...climes and starry skies; And all that’s best of dark and bright Meet in her aspect and her eyes; Thus mellowed to that tender light Which heaven to gaudy day denies. One shade the more, one ray the less, Had half impaired the nameless grace Which waves in every raven tress, Or softly lightens o’er her face; Where thoughts serenely sweet express, How pure, how dear their dwelling-place. And on that cheek, and o’er that brow, So soft, so calm, yet eloquent, The smiles that win, the tints that glow, But tell of days in goodness spent, A mind at peace with all below, A heart whose love is innocent! "She Walks in Beauty" is a poem written in 1814 by Lord Byron. One of Lord Byron’s most famous, it is a lyric poem that describes a woman of much beauty and elegance. TITLE: What’s Up With the Title? We usually refer to this poem simply by its first line, "She Walks in Beauty." But the first line does more than introduce the subject of the poem – a beautiful woman. The first line of the poem (and therefore the title) is an apparently conscious echo of the famous sonnet by William Shakespeare, "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day" (Sonnet 18). Except, of course, instead of comparing the beautiful woman to a "summer's day," Byron compares her to "night." So he's not just setting up a contrast between night and day, he's also setting up a contrast between himself and Shakespeare. This is a pretty gutsy move, if you think about it – even in the early nineteenth century...
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...The Red Line The short story ”The Red Line” written by Charles Higson’s in 1993, takes place in the centre of London. The story deals with three extremely different people who all happens to meet each other while riding the tubes of London, which takes a dramatic turn. Furthermore I will analyse and interpret the short story with special focus on narrative technique and the creation of suspense. In this short story we are introduced to an Italian man, named Berto. He used to live in Venice, where he met a girl who he believes to be his “girlfriend”, Cathy, who is English. They met in Venice where they had a “relationship”, but they spent most of their time in bed, partly because of Berto's lacking skill of speaking English. Furthermore Berto seems to be a very naive and persistant kind of person. He's naive in a way because he believes that he and Cathy actually were in a relationship, he may not have understood the things that Cathy told him back in Venice, because when he arrives in London he finds that Cathy is in this “open relationship” with another man, with whom they spent a lot of time with. Berto is persistent because even when finds out that Cathy is in this other relationship and has been, even before the two of them met each other, he still keeps on trying to be with Cathy, he clearly seems to be in love. One last thing we can tell about Berto from hos behaviour is that he is very shy. The only to why he keeps sitting in the tubes is because he is way too afraid...
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...money they would not be able to buy food and would face starvation. Fortunately, Ishmael and friends were able to secure the money, but faced life-threatening at every turn of the journey. Recalling the danger of crawling through an open clearing to avoid rebel gunfire, Ishmael states, “We started to crawl across the clearing at the signal of the first group that had it across...There were dead bodies everywhere and flies were feasting on the congealed blood on them” (Beah 28). Ishmael had the inner strength to remain calm and make it through this horrifying situation. Throughout the memoir, Ishmael demonstrates bravery countless more times. The imam showed courage when he refused to tell the rebels where the others were hiding. At this point in the memoir, if a person didn’t give the rebels what they wanted, you would be killed. If the Imam would have told the rebels where they were hiding , most of them would have been killed, including the imam. So either way the Imam would have died, so...
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...characters (four, including Cathy) that have nothing in common whatsoever. They come from different environments, backgrounds and families. However, as the story proceeds we discover how fragile, weak and alike they become when their fears take over their lives. I will therefore do a thorough analysis focusing on fear of the unknown as the main theme. In order to do that, I find it important to do a characterization to gain an insight to the four protagonists’ personalities. Berto, Denise and “the nameless guy” are all sitting in the same cabin in The Tube in London. Berto is visiting London trying to find the love of his life, Cathy, an English girl who has visited Berto in Italy where they have had an affair. To his disappointment he comes to find out that she is in a relationship. She leaves him in the Tube after an argument. He feels very self-conscious about speaking English. He has asked for directions and he hasn’t been able to make himself clear, so the man just laughed at him and it has been very humiliating. Another obstacle for him is his pride. He is on the platform and he is deciding whether he should ask anybody for directions and he keeps making excuses of why he shouldn’t. The old women are deaf, some of the men seem drunk and so on. Nobody is good enough. He is actually ashamed of asking for the cherub’s help. (“Why was he ashamed to ask a man for help? He was a stranger here”). He doesn’t want to appear helpless (“He felt very small and foolish”)...
