ from the weight of God only in the way that syllable differs from sound. /his poem employs all of Dickinson's familiar formal patterns: it consists of three four-line stanzas metered iambically, with tetrameter used for the first and third lines of each stanza and trimeter used for the second and fourth lines; it follows ABCB rhyme schemes in each stanza; and uses the long dash as a rhythmic device designed to break up the flow of the meter and indicate short pauses. / statement as "success is counted sweetest by those who ne'er succeed"—, Dickinson testifies to the mind's capacity to absorb, interpret, and subsume perception and experience. The brain is wider than the sky despite the sky's awesome size because the brain is able to incorporate the universe into itself, and thereby even to absorb the ocean. The source of this capacity, in this poem, is God. In an astonishing comparison Dickinson likens the minds capabilities to "the weight of God", differing from that weight only as syllable differs from soun

The Second Coming

The speaker describes a nightmarish scene: the falcon, turning in a widening "gyre" (spiral), cannot hear the falconer; "Things fall apart; the center cannot hold"; anarchy is loosed upon the world / stunning, violent imagery and terrifying ritualistic language, thematically obscure and difficult to understand. / eats believed that this image (he called the spirals "gyres") captured the contrary motions inherent within the historical process, and he divided each gyre into specific regions that represented particular kinds of historical periods (and could also represent the psychological phases of an individual's development). / This poem was intended by Yeats to describe the current historical moment (the poem appeared in 1921) in terms of these gyres. Yeats believed that the world was on the threshold of an apocalyptic revelation, as history reached the end of the outer gyre

The Circus Animals' Desertion

The speaker describes searching in vain for a poetic theme: he says that he had tried to find one for "six weeks or so," but had been unable to do so. He thinks that perhaps, now that he is "but a broken man," he will have to be satisfied with writing about his heart, although for his entire life ("Winter and summer till old age began") he had played with elaborate, showy poetic themes that paraded like "circus animals"/ This poem finds the author looking back over his poetic career, reinterpreting his past work and his motivations for writing it, and searching for the truths that remain when all the vanities and illusions of life have been stripped away by the decay of age and the corruptions of time. "At last," the speaker writes, he is "but a broken man," and his poetic faculties have abandoned him. / In the final stanza of the poem, Yeats takes a hard look at his "masterful" imagery, and realizes that though it seemed to grow in "pure mind," it actually began in the ugly, common experiences of everyday life, which work upon the mind.

Much Madness is divinest Sense—

The speaker drops a mind-bomb on us, saying that crazy people are sane and sane people are crazy. Next thing you know, she's going after the Majority who cracks down on anybody who dares to go against the mainstream. It's the people on the outside, claims the speaker, who see it all for what it really is.

Life is Fine

The speaker goes to the river and sits down by the bank to think. He cannot concentrate so he jumps into the water and sinks. He surfaces and cries out twice. If the water had not been so frigid he would have died, he says, "But it was Cold in that water! It was cold!" / He takes the elevator to the sixteenth floor of his building, where he thinks about his "baby" and considers jumping. He stands up there and yells, and if it had not been so high, he might have leapt off and died. "But it was High up there! it was high!" He says. / He comments that since he is still living, he might as well live on. He might have died for love but he was born to live. He says to his baby that he would "dogged" if she were to see him die. He concludes, "Life is fine! Fine as wine! Life is fine!" / In this poem, **** revisits a common theme in his work: perseverance. He understands the plight of his people and crafts a vulnerable character here who often considers giving up on life, but can never quite follow through - meaning that he still has something to live for. By coming so close to death, the speaker in **** finds a renewed desire to live

A Virginal

The speaker is a man shouting at someone, most likely a woman, because he already has a virgin lover who has "bound [him] straitly." He says he will not spoil this happiness by loving another, then goes on to describe his love, the magic surrounding her, and what she has done to him. He is adamant, and in the second half of the poem, he tells the first woman to go away again because she will never be as good as his virgin girl

Because I Could Not Stop for Death

The speaker is communicating from beyond the grave, describing her journey with Death, personified, from life to afterlife. In the opening stanza, the speaker is too busy for Death, so Death—"kindly"—takes the time to do what she cannot, and stops for her. Death, in the form of a gentleman suitor, stops to pick up the speaker and take her on a ride in his horse-drawn carriage. They move along at a pretty relaxed pace and the speaker seems completely at ease with the gentleman. As they pass through the town, she sees children at play, fields of grain, and the setting sun. death personified. He is no frightening, or even intimidating, reaper, but rather a courteous and gentle guide, leading her to eternity. The speaker feels no fear when Death picks her up in his carriage, she just sees it as an act of kindness, as she was too busy to find time for him. hymns, usually written in rhyming quatrains and have a regular metrical pattern. ***'s quatrains (four-line stanzas) aren't perfectly rhymed, but they sure do follow a regular metrical pattern

I heard a Fly buzz -- when I died --

The speaker is writing from beyond the grave, and like other poems it is describing the scene of the speaker's death, although in a very different way. The poem opens with a fly interrupting "The Stillness in the Room," which, however, is not a permanent peace, since it is "like the Stillness in the Air --/Between the Heaves of Storm -.e see that although the room is so quiet that the speaker can hear a fly buzz, there are in fact many people there, waiting for her death. They have all finished crying. the fly's importance also emphasizes this focus on the process of death. Were it the afterlife, faith, or the journey to eternity that proved most important, the fly would be a minor character; but it is, instead, the only significant character besides the speaker in the poem and the character that best represents the poem's climactic moment. Its significance is so apparent that it comes between the speaker and "the light" -- this small, very earthly bug thus supplants spirituality and the afterlife.

I died for Beauty--but was scarce

The speaker says that she died for Beauty, but she was hardly adjusted to her tomb before a man who died for Truth was laid in a tomb next to her. When the two softly told each other why they died, the man declared that Truth and Beauty are the same, so that he and the speaker were "Brethren." The speaker says that they met at night, "as Kinsmen," and talked between their tombs until the moss reached their lips and covered up the names on their tombstones. / the ultimate effect of this poem is to show that every aspect of human life—ideals, human feelings, identity itself—is erased by death. But by making the erasure gradual—something to be "adjusted" to in the tomb—and by portraying a speaker who is untroubled by her own grim state, Dickinson creates a scene that is, by turns, grotesque and compelling, frightening and comforting. It is one of her most singular statements about death, and like so many of Dickinson's poems, it has no parallels in the work of any other writer

Pied Beauty

The speaker says we should glorify God because he has given us dappled, spotted, freckled, checkered, speckled, things. The speaker goes on to give examples. We should praise God because of the skies with two. n short, the speaker thinks we should praise God for everything that looks a bit odd or unique, everything that looks like it doesn't quite fit in with the rest. All these beautiful, mixed-up, ever-changing things were created or "fathered" by a God who never changes. The speaker sums up what he believes should be our attitude in a brief, final line: "Praise Him."

Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard

The speaker starts to imagine the kinds of lives the dead probably led. Then he tells us not to get all snobby about the rough monuments these dead guys have on their tombs, since, really, it doesn't matter what kind of a tomb you have when you're dead, anyway. The speaker reminds us, we're all going to die someday, that gets the speaker thinking about his own inevitable death, and he gets a little freaked out. / written in heroic quatrains (four-line stanza written in iambic pentameter with a rhyme scheme of ABAB) / consonance.(s, z)

I dwell in Possibility

The speaker tells us that she lives in a house with lots of doors and windows, which just so happens to be a way prettier house than "Prose." This house is a metaphor for poetry. The speaker goes on to describe her poetry-house with lots of nature imagery. It's got trees for rooms, the sky for a roof—cool stuff like that. She ends by telling us how awesome the visitors to the house (readers of her poetry) are. Then she tells us that writing poems—or the life of the mind—is the best way she knows to reach for the divine. / This poem is deeply interested in the power gained by a poet through their poetry. In the first stanza / The structure of the poem also reflects the freedom available in poetry. Only two lines in the poem do not end with the dashes and thus emphasize the empty space between lines—the windows of interpretation. Additionally, although there is a rhyme scheme, Dickinson only follows it loosely -- and thus helps to give the poem a foundation -- but one that is not constrained by its rules.

Church Going

The speaker thinks that the church wasn't worth stopping to check out. But he also admits that he did stop, and that this isn't the first time he's done / e can't help but wonder what he's looking for when he keeps coming back to this place, and also asks himself about what will happen to churches when there are no more believers left in the world. He wonders if they'll make museums out of the churches, or if they'll just leave the buildings' doors open so that sheep can hang out inside them. Nearing the end of the poem, the speaker asks what will happen to the world when religion is gone altogether. Then he wonders what the very last religious person will be like. Will they be an obsessive compulsive, who just can't stop wanting to smell incense? Or will they be more like the speaker, someone who's bored and ignorant about the church, and just passing by without knowing what they're looking for? / Mostly Iambic Pentameter with Regular Rhyme

Dubliners

The stories themselves create an even better map of the Irish capital because they dig deep into the thoughts of its citizens in order to draw a psychological map of a place and a time. / In this Dublin, almost everyone's unlucky: they are beaten, berated, betrayed, and deserted by their loved ones; they drink away their salaries and their good sense; in some cases, they simply die; and as if this weren't enough, they even lose vast sums in poker. If Lonely Planet guides give you up-to-the-minute updates on Dublin for the fanny-pack-and-camera crowd, Dubliners is the Not For Tourists black book in an edition that hasn't needed revising since it first came out in 1914. / this is starting to sound bleak, we're not going to lie: there's not a single happy ending to be found among the fifteen stories. But that's exactly why these stories are so good. They portray moments of extreme personal crisis and intense personal reflection with such realistic power that we can't help but see ourselves in these ***, as scary as that sounds.

