havensaregna

Part 1:

McKay’s poem title “Icarus” is infested with bird imagery for different reasons. Icarus’ ambition to fly and his idolization of flight is best exemplified by birds. A playful description of movement is related to a grounded aspect of life… “Icarus notices how the Red-tails and Broadwings separate their primaries to spill a little air, giving up just enough lift to break their drag up into smaller trailing vortices. What does this remind him of? He thinks of the kind of gentle teasing that can dissipate a dark mood so it slips off as a bunch of skirmishes and quirks,” showing that being in flight makes more sense to him than being earthbound. Birds are representative of freedom and in the line “he’s out of the story and into the song” reminds us of the carefree nature of a birds song when he is free and is what Icarus longs for.
Also, in the mythology Icarus is told by his father how to manage his wings when he is instructed to not fly to close to the sun. In the poem, Icarus idolizes the movement and skill of different types of birds. Birds possess the instinct to use their wings wisely and not fly too close to the sun which Icarus has yet to learn, or will not evolve to possess the wings in the same way as the birds do. His father gave him a gift and birds are the proper execution of how to use that gift.


Part 2:

A dystopia is a term to describe a society wherein there is lack of autonomy in its citizens and there is a high degree of control, shown through forced conformity or allegiance to a leader or political structure. A dystopian work of literature is one that creates the image of an oppressed society, in a way it is a form of satire that exaggerates a pre-existing social more in order to bring it into the light. Because of this, what we might learn from studying a dystopian novel is a new way of looking at the social customs that we readily accept and take for granted. Since a lot of what we do is second nature it may take exaggeration for readers to become aware of a present or potential social problem. The movies that I have seen referred to in the article are Brazil and A Scanner Darkly. What stands out in my memory of the movie Brazil was the exaggerated and overbearing presence of TV’s in every scene, which was satirizing and foreshadowing the reliance and inescapability of media and technology in our lives.

Part 1:

Lorna Crozier uses packing for a long journey as an extended metaphor in her poem “Packing for the Future”. The word choices in the first stanza remind you of going on a literal journey: she uses words like walk, water, stones, high places, and earth, as a metaphor for the figurative journey of life. The title “Packing for the Future” is referring to gathering together what is important, and making the separation between what is worth carrying around and what can be left behind. These can be abstract such as “that small thing you cannot leave” or literal objects such as “the photograph that keeps you sane”. The line “[t]ake the thickest socks wherever you’re going you'll have to walk” implies that a self reliance will be necessary for the journey that you may have to walk alone, so be prepared by “[taking] the thickest socks” and stay grounded with “the way they hold you to the earth”. The sixth stanza that begins with “There may be doors nailed shut” is a metaphor for the challenges and rejection that accompany growing up, and “Take the dream you've been having since you were a child,” is the hope and innocence that if kept intact gives us the resiliency to keep going. And finally “Always travel lighter than the heart” means to not weigh ourselves down with the excess emotional baggage that will negatively weigh heavy on our mind and heart.
Richard Wilbur uses two extended metaphor’s for growing up in his poem “The Writer”: at first his daughter who is “the writer” is the metaphorical ships captain who is embarking on a new passage of life, and secondly she is the starling who must escape from that very room no matter how difficult. The tool for achieving this escape is through her writing. The author uses words like prow, gunwhale, and cargo to describe the ship that is her room, her life, and her writing when he says “In her room at the prow of the house”,“the stuff of her life is a great cargo”, and “from her shut door a commotion of typewriter-keys like a chain hauled over a gunwale”. The second metaphor is that of a starling “Which was trapped in that very room” just as his daughter is trapped until she grows up or gains freedom through her writing. As the starling “batter[s]” against the window while trying to escape, finally “clearing the sill of the world” this is the author’s hope for his daughter that she will not have to struggle as the starling did.
Both Crozier and Wilbur use extended metaphor to describe the nature of growing up, whether it compares to a long journey or a starling that is looking for freedom. The metaphors within the poems are an effective way to offer advice for how to approach life. Crozier speaks to a more general audience and to life’s journey in general, and Wilbur specifies his advice to his own daughter while being more specific to the process of growing up. The use of metaphor however generalizes both poems to some extent as the variation of images allow for creativity in the interpretation.


Part 2:
There are a few areas of overlap in Sylvia Plath’s biography and her poem titled “Daddy”. She says in her poem, “I was ten when they buried you” and she was in fact ten years old when her father died from complications with diabetes. She attempted suicide with the aid of sleeping pills when she was twenty years old as said in the next line, “At twenty I tried to die”. When she says, “I made a model of you, A man in black with a Meinkampf look…And I said I do, I do.” She may be referring to when she met Ted Hughes, who could have reminded her of her father and married him.
I do not believe that there is much accuracy in the details. Two very prominent issues that come with the accuracy of a biography, be it self written as poetry or an outside biography, are subjectivity and a selective memory. We interpret the world through our own lenses of our experience and can never be truly objective. Having access to the journals and poetry of Sylvia Plath can illuminate and back up pieces of the biographical information and vice versa. I do not think that she chose to write her life in this way for any purpose, I think that she was simply writing what was her internal experience. In my opinion an autobiography can be “art and lies”. It is not uncommon for people to recount the memory of a shared experience in entirely different ways. The art that is poetry and the lies that are our emotional experience is what I think Plath would consider her autobiography.

Part 1:

What has been a useful aspect of studying literature for me has been learning about binaries, how to identify them in a work of literature and how they add to the meaning that the author is trying to get across. It has been interesting to learn all of the different things to look for to enhance the meaning of the story such as patterns, binaries, symbols, and setting.

