¶ … Last Duchess';'Punishment'; 'Capital Punishment'
Three Poems of Decentralization and Marginalization: Browning's "My Last Duchess; Heaney's "Punishment"; and Alexie's "Capital Punishment"
Within the poems "My Last Duchess" by Robert Browning; Punishment by Seamus Heaney; and "Capital Punishment" by Sherman Alexie, all three authors deal, although in much different ways, with shifting, and often surprising, relationships between centrality and marginality: of speaker, subject, or both. In Browning's "My Last Duchess, for example the speaker, a duke (the sort of figure one least expects to say or do anything that might cause him to be seen as "marginal," or even unusual, recollects in detail the various jealousy-provoking and ultimately fatal behaviors of his "last duchess." These, at least in the speaker's mind, have given him justifiable cause to kill her. All that remains of her now is her portrait on the wall. In this essay, I will analyze ways that all three poems deal thematically with the tensions and interplay between centralization and marginalization.
Somehow - I know not how - as if she ranked
My gift of a nine-hundred-years-old name
With anybody's gift. (lines 32-34)
The speaker's deliberate, sneering repetition of the word "gift" underscores the powerfulness of his feelings about having had that "gift" rejected by the Duchess. The Duchess's lack of discrimination in this respect seems to have been her "crime." As the speaker adds a few lines later:
Oh sir, she smiled, no doubt,
Whene'er I passed her; but…
Seamus Heaney Few writers can boast such an impressive volume of work as Seamus Heaney has produced in the last thirty years: nineteen books of poetry, nine poetry pamphlets, two books of selected poems, one-book length verse translation, three collection of essays, one play, and two anthologies of poetry. And few writers in their lifet6ime achieve the kind of popularity and reputation that Seamus Heaney has" http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/0231119275/ref=sib_rdr_ex/103-2?%5Fencoding=UTF8&p=S008#reader-link Seamus Heaney is one of
Seamus Heaney's poem "Digging" and Peter Meinke's poem "Advice to My Son" both address the idea of family and how it is essential for connections between members of the family to be strong. Even with this, they both deal with the matter from different perspectives. In addition to the obvious fact that one concentrates on showing a son's feeling toward his father and grandfather while the other involves a father's
And indeed life was like the churning and stinking of the butter-making process. "Brains turned crystals full of clean deal churns"; this is the poet saying that living and thinking was a process like making butter; you have to have something of substance to begin with, then you have to make sure it is "clean" and finally, it is complete. Poetic form "is both the ship and the anchor," Heaney stated
Annotated BibliographyAlexander, Stephanie. \\\"They \\\'smelt of rot\\\': Abjection and Infection in Seamus Heaney�s EarlyWork.\\\" Estudios Irlandeses, Issue 18, 2023, pp. 11-24.In this scholarly article, Stephanie Alexander examines the early pastoral poetry of Seamus Heaney through the lens of Julia Kristeva�s notion of the abject. The article focuses on several themes, such as darkness, fear, and fertility. Alexander�s main argument is that Heaney�s poetry and the landscapes he presents are complex
Digging" by Seamus Heaney and "Father and Son" by Stanley Kunitz Comparative analysis of the poems "Digging" by Seamus Heaney and "Father and Son" by Stanley Kunitz showed that though both poems had used similar themes in discussing the father and son relationships of the two authors with their respective fathers, the utilization of poetic elements such as tone and diction, symbolism, and denotation and connotation greatly differed. In discussing the
Going further with the analysis, it could be stated that the Irish get answers to their dilemmas from their own cultural identity (which is nourished by the best values). The previous idea of Ireland being eternal is supported by the view according to which its history stretches to immemorial times: "Every layer they strip/Seems camped on before./The bogholes might be Atlantic seepage./The wet centre is bottomless" (Heaney, 25-28). The fact
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