To Lucasta, Going to the Wars

The story goes that when Lovelace was off getting injured in a battle at Dunkirk (in Northern France) in 1646, Lucy thought he was dead and ditched him for another dude. Needless to say, poor Richard was heartbroken. Maybe "loveless" is more fitting than we thought. But hey, this is all speculation. What we do know for sure is that "To Lucasta" was published in 1649, along with several other poems about his ladylove, in a volume called, appropriately, Lucasta. As with most stories, the true facts aren't quite as interesting as the juicy gossip. / themes: sacrifice, love / iambic tetrameter

Invisible Man

The story of a man in NYC who, after his experiences growing up and living as a model black citizen, now lives in an underground hole and believes he is invisible to American society. / depicts several ideologies in the novel that line up with the ideologies of Booker T. Washington, Marcus Garvey, and communism.To equate the ideologies because the characters portrayed in the novel are only caricatures of their real-life inspirations. However, the novel's rejection of ideology, in general, is a central theme, which explains why *** was incredibly controversial among influential black thinkers from the civil rights movement in the 1960s. and even to this day.

To Kill a Mockingbird

The story of a young girl confronting deep-seated prejudice, it pits a six-year-old Scout Finch and her (relatively) anti-racist family against the segregation of an American South in the grip of Jim Crow. Author drew on her own childhood experience for the events of*** More than one critic has noticed some similarities between Scout and Lee herself—and between Scout's friend Dill and Lee's own childhood friend, Truman Capote. Like Scout, Lee's father was an attorney who defended black men accused of crimes; like Scout, Lee had a brother four years older.

Sonny's Blues

The story of a young jazz musician (Sonny) from Harlem, NY who gets addicted to heroin, is arrested for using and selling drugs, and returns to his childhood neighborhood after his release from prison. He moves in with his older brother (the story's narrator) and his brother's family. The two brothers sort of reconnect after a very tense few weeks during which both try to deal with their anger towards each other. Drugs are a central part of the story, but it's also about family, music, and trying to overcome life's struggles

The Trojan Woman

The structure of **** is episodic. That is to say, it does not so much tell a continuous story as depict a series of individual and discrete scenes. The sum total of the episodes is not a plot, as in standard narrative tragedy, but an impression. The impression that Euripides sought to convey in The Trojan Women is that war is unspeakably horrible. The author attempted in the various scenes of this tragedy to depict the suffering that war causes even for those innocents who do not fight in it, innocents such as women, children, and the elderly.

Old Ironsides

The subject of this poem, the U.S.S. Constitution, was first commissioned along with five other frigates in 1794 when Congress wished to protect merchant fleets from pirates and British and French interference. The most pivotal moment in its long and storied career occurred during the War of 1812, when the ship engaged a British man-of-war off the coast of Nova Scotia. During the fray, both ships fired heavily on one another, but the shots from the British craft appeared to bounce off the sides of 'Constitution' as though they were made of iron rather than wood - hence / the nickname '***.' After almost 40 years of active duty, the Navy considered scrapping 'Constitution' in 1830. What they hadn't planned for, though, was the growing public attachment to the vessel as a symbol of American freedom and endurance. A large public outcry was heard in favor of preserving the ship, and among those voices was that of Oliver Wendell Holmes. However, even though 'Old Ironsides' might look to be just an appeal to preserve this historic vessel, Dr. Holmes looked deeper into the ship's symbolic meaning to find the true reason for its preservation.

Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night

The theme of this line is morality and transcendentalism. This line laments inevitability and necessity of death, encouraging the old people to rise up against their death and fate. The poet's voice is arguing that the old people should not consent to die immediately. He has linked being alive with passion and deep emotions. Poet's "good men" and "wise men" resist dying gently, because they could not achieve what they might have achieved in their lives. Through the examples of different types of men, poet affirms the importance of being alive. He believes that they should resist dying, if they have not truly lived their lives./ Metaphor: Good night is a metaphorical expression of death / Alliteration: Alliteration occurs in sound g in "Go Gentle and Good" and n sound in "not and night."/ Setting: Night, Darkness

To the Memory of My Beloved Master William Shakespeare

The theme of this poem concerns the nature of the praise that can be given a great writer by a contemporary of almost equal stature. Jonson has the task of devising a strategy that will enable him to praise Shakespeare without sounding foolish, sycophantic, envious, or uninformed. He has to create a poem that will give a universal genius his due. This is no easy matter, and he has to do this in such a way as to prove his own credentials as a poet. / The poem is written in heroic couplets, both closed and open. The closed couplet comes to a full stop at the end of two lines, while the flow of the open couplet continues into succeeding lines. Jonson alternates these types of couplets throughout the poem to create a distinctive rhythm of two-line and larger units.

Canonization

The title leads the reader to expect a poem concerned with saints and holy practices, but the very first lines sound more like a line delivered on stage. "For God's sake hold your tongue" is nearly blasphemous when following the sacred title. By the end of the poem, the reader determines that "***" refers to the way that the poet's love will enter the canon of true love, becoming the pattern by which others judge their own love. As usual, this hyperbole also leads the reader to find a spiritual or metaphysical meaning in the poem, and as usual, this will lead us to see that Donne sets out the perfection of divine love as the only realistic model for all others.

next to of course god America i

The title shows the order of importance according to the narrator: God, America and Self. This order of importance shows Faith, Patriotism and Self-importance. 'next to of course god america i' is a satirical poem (satire is mocking someone or something). He initially appears to glorify America, although this is also ambiguous (has more than one meaning) as he tempers this with phrases such as 'and so forth'. In many ways one can view this as a very modern poem, with many of the criticisms Cummings levels at his country being as relevant today as they were in the 1920s. It is better to put in mind that the poem has two personas, the patriot and the main speaker. The poem looks like it is delivered by a patriot but was paraphrased by the speaker added with his mockery and own opinions. You should compare this poem with other poems about the same themes: causes of conflict: 'Hawk Roosting', 'The Yellow Palm', 'The Right Word'; patriotism: 'The Charge of the Light Brigade', 'Flag'. The poem of e. e. cummings shows patriotism and also foolishness which are its theme. In the poem, there are two personas, the patriot and the main speaker. The speaker of the poem mocks the patriot by adding words to the patriot's words. The poem is all about nationalism but also it tells the reader that it is not always wise to be patriotic or heroic and that it is sometimes irrational. The poem also shows America being diverse in culture and language. Also, it talks about war and the innocence of the young, inexperienced soldiers during the battle. And finally, the poem shows the reader that bravery and fearlessness usually lead to stupidity and irrationality.

In Our Time

Thees: Fatherhood, The Problem of Relationships / Critics currently argue over whether it should be considered a novel or merely a compilation of short stories and vignettes. In fact it has no defined genre / The overall meaning of the narrative is created by the positioning of each story and vignette in relationship to others, but these juxtapositions also create its confusing structure. Each concrete image is set against another without the benefit of any real transition

My Heart Leaps Up

This love of life and capacity to take pleasure in simple joys—which Wordsworth is more likely to find in a blade of grass than a bank account—comes through like a clap of thunder in this 1807 ditty, "My Heart Leaps Up When I Behold." The speaker uses the image of a rainbow to show that he loves the beautiful small things in nature so much that he would rather die than stop loving them. A day without nature, this poem expresses, is a day not worth living. if you don't know anything about Wordsworth, this poem is a great place to start, because it's got his joie de vivre written all over it./ Iambic Tetrameter with variations

The Misanthrope

stock characters. There's (1) the humanity hating curmudgeon; (2) the hopeless flirt; (3) the bumbling knuckleheads; (4) the innocent bystanders; (5) that lady who is crazy jealous of the flirt./ It's about a guy who hates everyone except for the most insincere and deceitful lady you could imagine. Oh, but she's pretty.

The Shield of Achilles

Theme: the spiritual emptiness that arises from oppressive government, the essential loneliness of modern individuals, and the ultimate hope of redemption provided by the Christian God. As a child in England during the Great Depression and then as a young man in the United States during World War II, au. saw many examples of the mindless acts and hopeless figures that he places on **** shield, but he found in Christianity a way to escape the despair that arises from life on Earth. In much of his poetry, au. attempted to speak universal truths that might change the world. He rejected grand but ultimately artificial language and wrote about the world outside rather than about his interior life and personal struggles. / The most important rhetorical device in "The Shield of Achilles" is contrast, between what Thetis expects to see on the shield and what she does see, and between the ancient world and the modern world. Three times, Thetis looks over Hephaestos's shoulder, expecting to see idyllic and pastoral scenes of civilizations enjoying peace and prosperity. The images she expects—olive branches, sacrificial animals ornamented with flowers—are from the classical world, and the language of these stanzas invokes an earlier time, with phrases such as "untamed seas," "ritual pieties," "Libation and sacrifice," and "flickering forge-light."

The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber

Themes in this story are masculinity and its foil, cowardice, and the "coming of age" that is possible through exposure to nature and by overcoming the challenges of the great outdoors. / Author portrays *** as weak, subservient to his wife, cowardly and frustrated. Once he conquers his fears and guns down three buffalo, he becomes empowered, emboldened, and elated. By conquering nature, he has become a man / Author was a great believer in the power of nature to improve one's quality of life. He was a lifelong outdoorsman; he went hunting, fishing, camping, and boating in places as diverse as Europe, the Caribbean, the United States, and Africa. In fact, he wrote this short story following a 10-week safari in East Africa. This story summarizes the importance Author placed on outdoor activities, especially for men.

