Biography Of Emily Dickinson

Emily Dickinson [1830-1886] was a powerful poet of America and the â€Å"most perfect flower of New England. † She not only did occupy a pride of place in American Literature but she was considered to be an anticipator of philosophical poetry, a harbinger of Modernity and an upholder of Romanticism. In her wit she was philosophical, in her attitudes a Romantic and in her poetics a Modern. She wrote upon varied subjects though she was known to be virtually withdrawn from the outside world till she breathed her last.Her pen gave poetic touch to all issues right from Death, contemporary social scene, immortality , pain and pleasure , hope and fear, love , Nature, God, religion, virtue. Hers was a highly romantic soul that found strange beauty and startling suggestion in the simplest elements of experience—the glance of a friend ,a sentence in a book, a bee’s hum, a stone in the road or the slant of light on winter afternoons. Her poems won her a place in world liter ature because of their originality.It is really interesting to note that Emily Dickinson once wrote to Thomas Wentworth Higginson of The Atlantic Monthly sometime in 1862 â€Å"Are you too deeply occupied to say that my verse is alive? † No doubt, A. C. Ward had called her â€Å"perhaps next to Whitman the greatest American poet of the last century. † Emily Dickinson had a checkered life of love and frustration or love and a sense of loss before 1958 when she had withdrawn from the society , keeping herself cooped up in her father’s residence at Amherst, Massachusetts. She used to write and preserve the poems in small volumes,- in her own coinage ‘fascicles’.In her lifetime she was able to publish only seven to ten poems though she went on writing madly from 1858 to 1864[some say 1862]. Most of her neighbors remembered her to see wandering alone in the house dressed in spotless white. They even nicknamed her â€Å"the woman in white. † She re mained an enigma till her demise. After her death, her sister Lavinia found forty such poems in her bedroom. She sat with Mary Babel Todd , their neighbor as well as a family friend, and Thomas Wentworth Higginson they found these to be somewhat difficult to publish. Emily Dickinson even loved to share her poems through letters with her friends.Emily Dickinson used to stay in her paternal residence with her unmarried sister Lavinia till death. Her brother Austin Dickinson moved to a nearby house with his wife Susan. And it is known through the article by Emily Dickinson: Continuing Enigma by Jone Johnson Lewis [Women’s History Guide] that she used to write letters even to her closest neighbors and even with Susan and Mabel Todd she used to write regularly. She even sent poems to them through the letters. Says George Frisbie Whicher in her book This was a Poet, â€Å"A letter seemed to her to possess a spectral power.It was the disembodied mind, walking alone†¦.. The let ters that she composed during her years of seclusion are like her poems, distinguishable from them only by their greater length and variety. † It is interesting to note that Emily Dickinson used to write poems right from the days in Mount Holyoke Seminary. R. B. Sewall has it that the Book of Revelation was her favorite book of the Bible. As a schoolgirl when she wrote, †I hope the father in the skies /Will lift his little girl ,–/Old-fashioned, naughty, everything,–/Over the stile of pearl!† she seemed to echo the ideas she imbibed from her tutor, Doctor Wadsworth. But she began to mature along with the growing years, gave up the religious inclinations she had so far. From the winter of 1861—62, Emily Dickinson changed her course of thought and started to declare, â€Å"They[family members] are religious, except me† From then onwards she decided to live and breathe for her writing alone. Perhaps, she found as a poet a more satisfying ex istence than she could otherwise find as a woman. She had a horde of literary friends to whom she loved to send her poems . They were:Samuel Bowles, Josiah Gilbert Holland, Helen Hunt Jackson, Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Thomas Niles of Roberts Brothers all with a professional interest. They also were of the opinion that the reading public of the sixties and the seventies were not of the required wavelength to meet her on her own level. It might have been one reason behind her very few publications during her lifetime. Her niece Martha Dickinson Bianchi took all the responsibility to publish three authentic volumes of her poems: Further Poems of Emily Dickinson[1929],Unpublished poems of Emily Dickinson [1935]and The Poems of Emily Dickinson[1937].Emily Dickinson’s poems made a remarkable difference in understanding the modern poetry. Hence, it goes without saying that hers was a major influence upon the mature readers of that period. If from among the gems of her creation we take at least a few to judge and analyze critically we will be able to understand why the world of literature still makes room for such a rare genius! Emily Dickinson’s fascination with Death comes out in the much read and critically appreciated lines: â€Å"Because I could not stop for Death–/He kindly stopped for me-/The Carriage held but just ourselves-/And Immortality.Immortality also creeps into the lines and is pictured as the third person in the carriage ,mentioned in the first stanza. To Emily Dickinson, Death appeared in various guises. At times she treated Death as a courtly lover sometimes again as the dreadful murderer. â€Å"Because I could not†¦Ã¢â‚¬ or â€Å"A Clock Stopped† deal with the tremendous and irresistible power of Death . These poems also highlight the physical transformation and the final isolation that Death involves. Sometimes she had stressed upon the ghastly aspects of Death by her willing use of the funeral and the rel igious imagery.For example, â€Å"I heard the fly buzz when I died .. † Quite difficult ,no doubt, for the contemporary readers to understand such invincible power of Life that it goes beyond the Ultimate Barrier of Death too!! Emily Dickinson fell in love many a time . Her possible lovers, as suggested by her biographers were: Benjamin Newton, Charles Wadsworth, Emmons et al. From the early sentimental love lyrics to the religious-mystical love-utterances , we are sure to find a wide range in Emily Dickinson’s love poetry.From among her early love lyrics we get one poem starting with â€Å" I started early –Took my dog–/And visited the Sea–/The Mermaids in the Basement/Came out to look at me. † The word â€Å"Early† holds the key to the interpretation of the poem. It means that the young girl is on a journey ,un-attempted before. Gradually, the tone changes from that of childlike innocence to a mellower awareness. The newly-aroused e motions of the girl and her fear at the thought of the Sea’s complete possession of her are expressed in a verse that is suggestive of shock and renunciation of life’s prime forces: love, sex, beauty so forth,-â€Å"And He-He followed-close behind-/I felt his Silver Heel/Upon my Ankle—Then my shoes/Would overflow with pearl-/Until we met the Solid Town-/No one He seemed to know–/And bowing with a mighty look–/At me-the Sea withdrew. † Examining all the associations clustered around the Sea , beauty, freedom , haughtiness, male power coupled with shy nature of the female we assume that the poem intends to express the emotional and physical effects of a lover’s advances. The girl nearly gives in to it but her life of control and proves stronger than this short-lived temptation and she beats a retreat!Dickinson’s images are powerful, her â€Å"dash† means a lot like her lonely existence and her poems help her win an immorta l place in the hearts of her readers because of their unique and universal appeal! Works and References 1. Sewall R. B. :The Life of Emily Dickinson, Boston, 1978. 2. Whicher G. F. :This was a poet, Michigan, 1957. Other Sources 1. High Beam Encyclopedia[http://www. encyclopedia. com/doc/1E1-DickinsoE. html] 2. http://www. womenshistory. about. com/library/bio/bldickinson. htm

Proud to Be a Woman Essay

â€Å"First Bone of a Woman† by Patricia Wellingham-Jones and â€Å"Afternoon in the Garden† are two poems that present the creation of the first woman and explore the nature of womanhood through the behavior, speech and descriptions of her. The authors addressed the story of creation differently through the use of alliteration, figurative language and symbol. â€Å"First Bone of a Woman,† describes in full detail the configuration of the female body as it is being constructed and focuses on the beauty and strength of her figure while â€Å"Afternoon in the Garden,† involves a complete and detailed version of the first woman’s day in the Garden of Eden and the meaningful discoveries she encounters that are not explored in other versions: â€Å"Then God created the woman: But for Adam there was not found a helper comparable to him. And the lord  God caused a deep sleep to fall on Adam, and he slept; and He took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh in its place. Then the rib which the lord God had taken from man He made into a woman, and He brought her to the man. And Adam said: â€Å"This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man. Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and they shall become one flesh† (NIV Gen 2:18-24). We begin reading â€Å"First Bone of a Woman† with a specific understanding that Wellingham-Jones is referring to the extraction of Adams rib to create his counterpart, Eve. â€Å"Flesh pads the jointed structure, soft skin covers the curves† is a specific example of Walders’ use of alliteration and figurative language to describe the smooth contour of a woman’s body as she is coming together piece by piece (Patricia Wellingham-Jones 6). The author’s repetition of sounds points the reader to importance of the actual physical structure that may otherwise be overlooked without the employment of such poetic device. In many ways this is reminiscent of Davi Walders’ poem when she is referring to the apricot and describes the â€Å"sun on its flesh† (Walders 44-45). The repeated â€Å"s† and â€Å"c† sounds helps to communicate that  the female body is feminine and light and should be thought of in a beautiful and fruitful fashion. As the sounds roll off of your tongue and as you read the works aloud you will find that they flow softly as the authors intend to describe the female figure. In some ways the author’s use of figurative language and symbol seem to be the strongest literary devices used in their poems to create unique portrayals of the early creation of woman and their role in womanhood. â€Å"Afternoon in the Garden† Walders describes the moment that the first woman shows her independence and uniqueness. Rather than seeing her choice to taste the fruit as a naà ¯ve and irresponsible choice that could lead to trouble, Walders presents the firs t woman’s decisions as thoughtful and experimental. Walders describes the first woman as she wonders through the garden on her exploration: There’s that other fruit. He calls it â€Å"apple†. I think It’s not. It needs another name. (Davi Walders 41-43). Walders begins to present the first woman as an individual capable of thought and decision and not merely made to be Adam’s entertainment. Although she is merely describing the picking and naming of fruit, this alludes to the idea that the first woman has a mind and ability to make judgments of her own to help satisfy her man. The fruits in this poem, apple and apricot symbolize a woman’s independence and her need for variation and excitement. This helps to support Walders’ exploration of womanhood as good and essential. The main character goes on to say: I’ll pluck one with the sun On its flesh. It will not squash Or stain, has no thorns. I’ll call It â€Å"apricot†, bring an apple as well. Then he will tell the difference. A treat to share when he awakes. Then I shall sing of the joy†¦ Of learning to be a good wife. (Walders 44-54) Not only is Walders using this type of language of describing the fruits to show that she has conscious thoughts, but she also has the ability to use them to entice and pleasure her husband. The words, â€Å"I think: and â€Å"I’ll  pluck one with the sun†¦ on its flesh† clearly emphasizes the connection between the woman’s smooth body and alluring features as she explains she will bring the fruit to her husband to share as a treat together (Walders43-45). Walders is making a clear statement that a woman has the ability to make decisions, choose to go where she wants, when she wants and return in time to still make her husband happy after he has had his time to nap for the afternoon. They both work together in the garden but they each have their own roles. She is not there to serve Adam as we have read in the Bible but more as her own person able to express independent thought and virtue. While he does the majority of the physical labor, she will go out and fill her need for change and difference and excitement while she explores her own identity and goes off to define their world as they are learning and growing each day both together and separately. If Walders did not state these words, â€Å"I think† and â€Å"on its flesh† we may not be able to conclude that she is so adamantly stating a woman has independent thoughts and deserves to be viewed as an asset to the future of our lives as we know them. In contrast to â€Å"Afternoon in the Garden† the poem â€Å"First Bone of a Woman† in its literal description of the creation of the body, â€Å"The first bone of a woman shines with a spectral glow, knits itself to another until the framework brackets its form† (Wellingham-Jones 2-3). Wellingham-Jones is describing the formation of the body and the ability for each piece to easily connect from one to the next. This poems comes across as the strong, foundation of a female structure that not only has shape, but attractiveness necessary for a woman, while â€Å"Afternoon in the Garden† concentrates primarily on the discoveries that the first woman has during her explorations in the garden. â€Å"Soft skin covers the curves† is most certainly the author’s way of reminding the reader of a woman’s beauty and sexual attractiveness (Wellingham-Jones 6). Without these lines the poem would read more like a blueprint to build a stick figure while the addition of these lines guides the audience to the sensual curves of a woman’s body. In many ways we forget that women are not only physical beings, both hard working and nurturing, but we are also loving and sensual being capable and requiring attention and affection. Patricia Wellington-Jones and Davi Walders approach their stories with unique and distinct voices. While Wellington Jones’ poem, â€Å"First Bone of a Woman† explores the creation of the  female body as first understood by the biblical story presented to us in the story of Adam and Eve, she adds her own exciting idea that once the female body begun to take on its own shape it became an individual with a womanly nature and no longer would be reliant upon a man for her definition. The man and the woman would complement each other. Davi Walders poem, â€Å"Afternoon in the Garden† explores the diversity of a woman and her abilities to make decisions and entertain herself as well as contribute to the growth and prosperity of the world. Walders depicts womanhood being expressed through exploration and contribution. Both poems present the creation of the first woman in a manner that the topic of womanhood can be viewed in a more substantial and important role than in other works available.

