¶ … Linda Pastan's "Marks" and Marge Piercy's "The Secretary's Chant" use the medium of poetry to provide powerful social commentary. Their respective poems use vivid imagery to convey the constricted roles in which women find themselves: especially as wife, mother, and office aide. These roles are subservient and underappreciated. The women speakers in these poems receive no respect for their hard work. Although Pastan's and Piercy's poems focus on two different aspects of female roles, their poems both convey similar notions related to the subjugation and oppression of women. Both "Marks" and "The Secretary's Chant" use metaphor to convey the central idea related to the oppression of women; for Pastan the metaphor is school grades; for Piercy the metaphor is office supplies. In "Marks," the speaker refers to the way her husband and children both grade her continually. She receives, for example, an "A" in "last night's supper," and a "B plus" in bed (lines 2; 4). The children also grade her, showing that the father is negatively socializing his children in to believing that women are simply domestic slaves that can be evaluated. Although the poet makes some commentary at the stupidity of school grading systems, as they inaccurately capture the true talents of the students, the main gist is that the woman speaker is being compared with a child. She is being compared with a child who receives all her validation from the outside world -- in the form of rigid grading systems. This metaphor helps to drive home the point...
By including the children's "passing" grades, the poet also shows how patriarchal social systems are perpetuated by people passing down their values and gender norms to children. Piercy also uses an extended metaphor to convey her concept of the oppression of women. Instead of using school, though, Piercy uses the office environment. Because many women are trapped into serving men rather than leading them, the metaphor of secretary is as apt as the metaphor of children in school. The woman speaker in Piercy's poem laments the fact that she is so identified with her job, that she has ceased to be viewed as a human being. "File me under W / because I wonce / was / a woman," (lines 22-25). Her entire body has become office supplies, to the point where she is indistinguishable from them. Her hips are a desk, her head a "badly organized file," (line 10). Like Pastan, Piercy shows how strict gender roles inhibit a woman's personal development and personal empowerment. While Pastan's speaker is denigrated due to her receiving grades in school like a child; Pierchy's speaker is denigrated because she is treated and viewed like an object.
Whatever the significance of the phrase "He kindly stopped for me," the speaker does not dread Death, as personified by the kindly carriage driver. This poem also suggests that the speaker's perceptions of time and space are different in death; centuries may pass, yet it still Feels shorter than the Day first surmised the Horses Heads Were toward Eternity -- (Lines 22-24) In both "465" ("I heard a Fly buzz --
Thomas/Updike Compare/Contrast The Fight for Life in Dylan Thomas' "Do not go gentle into that good night" and John Updike's "Dog's Death" Death has proven to be an inspiration for many poets and has been written about throughout history. These poets look at death from differing perspectives and many have argued that it should be fought against while others are more submissive to the concept. In "Do not go gentle into that
Shelley and Smith's Ozymandias Compare/contrast In Ways of Seeing, John Berger (1972) claims, "When we 'see' a landscape, we situate ourselves in it. If we 'saw' the art of the past, we would situate ourselves in history." Berger proposes that sharing ones experiences is dependent on that individual's perspective. Two poets that are able to demonstrate how perspectives may differ after experience the same event are Percy Bysshe Shelley and Horace
Langston Hughes and James Baldwin Compare/Contrast Music plays a major role in much of the literature that came out of the Harlem Renaissance. The Harlem Renaissance was an American cultural movement that aimed to celebrate African-American culture through literature, art, and other intellectual and artistic means. One of the musical styles that was influential in literary works of Langston Hughes and James Baldwin was the blues. This musical style rose out
The mood is not unlike the effect of the lotus, being a state of languor. The landscape is lush and detailed, the sort of landscape that would be appealing on its own and that visitors would not want to leave for its own sake. Such description begins as the ship apperoaches the land and Ulysses tells his men to have courage: In the afternoon they came unto a land In which it
T.S. Eliot and Paul Verlaine The late nineteenth century Symbolist movement in literature was first identified as the primary origin of twentieth century Modernism by Edmund Wilson, in his 1931 work Axel's Castle: A Study in the Imaginative Literature of 1870-1930. Wilson's study ranges widely enough to cover the Modernist prose of Proust and Joyce in addition to the experimental prose-poetry of Gertrude Stein, but he makes a particularly strong case
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