The Illustrated Man

This is a short story collection with a framing sequence. The framing sequence is meant to tie together these stories in a very loose fashion - with the exception of "The Illustrated Man", none of these stories have any apparent relation to one another or to the framing sequence. However, they tie together in ways outside of actual plot. / The dangerous nature of the creative imagination manifests itself in many ways, but is almost always fatal. Censorship threatens the literary characters of "The Exiles," who try to fight back but are ultimately defeated by the forces of logic and rationality. However, faith can help elevate the power of imagination: Father Peregrine's memories of childhood and sense of awe when watching fireworks and fire balloons reflect the awe he feels about his religious faith and his encounter with Martians; this alarms Father Stone, who is more "adult" in wanting to stick to conventional views of religion, sin, and redemption. That said, the imagination of children is the most dangerous in these stories, as seen in "The Veldt" and "Zero Hour

Bartleby the Scrivener

This is a story in which the most exciting thing that happens is actually the fact that nothing really happens. / The true meaning of "****" has been discussed and dissected by critics everywhere, ever since its first publication. Is it simply a comment on the oddities of human nature? Is it sufficient to look at the story as a scathing mockery of the writings of Melville's contemporaries, Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose specific brand of self-reliance and independence might be seen in Bartleby's stubbornness? Or can we perhaps even see Melville himself in the infuriatingly fascinating character of Bartleby? The critics all seem to have different opinions on this question

A Psalm of Life

This is one of ****'s most beloved poems. It is didactic, intending to provide advice and counsel to young men earnestly endeavoring to discern how to live this ephemeral life. The poem concerns a young man who is responding to a psalmist after the older man gives an answer to the putative question of what the meaning of life is; we do not have the psalmist's response but can guess that it consisted of Bible verses and a prosaic /a youthful declaration of independence from a pessimistic determinism supported by the full weight of biblical authority." The words "numbers" and "psalms" allude to the Bible, particularly the Old Testament, and provide the sense that the psalmist's conception of life is one of bleakness, conservatism, and pessimism.

A Bird Came Down The Walk

This is the finest example of ***nature verse, for it perfectly juxtaposes elements of superficial gentility against the inner barbarity that characterizes the workings of the world. The narrator chances to see a bird walking along a pathway, but just as the scene appears perfect, the bird seizes upon a worm, bites it in two, and devours it. The bird drinks some dew on nearby grass (note the alternate for a drinking "glass"), then graciously steps aside, right to a wall, to allow a beetle to pass. The bird, like one fearful of being caught in an unacceptable action, glances around quickly with darting eyes. "Cautious" describes both the demeanor of the bird and that of the observing narrator. Both feel threatened, the bird of the possible consequences of its savagery, the narrator because she is next on the bird's path. She "offered him a Crumb," not because she admires the bird but out of fear and expediency. The bird, sensing that it has escaped any potentially harmful consequences for what it has done, struts a bit as "he unrolled his feathers" and "rowed him softer home—." Ironically, its walk is too casual, softer than oars dividing a seamless ocean or butterflies leaping into noon's banks, all without a splash. Behind its soft, charming, and genteel facade, nature is menacing, and its hypocritical attempts to conceal its barbarism make it more frightening

Intimations of Immortality

This ode treats the preexistence of human life, using the poet's personal life experience combined with a Platonic concept. / the main concept of Wordsworth's Ode is based on the poet's belief that the "Child is Father of the Man" a sentiment taken from John Milton's Paradise Regained (1671) and used by Wordsworth in his short poem "My Heart Leaps Up" (Complete Poetical Works, 1802). In the Ode, he explains that birth is "a sleep and a forgetting," not the beginning of life. Thus, he believes, children still carry a glorious memory of the "imperial" heaven as their home with God. Innocent babies and children see the beauty of the terrestrial world not only with their physical eyes but also and even more through their hearts and souls, which carry a preexisting sense of the spiritual presence. With an elegiac and definitely a nostalgic timbre, the Ode starts with the poet's own memory of that blissful place (or state of spirit and mind

Evangeline

This poem celebrates the history of a people that today are associated with Louisiana bayous and crawfish boils (mmm, mudbugs). It tells the story of poor **** Bellefontaine, a sweet and beautiful farmer's daughter who is betrothed to Gabriel Lajeunesse, the handsome son of the local blacksmith. Unfortunately for Evangeline and Gabriel (and all of their friends and neighbors), they just happen to live in Acadia. / . This poem lends both an epic and a tragic quality to the story of these evicted colonists (who, to be fair, did their own share of evicting the local Native Canadian population first—something that Longfellow doesn't quite get around to in this poem). Our poor heroine ****has one whale of a sob story, though. If you have warm blood in your veins, you'll definitely need to keep a box of Kleenex nearby when you read this one.

Expostulation and Reply

This poem expresses a principle of the Romantic Movement (or romanticism)—namely, that nature and human intuition impart a kind of knowledge and wisdom not found in books and formal education. (A lyric poem presents the deep feelings and emotions of the poet rather than telling a story or presenting a witty observation.) / tells of a brief encounter between the poet and his friend Matthew. Why, Matthew asks in his expostulation (an attempt to reason with a person in order to turn him away from a course of action), does Wordsworth spend so much time at the lake, musing, when he could be reading books to educate himself? Wordsworth, one of the leaders of the Romantic Movement in literature, replies with an answer that reflects his philosophy: Nature nurtures the mind with a wisdom of its own. A man has only to sit passively in its presence, and it will stimulate his senses in profound ways. The idea that nature is a teacher is the theme of the poem and one of the tenets of the Romantic Movement in literature / iambic tetrameter

On the Road to Mandalay

This poem expresses a soldier's longing for the exoticism of the East, particularly Burma. The speaker muses on a Burmese girl sitting by the sea at the Moulmein Pagoda who is thinking of him. The wind is in the palm trees and the temple bells are calling him back to Mandalay. They want him back there with the flotilla where the paddles clank from Rangoon to Mandalay, and the fishes play, and dawn breaks like thunder / it often inspires mixed feelings of longing for the same idyllic, exotic locale experienced by the poet's speaker and disgust and guilt at being sucked into the poet's imperialist vision. The poem is a tantalizing depiction of a beautiful and languid Orient, yet it is infused with the subtle racism and social Darwinist ideals of the British during the late 19th/early 20th century.The great strength of the poem is in its comparison of Mandalay with London; for, after all, the contrast between warmer climes and the dark, dank city does resonate with modern readers, regardless of the poem's imperialist slant. Kipling describes London as a place of "gritty pavin'-stones" where the "blasted English drizzle wakes the fever in my bones".

Inferno

This poem is insane. And it's also insanely important and eloquent. And—as if you needed a cherry on top of this demented literary sundae—it was totally controversial when it came out. / Written in the early fourteenth century by Italian politician Dante Alighieri, the Divine Comedy is a literary reaction to the bitterly contested politics of medieval Florence. Florence, the richest of the Italian city-states and possibly all of Europe at that time, was divided between two political parties—the Blacks (who supported the Pope) and the Whites (who didn't). When Pope Boniface VIII schemed with the Blacks to seize power over Florence in a military coup, Dante was exiled. His hatred of the Pope can be seen throughout his Divine Comedy.

Surprised by Joy

This poem is not simply one that remembers the death of a loved one. It is both about death and about remembering that death. The poet thinks of his daughter in two ways: in her grave and in his memory. Her body is buried in a tomb, a physical spot where all is silent. Mary Wordsworth was so affected by seeing her daughter's grave so close to her home that the family had to move. In this poem, however, memories are more potent reminders than graves. The impact of "***" comes first from its vivid rendering of a moment of joy, immediately followed by the realization that the loved one with whom the poet needed to share that joy to make it complete was not present.

Easter Wings

This poem shaped like bird wings, but also because it explains in simple and moving language some of the most complex ideas in all of Christian thought. back-and-forth between despair and hope. First comes the bummer: in the first half of each stanza, Herbert describes the downward spiral of human life. It all starts with Adam who, in addition to being the first man, was also the first Loser, bungling away the "wealth and store" God gave him and sinking into poverty. Because of Adam, Herbert also has it bad. In the second stanza, he goes from one sad to the next, getting serious about how sickness, shame, and sin wore him down to nothing. Themes: religion, weakness, sin, transformation

Concord Hymn

This poem was first distributed as a leaflet on the occasion of the dedication of a monument (July 4, 1837) commemorating the battle of Lexington and Concord. This short poem is composed of four stanzas of quatrains written in iambic tetrameter rhythm. The alternating lines rhyme in a pattern of abab. First stanza reenacts the early American Revolution battle that took place at Concord bridge on April 19, 1775.

The Snows of Kilimanjaro

This story focuses on the self-critical ruminations and memories of a writer dying of a preventable case of gangrene on safari. Its main themes are death and regret, and Harry's morbid thoughts epitomize a classic case of taking things for granted. The progression of his gangrene symbolizes his rotting sense of self-worth

Design

Three characters: white spider on a white flower, poised to eat a white moth. The speaker sees this bizarre little albino meeting as some weird witches' brew, as all three are brought together for some awful reason. That observation leads the speaker to a series of questions: Why is this flower white, when it is usually blue? What brought the spider to that particular flower? What made the moth decide to flutter by right then?. This short poem takes a simple little thought and pushes us all the way to questioning the very nature of creation and life as we know it. / themes: existentialism, fate and free will fear, the supernatural

The Hunger Artist

Through artistic characters, ***explores how art relates to real life, the conflict between the artist and society, and the cost of artistic perfection. Author's stories include elements of fantasy in an ordinary world. The mash-up of the realistic and the fantastic contributes to a parable-like or allegorical quality to ***'s work. Not that you'd ever mistake him for Aesop, though. / *** was writing in the period that witnessed the provocative public events and performances staged by the Dadaists and Futurists. The more spectacular aspects of the hunger artist's performance - the theatrics on the last day of his fasting during his popular phase, the circus setting in his unpopular phase - seem to echo the theatrical strategies of these and other modern artist-provocateurs. / a haunting fable of the fate of the artist in modern times. The story follows the career of a hunger artist from the height of his popularity to his lonely death. His performance - a kind of slow death by starving himself - could be seen as representing all artists who attempt to achieve artistic perfection. And it's an isolating business, this artistic work. Just as the hunger artist remains unappreciated and misunderstood by his audience, even at the height of his popularity, artists in general risk alienation from a society that doesn't have a taste (pun!) for their work.