Grand Theft Auto VS The Power-Go-Round Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

Grand Theft Auto VS The Power-Go-Round - Essay Example In this case, what Finn is trying to emphasize is the fact that most of the agencies responsible for the monitoring and regulating of video games (in Australia, the Office of Film and Literature Classification), especially on video games with a violent and interactive content, usually fall short in properly classifying games that is to be played and not to be played by the Australian public; given that the game GTA3 has already been generating much sales on the video game playing public, and have already become one of the most popular games played by video game enthusiast before it was banned by the said agency (Finn 2006). The fact here is that the violent game Postal 2 also shared the same experience, and even worse, wherein despite being involved with controversy due to its violent content, even gaining opposition from the American politician Senator Joe Lieberman, who decried in it Congress (Wolpaw 2003), the game was not banned in the United States (although it was banned in oth er countries) (Wolpaw 2003). Another important concept that was revealed by Finn in his essay is the fact that the reason why the Office of Film and Literature Classification actually bans video games is because if the fact that it actually â€Å"exceeded limitations† of how games are going to be classified; that is, according to â€Å"the standards of morality, decency and propriety generally accepted by reasonable adults; the literary, artistic or educational merit (if any) of the publication, film or computer game; the general character of the publication, film or computer game; the persons or class or persons or who amongst whom it is published or intended or likely to be published† (Finn 2006) From the said standards, it can be seen that the game Postal 2 certainly exceeds the limitation of these classificatory descriptions. With regards to the â€Å"the standards of morality, decency and propriety generally accepted by reasonable adults† (Finn 2006), Posta l 2 ultimately fails, given that the game actually shows and encourages players to â€Å"†¦drop-kick grenades and whip scythes at unsuspecting civilians if they refuse to participate in your everyday life story (which is, after all, the plot behind the game). Of course, this includes using cat carcasses as silencers on your gun, hitting people with anthrax-laden cow heads and playing ‘fetch’ with dogs using the severed heads of your dismembered victims† (Chomick n. d.). Of course, such kind of behavior does not pass any standard of morality or decency of reasonable adults, given that such kind of behavior, which expresses and encourages cruelty, murder and defamation are considered totally unreasonable and unacceptable. In no way can drop kicking grenades and whipping scythes to â€Å"

Business memo Assignment Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 250 words - 1

Business memo - Assignment Example ring test data into adequate statistical process control system.  As the next step in my professional development I would like to try myself on the position of a supervisor. I consider my objectives for the next year is to be able to inspect the product for the correct orientation and placement. In addition, I would like to be able to run tester diagnostics at specified intervals and perform the preventive maintenance at specified intervals on testers. I am also interested in accounting and am already mastering the course in that field. I am a creative thinker, have an open mind about how should things work best. I also like to explore alternative solutions to problems. I am highly organized person and this feature helps me to be as productive as possible on the job. I am sure that position of supervisor requires more responsibility not only for my actions, but also for the activities other perform. That is why I find it as the area for my improvement as a leader to be able to attr act and retain employee’s attention on common goals and objectives. I have a strong vision of how my work should be organized, what should people do and what contribution I can do for the good of the entire

International perspectives Dissertation Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 6000 words

International perspectives - Dissertation Example Some of the important models of inclusion education are described below (Anon., n.d.). Models of Inclusion Some of the important models of inclusion education are described below. The Teaming Model for Inclusion Education emphasises team work and has in place a special education teacher for every grade level team of teachers. This specialist teacher provides information, instruction strategies, revision ideas for tests and assignments, and strategies to promote acceptable behaviour in the class (Anon., n.d.). In the Co – Teaching Model for Inclusion Education, the special and general education teachers work together and teach the students by turns. This enables the learning experience to become important and tangible. This model prepares teachers, by means of student assessment, discipline, and instruction planning and delivery (Anon., n.d.). There are several obstacles to Inclusive Education; such as, negative attitudes, invisibility in the community and in school, cost, phys ical access to classrooms and facilities in the school, size of classes, impoverishment, discrimination on the basis of gender, and emergency and refugee situations (Anon., 2002). In the Adaptive Learning Environment Model (ALEM), special education students are integrated into the classroom. This model was propounded by Wang and is quite complicated. The objective of this model is to produce school learning environments that permit every student to acquire fundamental academic competency and enhance their confidence to address the intellectual and social requirements of school (Lazarus, 2010). In addition, this model is a blend of the following features. First, an exploratory learning component that includes an array of learning activities that are expected to enhance the capacity of the school to address the learning needs at the individual level. Second, a prescriptive learning component of hierarchically organised, highly structured learning activities (Leiding, 2009). Moreover, the ALEM model is characterised by instruction that is planned for the individual students. The pace of learning is adapted to the needs and capacities of the students. Classrooms in this model permit free movement and simultaneous activities. The learning content is sub – divided into small portions, in order to accommodate students with special needs. The students of this model have to plan and supervise their individual learning. In addition, they are made accountable for managing and completing their learning tasks in a timely manner (Lazarus, 2010). In general, inclusive education consists of isolating and discarding actual and latent sources of exclusion. This includes attaching importance to the opinion of stakeholders in the school community. It includes a philosophy of acceptance that respects and values all. The process of inclusion does not admit of culmination and it can be developed to gradually increasing degrees. Inclusion is the outcome of longstanding educati onal innovation and denotes improvement of schools at several levels for students (Gillies & Carrington, 2004). Inclusive education has to be viewed within the context of the policy relating to education. Undoubtedly, the UK Government adopts a qualified approach to inclusion, and this was disclosed by the Green Paper on Excellence for all Children (Department for Education and Employment, 1997).

History Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words - 26

History - Essay Example After this war Britain came up victorious and this also eradicated fear of French attack on the colonies. Colonies did not have to worry about their own defense (from French) and therefore their reliance on British decreased significantly. British also were heavily indebted due to the expenses on the war so they increased taxes of the colonies. It was a tradition at that time to impose taxes on colonies in order to earn more revenue. This was also a reason for the disgruntlement of the people of colonies. They felt that they were under slavery and this played a major role in the revolution. British Empire had colonies all over the world and they wanted to extend their power. For this reason they forced all their colonies to trade with themselves only. Through Navigation Act British Empire forced the American colonies to trade with British only and restricted trade with France and Spain. This was economically crushing American colonies and they had their reservation on the act. Sugar Act was another piece of legislation that increased the problems of the American Colonies. The act increased duties on imported sugar and this forced American colonies to stop using British goods. The timing of this act was a problem. It came at a time when people were already suffering from depression and this Act angered people more. They thought that they were being exploited. Currency Act was also a controversial act that restricted the colonies from printing money. British Empire thought that the devalued currency of colonies was hurting their economy therefore they forbade colonist from paying British traders in the colonist currency. This really made life difficult for the American colonies. People had to pay higher and this deprived them from their hard earned money. Currency Act can be regarded as a derogatory piece of legislation that was aimed at hurting the colonies of America. This was a major cause of the American Revolution. The tipping point

Organization of context in nursing Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

