Essay 1

Basho, "Haiku"

Lyric? Narrative? Maybe both.

Haiku: 5 - 7 - 5 syllables: 3 line poems which may stand alone or be linked with other poems

Imagery: not just visual--various senses

allusion:   Sado Island      Kyoto


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Gwendolyn Brooks, "Malcolm X"


Brooks had some involvement with the black power movement, which included Malcolm X, who was killed in 1965.

Alliteration:    r and r sounds repeated in lines 2 and 3.   Also, in line 2, the strong "d" sounds are repeated at the end. "Hence" is the repetition at the beginning of two lines; this is called anaphora.

Notes by Janette Brown:

Stanza 1:

            “Original” -Iambic Diameter. Dramatic tone. Straight to the point that she views X as original.

            “hence ragged round….robust”- describes his lack of polished vocabulary. (Historical Context- he generally wanted to appeal to the lower working class therefore his vocabulary had to fit the audience). Alliteration of the “R and R” sounds, and also “d”

Stanza 2:

            Trimeter.

“hawkmans eye’s” – trope for fierce , sharp.

“we”- the African American community.

“maleness”- aggressiveness/dominance = power. Masculinity. Went against the portrayal of how African Americans were supposed to be.

“the maleness” – repetition means she feels strongly about that characteristic.

“raking out and making guttural the air” -hyperbole. The air can be the social/ political atmosphere. Guttural can also mean rough so it can be interpreted that he’s exposing the rough side. Raking out can also mean expansion , and his energy is being expanded.

“pushing us to walls” – walls is a trope for forcing African Americans to take risks,

Stanza 3:

            Iambic Pentameter after iambic dimeter and iambic trimeter

            “soft”= change. “fundamental hour”= black power movement (mid 60s)

            “sorcery devout and vertical” – she views his way to call action to black empowerment as magical. She uses the word vertical to illustrate that X doesn’t lie down and get walked over.

            “beguiled the world”- X charmed the “black world” so it's clear she is addressing that group and not whites who were not progressive in the sixties, because they saw him negatively.

Stanza 4 :

            “he opened us”- he gave them a different perspective on the possibility of political change,

            “he was a key”- they viewed him to be the answer/ solution for black empowerment. There is also a possibility that door/key are somewhat sexualized tropes that connect to his masculine power; in this era, many would find this reading problematic.

Group work, Monday, Jan. 7, 2019: List: the most interesting parts of the poem and why they are interesting either in terms of literary technique (trope, image) or thematic development or both, and ask specific questions about about lines, phrases, or sentences in the poem that seem to block your ability to experience the language.


A. Emily Dickinson, 209 (520)


problem with second stanza--meaning of tropes

Is it the fear of ocean itself or a fear of death or of a person?

 low-stakes writing samples:

Dickinson was a woman who lived in solitude and never married. This poem could be about an interaction or feeling she once felt or perhaps even yearned for--a person or feeling. The sea engulfing her could be as if she wanted the embrace since she stood there.

 In the first four stanzas every other line rhymes in accordance to the last word said.

quatrain 1:
q a r a
2:  s b t b
In the last quatrain, the only slant rhyme appears:   know/withdrew

Dickinson uses a first-person narrator. Actually, this is a term used to describe fiction (novels and short stories); in poetry, we refer to the speaker. But it's very good that you are distinguishing the "person" in the poem from the author; they should not be seen as one, except in rare cases!

The poem thrusts you into a situation with a woman and a dog out at sea as they happen to be battling the harsh elements. You can feel the conviction in her will to not give up on this journey through the words of the poem. It feels very much like an outlandish short film.

The man whom she's describing seemed to be very sneaky as he would follow up on her secretly in the poem.

It sounded like she wanted to commit suicide.... I knew that she was mentally sick, and she described her desires to swim along until it withdrew her.

I feel like the in-depth exaggeration shows how much she felt attacked by the sea. The touch of the wave scared her away.

She is bold and confident and nobody can interfere with her motion. The opposite force is strong as well, but... the last stanza clarifies that she has the victory.