Choruses from 'The Rock'

Treatise on humanity's abandonment of faith in their daily lives. Eliot speaks of civilization running back and forth, gaining knowledge, but never learning truths. He returns to his theme of humankind striving for physical gain at the expense of spiritual enlightenment. *** says that countrysides are for picnics, that people do not want the Church there, or in the suburbs and towns. The poem continues as a talk between Jesus Christ (The Rock) and humankind (The Workmen). The Rock tells everyone that life is about living righteously; we reap what we sow, so we must sow properly. He also relates that the universal struggle is the battle between Good and Evil.

The Good Eearth

Wang Lung is a farmer who tries hard, even through bad times, and eventually makes it rich. He is tempted over and over again by the vices of wealth, but he always comes back to his roots and to the land. Timing was everything for the book's popularity. America was in the middle of the Great Depression, so Americans saw themselves reflected in Wang Lung's suffering. The novel also appeared shortly before the beginning of World War II. The United States would be allied with Chinese forces against the Japanese, and the novel helped to humanize Chinese people for American audiences. Instead of choosing intellectuals or upper-class Chinese as her subjects, Buck chose normal, everyday people who did normal, everyday things. That appealed to—you guessed it—normal, everyday Americans.

On My First Son

We begin with goodbye. The speaker is saying farewell to his son after only seven years. Sad. It seems that the speaker blames himself in a way for the loss of his son. / The speaker then envies his son, who (since he's dead) is free from both the physical and the mental pains of life. The son also won't have to worry about the hassles of getting old, either. / The speaker then asks his son to tell anyone who asks that he (the son) is Ben Jonson's best piece of poetry. Then, for his own sake, the speaker vows in future not to like the things he loves too much. / use of assonance. In other words, it's the vowel sounds of the last words in each line that join each couplet together in rhyme.

Lucy Poems

William Wordsworth's poem "Three years she grew in sun and shower," sometimes titled "The Education of Nature," is usually considered one of the so-called ***—that is, poems written about an ideal female (whether partly real or wholly imagined) for whom the speaker feels great affection./ The poem is difficult at first to interpret, mainly because of the word take in line 4. At first, the word may seem to suggest that Nature "take[s]" a three-year-old girl in the sense of causing the girl to die. However, this potential interpretation is undermined by subsequent details. The phrase "I to myself will take" (4), then, seems to mean something like "I myself will show special favor to" or "I myself will adopt." Once the phrase is read this way, the poem makes much better sense.

The Republic

a Socratic dialogue, written by Plato around 380 BCE, concerning justice the order and character of the just city-state and the just man.It is Plato's best-known work, and has proven to be one of the world's most influential works of philosophy and political theory, both intellectually and historically.

Work without Hope

a colorful description of how nature changes from winter to spring in the first stanza. The poem uses words that help to give the mental picture of how the flowers bloom and how the animals come alive after a long winter./ t talks about hopefulness turning to desparation and sadness and depression. The colorfulness and happiness in spring arriving is described using words like "slugs leave their lair" and "bees are stirring" which offer the reader the opportunity to picture in their head the awakening that happens when winter begins to turn to spring. Hopefulness is communicated with winter's "smiling face a dream of Spring" and winter seeming to be ready for spring to arrive. There is activity that is accomplishing the next steps in life for the animals and the seasons and in nature.

Symposium

a philosophical text by Plato dated c. 385-370 BC.[ It concerns itself at one level with the genesis, purpose and nature of love, and (in latter-day interpretations) is the origin of the concept of Platonic love. Love is examined in a sequence of speeches by men attending a symposium, or drinking party. Each man must deliver an encomium, a speech in praise of Love (Eros).

The War Prayer

a short story or prose poem by ---, is a scathing indictment of war, and particularly of blind patriotic and religious fervor as motivations for war. The structure of the work is simple: An unnamed country goes to war, and patriotic citizens attend a church service for soldiers who have been called up. The people call upon their God to grant them victory and protect their troops. Suddenly, an "aged stranger" appears and announces that he is God's messenger. He explains to them that he is there to speak aloud the second part of their prayer for victory, the part which they have implicitly wished for but have not spoken aloud themselves: the prayer for the suffering and destruction of their enemies. What follows is a grisly depiction of hardships inflicted on war-torn nations by their conquerors. The story ends with the man being ignored.

Billy Budd

a taut little morality tale that takes place on board a ship of the English Royal Navy. / t focuses on John Claggart's false accusation of *** as a mutinous man, and the difficult moral and legal decision that falls on the Captain's shoulders as a result. The story is philosophically rich and remarkably nuanced, and the historical situation only adds to the suspense because it takes place in the year 1797, in the midst of the Napoleonic Wars and in the wake of several massive mutinies in the English fleet.

Danse Russe

a very simple yet poignant piece by William Carlos Williams. In ninety-five words we as the reader are able to develop a whole new understanding of Williams (as it is evident that he is the speaker in this piece), what kind of person he is, and the life he lives. He begins his poem with, " If I when my wife is sleeping and the baby and Kathleen are sleeping." This immediately paints a picture of a married man with a newborn child, suggesting the Williams is young at the time, who we understand, after a little research to discover who Kathleen / he goes on to explain his admiration of his physical existence, stating, "If I admire my arms, my face, my shoulders, flanks, buttocks against the yellow drawn shades." A reader might assume that perhaps he is acknowledging a creation of God in its beauty, Williams is a Unitarian so this is less than likely. It is more probable that he is examining the growth and change of his body as it easy to get caught up in life and go unaware of changes not only around you, but to yourself Finally, what we say and do and how we act and perform in life? Williams illustrates like so many other have that who we are is not decided by public opinion and what people think about us but instead who we are on the inside, the joy we feel when we our isolated to be ourselves, and what we do when no one is looking.

Sunday Morning

a woman is sitting outside in her nightgown, eating a late breakfast and enjoying the morning / She imagines herself traveling with a bunch of ghosts to Christ's tomb in Palestine. After this vision, she entertains skepticism about Christianity. She wonders why she only has thoughts about Christ when she is not thinking about other things. She likes the idea of heaven, but she believes that the natural world provides just as much comfort. She decides there is nothing divine apart from the emotions she experiences in nature. The poem compares Jesus Christ with Jove, the most powerful god in Greek and Roman mythology. Because Jove represented the sun and the sky, the poet thinks the worship of Jove is an expression of love for these and other natural beauties.

The Circular Ruins

allegorical story. It is a touching tale of the process of creation; not only does it treat matters of identity, but it also acts as a memorable foray into the realm of dreams / The story begins with a wounded foreigner from the south of Persia fleeing to ancient circular ruins in the north. Upon resting there, he finds that his wounds magically heal - but he is not surprised to see this. The temple ruins appear to have one been colored like fire, but now have an ash color, destroyed by fire. Crowning the ruins is a statue of what might be either a horse or tiger, made of stone./ It becomes clear at the end of the story that creation is a cycle of men dreaming each other, training the dream in the arts of fire, and sending the new dreamed man to the other ruins to repeat the process for himself. The creation is not aware of his origins until the apparent end of his existence, when he finds himself not destroyed by the forces of creation and destruction - i.e., fire. In this way, the concept of reality is held together by the illusion that dreams are different from rea

The Death of Ivan Ilych

alternately called a short story or a novella - is probably the most famous shorter work of Count Leo Tolstoy. Since it was published in 1886, in Volume 12 of Tolstoy's collected works (edited by his wife, Countess Sofia Tolstoy), it's been hailed as a masterpiece by critics and readers. Ivan Ilych also acquired a reputation as one of the modern treatments of death - one that has changed the way that subject is treated. / nremarkable its main character - and his death - was. The Death of Ivan Ilych is the story of a painfully ordinary government official who comes down with an untreatable illness and dies at home slowly, painfully, and full of loneliness. He's middle aged, has an unhappy family life, and a petty personality. Rather than turning to religion, art, or the love of his life to cope with death, he turns to doctors. About as far from a dying romantic hero as you can get. Much more like, well, us normal people.

Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses

an 1895 essay by ---, written as a satire and criticism of the writings of James ***.Drawing on examples from The Deerslayer and The Pathfinder from ***Leatherstocking Tales, the essay claims **is guilty of verbose writing, poor plotting, glaring inconsistencies, overused clichés, cardboard characterizations, and a host of similar "offenses." The essay is characteristic of ---biting, derisive and highly satirical style of literary criticism, a form he also used to deride such authors as Oliver Goldsmith, George Eliot, Jane Austen, and Robert Louis Stevenson.

The Pilgrim's Progress

an allegory of Puritan ideals; a story that is really an extended metaphor representing larger concepts or ideas /everything in an allegory is a metaphor for something else, and all of it together is trying to make some larger point / very element of the story (characters, actions, events, dialogues, etc.) is always going to be an analogy for typical Christian concepts (faith, hope, love, temptation, salvation, etc.)..

