"This is Just to Say" Parody-By Alex G.

I have eaten

the cake

that was in

the fridge

and which

you were probably

preserving

for your wedding

Forgive me

it was delicious

so sweet

and so yummy

The Political Background of "Harlem"

The poem “Harlem” by Langston Hughes was directed towards the African American population living in Harlem, New York, who were often denied the right to fulfill their dreams because of the prejudice against their skin color. In 1951–the year of the poem's publication–frustration characterized the mood of American blacks. The Civil War in the previous century had liberated them from slavery, and federal laws had granted them the right to vote, the right to own property, and so on. However, continuing prejudice against blacks, as well as laws passed since the Civil War, relegated them to second-class citizenship. Court and legislative decisions later emasculated the legal protection of blacks. For example, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1896 (Plessy v. Ferguson) that it was legal to provide "separate but equal" accommodations for passengers of Louisiana's railroads. This ruling set a precedent that led to segregated schools, restaurants, parks, libraries, and so on. Access to other facilities, such as buses, required them to take a back seat, literally, to whites. Meanwhile, hate groups inflicted inhuman treatment on innocent blacks, including brutal beatings. Lynchings of innocent blacks were not uncommon. As life in the South became increasingly difficult, African Americans began to migrate North in great number. Those expanding northern communities confronted familiar problems—racism, poverty, police abuse and official hostility— but these were in a new setting, where the men could vote (and women, too, after 1920), and possibilities for political action were far broader than in the South. Many in the Harlem Renaissance were part of the Great Migration out of the South into the negro neighborhoods of the North and Midwest. The Harlem Renaissance refers to the flowering of African American cultural and intellectual life during the 1920s and 1930s. Characterizing the Harlem Renaissance was an overt racial pride that came to be represented in the idea of the New Negro, who through intellect and production of literature, art, and music could challenge the pervading racism and stereotypes to promote progressive or socialist politics, and racial and social integration. The creation of art and literature would serve to "uplift" the race. Therefore, in his work he confronted racial stereotypes, protested social conditions, and expanded African America’s image of itself; a “people’s poet” who sought to reeducate both audience and artist by lifting the theory of the black aesthetic into reality.

What Truly Happens When A Dream Is Deferred???

This week in English 03, we read the poem “Harlem” by Langston Hughes. What is unique about his poem is that Hughes uses rhetorical questions to emphasize how someone’s dream deferred could slowly diminish the dream and even the person. Hughes also uses consecutive similes in his rhetorical questions to create images for his audience to relate these dreams to. However, Hughes does not group these rhetorical questions in any random order, but arranges the rhetorical questions in a specific order and structure to create an overall tone and effect to this poem.

Hughes employs a specific structure to allow his poem to convey his message. He starts out with having the first stanza as just a single line. He does this to directly state the overall topic of his poem. Hughes then shows a transition of thought by creating a 7-lined stanza. By separating these lines from the first line, he is revealing that he is switching to examples that express his main topic. He shortens these lines to seclude the stanza to express how a dream could slowly diminish in value over time. Hughes conveys this in this stanza by bringing up four examples: a raisin, a sore, meat, and a syrupy sweet. These four examples can only become these grotesque scenes if they are improperly taken care of. A raisin too long in the sun will shrivel up and lose its nutritional value. A sore not treated properly will fester and then run. A piece of meat left out unattended will just lose nutritional value just like the raisin, and no longer be edible. Then by including the syrupy sweet, he again reflects how if something is left out for too long, the sugar will clump up and won’t sweeten the food anymore. The luster it conveyed no longer is present when left out for a long time. Therefore, Hughes uses this stanza to bring forth examples that emphasize how time prolonged can lead to the deterioration of things in life. Thus, he uses this stanza to show how only the dream will slowly diminish if the person does not have hope that the dream will ever be realized.

Hughes separates the next two lines from the huge stanza to change the emphasis of the dream diminishing to how the person that holds the dream could be physically affected by it. The 7-lined stanza only explains instances of what happens to the dream, but does not correlate to how it affected the person physically. The two-lined stanza secludes a physical attribute on what the dream could do to someone. The last line being by itself emphasizes the extreme case of what could happen if someone does not achieve his or her aspiration in life. Hughes states, “Or does it explode?” in this line, which grants the audience a picture of a bomb. Nothing beneficial results from an explosion: only death and turmoil. Therefore, Hughes relates that the dream could destroy the person all together. This is the ultimate extreme, and that is why Hughes puts this line by itself and in italics for emphasis.

Therefore, Hughes’ use of similes ultimately shows that these are possible scenarios that could happen if someone’s dream is deferred, but are not scenarios that will happen. How much they are involved in their dream truly correlates to how they will be affected by it being delayed. By Hughes arranging these rhetorical questions in this specific order, he builds up the least dangerous scenarios to the most menacing scenarios created by a dream deferred.

Oh Yeah, Don't Forget the Thesis!

Elizabeth Barret Browning, in her "Sonnet 43," refers to her religion to express how her love for her husband is naïve, pure, passionate, and everlasting.

People Are Beautiful

http://mitocw.vocw.edu.vn/NR/rdonlyres/Linguistics-and-Philosophy/24-810Fall-2006/642C2D5C-9D00-462A-8F95-C92441E08B93/0/chp_crowd.jpg

This week, in English 03, we got to explore Ezra Pound’s “In the Station of the Metro.” This poem was very short, but Pound was able to convey its message effectively by the metaphor created in the second line. Pound incorporates the metaphor by creating the image, “petals on a wet, black bough.” The metaphor is the petals of the flower on a tree, which ultimately represents the people at the Metro. Pound uses this metaphor in an abstract way versus a concrete way to emphasize his sudden epiphany.