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...term papers so they could earn enough money to escape Franconia. While Jason is unknowing of their sneaky business, he is busy conducting a special diet experiment in his bedroom involving his twenty hamsters. The principal at the school suspends Eugene and the nameless narrator after finding out that they sold term papers to other students. After the suspension, Eugene buys a plane ticket to San Francisco leaving his pet (owl) behind, as a responsibility to Jason’s sister. Jason’s sister takes it home where it later kills all Jason’s hamsters, forcing Jason to buy new pets but this time Jason decides to buy chicks. Characterization. The narrator in this story is nameless and genderless, by the emotions she/he expresses throughout the story; one might think that the narrator could be a girl. In line 2 she/he says that ‘’ it wasn’t so much that Eugene and I liked each other, or that there was any possibility of romance between us”, this indicates that the narrator could be female or a homosexual man, considering the fact that she/he points out that there was no possibility of romance between their relationship. The narrator is described to have long hair. Females are known to have long hair but men theses days have just as long hair as females. I personally think that the narrator is a female because she’s attracted to Eugene who is a boy. The narrator is a static character because she remains the same age and has the same life throughout the story. Similarities and differences...
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...novel exemplifies the typical life and actions of Japanese Americans of the time period. The novel is told from five different perspectives, the mother, the girl, the boy, the father, the boy and the girl. The chapters are described by the family members and it is expressed from a third person point of view. At first, the father is arrested by the FBI because of the suspicion as a spy from the government. Therefore, the mother has to take care of her two children. Later the family moved to the internment camp in Utah. After three years and five months, the family is released from the internment...
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...all the stories. The idea of “paralysis” can mean a number of different things to different people depending upon their interpretation of a certain text. In general, what “paralysis” does is inhibit a character from doing what they want to do or know they should do, as if there is a kind of shadow in their life, just lurking and haunting them in the darkness. These shadows especially play an important role in two stories from the collection, “The Sisters” and “The Dead”; they act as a sort of imprisonment for the main character. In “The Sisters”, the narrator and main character is a nameless boy. The boy says at the beginning of the story, “Every night as I gazed up at the window I said softly to myself the word paralysis. It had always sounded strangely in my ears…like the name of some maleficent and sinful being. It filled me with fear” (“The Sisters”, 2). From this, the reader sees that the boy does not really know how to respond to the priest’s inevitable death. What kind of relationship exists between the boy and Father Flynn is hard to determine because the reader only sees their relationship through the eyes of the boy. As the reader is introduced to other characters in the story, they start to learn bits of information about the nature of their relationship, but the reader is still somewhat left in the dark. Throughout the story the dialogue is ambiguous and leaves it up to the reader to fill in the blank. Whenever the reader comes close to thinking that more information...
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...exemplifies the extreme racial prejudices of the mid twentieth century that Afro-Americans suffered under white supremacy dominance. Battle royal tackles issues of social inequalities in terms of economic empowerment, education, self-identity and racial superiority or lack thereof. Through the main protagonist in the story, the writer manages to bring to the fore the brutal acts of racial segregation and the horrors of a people struggle for self-recognition and identity. The agonizing plight of the young black man, point to the psychological torment that the black race had to endure as he tries to impress the white folks, despite his grandfather’s counsel that their lives was a perpetual war that he has to fight. The story depicts a nameless protagonist trying to define his place among his people and acceptance from the white people. The story if full of symbolism through use of imagery and satire allowing the reader appreciate the magnitude of a class-based society. The cultural differences are played out in the story depicting the superiority of the white people as opposed to the black race. For instance, the young man is invited to give a speech to an all-white audience, but first he is forced into a ‘battle royal’ with his classmates who all happen to be black. The fight is not for accolades for the winner but purely for the amusement and entertainment for the white folks in the audience. Though he is intellectually capable and he is invited to give a well received valedictory...