When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd

an elegy on the death of Abraham Lincoln, though it never mentions the president by name. Like most elegies, it develops from the personal (the death of Lincoln and the poet's grief) to the impersonal (the death of "all of you" and death itself); from an intense feeling of grief to the thought of reconciliation. The poem, which is one of the finest Whitman ever wrote, is a dramatization of this feeling of loss. This elegy is grander and more touching than Whitman's other two elegies on Lincoln's death, "0 Captain! My Captain!" and "Hush'd Be the Camps To-day." The form is elegiac but also contains elements found in operatic music, such as the aria and recitative. The song of the hermit thrush, for example, is an "aria." / The symbols are retained throughout this section. The poet bestows, as a mark of affection, a sprig of lilac on the coffin. The association of death with an object of growing life is significant. The star confides in the poet — a heavenly body identifies itself with an earthly being. The star is identified with Lincoln, and the poet is still under the influence of his personal grief for the dead body of Lincoln, and not yet able to perceive the spiritual existence of Lincoln after death. The song of the hermit thrush finally makes the poet aware of the deathless and the spiritual existence of Lincoln.

There's a certain Slant of light

be a bit more upbeat than usual for Dickinson, since it looks like it's about light. But you'd be mistaken, because "light" in this case is something that's harsh, oppressive, and impossible to define—especially in those "Winter Afternoons."/ groundbreaking in form, syntax, and philosophy so many years later. / provides a nearly perfect indication of what Dickinson's work was all about. She uses the imagery of winter light to create connections with the speaker's internal conflict over meaning, despair, and understanding. So, yes, we can't escape the elements of depression and despair here, but it isn't just about doom and gloom

Hills Like White Elephants

centers on a couple's verbal duel over, as strongly implied by the text and as widely believed by many scholars, whether the girl will have an abortion of her partner's child. Jig, clearly reluctant to have the operation, suspects her pregnancy has irrevocably changed the relationship but still wonders whether having the abortion will make things between the couple as they were before. The American is anxious that Jig have the abortion and gives lip service to the fact that he still loves Jig and will love her whether she has the procedure done or not. As the story progresses, the power shifts back and forth in the verbal tug-of-war, and at the end, though it is a topic of fierce debate among Hemingway scholars, it seems that Jig has both gained the upper hand and made her decision. / Author's feat in this story is to accomplish full, fleshed-out characterizations of the couple and a clear and complete exposition of their dilemma using almost nothing but dialogue. This dialogue even omits the main causes of disagreement: the words "abortion" and "baby." He also gives the reader a clear sense of how the power shifts in the couple's relationship./ The title of the story has led many to speculate on what the "white elephant" symbolizes for the couple. A white elephant is generally thought of as unusual and cumbersome, in short, a problem. Various theories exist. The white elephant could be the pregnancy, the baby itself, the abortion, Jig's reluctance to get the abortion, the American's insistence that Jig abort, Jig herself and the American himself. The most popular choices among scholars are that the white elephant is the baby/pregnancy (the obvious choice) and the American himself, given his bullying of Jig.

A Passage to India

complex and multi-faceted work considered one of the greatest novels of the 20th century: "A girl walks into a cave...and an empire trembles". / Published in 1924 when the cracks in the British Empire were just emerging, the novel centers on the trial of an Indian doctor accused of raping an Englishwoman./ It has been lauded not only for its critique of the British Empire, but also for its stylistic innovation and philosophical density. / it takes an individual case - a rape trial - and shows how it sets off network of social, political, and cultural forces that reverberates across the British Empire. Set in India in the early 20th century when it was still a British colony, the novel challenges the claim that British had a right to colonize India

We Are Seven

delves right into all the big questions, especially the questions about the meaning of life and death / The author wanted to penetrate right into our hearts and feelings; he wanted poems to be pleasurable; he wanted to reach what he called "the naked and native dignity of man." / The poem tells the story of a man talking to a young girl about her family. Though two of her siblings are dead, and only four are alive, she insists (over the protests of the man) that she and her brothers and sisters "are seven" in total. The man, however, thinks that they are only five. He thinks that the dead just don't count. Through this dialogue, we come to understand that the girl and the man think about death differently. And as we read, we begin to wonder if, in fact, the child is way smarter than the old dude talking to her. Children just might understand the meaning of death way better than we grown-ups do.

The Return of Sherlock Holmes

e was tired of writing the dude. But rather than take a break from Holmes, Conan Doyle decided that Holmes had to die. So in a story titled "The Adventure of the Final Problem," published 1893, Holmes dies after falling off a cliff while battling his arch-nemesis, the evil Professor Moriarty. The end. Except not. The reading public of Victorian England flipped out over the death of Sherlock Holmes. But, Conan Doyle was able to get away with his (fictional) homicidal ways for nearly a decade.

Kidnapped

ells the story of David Balfour, a young orphan who winds up kidnapped, placed on a ship bound for the Americas, shipwrecked on the northwestern coast of Scotland, and suspected of murder. This story, marketed to boys in the 1880s, has a fast pace, an exotic setting, and lots of suspense and danger to go around / has been popular since its publication precisely because of au. skillful simultaneous use of historical detail and character development.

The Duel

explore the emotional and mental states of two lovers, realizing how different daily life is from romantic dreams, how different life as a farmer would be from visions of love in a vineyard / there is constant opposition between love and hate, between fidelity and infidelity. Whatever speeches the characters may make about values, they are motivated by their emotions.

Lake Isle of Innisfree

expresses his desire to build a small cabin at ***, out of natural materials, and live alone. He will find peace on the lake, where it drops from the morning, and the beautiful midnight.He determines to leave immediately, because even when he stands in a road or on a city pavement, he hears the lapping of the lake waters in his heart./ ***'sprofession of love for nature is one of his most famous and beautiful poems. It is unusual in this collection as it contains no references to the Irish nationalist movement, to Maude Gonne, or to ancient Irish mythology. Yeats first wrote the poem in London, in 1890, where he was feeling intensely homesick.

Pride and Prejudice

he novel deals with plenty of its own deep thoughts and serious subjects. At the turn of the century, the old debate between rationality and emotions was heating up again. The 18th century had been the Age of Enlightenment, with Voltaire and David Hume and Adam Smith making sense of life in a super-scientific, man-centered, non-religious way. These Enlightenment ideas about the rights of men and the value of individuals got a bunch of people fired up in the American colonies, and pretty soon they were doing it up democracy-style across the Atlantic. And just across the English Channel? The French Revolution led to an overthrow of the entire monarchy. Kings all over Europe were making sure their heads were still attached to their necks./ it's definitely a reflection on what those ideas might mean for women's lives.

Jane Eyre

he story of a young, orphaned girl who lives with her aunt and cousins, the Reeds, at Gateshead Hall. Like all nineteenth-century orphans, her situation pretty much sucks./ A poor, unloved, and unattractive orphan uses her "blunt and somewhat annoyingly obsessed with duty personality to win over a wealthy sort-of-aristocrat and live happily ever after./ Madness, disability, missionaries, and a tasty sprinkle of the gothic make **** a pretty compelling read for a book that was published

The Tell-Tale Heart

he unreliable narrator of this classic short story denies accusations that he is mad. He begins to tell a tale to prove his sanity. He recalls being inspired to kill the old man who he was living with and notes that he was made nervous by the man's "evil eye."/One night, the narrator slips into the old man's bedroom, removes him from his bed, and drags the bed over his body to kill him. He cuts him into pieces and buries the body under the floorboards./When the police come to question him, he is disturbed by the sound of the old man's heart, which he perceives to be still beating beneath the floorboards. He is so disturbed that he confesses and tells the police where to find the body.

The River-Merchant's Wife: A Letter

he words of a fictional woman in eighth-century China, writing to her husband while he's away on a six-month business trip. Throughout this piece, the wife recalls memories of how their love progressed and how she longs for her husband's return. More than mere letter in verse, though, this poem represented a bold, first step in the career of one of most influential poets of all time./ Themes" women and feminism / isolation

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court

helped create the time travel story while simultaneously sending up the larger-than-life ridiculousness of Arthurian literature / This book tells the tale of a hardheaded New England factory manager in the late 19th century named Hank, who finds himself whisked back to the time of King Arthur thanks to a crowbar blow to the head. When he arrives, he clashes with their Olde Tyme traditions such as wearing hose and burning witches at the stake. Thanks to Hank's practical ingenuity (and a handy eclipse), he soon has the whole court at his feet, rising to Boss level and thwarting the nasty schemes of the wizard Merlin.

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

hugely bold and controversial book that was published in 1962 in Soviet Russia. This book is a work of fiction, but it is also a kind of journalistic tell-all about a serious topic: the gulag system. / was an international sensation when it was first published and it has remained influential since it was first published. It was the first literary work to openly discuss the oppressive policies of Stalin and the gulag system, and it did a lot to inspire future dissidents, or people who opposed the Soviet government.

Emancipation

strict meter, in a poem about freedom (11-10-11-10) Dramatic Monologue/Lyric almost like a song, or a motivational speech. Calling for the rising up of African Americans through hard work, ambition, & good deeds. T. Biblical references used: "Day of All Days" Liberty as a bird

Ode on a Grecian Urn

immortal and mysterious final lines, is the most well known. The "ode" is an Ancient Greek form of poetry that is marked by its seriousness and technical difficulty. / In 1819, the year in which Keats contracted tuberculosis. He told his friends that he felt like a living ghost, and it's not surprising that the speaker of the poem should be so obsessed with the idea of immortality./ Most of the poem centers on the story told in the images carved on the side of one particular urn. But this isn't some mellow reflection on a pot: it's a wild rollercoaster of a poem covering BIG subjects like sex, love, nature, and death. / Ode in Iambic Pentameter

Little Women

is a classic - if not the classic - girls' book. Written just after the Civil War / The first half of the book is loosely based on au's own life; in fact, it's semi-autobiographical, and reflects the experiences she had growing up with her sisters in New England / Part of the fascination with the novel is its treatment of gender roles, which balances tradition and gender distinction with more forward-thinking, proto-feminist attitudes. We fully expect that readers will be considering and debating issues of gender in this novel for many decades to come.