I noticed the many pauses she is taking. She is using a lot of rhyming and meter.

I notice the odd punctuation: this poem is separated by hyphens. This creates a stronger separation between lines. Dickinson makes use of vivid imagery.

The poem may be using personification by giving the sea a personality because this "sea" is representing someone or something else. For her this sea has a kind of dangerous or consuming side. "The sea withdrew" is my interpretation of a goodbye or some kind of farewell. This sea could represent a lover who is consuming and beautiful.

"The mermaids in the basement... look at me." Hyperbole, possibly meaning fish deep in the sea. Yes, it's a trope (metaphor) that connects mermaids/fish & basement/bottom of sea, but hyperbole is exaggeration, and this is not primarily exaggeration.

Why did she choose this title? She didn't; she didn't use titles; her editors used numbers after her death.

Notes by Olive Casareno:

Background info:

-Dickinson was a recluse that stayed hidden away on the second floor of her house for about 20 years

-Some queer theorists believe that Dickinson was, in fact, attracted to women and had a deep affection for her own sister in law, Susan Gilbert; the evidence they use to support this lies within the intimate nature of the letters Dickinson and Gilbert often exchanged

Although same gender relationships have existed throughout human history, since Dickinson lived during the Victorian era, there was no "model" of what lesbianism or bisexuality in society

-some conventional critics believe that Dickinson was actually in love with a preacher, who had no interest in her affections (though there is no conclusive proof for this claim)

-Poem 520 addresses both death and the conflict between desiring and resisting sexual relationships; it relates pleasure/pain, sex/death 

B. Megan Hall, "Real"

The first sentence is the most striking, because it made the most sense.
The first 2 stanzas are very different from the last 2. We need to think about how leaps of association happen.
Megan Hall seems to be a white woman, but she may be of mixed race.

Notes by Alex Marston:

When the speaker uses the word "white" she does not seem to be using it in a racial context. The image/trope of "butterflies" may signify beauty and "sword" the fight to gain acceptance regardless of looks. In the middle of the poem, we can question whether the speaker is awake, dreaming or struggling to distinguish reality from fantasy. A "lucid dream" occurs when one is dreaming and is at the same time aware that this is a dream; this may be a situation similar to lucid dreaming.

"Looks that want to peel me" may deal with racial categorization; the speaker may be imagining people in her dreams who dislike her for being of mixed race. She wants to use her fantasy to help her get away from them or have them disappear. The idea about those who wish to "split" and "shred" her indicates that she is facing racism in South Africa at the time of Apartheid (before the 1990s).

The dream undergoes a transition onto a beach, and she emphasizes her "brown" color ("colored," neither white nor black in the Apartheid racial system). The later reference to "blackness" could be a trope for race or rather for emptiness, lack of hope, unhappiness.

The final vaginal reference to what is "between" her "legs" ("words") may represent her femininity as an ancient source of power. We wonder: how can words cast "shadows"? And how can a shadow be cast at night without some source of light to contrast with it?



C.  William Shakespeare, excerpt from King Lear 

Notes by Antonyio Artis:

- King Lear has gotten old and wants to give on of his daughters the throne. He pits the 3 daughters against each other by deciding who gets the throne based on who loves him more. The older two, Regan and Goneril pretend to love him the most just to get his throne.

- Before this poem took place; Regan and Goneril had shut their father out in the middle of the storm.

"Thou think'st much that this contentious storm

Invades us to the skin: so 'tis to thee;

But where the greater malady is fix'd,

The lesser is scarce felt."

-The first line gives off the sense of anger and danger.

-CONTENTIOUS - Causing or likely to cause an argument; controversial.

-THOU - you

- The storm is personified since it cannot literally invade the skin.

-the punctuation shows one thought is proceeding the other.

-the storm symbolizes the daughters Regan and Goneril (figuratively) and the (literal) storm outside.

-MALADY - a disease or ailment.

- the last line suggests the storm may also exist in his mind. Depression.

