The imagery is very clear and stark; the objects and people she recalls in this stanza are not pleasant or beautiful, much of it is ugly and disgusting, such as a worm that lived in a cat's ear, presumably ringworm, or some other type of disease. Perhaps, she is comparing love to all of these awful, drab things. In the places we could find love, such as in the everyday objects we enjoy, or the people who are supposed to bring us spiritual clarity or advice, such as the preacher, are disgusting, dangerous, and full of death. She certainly does not have a positive view of religion, or the representative of religion, as she describes the preacher with thin lips, who scuffles, and looks for scapegoats. She did not describe him as pious and sweet, as we might think the average preacher is, and for him to be coming by only to locate a scapegoat is not a positive image at all. Thus, though the topic of the second stanza has shifted slightly from the first, the overall tone of the poem is maintained.
The third stanza returns to the direct conversation or argument to love. She begins with a refusal of her own. Just as the dead refuse to listen, she refuses to remember the dead. The narrator believes that the dead are bored with everything. Are the dead bored with love? Are the dead bored with death? How can the dead be bored if they are dead? Is that not a feeling that only the living have? Most poems, particularly those that are written well and are studied long after the poet is dead, offer more questions than answers, and this poem does just that. Perhaps the author forewarned us of this aspect of questioning, as the poem does begin with a question, so it can follow that the poem will leave us with questions, too.
She returns to her argument to love and attempts to tell love what to do. She, sarcastically and perhaps passive...
He clarifies his status i.e. A spiritual leader and a learned person by using well chosen ethos of St. Aquinas, Jesus and Paul therefore puts him forth as a trustworthy person. Also being an African-American makes him the right person to participate in this event because he understands the situation properly. By use of logos he explains the reason behind the actions of the black persons of which the
Earl of Rochester / Aphra Behn Masks and Masculinities: Gender and Performance in the Earl of Rochester's "Imperfect Enjoyment" and Aphra Behn's "The Disappointment" Literature of the English Restoration offers the example of a number of writers who wrote for a courtly audience: literary production, particularly in learned imitation of classical models, was part of the court culture of King Charles II. The fact of a shared model explains the remarkable similarities between "The
Mourning Becomes Electra It must have come as something of a shock for the original audience of Eugene O'Neill's Mourning Becomes Electra in 1931 to take their seats, open their programs, and discover that this extremely lengthy trilogy of plays does not actually contain a character named "Electra." This may seem like an obvious point, but it is one worth considering as we approach O'Neill's American analogue to the Oresteia of
And though he has an enormous collection of selves, in the first stanza he cannot find a single one of himself. The language of the first stanza could also be used to describe, for example, a pair of reading glasses that are "lost" on the forehead of the befuddled man looking for them. Moving from four lines in the first stanza to ten in the last, the poem gains
Furthermore the rhetoric here is rich in symbolism. Dr. King draws parallels between the response of violence to his peaceful protests and other great personalities whose commitment to justice, truth, and love also had unintended and unfortunate consequences. Personalities like Socrates and Jesus, for example, could not be expected to deny their truth for fear of public reaction. Dr. King makes this argument even stronger by also drawing the parallel
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