The Arabian Nights

is a collection of tales from the Islamic Golden Age, compiled by various authors over many hundreds of years. Though each collection features different stories, they are all centered around the frame story of the sultan Shahrayar and his wife, Scheherazade.

William Wilson

is a tale narrated by an infamous criminal who is on the verge of death. He is ashamed to reveal his name; *** is an admitted pseudonym. As death approaches, he tries to explain the momentous event that led to his life of misery and crime. His greatest fear is that he has forfeited heavenly bliss as well as earthly honor. / The author often deals with the theme of the divided self or the split in personality, and *** is his most obvious story of the war within. Au. links the two William Wilsons—they have the same name, common physical traits, and identical histories—to show that the two are doubles or twins or parts of the same self. What part of the self does each represent? The story's epigraph suggests the identity of the second ***: "What say of it? what say [of] CONSCIENCE grim,/ That spectre in my path?" The second ***, who comes and goes like a specter or apparition, represents the conscience or moral sense; that is why, as the gentle but persistent voice within, he speaks only in a low whisper and why no one other than the narrator ever sees him.

Lord Jim

is all about the life of a sailor. And it ain't a pretty one, that's for sure. It is is actually inspired by a real-life event during which some British sailors abandoned their damaged ship and its passengers in the South Pacific. / But ***was all about innovation, and as a foreigner he brought a unique and global perspective to the literature of the British Empire. So it's no surprise that *** explores issues that crop up in nearly all of Conrad's other novels: community and communal behavior codes, masculinity, national identity, imperial politics, life at sea, and what it means to live an exciting, romantic (and sometimes not-so-romantic) life in the empire.

Easter, 1916

it about a historical event called the **** Uprising, which happened in Ireland on **** of 19**. Basically, the British promised the Irish that they would give them free rule over their country in 1914. But then World War I broke out, and the English totally backed down on their promise, telling the Irish that they'd get around to the whole home-rule thing when the war was over. Some Irish didn't want to wait around for the war to end, so they banded together and seized control of the country on their own. The English were not happy. They brutally put down the uprising and executed a bunch of the uprising's leaders. Some of these leaders were good friends of W.B. Yeats. Yeats wasn't all that big on revolutions or even democracy for that matter. He was more interested in the status quo and the well-educated aristocracy. And at the start of this poem, you can see how he distances himself from the folks who led the Easter uprising. But at the end of the day, Yeats has to begrudgingly admit that these folks were brave and that they'll probably be remembered forever in Irish history. Yeats loves Irish history. He has trouble deciding what he truly thinks about the uprising. On the one hand, he things it's all a bit crude. On the other hand, he realizes that the people who died were probably a lot braver than himself, and he feels compelled to acknowledge this in a poem.

Democracy In America

its insightful portrayal of the American character and democratic institutions. Initially, the French government commissioned de **** and Gustave de Beaumont to study the penitentiary system in the United States, but in their travels from the cities to the frontier throughout the young country, the two men kept detailed journals as they attempted objective observation of all phases of American life. / The work received immediate recognition as a significant study of social changes brought about by political freedom and equality. The scope of the work was much broader than originally projected and prophetic in many ways, one of which was prediction of the inevitable struggle to end slavery.

Upon Julia's Clothes

many critics believe that ****was just an imaginative creation of Herrick's, a kind of catch-all for the general ladyfolk of the time /Iambic Tetrameter / Internal Rhymes **** is full of subtle repetitions of sounds.

The Sound and The Fury

may just be the greatest Southern novel ever written. It may also be the most searing discussion of race in a modernist novel. It may also be the greatest family drama ever composed. Heck, it may just be the Great American Novel. We don't mean to toot Faulkner's horn here, but lots of folks have been saying things a lot like these ever since The Sound and the Fury burst onto the scene in 1929. It was Faulkner's first critically-acclaimed novel, and it immediately launched the young author from Mississippi into the literary limelight. / The novel traces the decaying values of the Southern society in which it's based, while also tracking the desperation and hopelessness of individuals (the three brothers of the Compson family) as they each try, in their own way, to mourn the loss of their sister, Caddy. Caddy's sexuality, her early pregnancy, and her quick and unhappy marriage are the obscured heart of this novel: everything else happens after (and as a response to) the actions of Caddy.

The Glass Menagerie

memory play that premiered in 1944 and catapulted the author from obscurity to fame. The play has strong autobiographical elements, featuring characters based on Williams himself, his histrionic mother, and his mentally fragile sister Rose.

To John Donne

my thesis is basically saying that the poem praises Donne but also showcases Jonson's unease about his place in canonical history and makes him feel as though he has to assert himself. As Harold Bloom says, authors have to engage with other canonical authors to be canonical, which is essentially what Jonson is doing by asserting himself next to Donne. My evidence is that he uses hyperbole to hint that Donne isn't as good as he is ostensibly saying he is. The use of 11 syllables in the line "And which no affection praise enough can give" is satirical because he feels he is in reality giving him more than enough praise. Jonson's use of iambic pentameter and rhyming couplets is also a jab at what he considered to be Donne's nonmetrical poetry. Also since Donne was only writing Coterie and Jonson had his works published he's setting himself above Donne.

Alice in Wonderland

new era of children's literature in English: books that didn't have to be didactic or moralistic, that didn't teach children lessons. Books that simply created imaginative worlds in which children could let their minds roam free. The result was a style of writing that simultaneously embraced nonsense and logic. While other Victorian books for children - like Tom Brown's Schooldays and the works of Mary Louisa Molesworth and Mary Martha Sherwood - gave rules for living, these books simply provided space in which to live.

Sonnet 30

the narrator spends time remembering and reflecting on sad memories of a dear friend. He grieves of his shortcomings and failures, while also remembering happier memories.

Sonnet 129

one of Shakespeare's most famous sonnets and centers around the idea of the human mind and its primal urges. Narrator having an internal mediation with himself about his sexuality; he fears it and harvests feelings of self-disgust for having such desires.

Sonnet 55

one of the best and most critically acclaimed sonnets. About time and immortalization. The speaker claims that his beloved will wear out this world to the ending doom. adhering to a larger theme of giving and possessing that runs through many of Shakespeare's sonnets

Things Fall Apart

one of the first novels by an African author to garner worldwide acclaim. Though mostly fictional, Nigerian author Chinua Achebe claims that the book documents Africa's spiritual history - the civilized and rich life the Igbo lived before the arrival of Europeans and the ruinous social and cultural consequences that the arrival of European missionaries brought. Achebe wrote Things Fall Apart as a sharp criticism of imperialism, or the European colonization of countries outside of the European continent (especially Africa and the Americas). The novel also critiques Joseph Conrad's famous novel, Heart of Darkness, which documented the African natives from an imperialist's (or white colonizer's) point of view.

Sonnet 73

one of the most famous of William Shakespeare's 154 sonnets, focuses upon the theme of old age, with each of the three quatrains encompassing a metaphor. The sonnet is pensive in tone, and although it is written to a young friend (See: Fair Youth), it is wholly introspective until the final couplet, which finally turns to the person who is addressed (the "thou" in line one).

Letter From Birmingham Jail

open letter, 1963. the strategy of nonviolent resistance to racism. It says that people have a moral responsibility to break unjust laws and to take direct action rather than waiting potentially forever for justice to come through the courts. Responding to being referred to as an "outsider," King writes, "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere" -The letter responded to several criticisms made by the "A Call for Unity" clergymen, who agreed that social injustices existed but argued that the battle against racial segregation should be fought solely in the courts, not the streets.

Common sense

pamphlet 1775-76 advocating independence from Great Britains. Written in clear and persuasive prose, Paine marshaled moral and political arguments to encourage common people in the Colonies to fight for egalitarian government. I - Common Sense made public a persuasive and impassioned case for independence, which before the pamphlet had not yet been given serious intellectual consideration. He connected independence with common dissenting Protestant beliefs as a means to present a distinctly American political identity, structuring Common Sense as if it were a sermon."the most incendiary and popular pamphlet of the entire revolutionary era".[6]

Barbara Frietchie

patriotic ballad: The author freely embellished the story of a courageous ninety-year-old woman who dared to wave the Union flag from her second-story window in the face of Confederate general Stonewall Jackson as his troops marched through the small Maryland town. The poem, which passionately validated the importance of the Union, was widely embraced as inspiration for a North weary of the long, bloody war. / compact, rhythmic verse narrative, told impersonally by an omniscient voice, which recounts the courage of common people in a crisis. Whittier, who mastered the form by reading the poetry of Robert Burns and Sir Walter Scott, self-consciously draws on that style to give this contemporary event importance and historic largeness

Cyrano de Bergerac

pick an emotion and **** will have you feeling it. You want to swoon? Listen to one of the titular big-shnozed hero's love speeches. You want to feel scorn? Check out the weasel-y Compte de Guiche's manic machinations. Pity? ****bjhbhmbmbnbmbody issues have you covered. Fear? There's a dang battle scene that's full of suspense (and blood and guts). / But the major emotion you'll feel during the reading (or watching, if you're lucky enough to see a stage production of ***) is admiration for Edmond Rostand's verbal acrobatics and blisteringly witty banter./ play about an eloquent, talented, and brave man and his love for a beautiful woman, Roxane. Straightforward? Not so much. Because Our Hero is kind of an uggo—he has a nose the size of an elephant's trunk and a resulting inferiority complex the size of Jupiter.