"Thou'ldst shun A bear;

But if thy flight lay toward the raging sea,

Thou'lst meet the bear i' the mouth. When the mind's free,

The body delicate: the tempest in my mind

Doth from my senses take all feeling else

Save what beats there. Filial ingratitude!

Is it not as this mouth should tear this hand

For lifting food to't?"

-SHUN - to avoid

-He'd rather fight and risk his life trying to kill the bear than face the sea.

-When the mind is okay, the body is fragile to you. You tend to care about yourself more when the mind is free than when it is damaged.

-TEMPEST - a violent windy storm

-"tempest in my mind" defines and supportd the earlier use of MALADY. Internal sickness. His mind is not well throughout.

-FILIAL - Daughter or son

-INGRATITUDE - to be ungrateful

-This expresses King Lear's relationship with his daughters is the exact opposite of what it should be. The daughters should be grateful since it is their father's hands that nurishes them. Instead they don't love him and reject the figurative warmness of family.

"But I will punish home:

No, I will weep no more. In such a night

To shut me out! Pour on; I will endure.

In such a night as this! O Regan, Goneril!

Your old kind father, whose frank heart gave all,-

O, that way madness lies; let me shun that;

No more of that."

-there is a mood switch. He driving to take action against the things causing him pain.

-He will punish home directly. He will punish his daughters.

-"pour on" he is speaking to the Gods.

-His words contradict his previous actions in the lines "Your old kind father whose frank heart gave all" because he pinned the 3 daughters against each other and ridiculed the youngest.

-MADNESS - the state of being mentally ill, especially severely.

- Madness was used in those times in literature to symbolize insanity and a state of the mind being too far gone to recover easily.

-King Lear convinces himself he will endure the storm to keep himself from going insane.

-the first half (before the mood change) suggests a King Lear who is numbed by the pain his older two daughters caused. The second half expresses King Lear's inability to feel numbness and (instead) use his hurt emotions to enact retribution against them.

D. A.K. Ramanujan, "As Eichmann Said, My Brother Said"


Adolph Eichmann: a leader of the Nazis who carried out aspects of the Holocaust and other atrocities.

It's striking that Eichmann did not regret anything and is justifying his horrible actions.

Notes by Isabella DaSilva

Ramanujan uses allusion when mentioning Eichmann, who was a Nazi enginerr whjo worked at the concentration camps.
- uses simile when stating "the trains ran like a dream"
- harrumping = dissatisfaction or dissaproval
- bull market = doing well in stocks, upgrading
- "they had lot their eyes", infamous Nazi doctor, Mangela, did experiemtens with jews, gypsies and gays, suhc as detatching ones limbs and re attching them onto another, and changing their eye colors to be resemble the arian race (blonde hair with blue eyes). In addition, they would use their gold teeth to melt them and be resourceful.
- The image of "artiical limbs, climbing by themselves, all over the landscape" is seen as surreal and disturbing.
- Junk bonds =  when you invest your a large amount of your money that you dont get a refund
- Ramanujan mentions compare Jews to "caterpillars" because like caterpillar, they are yet to be their final form, their are incomplete, not yet butterflies, not yet perfect. It is seen as a trope/
- Eichmann was simply following orders as stated in stanza 3, "As Eichmann said, I obeyed orders, thats all".
- Pension - putting money for retirement
- Using juxtaposition when stating in stanza 4, "into ovens not unlike the ones in your kitchen" comparing the kitchen oven to the one that they had in the death camps, but bigger. Giving us a feel and making us understand them. The smell of something burning.
- "making pyramids of tangeled hands and feet, another allusion to what happened to these jews limbs?
- Evil & domesticity, they exist, they are seperate, but not!
- The pyramid scheme mention with men making pyramids with tangled hands
In stanza 5 line 4-5, "of not remembering and not forgetting either" states a paradox, general not specific. After the end of the concentrations camps, all Nazis were put in trial and have states the same that Eichmann said, "not remembering, and not forgetting"




E. Robert Browning, "The Bishop Orders His Tomb at St. Praxed's Church"

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There are 3 interpretations of Dickinson's poem in Academic Search Complete; here is one:

O'Maley, Carrie. "I Started Early--Took my Dog." Explicator, vol. 61, no. 2, Winter 2003, pp. 86-88.