Organization of context in nursing - Essay Example Holy Mercy Hospital currently has a total of 500 beds; the ICU and CVICU units have been allocated 25 beds each. For a hospital classified under Acute Care Facilities, with programs in emergency medicine, critical care, cardiovascular medicine and surgery such a bed capacity is a significant internal strength. The hospital handles mostly patients requiring specialised attention and therefore having enough beds greatly improves the quality of service offered to clients. Firstly, the comfort of patients is paramount in healthcare and with such a number of beds; the Holy Mercy Hospital is able to effectively deliver on comfort to patients as they await or receive care (Liew and Kennedy, 203). From the perspective of evidence-based practice, it has been established that boarding especially in acute care settings significantly worsens patient outcomes. Boarding involves holding patients for longer periods in emergency units due lack of space or low bed capacities in hospitals and this causes overcrowding. Some negative impacts of boarding and ultimately crowding include delays in care delivery, diversion of ambulance services and increased periods of stay at the hospitals. Cases of medical negligence, financial loss and medical errors also increase with boarding in hospitals and these culminate higher patient mortality rates. One high impact solution to the challenges above in hospital settings is to reduce triage times and increase bed capacity. With increased bed capacity Mercy Hospital is able to achieve this and even register patients at the bedside. This eliminates the need for long queues and waits in the process of registration. As a result of the bed capacity, the hospital is at times able to completely bypass triage and effectively streamline service delivery. Patients who show no critical signs for instance are send directly the area where they wait on beds for service. This improves quality as physicians take their time to listen to the patients and

Information Systems and Business Processes Essay

Information Systems and Business Processes - Essay Example This approach will affect the revenue and cost of running the video game business (Halpin at el., 2011). Additionally, it will allow proper understanding and incorporation of the management approach since the business strategic assets as a process will allow the managers to understand, improve, and manage value-adding services to the clients or children. Business information systems are usually applied in the business processes to provide required information in delivering services to the clients. The advancement in the internet provides services provide a perfect platform for the business information systems to be used effective and interactively in service delivery (Brocke and Rosemann, 2010). Therefore, in the video game business, the internet will be used to source the information from the clients or children and the service or game provider (Dumas, 2013). Additionally, the business will apply the computer technology or the already readily available software for billing and timin g the game. The use of these technologies will ensure that even distribution time to all games is achieved. Additionally, the same software will enable the business to calculate its profits or losses as it is expected that the system will register all times used per computer. Notably, effective application of the timing and billing technology of the video games per video game will reduce cost of running the business since only one employee may be able to run all the computers in the rooms from a central point. Moreover, there will be increased efficiency and effectiveness in running the business. However, a challenge may emerge when (Halpin at el., 2011); the entrusted employee to the business learns a new technique or mode of adjusting time to these systems. In essence, if that occurs, then losses may be registered without knowing since calculations of time and cumulative amount generated in the business will be calculated from coded data. When such may be the case, then the busine ss plans to incorporate additional data point that is only known to the business owner (Dumas, 2013). This data storage point must code the same information as that managed by the employee; however, edition of such information must never affect its data. Additionally, the systems using internet are usually pound to virus threats. To ensure that all the games are accessible effectively and efficiently at all times to the clients, the business shall ensure that it is abreast with all antivirus software among other new technologies in the market that protect it products and services from being effective to the clients (Halpin at el., 2011). To ensure that children do not misuse the internet by login into antisocial site, the business will use internet technological software or knowledge to ensure that such site are not accessible within its servers (Halpin at el., 2011). Additionally, the business shall ensure that only its programs can operate through its products or computer systems (Brocke and Rosemann, 2010). Therefore, to ensure that this is achieved and children maintain high morals without being unethical and antisocial within the business enterprise, complicated software such as the windows 2008 will be installed so children can only access limited applications. Nonetheless, the use of such complicated software will also increase creativity and critical thinking of the

Service operations managements Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words - 1

Service operations managements - Essay Example hai Banking Corporation (HSBC), which are highly critical services and need absolute customer focus besides thorough banking knowledge and skills and effective operations management. Service operations management is a large and critical business sector. Besides customer satisfaction, service operations managers are also responsible for continuous improvement and cost-saving objectives. These are to be achieved with the available resources such as materials, staff, equipment and process technology (Johnston & Clark, 2008). Service operations management also requires specialized skills and competencies in terms of the five main management functions, planning, organising, leading, coordinating and controlling. These five core functions are achieved through strategic planning and management, effective leadership, technology and skills, and human resources management. In general, these functions seem quite similar to any other service/production management; however, the practices, policies, and approaches differ in the service industry. In service operations, all operational functions are pre-planned and assessed in terms of costs, infrastructure, staffing etc; these operational functions require the support of other functions like the administration, facilities, human resources department, training and quality assessment departments etc. All functions are strategically aligned to the organisation’s main goal. Among HSBC’s five core business principles, customer service, effective and efficient operations, strict expense discipline through teamworking and organisational commitment form the grounding principles for carrying out efficient service management (HSBC Holdings plc, 2001). Amongst the hundreds of different services provided by the global bank, payment services forms one critical unit and service which has sound impact on its customers as well as the bank itself. Capacity planning is the process of calculating the capacity of materials, personnel

One Dimensional Motion Essay Example for Free

One Dimensional Motion Essay Motion is everywhere: friendly and threatening, horrible and beautiful. It is fundamental to our human existence; we need motion for learning, for thinking, for growing, and for enjoying life. Like all animals, we rely on motion to get food, to survive dangers, and to reproduce; like all living beings we need motion to breathe and to digest. Motion is the most fundamental observation about nature at large. It turns out that everything, which happens in the world, is some type of motion. This lab looks at one-dimensional motion namely kinematics. This is when an object moves in relation to something else. It is the most basic of motions and a great starting point in researching motion. In looking at motion in a more scientific manner rather than just observing this lab will be taking measurements to look at relationships of distance, velocity and time. These measurements should agree with the known Galilean theories of motion. Method Part A A CBL unit was used with a motion sensor that could determine distance. The apparatus was placed on top of a table facing a long hallway with no obstructions. The CBL unit was then attached to a Ti-83 plus calculator to gather the data from the experiments. The HIKER program on the calculator was performed, which took distance measurements every 0. 1 seconds for 6 seconds. Each test was collected then the results were inputted into the Graphical Analysis program for regression analysis. The first test was that of a person walking away as shown in figure 1. The second test was that of a person walking away at a faster pace as shown in figure 2. The third test was that of a person walking towards the detector as shown in figure 3. The fourth test was that of a person standing still with no movement, which is shown in figure 4 and the last test was that of someone walking away and coming back, which is shown in figure 5. Each graph has the corresponding regression curve of best fit that was calculated using Graphical Analysis. Next the same CBL motion detector was taken outside to allow for enough room for the test and placed on a table. Foam was packed around the sensor to ensure that the device wouldnt be damaged during the test. The sensor was placed facing up. Again, like before, the CBL unit was attached to the Ti-83 plus calculator for data collection and the BALLDROP program was executed. The program took readings of distance at 0. 02 seconds for approximately 1. 6 seconds. After the program executed a basketball was thrown in the air above the sensor and caught after 1. 6 seconds. The test was repeated many times because the testers hands would get in the way of the reading. When there was no unwanted obstruction influencing the results then the data was saved and imported in the Graphical Analysis software to ensure the accuracy of the results by minimizing the systematic error. Figure 6 is the resulting graph from the data and table 1 has the raw data collected.