The Importance of Being Earnest

play 1895. Farcical comedy in which the protagonists maintain fictitious personæ to escape burdensome social obligations. Working within the social conventions of late Victorian London, the play's major themes are the triviality with which it treats institutions as serious as marriage, and the resulting satire of Victorian ways.

Fra Lippo Lippi

poem 1855 -dramatic monologue - it depicts a 15th-century real-life painter. The poem asks the question whether art should be true to life or an idealized image of life. - blank verse, non-rhyming iambic pentameter. - A secondary theme is the Church's influence on art. The Church requires him to redo much of it, instructing him to paint the soul, not the flesh. ("Paint the soul, never mind the legs and arms!"). Aside from the theme of the Church and its desires to change the way holiness is represented artistically, this poem also attempts to construct a way of considering the secular with the religious in terms of how a "holy" person can conduct his life. Questions of celibacy, church law, and the canon are considered as well by means of secondary characters.

My Last Duchess

poem, 1842 - example of the dramatic monologue. It first appeared in 1842 in Browning's Dramatic Lyrics. The poem is written in 28 rhymed couplets of iambic pentameter. - The poem is set during the late Italian Renaissance. - He says, "She had a heart - how shall I say? - too soon made glad..." He goes on to say that his complaint of her was that "'twas not her husband's presence only" that made her happy. Eventually, "I gave commands; then all smiles stopped together." This could be interpreted as either the Duke had given commands to the Duchess to stop smiling or commands for her to be killed.

The Unknown Citizen

poem, 1940. Wit and irony in complaining about the stultifying and anonymous qualities of bureaucratic, semi-socialist Western societies. - satiric elegy, as though the boring, unknown citizen was so utterly unremarkable that the state honored him with a poetic monument about how little trouble he caused for anyone. - The rhyme scheme changes a few times throughout the poem. Most frequently the reader notices rhyming couplets. These sometimes use the same number of syllables, but they are not heroic couplets

On My First Daughter

poetic epitaph, or funerary speech or inscription, honoring the deceased. Jonson wrote it for his daughter, who died 'At six months' end.' As with our pets or any other family member, we understand how attached people can become to those they love. We might also know how difficult it sometimes is to separate our love for them from our attachment to them. These feelings can quite often be rather contradictory, especially when it comes to letting loved ones go, and this is the type of problem that Jonson outlines in his poem. / He opens the epitaph by expressing the pain felt from this loss: 'to each her parents' ruth.' Although he only knew Mary for six short months, Jonson's pain comes from his attachment to his daughter - the familiarity and comfort of having her around. With that connection severed, he has to find a new source of comfort, and the poem's second couplet is the first step in arriving at that new source.

The Emancipation Proclamation

presidential proclamation and executive order (1863). It purported to change the federal legal status of more than 3 million enslaved people in the designated areas of the South from "slave" to "free", although its immediate effect was less. It had the practical effect that as soon as a slave escaped the control of the Confederate government, by running away or through advances of federal troops, the slave became legally free. Eventually, it reached and liberated all of the designated slaves. It was issued as a war measure during the American Civil War, directed to all of the areas in rebellion and all segments of the executive branch (including the Army and Navy) of the United States

Dawn

prose poems included in Rimbaud's Illuminations (1886), is particularly representative of the concerns in most of his writing. Subjectivity, underlined by the use of a first-person speaker; erotic desire, rendered by the image of pursuit of the object; and a final depersonalization accompanied by fainting are the principal themes of the work.yhgyjdtyhg / Perhaps the most striking literary technique apparent in the first stanza is personification. The façade of the palaces is called a "forehead." The water is "dead." Shadows are "encamped," and nature is "breathing," while precious stones "watch" the speaker. By attributing life to the inanimate, the poet tends to make it more active than his speaker.

A Narrow Fellow in the Grass

published by Sue Dickinson without Emily's knowledge. Sue submitted one of Emily' private poems with some edits and a title ("The Snake") to the Springfield Daily Republican. One of those edits was moving the question mark in the third line. Dickinson may have been secretly happy to get something published, but she certainly wasn't happy about having people mess with her punctuation. She even wrote a letter to this guy she had a crush on, just so he would know that she didn't mean to put the question mark at the end of the third line. Here's part of the letter: "Lest you meet my Snake and suppose I deceive it was robbed of me—defeated too of the third line by the punctuation. The third and fourth were one."/So, clearly, Dickinson was not just scribbling in her diary. She had artistic vision behind her poems, and was rightly cheesed off when somebody came around to mess with that. And what a vision it was. With "A narrow Fellow in the Grass," Dickinson has crafted a poem that has more layers than a toddler going out into a snowstorm. Every element of the poem calls for our attention. The dashes, the question mark, the capitalization, and the strange wording are all important, because they mix together to make our encounter with "A narrow Fellow in the Grass" both intriguing, and as startling as almost stepping on a snake.

To Autumn

reference for autumn over spring, but the real star of "To Autumn" is the language and, more specifically, the sound / des often address an inanimate object or abstract idea directly, but they do not always portray that object/idea as a person, as Keats does. We think that autumn is a woman, because the seasons were typically personified as beautiful women in European Art. The Italian painter Botticelli, for example, depicted spring as a pregnant woman. (Check out the painting here.) In this poem, the lady autumn teams up with the sun, basks in the breeze of a granary, and takes lazy naps in a field. / .

Gulliver's Travels

satire, Au. completed **** in 1725 and published it through London printer Benjamin Motte in 1726. Swift wrote to Motte under an assumed name, Richard Sympson, to arrange the novel's printing. Motte was so concerned with being charged with treason for publishing ****that he tried to tone down the political content of several parts of the novel (source). The fact that Swift couldn't even use his own name when planning his book's publication, and that the publisher tried to censor its content, gives us a sense of exactly how offensive **** must have been when it was written.

Anna Karenina

serves up all the Big Issues with a side order of tasty, titillating and tantalizing gossip. It's the story of a high-profile affair, complete with sex, pregnancy, heartbreak, and suicide-by-train. / he story of the claustrophobic nightmarescape of 19th Century Russian society. And the story of Russian labor after the serfs were freed. And the story of gaining religious faith. And the story of being a political figure. And the story of family. And the story of unstable national identity. And...

Spring and All

short, beautiful, and filled with simple images. It focuses on making each moment as clear and sharp as possible. / Someone has stopped by the side of a road that leads to a hospital, and he or she is looking at the landscape. This person (the speaker of the poem) begins by describing the scene: the dead plants that cover everything at the end of winter. Then, the poem shifts, and the speaker describes the coming of spring, imagining how new life will emerge from this landscape as it begins to wake up.

Ballad of the Goodly Fere (old English for companion)

show his knowledge of the ballad form and he knew a ponderous lot about the forms of poetry. / The speaker is Simon Zealotes (one of the more silent of Christ's disciples) after the crucifixion. A "capon" is a castrated rooster (it's done so that they'll be more edible.) Pound wanted to write a poem about Jesus which depicted him as more of a man's man and less effeminate. The ballad form is good for the purpose and the seafaring slang is even better for it.

Fog

six-line poem. au. is known for speaking a "language of the people," meaning he's not trying to throw in a bunch of ideas and words that everyday folks can't really identify with. Using this kind of simple language could also explain why he packs so much meaning into so few words. In fact, he's often compared to Walt Whitman because of the sort of ease and simplicity he demonstrates in his work without getting super-highbrow on us. ***is no exception. The simple metaphors and imagery he uses captivate our imaginations and evoke a broad spectrum of emotions and ideas ranging anywhere between surprise, awe, and fear, to name a few. And since it's so short, you might even feel compelled to give it a few reads and see how many different ideas come to mind.

The Recessional

speaker calls out to God, the Lord of their battle-line under whose hand they hold power over the land. He calls for the "Lord God of Hosts" to be with them "lest they forget". /I was written for Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee in 1897, which celebrated the 60th anniversary of her reign. The poem is well-known for the biblical phrase "Lest we forget" repeated throughout the poem which quickly became a mainstay of memorials and headstones./ enigmatic and cerebral poem /the English should be careful of imperialistic hubris, be wary of jingoism, and understand that their earthly conquests pale in comparison with the mighty works of God

The Gettysburg Address

speech, 1863. Carefully crafted address, secondary to other presentations that day, was one of the greatest and most influential statements of national purpose. In just over two minutes, Lincoln reiterated the principles of human equality espoused by the Declaration of Independence and proclaimed the Civil War as a struggle for the preservation of the Union sundered by the secession crisis, with "a new birth of freedom" that would bring true equality to all of its citizens.Lincoln also redefined the Civil War as a struggle not just for the Union, but also for the principle of human equality. Beginning with the now-iconic phrase "Four score and seven years ago"—referring to the United States Declaration of Independence in 1776—Lincoln examined the founding principles of the United States as stated in the Declaration of Independence. I

I Have a Dream

speech,1963. Beginning with a reference to the Emancipation Proclamation, which freed millions of slaves in 1863,[3] King observes that: "one hundred years later, the Negro still is not free".[4] Toward the end of the speech, King departed from his prepared text for a partly improvised peroration - 3 rhetorical lenses: voice merging, prophetic voice, and dynamic spectacle. Voice merging is the combining of one's own voice with religious predecessors. Prophetic voice is using rhetoric to speak for a population. A dynamic spectacle has origins from the Aristotelian definition as "a weak hybrid form of drama, a theatrical concoction that relied upon external factors (shock, sensation, and passionate release) such as televised rituals of conflict and social control. - "Given the context of drama and tension in which it was situated", King's speech can be classified as a dynamic spectacle. A dynamic spectacle is dependent on the situation in which it is used. It can be considered a dynamic spectacle because it happened at the correct time and place: during the Civil Rights Movement and the March on Washington.