Part 2:
http://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/Library/SLT/drama/classical%20drama/terms.html#anagnoris

1. Hamartia: The protagonist most often contributes to his or her own downfall by a mismatch betwen character and circumstances, or hamartia. Interestingly enough, the translation of hamartia as "flaw" may in fact itself be flawed. There is some evidence that suggests that it rather means any quality in excess--perhaps even a virtue--that brings about the fall of the protagonist.

Creon contributes to his downfall by acting on what he thinks is right by sending Antigone to the bridal chamber and preventing his son Haemon from marrying her, and then losing his son to suicide because of those actions as well as his wife’s suicide.

2. Hubris: Frequently an Oedipus, an Antigone, a Macbeth, a Lear, or a Cleopatra is brought to doom by excessive pride--hubris--a belief that he or she is somehow above the fates, or in control of destiny.

Antigone had excessive pride or hubris in that she actively went against Creon’s orders to satisfy her own moral beliefs that everyone should have a proper burial whether it was condoned or not.

3. Catharsis: Exactly what Aristotle meant by "purgation" or "catharsis" has been the subject of much discussion, but in essence he was concerned to explain the release of powerful, healing emotions that make tragedy so moving.

Creon experiences catharsis when he wails and prays over his son and his wife whom he lost to suicide due to his own actions.

4. Peripeteia: a sudden turn of events or an unexpected reversal

Creon sends Antigone away to suffer for disobeying him and burying her brother, and he ends up being the only one left to suffer alone.

5. Anagnorisis: Often the protagonists in tragedy undergo a process of recognition, in which they see their own nature, and destiny, more clearly than before.

After the seer visits Creon he recognizes that he is destined for tragedy unless he releases Antigone, and being prevented from doing so because she and his son are dead when he arrives forces him to repent and pray for what he has done.

Part 1

The allusions that were used in “The Boat” were: Thomas Hardy’s Eustacia Vye who was emulated by the narrator’s mother; the life and hardship of a fisherman and reference to the uncle as “a latter day Tashtego” as seen in Moby Dick; and David Copperfield’s Ham Peggoty, who has a love of the sea and is the son and nephew of fishermen.

What these three intertexualities have in common is their connection to fisherman, a life on the sea, and tragedy that comes in the form of drowning

The allusions do not idealize the life of a fisherman but connect it to a life that ends in tragedy; the narrator included these references in his reflections to foreshadow the details of his father’s death. The narrator who is now an adult man and “…teaches at a great Midwestern university” is likely to have read the literature that his father was so fond of, and in retrospect is able draw the connections and parallels between the two. Also, if his father was not on the boat he was on his bed reading, or discussing books with his children so it is fitting that the memory of his life be entwined with the stories.


Part 2

6. Key passage: “I say this now with a sense of wonder at my own stupidity in thinking I was somehow free…”
Why does his father get better “rather miraculously”?

The narrator had thought that he “was somehow free” from having to become a fisherman and could continue “playing and helping in the boat” even as his parents got older, and continue “doing well in school”. The point at which he realizes that he was not free to continue doing these things is when he realizes that “there were but three of us in the house” which meant that he as the only son would eventually have to begin to work in the fishing boat as his father got older, and he could not as easily do as his sisters did and leave his parents behind forever.

His father gets sick and “…seemed to grow old and ill at once” which meant that all of the preparation work was left to the narrator, his mother and her brother. Because it is getting closer to the start of the season and his father is still sick when they begin to fall behind in their work it is at this time he realizes that his studies and the books he loves will have to come second in life if there is room for them at all, and he spends his first entire day at home to work.

His father asked his son to go back to school which he first defies but then agrees to. If he were to not get better “rather miraculously” in time for the start of the season his son would have no chance of staying in school but would have been forced to work on the boat before the school year was over. Which his father predictably would try to delay in order give his son the chance to study since that was his wish for his younger self. And so he finds the will to get up and back to work when it is time.

Part 1:
In the first line of this poem, “They fuck you up, your mum and dad”, Larkin is addressing the universal you, implying that every parent fucks up their children. This line likely provokes some sort of emotional response with everyone whether they believe the merit of the statement or not, since we all have parents and have been affected by how they raised, or didn’t, raise us. The emotional response combined with the immediacy of the universal aspect in the poem shows that it contains at least a few aspects of great literature.
The reader is not sure whether it is meant to be taken seriously or not; with his nursery rhyme style of rhythm and use of simple language, it’s as though he is making fun of the topic. Then the last stanza becomes serious and reads like a pessimistic warning, that the only way to not fuck up our children is to not have any. Concurrently it is this contrast between seriousness and levity in the poem that makes it intriguing. However, Larkin does not go very deep in to the intense theme of man perpetuating a cycle of misery beyond a face value idea that we can all simply blame our parents. Also, intimating that everyone is fucked up is a very strong and incisive statement and leads me to feel that the message in his poem reads more like a limited opinion than a universal truth. I would not classify this particular poem as “great literature” if only by how straightforward it is; there are not too many ways in which it can be interpreted, but can only vary slightly according to who the reader is.


Part 2:
In “Evaline”, even after the mother has passed away Evaline’s decisions are still heavily weighted by a promise she made to her mother to keep the home together, conflicting with the desire to escape the pitiful vision of what her mother’s life had been. This deepens the theme of Larkin’s poem in that it shows the inescapable effect of passing down baggage onto our children however unintended.
In the end it seems that she is not able to break free from the conditioning of her parents in order to seek a life that is truly her own. By giving up her own dreams to fulfill the promise to her mother Eveline may feel it her future child’s duty to do the same, and perhaps her only chance at avoiding that fate would be to heed the warning in Larkin’s poem and not have any kids herself.