Double Indemnity And Touch Of Evil Film Studies Essay

Double Indemnity And Touch Of Evil Film Studies Essay Film in popular culture was under scrutiny from cultural theorists during the 1930s and 1940s. It was suggested that film lacked originality and authenticity because of the way in which organisations, such as Hollywood, were producing art by using generic formulas (Grant, 2007:5). This repetition of conventions, characters and settings was typical of the Hollywood genre system (Palmer, 1994:1). This system enabled Hollywood to make films cheaply and competitively, which was criticised further by cultural theorists because the organisation was mainly motivated by profit (Grant, 2007:7). Genre films were at the forefront of the American ideal as films were an important feature of American culture. They represented an expression of the spirit of the time and worked as an inexpensive form of entertainment (Grant, 2007:5). The generic formulas were liked and accepted which was beneficial for both consumer and institution as the Hollywood studio could cater to a large audience (Palmer, 1994:2). However, the poor economic conditions of America in the 1930s meant that cinemas had to entice their audience with a more modern form of storytelling and representation (Palmer, 1994:3). Whilst the typical Hollywood film had to follow certain principles of narrative, the film noir was able to push the boundary of conventional storytelling. The visual stylisation, storyline and dark themes describe the essence of the noir film. These conventions will be discussed with examples from Billy Wilders Double Indemnity (1944) at the beginning of the noir period and Orson Welles Touch of Evil (1958) towards the end. The distinct elements that form the noir were largely due to the contributions of those in film production. During the early 1930s directors, actors and cinematographers who were involved in German expressionist cinema moved to Hollywood (Grant, 2007:25). The stylistic qualities of noirs were heavily influenced by expressionism; German silent films were admired by the Hollywood film industry (Silver, 2004:11). The artistic roots in German expressionism are portrayed in the use of common stylistic conventions such as chiaroscuro lighting, distorted camera angles and the use of symbolic designs (Silver, 2004:11). The most visible feature of the noir style is low-key lighting; cinematographers manipulated contrasts of light and shade between day exteriors and realistic night scenes through the use of curtains or venetian blinds (Silver, 2004:16). Dramatic use of lighting was used to create tension and confirm beliefs that the noir world was uncomfortable and corrupt. In Double Indemnity the establishing scene already implies this as Walter Neff begins to confess his crimes, while his face is in shade suggesting that he is ashamed. A less apparent feature, though crucial in terms of its expressionist value, was the use of distorted camera angles. Each camera angle was used specifically to create a dramatic and symbolic meaning. Low angles were pivotal in creating the feeling of claustrophobia and paranoia, for example when ceilings of interior settings were visible in the frame (Silver, 2004:16). Double Indemnity continues to provoke uneasy feelings with low angled shots in the initial scene suggesting that Neff is trapped with no other option but to confess. The use of high angles creates disequilibrium, for example when a city street is visible far below out of a window (Silver, 2004:16). This type of feeling is also expressed by dimly lit alleyways and shadowy pedestrians in the urban landscape (Silver, 2004:16). The noir style frequently makes use of shadow and unbalanced compositions (Telotte, 1989:17). Off-angle compositions of characters in the frame were used to create the suggestion of an unstable world (Spicer, 2002:47). In Touch of Evil, Spicer (2002:62) suggests that Orson Welles is able to draw the audience into a state of confusion by not including any stabilising balance of scenes. Touch of Evil was produced after the film noir description was established which suggests that the noir features in this film were used more deliberately. The expressionist style had been developed by using scenes of limitless darkness to create a sense of claustrophobia and agoraphobia (Spicer, 2002:61). Welles primarily uses night scenes, which allows characters and shadows to merge together creating a sinister atmosphere. Vargas is unsuccessfully attacked with acid by a shadowy figure. Hank Quinlans own corruption is symbolised in Touch of Evil as he falls to his death into floating waste (Silver, 2004:169). Similarly, visual symbolism is used in Double Indemnity as Wilder carefully constructs a mise-en-scà ¨ne to provoke meaning that may not always be obvious. The character of Phyllis Dietrichson is given primary importance both in style when she makes spectacular entrances and in the narrative when she manipulates those close to her. Both Double Indemnity and Touch of Evil share similarities in their visual styles which are heavily influenced by German expressionism. The expressionist style also influences the narrative and themes of noirs. Some of the themes that are expressed in the films are developed through the narrative. Noir stories challenge the conventional linear narrative of other Hollywood films and explicitly state points of view (Telotte, 1989:3). Strategies used are the voice-over, the third person flashback style, and the subjective camera technique (Telotte, 1989:12). The voice-over narrative technique enables the audience to experience situations through the protagonist. The first person narration allows the audience to identify with the character or narrator even if they are morally wrong (Silver, 2004:20). Telotte (1989:16) suggests that the I whose most basic purpose is to provide us with a privileged and personal eye on the world. Flashbacks are used to introduce the past which is presented from the narrators point of view (Silver, 2004:16). This is clear during Double Indemnity as Neff takes the role of narrator in flashbacks through to the present day. The first person voice-over is used as he retells the crime story on the Dictaphone but third person is used in the flashback scenes. Telotte (1989:45) suggests that Dictaphone narration is used to avoid speaking directly, which conforms to the noir ideology of tricks, lies and communication difficulties. There is frequent use of the subjective camera in noirs which emphasises points of view (Telotte, 1989:17). Welles uses this technique in Touch of Evil in confrontation during interrogations between Quinlan and Vargas where the audience is constantly deciding who is the dominant figure. Noir films were generally marketed as detective, thrillers or crime melodramas. Audiences were unaware that they were watching anything that was different from the Hollywood genre system. It was only the French critics who coined this term as the films dark qualities went unnoticed by audience and industry (Palmer, 1994:6). However, these films followed the crime detective formula as most, including Double Indemnity and Touch of Evil, were based on crime fiction novels. Double Indemnity was an innovative film and perhaps therefore a more authentic film noir. By comparison, Touch of Evil was rewritten into a much darker version that deliberately played on the noir styles. Silver (2004:15) states that noir relies on the element of style not just the content and that narratives are complex and not just icons. Literature of the time contained existentialism and psychological matters that promoted the importance of the past reflecting on present actions. This was particularly meaningful given the circumstances of America during the World War and the Depression (Silver, 2004:15). Grant (2007:26) suggests that noirs depict a sense of post-war disillusionment and was a delayed reaction to the enforced optimism of popular culture during the Depression and war years. The intended purpose of Hollywood narratives was to confirm the beliefs and values of the audience. Hollywood took a conservative stance within society both socially and politically. Films had to follow censorship regulations where certain principles had to be followed such as poetic justice, unsuccessful villains and restricted sexual liaisons (Palmer, 1994:4). Film noirs, for the most part, complied with these regulations given that they were unnoticeably different. However, they did touch on certain non-traditional themes such as sexual and criminal violations (Palmer, 1994:9). The French critic Nino Frank (cited in Palmer, 1994:8) described noir having rendered obsolete the traditional detective film because noirs focussed on the psychology of the characters rather than the actual crime and criminal. According to Silver (2004:15), important themes in film noir were classified as the haunted past and the fatalistic nightmare. The haunted past suggests the protagonists escape from a traumatic incident as in Touch of Evil or, crimes committed out of passion as in Double Indemnity. Past and present circumstances are mixed within the narrative; the past is real and inescapable and the protagonist has to confront it to seek redemption. This is featured in both Double Indemnity and Touch of Evil. The second theme is the fatalistic nightmare which is based on causality where present events lead to an inevitable conclusion. Good intentions of characters can be overridden when certain factors are taken into consideration. Double Indemnity uses chance and opportunity to commit crime, whereas the structure of society affects situations in Touch of Evil. Confusion was another theme in noir. It gives a sense of ambiguity to the narrative and a sense of nightmare to the atmosphere. This is conveyed in Touch of Evil when Susan Vargas is resting in the motel and a group of Mexican youths take over which leaves the audience questioning what happened exactly. Noirs present a bleak vision of contemporary life that was populated by criminals and immoral people; all of which opposed the American ideal (Palmer, 1994:6). The protagonists are mostly male and reflect the disruption to the traditional male role that was caused by the war and post-war readjustments thereafter. Females were characterised as both domestic and bland or as femme fatales. Male powerlessness is demonstrated next to the femme fatale which was a common feeling in post-war society (Grant, 2007:26). However, post-feminist critics suggest that Phyllis Dietrichson in Double Indemnity was a strong woman in a male-dominated world where she had to use any kind of weapon, including sexuality, to become an equal (Silver, 2004:16). But ultimately, the femme fatale corrupts the protagonist. The themes in Touch of Evil also promote the sense of corruption: drug dealing, sex trade and gambling. Touch of evil represents the conflict between true justice and the prevailing norms of justice. It has a theme of good versus evil where the moral Vargas can progress through the noir world of corrupt police officers such as Quinlan (Conard, 2006:43). Unlike Neff in Double Indemnity, Quinlan is deeply flawed already. Noirs involve moral decision making, the ethics of knowing what is morally right but finding alternatives more attractive. For example, in Double Indemnity a manipulated insurance salesman plots with a married woman to murder her husband to gain financial rewards (Conard, 2006:42). Double Indemnity contains adultery, cold-blooded killing, insurance fraud and criminal activity that are blamed on a female, which went against the contemporary censorship rules of the time. However, Neff and Dietrichsons inescapable fatality that draws them into crime seems to agree with those rules (Palmer, 1994:9). This is proven as Neff begins his narrations suggesting that crime does not pay (Double Indemnity, 2005): Yes, I killed him. I killed him for money and for a woman. I didnt get the money and I didnt get the woman. Pretty isnt it? The noir categorisation occurred because of the interaction between style, narrative and theme attributions. Noirs were able to branch away from the standard Hollywood product in such a way that it still catered to a large audience but unknowingly contained influences from European cinema. The impact that German expressionism had on Hollywood was remarkable and it is clear that the expressionistic style influenced many subsequent films. Double Indemnity, the earlier film, was a good example of innovative style both in appearance and narrative and was extremely influential. Touch of Evil was made towards the end of the noir period and deliberately used noir features but to an excessive degree. Noirs were considered to be a new type of detective crime thriller that subtly changed from the standard Hollywood genre film. They were still able to maintain the industrys principles by allowing a moral outcome but incorporating a more complex body to the story. These themes reflected the feelings of the American people towards their own society which made the films acceptable. The audiences need for a new way of expressing the story was met by a different, experimental narrative technique which heightened the impact of the dark qualities in the themes. These influences together with the dramatic, expressionist style established the film noir and give it a unique element in Hollywood.

The Panama Canal :: essays research papers

The Panama Canal was one of the greatest triumphs and tragedies of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The tragedy was that the French were just simply too far ahead of technology, at that time, to complete or even get farther than the very beginning of the Panama Canal. The Americans took over the project after President Theodore Roosevelt's pushing of the Panamanian Revolution. After the Revolution the Americans took control of the canal and continued to build the canal to what it is today. The Panama Canal is one of the largest canals in the world. It consists of three dams, the Gatun, Pedro Miguel, and Mira Flores. Despite the limit in ship size the canal is still one of the highest traveled waterways in the world. The Panama Canal was constructed in two stages. The first between 1881 and 1888, was carried out by the French company headed by De Lessop. Second, was the work by the Americans who eventually completed the canals construction between 1904 and 1914. (Cameron 79)The contract for the canals construction was signed on March 12, 1881, and it was agreed the work would be carried out for 512 million French francs. Midway through the building of the canal, in 1885, the French company started to run into financial difficulties and even applied to the French government to issue lottery bonds. Rumors of these difficulties caused increased interest within the American government. The abandonment of the scheme at this stage would cause financial ruin for all the investors and a severe blow to the French. It was suggested that the original plan be modified and the lock system should be employed. Eventually, in 1899, France’s attempt at constructing the Panama Canal was seen to be a failure . However, they had excavated a total of 59.75 million cubic meters, which included 14.255 million cubic meters from the Culebra Cut. (Barret 63) This lowered the peak by 102 meters. The value of work completed by the French was about $25 million. When the French departed, they left behind a considerable amount of machinery, housing and a hospital. The reasons behind the French failing to complete the project were due to disease carrying mosquitoes and the inadequacy of their machinery. The construction of the canal was recommenced by the Americans in 1904. The first step on the agenda was to improve the standard of living and ensure ill health would be a thing of the past.