Critics have concluded that the main theme in Emily Dickinson's "I Started Early--Took My Dog" (1862) is a male/female sexual encounter. They dispute whether the encounter is malicious or consensual. Lynn Shakinovsky argues that the Sea is a symbol of power and masculinity working against the weak woman: "Poem 520 concerns itself, on the one hand, with the play of power between the female narrator and the Sea who is figured as male" ( 1). The narrator is undisputedly a woman in all criticisms, and the fact that Dickinson assigns masculine pronouns to describe the secondary character makes this assumption irrefutable. The womanly narrator is depicted as a "Mouse," whereas the male figure is posed as a "Frigate" in the Sea, descriptions that fit typical stereotypes of the aggressive male and the passive female.

Although the poem includes strong metaphors alluding to a corporal meeting between a man and a woman, many other phrases suggest a near-death experience. The Sea, although representing the male in a sexual encounter, is also a metaphor for Death, and Dickinson's use of the capitalized pronoun "He" shows the importance of this proverbially feared phenomenon. Indeed, the "basement" in the first stanza is the scary part of death, its power to make most humans run in fear. Additionally, Dickinson says that "Frigates--in the Upper Floor Extended Hempen Hands." The "Hands" are likely the hands of Death reaching down to take the narrator captive.

Most critics, however, view "Hempen Hands" as symbolic of male sexual dominance. According to Shakinovsky, "The welcoming, 'extending' hands of the Frigate are not entirely friendly and contain a slight sense of threat, as 'Hempen' implies the possibility of trapping, tying, and strangling" ( 2). Howeve, she fails to recognize the severe tonal switch in the third stanza:

But no Man moved Me--till the Tide
Went past my simple Shoe—
And past my Apron--and my Belt
And past my Bodice--too--.

The switch seems to imply that the narrator, at first fearful of her first sexual experience, is unsure of what is coming, but the ease in which the man approaches her wipes these fears away. Indeed, Jonnie Guerra argues that there is a lack of power in either the man or woman and that the pair share an intense mutual attraction: "The man's advances entice the female speaker as those of other men have not: according to the speaker's own report, he alone has 'moved' her" ( 1). But I contend that the encounter is with death, wherein death first frightens her and then beckons her with a calming rush.

In the same way a virgin may at first fear sex, most humans fear death. The touch of Death seems to ease the narrator, much as the gentle touch of a lover may ease a virgin during her first sexual encounter. The transaction is nearly complete in the fourth stanza, as death 'made as He would eat me up-As wholly as a Dew."

Guerra points out that the control possessed by both the male and Death in the second stanza has been completely handed to the narrator by the fifth stanza: "He--He followed--close behind--/ I felt His Silver Heel / Upon my Ankle--Then my Shoes / Would overflow with Pearl." Thus, not only does the male follow the female's lead, he possesses a "Silver Heel." This grandiose description of the male's body part stress-s the luxurious quality of the sexual encounter. Likewise, Guerra notes, "even when the speaker feels 'His Silver Heel' on her 'Ankle,' his touch is made to seem not irritating, but desirable, for her shoes overflow with 'Pearl,' an image that Dickinson privileges for things she deems precious" ( 2). This passing of control makes it evident that the pair share not only the aggressive power, but an intense mutual attraction as well. Likewise, the narrator overtakes death, and the fear that goes along with such a wondrous event has turned into acceptance. The narrator is at once at the same level as both death and her sexual partner, and she finds that neither being should be feared.

Shakinovsky claims that the final stanza reiterates male power and control, writing, "His power is conveyed again by the idea of control and choice that is implicit in the fact that his withdrawal at the end of the poem is presented not only as voluntary but also as temporary" ( 3). However, when the pair meet "the Solid Town" in the last stanza, the end appears as an intrusion that neither welcomes. It was not the male who met the town, nor was it the female. Rather, Dickinson distinctly uses the pronoun "We" to signify that the lovers experience this sad ending together.