Pound uses the flower as a metaphor in an abstract way by using the word “petals.” Petals are physically the most attractive part of the plant because they are vibrant and unique in color. However, a petal’s beauty by itself is nothing compared to the beauty created by more than one petal. The petals create the overall image of a beautiful flower, which Pound manipulates this characteristic to emphasize how he feels about the scene in front of him. Pound does not literally see these petals in a concrete manner, but makes this image symbolize the beauty that the people around him create. He makes the petals symbolize the people, and the “wet, black bough” symbolizes the world surrounding them. The area around them may be dark and damp, but all of the people seem to stand out and create a united beauty to this dark world. No longer does Pound ignore their presence, but sees that there had been beauty surrounding him this whole time.

Pound though uses this metaphor in another way, and that is to shift the original tone conveyed by the first line. By creating the flower metaphor in the last line, he stops the solemn and mysterious tone created by the first line. His first line creates this tone by using the word “apparition” and by describing the people as just “faces.” By Pound using the word “apparition,” he grants a supernatural image here, rather than a natural image. The unnamed “faces” create a blurred image, which conveys the notion that these people are unimportant. The flower being used after this line truly uplifts the tone. He switches the poem from the supernatural to the natural world, switching the mood to a more reviving moment. By switching to the natural world, Pound also conveys that this beauty was not forced or arranged, but that it happened naturally.

By Pound using the visual image of a flower as the metaphor in his last line, he effectively conveys to his audience that he had seen beauty even in the dreariness of the Metro. The people were no longer having just plain faces, but were making Pound’s world more vibrant. I put the image above to represent this metaphor. The people in the front of the picture are blurry and ghostlike, just as Pound first sees the people at the Metro. But when you look farther into the picture, the people are becoming more distinct. The people are becoming apparent and the faces are seen. This is what Pound is doing; he is finally not ignoring the people around him, but is seeing what each person does to this scene. He sees that each person brings their own color and beauty to the crowd and is just like a petal to a flower. Only by them all being gathered together at the Metro was Pound able to discover the beauty of the people surrounding him.

Death Sadly is Inevitable...

This week in English 3, we explored Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 73,” and Dylan Thomas’ “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night.” Although the two poems concentrate on the aspect of striving for life, even though death is inevitable, Dylan and Shakespeare take different approaches to grasp this message. The structure that they conform to ultimately allows their message to be expressed differently.

Shakespeare did not write his poem in a villanelle structure, as Dylan Thomas did for his poem, but uses a 14-lined sonnet structure. Shakespeare’s choice of using the sonnet structure gave him three quatrains to express different scenes of life approaching death, and a last couplet to address who truly was approaching death now. For each quatrain, Shakespeare uses a different kind of time flow of life going towards death. However, he makes each quatrain express a smaller amount of time for each event to occur. In the first quatrain, Shakespeare uses seasons to represent the coming of death. Autumn’s life slowly turns into the lifeless winter. The transition from one season to another represents the passing of a year. In the second quatrain, Shakespeare describes the passing of the day to night. Dylan uses day and night in his poem, but Shakespeare uses these two in his poem to emphasize time passing rather than symbolizing life and death. In the third quatrain, Shakespeare uses fire, not as a symbol of passion (which Dylan uses in his poem), but as a smaller increment of time. Fire will extinguish within hours due to its ashes. So by Shakespeare shortening the time span for each, he represents how life gets closer and closer to death as time passes by. Dylan did not manipulate this idea to create his message. But in Shakespeare’s last couplet, he does not give a name or real title to who he is addressing to. Dylan, on the other hand, addresses his poem to his father.

Dylan conforms his poem to the villanelle structure. This structure allows Dylan to include his message of striving for life in his first stanza, rather than Shakespeare, who places it at the end of his poem. In this stanza, he conveys the message by using night and light as representations of death and life. In the second, third, fourth, and fifth stanzas, Dylan’s choice of structure allows him to grant each of these stanzas with a specific type of men, rather than a flow of time. With each of the four stanzas containing the same number of lines, there is no single emphasis on just one type of man. Throughout these four stanzas, Dylan emphasizes the differences among these types of men through the inclusion of symbolic uses of nature. He uses words such as “lightning,” “green bay,” “sun,” and even “meteors” (lines 5, 8, 10, 14). Also, by Dylan putting the line “Do not go gentle…” or “Rage, rage…” at the end of each of these stanzas, he ultimately reinforces his message of striving for life throughout the poem. And with Dylan’s last stanza, he truly makes use of these two lines. Dylan does use the last stanza to make a reference to whom he is addressing, but by the last stanza being the biggest stanza in a villanelle, Dylan also uses this stanza to emphasize how he pleads for his father to fight for his life. He does this ultimately by putting both two repeated lines together in the last stanza. Shakespeare does not implement this tactic in his sonnet.

Shakespeare’s limitation to the sonnet structure allowed him only three descriptions of life turning to death. So ultimately Shakespeare made use of just nature for symbolic purposes and to create a time lapse getting closer to death. Dylan’s choice of the longer villanelle structure allowed Dylan to not be as restricted as Shakespeare was, and elaborate more on how his father was. Dylan having more stanzas, allowed him to express several types of men who strive for prolonging their inevitable death.