Orientalism :: essays papers

Orientalism "Two great themes dominate his remarks here and in what will follow: Knowledge and power, the Baconian theme. As Blafour justifies the necessity for British occupation of Egypt, supremacy in his mind is associated with "our" knowledge of Egypt and not principally with military or economic power." He describes the desire for knowledge about the orient as being spawned from the desire to colonialise effectively not to decipher the complex nature of a society which is inherently different, thus bound to do things a little differently. By comprehending the Orient, the West justified a position of ownership. The Orient became the subject, the seen, the observed, the studied; Orientalist philosophers were the apprentices, the overseers, the observers. The Orient was quiescent; the West was dynamic. This is a rather unfortunate position both for the West and the 'Orient'. The students used their position of perceived understanding to further compel 'Oriental' people into subservience while simultaneously justifying their actions. They protected their conscience by convincing themselves that the 'Orient' was incapable of running itself, thus their territory must be administered for them. "It dose not occur to Balfour to let the Egyptian speak for himself, since presumably any Egyptian who would speak out is more likely to be the "agitator [who] wishes to raise difficulties" Said makes some vivid, passionate and striking points however, he seems to be lacking of a little objectivity. The general tone of his book "Orientalism" depicts western Orientalists as persistently reinventing the near and Middle East in self-serving, eurocentric terms; as seen through Western eyes, "the Orient" emerges as a passive, backward world, monolithic in nature and exotic in its alienism, a realm ideally created to sustain the West's daydream of supremacy. Said brutally charges Western scholars for perpetuating the notion that the Orient should not be taken seriously but rather be seen as a subject of study. It is in this line that Said builds his argument. Totally oblivious to the fact that the sheer passion in his discourse may be equated to favouritism by readers. He makes many hard hitting and vivid points, but the repetitive hammering on the same point posses the ability to transform a great piece of work into an opus which skates around a diluted form of reverse racism. As progress is made through "Orientalism" several instances are depicted which provoke negative attitudes from the reader: "The European is a close reasoner; his statements of fact are devoid of any ambiguity; he is a natural logician, albeit he may not have studied logic; he is by nature very sceptical and requires proof before he can accept any proposition.

The Fight for Freedom and Rights in Early America Essay -- People Hist

The Fight for Freedom and Rights in Early America The names and faces of those considered pioneers in the fight for rights and freedom may not be instantly recognizable, but nevertheless, they are an important part to the history of the United States of America. Throughout the history of our country, there has not just been an injustice towards black slaves, but also towards women, with both being unfairly discriminated against. It was the work of many individuals who brought the unfamiliar taste for rights for all God’s creatures to the mouths of many people. The impact of such people, including Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Frederick Douglass, towards the demand for rights for women and slaves cannot be measured. Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815-1902) was born and raised in Johnstown, New York and was one of six children (Stanton 169). She was an incredibly gifted woman, extremely smart and intelligent and had a tongue for linguistics, as she had studied Greek and Latin. She enjoyed intellectual and stimulating conversations and became quite interested in temperance movements, abolishing slavery, and the struggle to gain rights for women. One day, after a discussion with like-minded women, she proposed a woman’s convention to discuss their situation. In July of 1848, she organized the first woman’s rights convention in the United States, known as the Seneca Falls Convention. Frederick Douglass was a slave with ambition and he became more educated than most slaves were by learning how to read. This in theory was good, but at times, did not work out to his advantage. His acumen and intelligence were characteristics that fed his yearning for knowledge and his taste for freedom. Frederick Douglass (1817-1895) was born... ...e of Elizabeth Cady Stanton or Frederick Douglass, but their impact on American history cannot be calculated. Their goals and ideas pushed through a white male dominated world and they set out to make change. They knew it would not come easily, but they knew it was something they were willing to fight forever for. It is due to their leadership, intelligence, and the strength in their hearts for the reason why they are considered two of the most important pioneers in the fight for freedom and the fight for rights for all individuals in our society. Works Cited Douglass, Frederick. â€Å"Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave.† A World of Ideas. Ed. Lee Jacobus. Boston: Bedford, 2002. 125-140. Stanton, Elizabeth Cady. â€Å"Declarations of Sentiments and Resolutions.† A World of Ideas. Ed. Lee Jacobus. Boston: Bedford, 2002. 169-178.

Andrew Marvell’s poem ‘To His Coy Mistress’ Essay

In this essay I will compare and contrast Andrew Marvell’s poem, ‘To His Coy Mistress’, with Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s sonnet, ‘How Do I Love Thee†¦?’ Andrew Marvell’s poem is about an older man trying persuade a younger women to ‘carpe diem’ (seize the day), in order to make love to her, by using compliments and flattery, ‘Vaster than empires, and should go to praise.'(Stanza 1, line 12) Additionally, Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s sonnet is about a female who is expressing her feelings towards a male. Judging by the poem, the woman is deeply in love with the man in a spiritual sense, ‘I love thee to the depth and breadth and height, my soul can reach.’ (Line 2-3) ‘To His Coy Mistress’ is a comparatively long poem of 46 lines, which is divided into three stanzas, representing different parts of the argument for which he is trying to persuade her to sleep with him. In the first stanza, the man flatters the women by using grandiose imagery and hyperbole. He says that her ‘coyness’ would be of no consequence ‘had we but world enough and time’ (Line 1) and then follows with more detail in the following stanzas. The older man also shows how interested he is by expressing the magnitude of his feelings, by explaining how he would, ‘love you ten years before the flood’ (Line 8), even if his love were to remain unrequited, ’till the conversation of the Jews.'(Line 10) In addition he then describes how long he would be prepared to appreciate all of her physical attributes, ‘two hundred to adore each breast, But thirty thousand to the rest.'(Line 15-16) On one hand, he is trying to prove to the young women how much he wants her; on the other hand she could perceive his words in the wrong way, maybe he just wants to sleep with her? You could argue that this is satirising the king’s court, because even though he is flattering her, it is inappropriate to assume that he would be allowed to look at her for this long period of time. In the second stanza, he continues to us the grandiose imagery from the first stanza, but introduces a sense of urgency. When he says, ‘but’ in the very first line, the audience realises that there is going to be a shift in focus. He now says that he hears ‘times winged chariot hurrying near.'(Line 22) From this point, his imagery becomes increasingly desperate. He tries to shock the women into sleeping with him, by talking about her ‘coyness’, and if she perseveres in life that way, she runs the risk of only ‘worms†¦trying that long preserved virginity.'(Line 27-28) He says that his attitude will turn to dust and ‘into ashes all my lust.'(Line 30) This sentence makes the audience more aware of his actual intentions by saying the word ‘lust’ rather than ‘love’, making us believe that he has betrayed his true motives, and slipped up in front of the woman, he is making out he ‘loves’. In the last stanza of ‘To His Coy Mistress’, it sees him almost demand that they make ‘sport’ (love). The imagery on this stanza becomes more erotic, and may have more than one interpretation. ‘Let us roll†¦.up into one ball, and tear our pleasures†¦through the iron gates of life.'(Line 41 and 44) Rolling up into a ball could represent two people making love together or a cannon ball which will smash down, ‘the iron gates of life.’ These gates could represent the woman’s chastity belt or society’s conventions which would frown upon an extramarital affair. The last two lines are similarly ambiguous. They both tie in with lines from the second stanza. ‘Thus, through we cannot make our sun, stand still, yet we will make him run’ (Line 45 – 46), suggests that they should make the most of their time they are spending together, and conceive a child (son). Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s poem, ‘How do I love thee†¦Ã¢â‚¬â„¢ presents quite a contrast to Andrew Marvell’s poem. Its imagery is humble, and very personal. It is an expression of deep love and devotion from one person to another. The purpose of the poem is to quantify the dimensions of her love and at the beginning of the poem, it is very clear to the audience that this woman is deeply in love with her partner By starting with the line, ‘How do I love thee? Let me count the ways'(Line 1) she begins to compare her love to religion and emotions rather than physical attributes, ‘I love thee freely, as men strive for right.’ (Line 7) The imagery she uses to supposedly quantify this love is suggestive of infinity, and a love which has no boundaries, even after the soul is free from the physical body, ‘I shall but love thee after death.’ (Line 14) Constructive descriptions are always used in this poem, compared to Andrew Marvell’s, which also describes the negative issues. Besides Browning’s poem having a very romantic meaning, you could question why the woman needs to prove her love for her partner, because she continually mentions and repeats, ‘I love thee†¦Ã¢â‚¬â„¢ in most of her sentences. She could be indeed counting the ways she loves her partner, however maybe her partner needs reassuring of her love for him. One could argue that, Barrett Browning chose the sonnet form for this poem, for the purposes of contrast; to take something which is supposedly infinitive (her love) and place it in a finite and restricted form (sonnet). Alternatively, people could think different because there are such strict rules governing sonnet writing, (i.e. 10 syllables per line, 14 lines etc) and people might question why she chose such a rigid format, for something which she feels most strongly about. Overall, the two poems are opposites, but they are both concerned with the concept of time, human life and love. At the end of the poem, browning says, ‘if god choose, I shall love thee better after death,'(Line 13-14) showing that even after she dies, her love for this man will continue to grow, loving him for eternity. ‘To His Coy Mistress’, and ‘How Do I Love Thee†¦Ã¢â‚¬â„¢ have many correlations with each other. For example; Both poems are about love; but represent different kinds of love. Andrew Marvell’s poem is about lust and sexual gratification, while Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s poem is about true love and loyalty. The sonnet is written from a women’s point of view, where she expresses her true love for her husband. The other poem is written from a mature mans point of view, and represemts his lust for a younger women. This poem is an elaborate ‘chat up line’ to present a logical argument in order to persuade her to make love to him. This can show how the significance of a poem can differ because of the century it has been written in. ‘To his coy mistress’, was written in the 1600’s while ‘How do I love thee†¦Ã¢â‚¬â„¢ was written in the 1800’s. The cultural difference between these two periods, is the writing style, as in the 1600’s people were interested in composing clever arguments, and were more interested in writing about sex, lust and passion. Whereas in the 1800’s, the poems written had more true meaning, with a deeper, more romantic feeling. ‘And into ashes all my lust’, compared to, ‘How do I love thee†¦Let me count the ways.’ Many love poems are written in a very traditional format, with very strict rules. Elizabeth Barrett Browning took the challenge to write about something which is supposed to have no limits (love) into something which is restricted (sonnet). On the other hand Andrew Marvell’s poem is all based around ‘carpe diem’, in a non-traditional format, with no strict rules or guide-lines. This can affect the imagery used as one has no limitation to the amount of syllables, lines or stanzas, while the other has a restricted format leaving a certain amount of phrases which can be used. Clearly this means that there are different types of imagery used between the two poems since, ‘How do I love thee†¦Ã¢â‚¬â„¢ uses abstract and emotional imagery, which tends to be highly personal and humble. In some cases you cannot quite put a finger on what she is describing. ‘I love thee to the level of every day, most quite nearby sun and candlelight. (Line 5-6) ‘To His Coy Mistress’, tends to use ostentatious hyperbole and grandiose imagery. He uses big overdone, tacky images, by using phrases such as, ‘times winged chariot’, ‘instant fires’ and ‘iron gates of life.’ You can picture what the man is describing; but on the other hand, you can tell that he might be misleading the audience to make them believe that he is in love with this woman. Throughout the whole of my essay, I have come to the conclusion, that both poems have many comparisons, similarities and differences. They both describe a form of love between two people. In my opinion, the poem I prefer is, ‘To his coy mistress’, because it had more of an effect on me, because of the language used. The man comes across as very desperate, but on the other hand with very good charisma. The imagery used is effective, as I could relate and imagine what he is describing. As well as keeping the audience intrigued on what the women will do next, he leaves the ending on a cliff hanger, by not telling on the final decision the women makes! However, I do not dislike the poem, ‘How do I love thee†¦Ã¢â‚¬â„¢ because it has appropriate language for the concept she is describing. I just think it is rather tedious describing only the optimistic qualities about a person, for the reason that everybody has faults and pessimistic attributes. Furthermore, I didn’t find it unique or distinctive from other love poems, since the language and imagery was very similar.