The poem is convincingly about both a first enjoyable sexual encounter and a brush with death. The allusions to each experience are impassioned, and the emotions associated with each phenomenon are universal. It is a strange paradox that Dickinson simultaneously describes one of the greatest pleasures of human life--sexual relations between men and women--and one of human beings' most feared experiences, death. The fact that the two experiences fall on opposite sides of life's spectrum of anticipated to feared events demonstrates that Dickinson understood that life is filled with both pleasure and pain. However, the ending of the poem shows that the narrator has embraced both sex and death. In refreshing contrast to all of Dickinson's poems and musings on death, "I started Early--Took my Dog" shows that the poet recognized that life brings joy and ecstasy along with darker pains, and that those seeming opposites are intimately related.
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For Browning :

Cervo, Nathan A. "The Bishop Orders His Tomb at St. Praxed's Church." The Explicator, vol. 61 no. 4, Summer 2003,  pp. 204-206.

As "The Tomb at Saint Praxed's," this poem first appeared in 1845. The poem was retitled in 1849, and in 1863 it was included in "Men and Women" immediately before "Bishop Blougram's Apology." (Pettigrew 1093). When each poem is considered superficially, it would appear that Browning had no further intent than to satirize two bishops; one, a sensualist besotted by renaissance inclusivity; the other, a self-deluded wielder of casuistry, who nonetheless is intelligent enough to understand the deleterious consequences to the Church of "Fichte's clever cut at God himself!" ("Bishop Blougram's Apology," 744).

....

In "The Bishop Orders His Tomb at Saint Praxed's Church," Browning attacks his subject much more subtly, by way of one of the bishop's sons, Anselm: "Draw round my bed: is Anselm keeping back?" ( 2) and "what do they whisper thee, / Child of my bowels, Anselm?" (63-64). Although there is not enough information in the poem to indicate what sort of person Anselm is, the introduction of his name is dialectically significant, as is the fact that he is "keeping back" ( 2) from completing the circle of corruption around the bishop's deathbed.

Saint Anselm (1033/34-1109) was Archbishop of Canterbury from 1093 to 1109. As archbishop, the elevated status he holds in the hierarchies of both the church and the realm of the Good Shepherd archetype is superior to that of Browning's two bishops. St. Anselm is best known in the secular community( n1) for his erroneously called "ontological argument"( n2) for the existence of God, the crux of which conceptualizes God as "that-than-which-nothing-greater-can-be-thought (id quo maius cogitari non potest)" (Pugh 37). The idea of God, not God unshelled from divine hiddenness, is signified by the "id" (it; "that-which") resorted to by St. Anselm.

Committed to the Christian narrative (to what we call today "the deposit of faith"), St. Anselm "had an overwhelming sense that the glory of God is inaccessible to human understanding and a concomitant belief that it is this very inaccessibility that ought to cause us to stretch our minds in search of God" (Pugh 36).( n3) Anselm expressed this belief in the phrase "fides quaerens intellectum" ("faith seeking understanding").

The notion that we cannot think of god, because God lies at the limit of our understanding, permits Anselm to claim that the universality of Christianity is found in its expression of belief and not the expectation of an inherent, constituent rationality, common to all persons. (Pugh 44)

In Browning's poem, the dying bishop represents a grotesque parody of "faith seeking understanding," having settled into a species of hedonistic skepticism. In his case, skepsis equals sepsis. The poem's persona embodies a potpourri of sensual (sensate) and intellectual (rationalistic) vices, the husks of which, signifying faithless inclusivity, fester and rot openly in his delirious ravings (57-62; 95: 106- 110). Without faith to seek it out and raise it to the status of right reason (the Thomistic recta ratio), the bishop's understanding amounts to little more than an implosion of rationalizations cored by projected concupiscence.

Significantly, "Anselm" ( 2, 64) is described by Browning as "keeping back" ( 2) seemingly reluctant to grace with closure the odious denouement to the bishop's miscreancy.