In Just-

spring has sprung. Everything's growing and all-around delightful. The kids, in fact, jump for joy when the man selling balloons starts to whistle. Clowns (and other balloon-selling folk) have gotten a bad rap for being scary and creepy, but this guy seems to be all right. At the very least, he gets the kiddies to come running to him. ****creates a poem that's half painting and half sound-scape (that's the aural version of a landscape -Chock-full of words like "mud-luscious" and "puddle-wonderful," the poem seems to be bursting with descriptions of the way that a spring day in the park looks and feels and sounds and smells. And because the poem repeats itself several times (in fancy technical terms, we'd call that a "refrain,") it emphasizes the way that all the tiny details of the poem actually contribute to one overarching image: the park in spring.

God's Grandeur

starts off with a claim: the earth is full God's special power, God's vitality. But the earth is ultimately temporary. The fire will go from it one day. It will reach a peak, then slowly spread, and then collapse. (This is confusing - don't try to take Hopkins too literally. Let your imagination feel and see the images he presents). / The speaker states that the natural world is inseparable from God, but at the same time temporary. The speaker wants to know why don't people don't take better care of the natural world. Why don't they recognize and respect the power of God that is running through our environment? / ature never stops. It's hiding underground, like a hidden spring. And even though the sun always sets in the west bringing darkness and night, it always rises again in the east, bringing light and morning. The speaker assures us that morning follows night, and light follows darkness, because the Holy Ghost is always hovering over the messed up world, pondering deeply, and worried. The upside, though, is that the Holy Ghost watches over the world and treats it in much the same way a bird would treat her unhatched eggs, providing comfort, security, warmth, beauty, and motion.

Virtue

starts with a direct rhetorical address to a personified thing: as if speaking to the day, the narrator says, "Sweet day" / themes： The Transience of Earthly Beauty, The Interconnection of Life and Death / Author shows us or tells us that the earth and all its beauty shall pass away but only a virtueous soul shall live forever. In line 1 he personifies the 'day' as sweet, cool, calm and bright, by using adjectives. He also gives us an imagery of a marriage between a man and a woman as seen in line 2, bridal is the marriage between the earth and sky which i think means 'us' and 'Christ' when he comes. He also personified the 'dew' who shall weep her fall tonight which means we shall all weep for the destruction of the earth for it must die. In the rest stanza he talks of the rose and spring and talks of how pleasant they are but at every last line he always added that they all must die except in the last stanza where he made known to us that only a virteous soul shall live for eternity. The poem is filled with biblical allusion on the end of the world. It is a metaphysical poetry

Animal Farm

t's a biting satire about tyrannical governments and a dark warning about the perils of Russian communism. / Criticism of Stalin wasn't banned in wartime British press, but it wasn't exactly encouraged, either. Stalin may have been bad, but Hitler was worse. When publishing house Faber & Faber rejected Orwell, an editor pointed out that it was simply distasteful to depict Stalin as "a pig."

The Last of the Mohicans

takes place in upstate New York in 1757 during the French and Indian War—a war that would, for all intents and purposes, prove more vital to shaping American identity than even ye olde Revolutionary War. It stars Hawkeye, a hyper-competent woodsman who combines attributes of European and Native American heritages and basically is the coolest guy ever.

Death, Be Not Proud

tells Death's really not as scary or powerful as most people think. The speaker starts talking in contradictions, saying that people don't really die when they meet Death - and neither will the speaker. Then, he really tries to burn Death's biscuit by comparing him to "rest and sleep," two things that aren't scary at all. the speaker claims that "only the good die young," because the best people know that death brings pleasure, not pain. As if this isn't enough trash-talk, the speaker kicks it up a notch, calling Death a "slave" and accusing him of hanging out with those lowlifes "poison, war, and sickness." Besides, we don't need Death - the speaker can just take drugs, and it will have the same effect: falling asleep. So death is just a "short sleep," after which a good Christian will wake up and find himself in Eternity.

The Necklace

tells the tale of a dissatisfied middle-class woman whose dreams of wealth and glamour end in disaster/ Though the author didn't invent the short story genre, he perfected it, popularized it, and greatly expanded his audience's understanding of what could be done with it. It helped that he wrote some three hundred short stories, all mostly between 1880 and 1890. He was also famous for his use of the twist endings

After a great pain, a formal feeling comes

that has all of Emily's eccentricities on full display. This one is downright experimental with dense conflicting images and an elastic use of meters. If an editor had seen this one, he seriously would've flipped out and the world would be short one intensely beautiful poem about the complex emotions that come after a trauma. / The poem tells us that big traumas are often followed up by periods of numbness. (Is that good or bad? Hard to tell.) The whole thing is this crazy kaleidoscope of contradictory images. Numb nerves, a confused heart, robot feet, people dying in the snow— all of these images come together to paint a vivid picture of the inner life of somebody who's totally messed up after experiencing something awful.

Apology

the Socratic dialogue that presents the speech of legal self-defence, which Socrates presented at his trial for impiety and corruption, in 399 BC Specifically the **** is a defence against the charges of "corrupting the young" and "not believing in the gods in whom the city believes, but in other daimonia that are novel"

On Giles and Joan

the descriptions of so-called discord between the two create several instances of litotes (in other words, by describing their "discord," Jonson reveals their concord through their disagreement on everything). One can also presume that the poem forms a meiosis: each description of Giles's and Joan's dislike for each other builds an "anti-hierarchy" (or rather, demolishes a hierarchy) by getting worse with each line / "In all affections she concurreth still." Instead of repeating again that Joan "concurs" or "agrees" with her husband's sentiments by ending with "concurreth," Jonson emphasizes "still" to point out that Joan still hates her husband as much as he does her.

Absolom and Achitophel

the leader of the group of antagonists to King David (Charles II) is Ach****. He selects Abs**** (King Charles' illegitimate son) as the fittest candidate for kingship. With studied flattery and art, Ach****begins a long temptation speech to seduce Abs***to this rebellious cause. -Heroic or Epic Poem. In some respects, differ from a heroic poem. A heroic narrative is expected to open with an invocation, or some such dignified figure. But Dryden's poem opens with a witty ironical setting. Further, in Dryden, there is no portrayal or development of character in action. Further still, Dryden's main purpose here is not narrative. Instead, there is dignified moralizing, which is much too numeroUs than decorum prescribed in a heroic poemIt is more complete poem than satire, for while author's mission was to attack Shaftesbury, he also wanted to praise the king and his followers. It is essentially a patriotic and didactic composition.

I like to see it lap the Miles

the progress of a strange creature (which astute readers discover is a train) winding its way through a hilly landscape. The speaker admires the train's speed and power as is goes through valleys, stops for fuel, then "steps" around some mountains. The animal-like train passes by human dwellings and, though it observes them, doesn't stop to say hello. Instead, it goes on ahead, chugging loudly as it passes through a tunnel, and steams downhill. Finally, the train (compared in the end to a powerful horse) stops right on time at the station, its "stable."

Nobody Knows My Name

themes: different experiences of race in Europe and America, depictions of African-Americans in literature, and the religious life. / His opening essay considers the old question: "What does it mean to be an American? / y Name also includes a series of essays on the U.S. South. Baldwin sees the South and the North as part of the same national trauma. Northern blacks live the South, even if they never have been there. It is in their family history and their cultural memory. Its problems are also not unique. He even correctly predicts that the trauma of the Civil Rights struggle in the South would be relived in Northern urban areas before long. "It must be said that the racial setup in the South is not, for a Negro, very different from the racial setup in the North. It is the etiquette which is baffling, not the spirit. Segregation is unofficial in the North and official in the South, a crucial difference that does nothing, nevertheless, to alleviate the lot of most Northern Negroes."

The Legend of Sleepy Hollow

themes: glutony, supernatural: seems like an investigative report about all things supernatural. We end up with more questions than answers, but one thing's for sure in our sleepy little town: whatever it is, the supernatural is going to come for you./

Joseph Andrews

this razor-sharp satire in 1742, the whole English nation was already abuzz about a little lady named Pamela. **** is all about mocking a book called Pamela, by Samuel Richardson. The heroine of this hefty classic, Pamela Andrews, is supposed to be super sweet, virtuous, and totally unwilling to succumb to her master's sexual advances. But unfortunately for Pamela, being a goody-two-shoes also means she's an easy target for people who think that sort of thing is actually kind of funny./ Th: The Vulnerability and Power of Goodness, Charity and Religion, Providence

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

was a follow-up to Tom Sawyer, and it dumps us right back in the Southern antebellum (that's "pre-war") world of Tom and his wacky adventures/ Only this time, the adventures aren't so much "wacky" as life- and liberty-threatening. ****is a poor kid whose dad is an abusive drunk. Huck runs away, and immediately encounters another runaway. But this runaway isn't just escaping a mean dad; he's escaping an entire system of racially based oppression. / He's escaping slavery

The Secret Life of Walter Mitty

（short story, 1939). One of the most anthologized short stories in American literature. The word "****esque" have entered the English language, denoting an ineffectual person who spends more time in heroic daydreams than paying attention to the real world, or more seriously, one who intentionally attempts to mislead or convince others that he is something that he is not. - Protagonist: the archetype for dreamy, hapless, Thurber Man". Thurber's love of wordplay can be seen in his coining of several nonsense terms in the story, including the pseudo-medical jargon