Literary Terms Modern Essay Essay

The aim of this glossary is not to set in concrete words that are constantly changing and evolving, but rather to help students develop the critical tools and vocabulary with which to understand and talk about poetry. Since poets themselves often disagree about the meaning and importance of terms such as free verse, rhythm, lyric, structure, and the prose poem, and since control of literary discourse is part of each new generation’s struggle for poetic ascendancy, it seems only reasonable and appropriate for the student to view all efforts to define critical terminology in a historical perspective and with a healthy degree of scepticism. This mini-glossary reflects the continuing debate between traditional metrics and free verse, and between differing conceptions of the poet’s craft and role in society. A fuller and more lively debate may often be found in the notes on the poets and in the poetics section. In a number of instances, I have been less concerned to offer hard-andfast definitions than to alert readers to the controversy that surrounds certain critical terms. The following list is by no means complete, but is intended to aid and provoke, to stimulate discussion and debate and send the curious reader on to more comprehensive sources. I have made use of and recommend highly A Glossary of Literary Terms (1957), by M. H. Abrams; the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (1974), edited by Alex Preminger, Frank, J. Warnke, and O. B. Hardison, Jr; and The Poet’s Dictionary: A Handbook of Prosody and Poetic Devices (1989), by William Packard. G. G. ccent The emphasis, or stress, placed on a syllable, reflecting pitch, duration, and the pressures of grammar and syntax. While all syllables are accented or stressed in speech and in poetry, we tend to describe the less dominant as unstressed or unaccented syllables. In metrical verse, accented and unaccented (stressed and unstressed) syllables are easily identified. Robert Burns’s famous line â€Å"My love is like a red, red rose† might be described as an iambic tetrameter line, with four feet each consisting of one unaccented syllable followed by an accented one. However, it can be argued that such a reading trivializes and effectively undercuts the emotional power of the poetic utterance, and that the sense of the line dictates a slightly different reading, which locates three strong stresses or accents in the second half of the line: â€Å"My love is like a red, red rose†. See also FEET and METER. 2 20 -Century Poetry & Poetics th alexandrine A twelve-syllable line, usually consisting of six iambic feet. alliteration A common poetic device that involves the repetition of the same sound or sounds in words or lines in close proximity. Alliteration was most pronounced in Anglo-Saxon poems such as â€Å"The Wanderer† and â€Å"The Seafarer†, which Earle Birney imitates in his satire of Toronto, â€Å"Anglo-Saxon Street†: Dawndrizzle ended dampness steams from Blotching brick and blank plasterwaste Faded house patterns hoary and finicky unfold stuttering stick like a phonograph While such intense piling up of consonants was once a common mnemonic device (an aid to memory), changing literary fashions have, to a large extent, rendered such self-conscious exhibitions too blunt and obvious for the contemporary ear, except when used for comic purposes. Exceptions include rap poetry and spoken word, both of which make extensive use of alliteration and rhyme. Nevertheless, the repetition, or rhyming, of vowels, consonants, and consonant clusters (nt, th, st, etcetera) remains a still a central component in constructing the soundscape of the poem, just as the repetition and variation of image and idea enrich the intellectual and sensory fabric. The most talented practitioners will be listening backwards and forwards as they compose, picking up and repeating both images and sounds that give the poem a rich and interlocking texture. See ASSONANCE, CONSONANCE, RHYME, and PROSODY. allusion Personal, topical, historical, or literary references are common in poetry, though, to be successful, they require an audience with shared experience and values. Biblical or classical allusions, for example, or Canadian political allusions, might be totally unrecognizable to an Asian Muslim reader. Although readers soon tire of verbal exhibitionism, they still expect a degree of allusion to challenge them and to stimulate curiosity. Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s â€Å"Junkman’s Obgligato† assumes the reader’s familiarity with both T. S. Eliot’s â€Å"Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock† and W. B. Yeats’s â€Å"Lake Isle of Innisfree† for a full appreciation of the ironic counterpointing of down-and-out urban images and those of an idealized pastoral landscape. At the same time, the poem also overflows with topical and literary allusions from the junkyard of nineteenth- and twentieth-century European and American culture. ambiguity Words and the texts they inhabit are susceptible of a variety of interpetations. While a word may denote one thing, usage and context often bring various connotations to bear on the meaning, or meanings, of that word in the poem. As the American poet Randall Jarrell explains in his essay â€Å"The Obscurity of the Poet† (in Poetry and the Age, 1953), what we speak of as literature ranges from Dante’s Divine Comedy, with its seven levels of meaning, to Reader’s Digest, which, Glossary of Poetic Terms 3 like pulp fiction and greeting-card verse, barely manages half a level of meaning. Sophisticated readers not only enjoy, but also demand a certain level of ambiguity, or mystery, in poems. They find such ambiguity in Shakespeare, who loved puns, double-entendre, and various kinds of wordplay; they find it also in such early Moderns as T. S. Eliot, W. B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, and Wallace Stevens, who were influenced by seventeenth-century Metaphysical poets and French Symbolist poets, for both of whom the poem retains something of the quality of a riddle. As a result of declining audiences, a general trend towards a democratization of the arts, and the pressure of new kinds of psychological and political content, the pendulum of taste since mid-century swung towards less ambiguity. While puns and worldplay still add to our sense of the fecundity and depth of poetic expression, contemporary poets admit that a rose may, at times, be intended only as a rose; and they tend to avoid the use of obscure and esoteric references. See Robert Graves’ Poetic Unreason (1925) and William Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930). anapest A metrical foot consisting of two unaccented syllables followed by an accented one: / ? ? ? /. See METRE. anaphora The rhetorical device of using the same word or phrase at the beginning of successive lines to obtain the effect of incantation. See Ginsberg’s â€Å"Howl† and Cohen’s â€Å"You Have the Lovers† and â€Å"style†. apostrophe A literary device of â€Å"turning away†, usually to address a famous person or idea. In the classical Greek plays of Aeschylus and Euripides, the chorus would march across the stage in one direction chanting various stanzas, or strophes, and then reverse their motion in an anti-strophe, or verbal about-face. In twentiethcentury poetry, the apostrophe is just as likely to be used ironically, or for romantic or satirical purposes. rchetype When you sense that a literary character, situation, or idea has significance far beyond its specific, or particular, occasion in the poem, you are probably in the presence of an archetype. In an essay called â€Å"Blake’s Treatment of the Archetype† (English Institute Essays, 1950), Northrop Frye says: â€Å"By archetype I mean an element in a work of literature, whether a character, an image, a nar rative formula, or an idea, which can be assimilated into a larger unifying pattern. † Psychologist C. G. Jung, in an essay called â€Å"The Problem of Types in Poetry† (1923), gives another dimension to the matter: â€Å"The primordial image or archetype is a figure, whether it be a daemon, man, or process, that repeats itself in the course of history wherever creative fantasy is freely manifested. Essentially, therefore, it is a mythological figure. If we subject these images to a closer examination, we discover them to be the formulated resultants of countless typical experiences of our ancestors. They are, as it were, the psychic residue of numberless experiences of the same type. 4 20 -Century Poetry & Poetics th Sibling rivalry, the betrayed or rejected lover, the innocent abroad, the rebel, the fool, the seasonal cycles of rebirth, fertility, and death, the enchanter or enchantress—all are common characters or situations in literature that can deepen our appreciation of a work of art. However, the search for universal symbols can be reductive in the reading of a poe m; so, too, can excessive efforts to make a work symbolic or archetypal reduce a poem into a sociology text or an essay on psychology. ssonance Also called vocalic rhyme, assonance is the repetition or recurrence of vowel sounds within a line (or lines), a stanza, or the overall poem. Listen to the long vowels conjure expiration and death in Wilfred Owen’s â€Å"Greater Love†: â€Å"As theirs whom none now hear, / Now earth has stopped their piteous mouths that coughed. † Assonance is most obvious among words beginning with an open, or initial, vowel (open / eyes / eat / autumn), but equally powerful as an internal rhyming device (tears / mean, thine / divine). allad A popular short narrative folk song, usually transmitted orally, and making use of various forms of shorthand, including truncated action, psychological and historical sketchiness, and a chorus or refrain for heightened impact and easy memorizing. A direct link can be drawn between such early folk s ongs as â€Å"Barbara Ellen† and â€Å"The Skye Boat Song†, country western music, and such contemporary ballads such as â€Å"Frankie and Johnny†, Leonard Cohen’s â€Å"Suzanne†, and Stan Rogers’ â€Å"The Lockkeeper†. lank verse Unrhymed iambic pentameter verse has been a staple since it was introduced by Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, around 1540 in his translations of Virgil’s Aeneid. Shakepeare and Christopher Marlowe both used blank verse in their plays; in poetry, Milton used it for Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained, Wordsworth for The Prelude, and T. S. Eliot for The Waste Land. Eliot claimed in Poetry in the Eighteenth Century (1930) that the decasyllabic (or ten-syllable) line was â€Å"intractably poetic† yet had many of the capacities of prose. As such, blank verse could be said to be a precursor of the prose poem, which seems more aligned with ordinary speech and the counting of syllables than with poetic meter. broken rhyme The dividing of a word between two lines to fulfill the requirements of rhyme: Madame had learned to waltz before the charge of falsehood had been laid . . . cadence When poet John Ciardi describes the poem as â€Å"a countermotion across a silence†, he comes close to defining cadence, which refers to the pattern of melody established from line to line that creates in the reader a sense of time slowed down Glossary of Poetic Terms 5 and palpable. While cadence originally referred to regular traditional poetic measures, in which syllables and feet could be counted and identified, the term has come to be used more in relation to irregular patterning, where stress and accent are much looser and determined primarily by phrasing and syntax. Cadence is what Ezra Pound was referring to when he spoke of composing with the musical phrase instead of the metronome. Also worth reading is Dennis Lee’s essay â€Å"Cadence, Country, Silence†, in which he employs the term broadly and with greater cultural import. See also MEASURE, MUSIC, RHYTHM, and SONG. caesura This term is used to refer to any substantial break or pause within the line, though it is most often found in lines of five or more feet. The caesura was a regular feature in Anglo-Saxon poetry, dividing the two alliterating units within the line, bluntly drawn in Earle Birney’s â€Å"Anglo-Saxon Street† or more subtly in Wilfred Owen’s â€Å"Arms and the Boy†: Let the boy try along this bayonet blade How cold steel is, and keen with hunger of blood; Blue with all malice, like a madman’s flash; And thinly drawn with famishing for flesh. anto While in the twentieth century the term is often used to mean, simply, a song or a ballad, the canto was originally a subdivision of epic or narrative, which provided both a simpler organizing principle for the creator of the long poem and a muchneeded respite for the singer during delivery. Ezra Pound draws on both meanings of the word when he calls his great epic-length series of meditations The Cantos. conceit When a METAPHOR or other FIGURE OF SPEECH is extended over many lines, it is called a conceit. oncreteness Concrete nouns referring to objects, such as lip, flint, hubcap, gunbarrel, wheel, smoke, sugar, and fingernail, seem capable of making their appeal through the senses. So, too, verbs, such as run, scream, chop, and lick. Concrete words activate the imagination and anchor poetry in the world of particulars. A gifted poet such as Samuel Johnson can use abstract words in such as way as to make them feel concrete, as in the line â€Å"stern famine guards the solitary coast†, where the abstract idea is given the quality of ternness, the action of guarding, and a spatial location. e. e. cummings concretized abstractions in much the same way: â€Å"love is more thicker than forget, / more thinner than recall / more seldom than a wave is wet / more frequent than to fail†. concrete poetry This name was first applied in the twentieth century to works that exploit the visual and auditory limits of poetry, ranging from contemporary â€Å"visual puns† back to a seventeenth-century â€Å"shape-poem† whose typography was de- 6 20 -Century Poetry & Poetics th ployed to create the image of an altar. Since so much of the power of poetry is derived from sound—from rhythmical patterns, the residue of recurring vowels and consonants—it’s hardly surprising to find poets who break words into component syllables and letters, downplaying the intellectual dimension of poetry and emphasizing, instead, the psychic energy to be found in the acoustic dimension of language. See the notes on, and poems and poetics by, bpNichol, as well as An Anthology of Concrete Poetry (1967), edited by Emmett Williams, ed. consonance Consonance is the repetition of consonants in words or syllables with differing vowels: winter / water / went / waiter. See, for example, Wilfred Owen’s â€Å"Strange Meeting†, which proceeds with a series of consonantal half rhymes: escaped / scooped, groined / groaned, moan / mourn. content The substance or subject matter of a poem, as opposed to its style or manner, is what we usually refer to when we speak of content. But content cannot, properly, be discussed apart from form. A poet may begin to write a poem, broadly speaking, about war, love, or beach-combing; however, as soon as his or her thought begins to take shape as poetic language, as form, it is so transformed by the process that it bears little or no relation to the original impulse. Ideas or anecdotes that find their way into a poem are not the poem’s content, though they are certainly germaine to its overall impact. In fact, everything in the poem contributes to what we might call its content. Poets have reacted strongly to attempts to oversimplify their work or reduce it to a generalization or two. Archibald MacLeish argued that â€Å"A poem should not mean, but be. † Most poets believe that the poem is its own meaning. Robert Creeley insisted that content and form are indivisible, and rejected â€Å"any descriptive act . . . which leaves the attention outside the poem†. It’s probably most useful to stop asking what a poem means and begin to consider, as John Ciardi suggests in his book title, How Does A Poem Mean? If you begin to examine the formal and technical elements in a poem, the ways in which certain effects are achieved, you are more likely to arrive at a point of understanding and appreciation of the poem far beyond any simple statement about its content. See also DICTION, FORM, PROSODY. couplet The couplet—two lines of verse, usually rhymed—is one of the most common and useful verse forms in English and Chinese poetry. The couplet’s brevity encourages a pithy, epigrammatic quality; its two-line split provides a fulcrum which lends itself to argumentative summary and generalization, as in Alexander Pope’s â€Å"Know then thyself, presume not God to scan; / The proper study of mankind is man†. Closed couplets such as Pope’s or Dryden’s, which use mostly iambic pentameter lines and complete their thought with the final end-rhyme, are also called heroic couplets, a form that dominated the eighteenth-century English neoclassical period. Glossary of Poetic Terms 7 The couplet has many uses, as a concentrating unit within the poem or as a separate stanza form. Shakespeare used the couplet to conclude his sonnets forcefully. See also GHAZAL. dactyl A metrical foot consisting of an accented syllable followed by two unaccented syllables: / ? ? ? /. See FOOT and METER. diction Word choice. The French poet Verlaine felt the need to remind us that poems are made of words, not ideas. This is useful to think about, since poems are often spoken and written of as if they were chunks of autobiography, representations of nature, or little treatises on how to conduct, or not to conduct, our lives. Words are magical. When nature, experience, or ideas—any of which may give rise to a poem—pass through the rucible of language, they are transformed, as surely as white light is split into a spectrum of colour when it passes through a prism. Words, similarly, slow and alter those non-linguistic elements that endeavour to use or pass through them; that’s one reason poems, stories, and other verbal texts give us the impression of time slowe d down, of felt time. Words and the ideas they carry fly rather quickly through the brain, but when you speak or hear them you become aware of being immersed in another element, like a diver suddenly encountering water. These considerations are central to postmodern poetics, which seeks to remind us that the poem is not a mirror of nature or a window through which we see the natural world, or so-called reality, but rather a verbal reality in its own right. When the word, or language in general, is foregrounded, poetry ceases to be simply a vehicle for conveying pictures of, and passing on information about, quotidian reality; it aspires, instead, to the condition of other arts such as music and painting, where representation and referentiality are not the only, or even the primary, concern. In a sense, words are the poet’s paint, his or her primary medium. Coleridge once spoke of poetry as â€Å"the best words in the best order†. He was using the word best in the sense of most appropriate in a specific context, not with the idea that certain kinds of words are forbidden or inherently better or worse than others, though the choice would have its own moral significance. Words are dirty with meaning and can never be washed clean; we use them for ordinary discourse, to sell lawnmowers, to deliver sermons, and to make political speeches. As Joseph Conrad once wrote, using the Archimedean metaphor: Give me the right word or phrase and I will move the world. M. H. Abrams reminds us that diction can be described as â€Å"abstract or concrete, Latinate or Anglo-Saxon, colloquial or formal, technical or common, literal or figurative†, to which we might add archaic, plain, elevated. See CONCRETENESS and WORD, and also Owen Barfield’s Poetic Diction (1952) and Winnifred Nowottny’s The Language Poets Use (1962). 8 20 -Century Poetry & Poetics th idactic While classical and neo-classical poetics argue that poetry should both teach and delight, in didactic poems the teaching function tends to override the imaginative. Such works, often dismissed as propaganda, recall Yeats’s distinction, that his argument with the world produced only rhetoric, whereas his argument with himself resulted in poetry. And yet all great works are overtly or covertly didactic, whether they teach us indirectly and sublimina lly through the senses (by way of imagery and patterns of sound) or by arguing transparently. And, of course, all art, while it may not be a blatant call to arms, is an effort to persuade us to view the world differently. dimetre A line of verse consisting of two feet. dissonance An effect of harshness or discordance in a poem, often achieved by combining rhythmical irregularity and a jarring concentration of consonants. distich A COUPLET. dramatic monologue Unlike the soliloquy, in which a character on stage reveals his or her inner thoughts by â€Å"thinking aloud†, the dramatic monologue assumes and addresses an audience of one or more people. In the process of addresing this audience, the speaker of the dramatic monologue manages to confess, or simply reveal, a character flaw, a dread deed, or an impending crisis. Robert Browning pioneered the form in poems such as â€Å"My Last Duchess†, â€Å"Andrea del Sarto†, and â€Å"Fra Lippo Lippi†, but it has been used by Tennyson in â€Å"Ulysses†, by Eliot in â€Å"The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock†, and by many contemporary writers. duration The length of acoustic or phonetic phenomena such as syllables. According to linguists, the sounds we produce when we speak have pitch, loudness, quality, and duration. Aside from grammatical and syntactical considerations, the pacing in, or the speed at which we read, a poem is largely determined by the length of time it takes to enunciate syllables, lines, and stanzas. Short vowels speed up the poem; long vowels slow it down. See also MEASURE, MUSIC, PROSODY, RHYTHM, and SONG. elegy Originally a specifically metered Greek or Roman form, the elegy has come to refer generally to a sustained meditation on mutability or a formal lament on the death of a specific person. The conventional pastoral elegy included a rural setting, with shepherds and flowers (all nature mourning), an invocation to the muse, a procession, and a final consolation. Classics such as Milton’s â€Å"Lycidas†, Thomas Gray’s â€Å"Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard†, and Shelley’s â€Å"Adonais† are clearly the chief source and influence on such contemporary elegies as W. H. Auden’s â€Å"In Memory of W. B. Yeats†, Michael Ondaatje’s â€Å"Letters & Other Worlds†, Seamus Heaney’s â€Å"Requiem for the Croppies†, and so many of the poems of Adrienne Rich, Denise Levertov, Lorna Crozier and Michael Longley. In fact, one Glossary of Poetic Terms 9 might safely say that the elegiac tone is dominant in English poetry from Beowulf to the present. enjambment A means of escaping the limitations and rigidity of the end-stopped line or closed couplet, enjambment occurs when a sentence or thought carries over from one line to the next. The enjambed line, with its greater freedom and flexibility, has served to focus a great deal of attention on the position of line-breaks in twentiethcentury poetry. See LINE-BREAKS and also Al Purdy’s poem â€Å"The Cariboo Horses†. pic While the epic, or heroic, poem such as Homer’s Iliad and Odsyssey or the AngloSaxon classic Beowulf—each with its elevated style, tribal or national struggles, invocations to the muse, occasional use of the supernatural, and cast of important, or exalted, figures—belongs to an earlier age, it has not lost its appeal to poets of later ages. From Dante’s Divine Comedy, Spenser’s F? r ie Queene, Milton’s Paradise Lost, and Dryden’s and Pope’s mock epic satires to such contemporary long poems as Pound’s The Cantos, W. C. Williams’s Paterson, Atwood’s The Journals of Susanna Moodie, and Ondaatje’s The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, the long, or extended, poem has provided an alternative to the limited scope, self-directedness and, perhaps, too intense heat of the lyric. See LONG POEM and NARRATIVE. epigram A short, witty poem or statement, seldom more than four lines long, whose form dates back to Roman epigrammatist Martial. Alexander Pope’s poems are full of condensed witticisms that might be displayed as separate epigrams: â€Å"To err is human; to forgive, divine†. ye-rhyme An eye-rhyme features words or syllables that look alike but are pronounced differently: come / home; give / contrive. feminine ending While it may no longer be politically correct, this term is still used in criticism to refer to a line that ends with one or more unstressed syllables. Far from suggesting weakness or passivity, feminine endings are more flexible and colloquial, and their in formality and irregularity have been especially useful in dramatic blank verse. feminine rhyme A two-syllable (or disyllabic) rhyme, usually a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed syllable: witness / fitness. igurative language When language is heightened so that it moves beyond ordinary, or literal, usage, it is said to be figurative. These figures, figures of speech, or tropes (â€Å"turns†), as they are sometimes called, include simile, metaphor, personification, hyperbole, paradox, and pun. An extended figure of speech is called a CONCEIT. 10 20 -Century Poetry & Poetics th figure A group of words that evoke the senses by transcending ordinary usage. Consider, for example, Gloucester’s comment in Richard III: â€Å"Now is the winter of our discontent / Made glorious summer by the sun of York†. oot In A Poet’s Dictionary: Handbook of Prosody and Poetic Devices (1989), William Packard provides an interesting account of the origin of the metrical foot: When the Greeks described poetry as â€Å"numbers†, they were alluding to certain conspicuous elements of verse that could be counted off: â€Å"feet† were strong dance steps that could be measured out in separate beats of a choral ode or strophe or refrain. These â€Å"feet† could then be scanned for repeating patter ns of syllable quantities, either long or short, within strophes and antistrophes of a chorus. Greek metrics, then, did not derive from accent or stress but rather from the elongation required in the pronunciation of certain vowels and syllable lengths. Instead of the quantitative designation of long and short syllables, we now use the terms stressed and unstressed, or accented and unaccented to describe the components of the poetic foot, which is essentially a group of two or more syllables that form a metrical unit in a line of verse. The most common feet are the iambic (/ ? ? /), an unstressed followed by a stressed syllable (delight); the trochaic (/ ? /), a stressed followed by an unstressed syllable (action); the anapestic (/ ? ? ? /), two unstressed syllables followed by a stressed one (interrupt); the dactylic (/ ? ? ? /), a stressed syllable followed by two unstressed ones (comforting); and the spondaic (/ ? ? /), two stressed syllables (handbook). Other feet include the pyrrhic (/ ? ? /), one or more unstressed syllables; the amphibrachic (/ ? ? ? /), one unstressed, one stressed, one unstressed; the bacchic (/ ? ? ? /), one unstressed followed by two stressed; and the chorimabic (/ ? ? ? /), a stressed, two unstressed, and a stressed. See METER. form Form in poetry is no less intriguing and no less difficult to define and describe than form in the other arts. We can easily identify obvious elements of form, such as rhyme schemes, metrical patterns, stanza-lengths, and traditional modes like the sonnet and sestina; but the intricacies of language, timing, syntax, counterpoint, verbal play—those elements that contribute to the formal beauty and power of a poem—require some training and considerable attention. However, in an essay called â€Å"Admiration of Form: Reflections on Poetry and the Novel† (Brick / 34), poet and critic C. K. Williams offers some useful thoughts, reminding us that, among other things, form and content are inextricably allied: The important thing about form, though, is its artificiality. In English poetry, the historically dominant iambic foot is closely related to the actual movement of the voice in our language between stressed and unstressed syllables, but the regularity of the iambic line, and the five beats of the pentameter, for instance, are purely conventional. In irregular, or â€Å"free†, verse, where the Glossary of Poetic Terms 11 cadences are not regular, and not counted, it is what Galway Kinnell has called the â€Å"rhythmic surge†, which defies and controls the movement of language across its grid of artifice; the line in free verse becomes a much more defining factor of formal organization than in more arithmetical versetraditions. The crucial thing about form is that its necessities, though they are conventions, precede in importance the expressive or analytical demands of the work. Although a poem may to a greater or less degree seem to be driven by its content, in fact all the decisions a poet makes about a work finally have to be made in reference to the conventions which have been accepted as defining the formal nature of that work. If a ompelling experience is conveyed in a verse drama, if an interesting philosophical speculation occurs in a lyric poem, if a poem involves itself in an intricate and apparently entirely engrossing narrative adventure, these are secondary, although simultaneous with, the formal commitments of the work, and they must be embodied within the terms of those commitments, although in the end these almost playful divisions of an experienitial continuum, whether in the structures of a musical mode, or the pulse and surge of a poetic line, will mysteriously serve to intensify the emo tion and the meaning which the work evokes. I should mention, perhaps, that the dour and puritanical and ferociously self-serving â€Å"new formalism† has nothing to do with the notion of form I am elaborating here: the new formalism is rather a kind of conceptual primitivism which seems to gather most of its propulsive force from a distorted and jealous vision of the literary marketplace; it calls for a return to the good old safe and easily accounted-for systems of verse, with counted meters, rhyme, and so forth. All despite the generation over the last few centuries, from Smart to Blake through Whitman and countless others, of an enormous amount of significant poetry in non-traditional forms; and despite the fact that many verse-systems in the world require neither rhyme nor strictly counted meter, and despite the practice of many modern poets, who have been quite content to use whatever verse-form fitted the poem they were composing. One would not want to sacrifice either Rilke’s â€Å"Duino Elegies† or Lowell’s â€Å"Life Studies†, just to mention two poets who worked in both systems. In his essay â€Å"Rebellion and Art† (in The Rebel, 1956), Albert Camus argues that â€Å"A work in which the content overflows the form, or in which form drowns the content, only bespeaks an unconvinced and unconvincing unity. . . . Great style is invisible stylization, or rather stylization incarnate. † See PROSODY, STRUCTURE, and STYLE, and also Denise Levertovâ⠂¬â„¢s â€Å"Notes on Organic Form† in the Poetics section. free verse Poetry written with a persistently irregular meter (which is not to say without rhythm) and often in irregular line-lengths. The King James translations of 12 20 -Century Poetry & Poetics th the Psalms and Song of Songs are often held up as models of how dynamic nonmetrical poetry can be. Ezra Pound advised composing with the rhythms of the speaking-voice sounding in your ear, rather than the regular beat of the metronome; Robert Frost insisted that writing free verse was like playing tennis without a net; and T. S. Eliot claimed that no verse is free for the poet who wants to do a good job. All three were concerned to emphasize that, whether regular or irregular, the music of poetry bears close scrutiny, for it accounts for much of our pleasure as readers and, far from being incidental or decorative, is fundamental to our total experience of the poem. See LINES-BREAKS, METER, MUSIC, RHYTHM, PROSODY, and SONG. ghazal A Middle Eastern lyric, most commonly associated with the fourteenth-century Persian poet Hafiz. The ghazal consists of five to twelve closed couplets, often using the same rhyme. These seemingly disconnected couplets about love and wine are held together not by a narrative or rhetorical thread, but by a heightened tone or emotional intensity. Not surprisingly, the apparently random or non-rational structuring of the ghazal has proven attractive to twentieth-century poets as diverse as as John Thompson (Stilt Jack), Phyllis Webb (Water & Light), and Adrienne Rich. hexameter A line of verse consisting of six feet. hyperbole A figure of speech that involves extremes of exaggeration: big as a house, dumb as a doornail. ambic pentameter A line consisting of five iambic feet. Iambic pentameter is considered the poetic rhythm most basic to English speech. See FOOT and METER. image Ezra Pound described the image as â€Å"that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time†. Other poets have spoken of images as concentrations of linguistic energy directed at the senses. The image is a controversial term, which has often been used to mean, simply, a verbal picture; however, the poetic image may also conjure things, events, and people in our minds by appealing to senses other than sight. Images are so central to language that, in the line a brown cow leapt over the fence, which constitutes a composite image, we also find four discrete images: a cow, a fence, the act of leaping, and brownness. Imagery, along with prosody, is one of the two central ingredients of poetry; and its evocative power cannot be divorced from the texture of sounds through which it is delivered. Specific images seem more likely to stimulate the senses than images that are generic (tree, animal, machine). The difference between a line such as â€Å"I think that I shall never see / A poem as lovely as a tree† and the following—â€Å"Don’t hang your bones from the branch / of that gnarled oak, exuding elegies. / The chihuahua’s waiting in the Daimler†Ã¢â‚¬â€has as much to do with diction and specificity of image as with the difference between metrical and non-metrical verse. Glossary of Poetic Terms 13 Imagism A poetic movement in England and the US between 1909 and 1917, which reacted against the discursiveness, sentimentality, and philosophizing of late nineteenth-century poetry by trying to focus on the single image.