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...Finding New York SUSANNAH GRIFFEE T he Port Authority, Central Park, subway stations, Broadway, Coney Island, Brooklyn Bridge, Downtown, Times Square, JFK: Colson Whitehead’s essays tunnel into the heart of New York City, revealing it to be both a bastion of cruelty and an alluring symbol of hope, both an executioner of dreams and a mother of new beginnings. Whitehead writes about the city as if it were human, and about its people as if they were buildings. Yet these personifications constantly interchange. Whitehead never represents living beings as wholly mechanical, or the city as wholly human. The key to this interchange lies in the way Whitehead projects his own reality upon the city, and his own multifaceted identity upon the legions of anonymous selves that populate the city’s streets. Whitehead’s constant creation and re-creation of characters and metaphors reveal a fear of being held to one identity, to one existence. And behind this urge to escape a solidified selfhood lies a desire to evade the confines of time, the inevitability of death. This yearning marks where our version of reality and Whitehead’s version overlap. It is the one immutable monument in a city of constantly shifting perceptions. From the very beginning, Whitehead dismantles the vision of New York as a glittering, perfect metropolis. He writes about New York as a complex force rather than a commercialized idea, as a being capable of doling out both salvation and destruction. In...
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...even care. People should just stop writing essays. First of all, essays are so formal. We have an exact formula on how an essay should be written. If you were writing an essay right now, first, you would do your intro, with their thesis at the end of it, then they have their three paragraphs of proof, and finally, after two hours of writing, they have their conclusion. Come on people, live a little! We are in college! Be wild! Do what you want to do! Put your thesis at the very end of the essay, or better yet, leave your thesis out of the essay. Then, we have extra little rules, within the formula, that we have to follow. For example, while writing some types of essays, we have a rule about not saying "I." What am "I," chopped liver? Do I have to become this nameless, faceless, mystery person, only to get people to listen to me? Also, what about using "you?" I mean, it's "you" that's reading my essay, isn't it? Who else would it be? Am I talking to myself? We all have a tendency to use "you" and/or "I" in our essays because it is in our daily communications with each other. So, if we are not practicing our daily communications, while writing essays, then what are we practicing? Secondly, the language that we have to use in essays make us sound like we are trying to make writing our profession! The writer starts sounding like a dictionary, using all those big words. All these essays, that have these "dictionary" words, really do is confuse the reader. The person writing it throws...
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...New York Times Book Review says about The Beloved by Toni Morrison as thus: In the book, the other world exists and magic works, and the prose is up to it. If you can believe page one – and Ms Morrison’s verbal authority compels belief – you’re hooked on the rest of the book. (Atwood, 1993, 35) Toni Morrison’s fifth novel, Beloved (1987) explores the degradation imposed upon all African slaves of America. The novel is about matrilineal ancestry and the relationships among enslaved, freed, alive and dead mothers and daughters. The text is so grounded in historical reality that it could be used to teach American history classes. The protagonist of the novel, Sethe’s character is based on a factual slave woman Margaret Garner in an exaggerated way. For Random House project, The Black Book (1974), “scrap book” of three hundred years of the folk journey of Black America, Morrison had to gather details for the text. A fugitive from Kentucky, Garner attempted to kill her children rather than having them re-enslaved when they were all captured in Ohio in 1850. She succeeded in killing only one, however, whose throat she slashed. Acknowledging that she had indeed conducted research while writing Beloved, Morrison told Martha Darling: I did research about a lot of things in this book in order to narrow it, to make it narrow and deep, but I did not do much research on Margaret Garner other than the obvious stuff, because I wanted to invent her life, which is a way of saying I wanted...
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...Life’s Flawless Fallacies In today’s society, many of us do not always use our common sense, let alone our imagination in day to day situations. Some people make senseless decisions based off of their own experiences, thoughts, or pride. When you are unsuccessful in realizing the possible dangers and outcomes of certain situations, you could end up in big trouble. In the following paragraphs you will read about a story written in 1910 and how it compares to today’s animal cruelty in the food production industry. Jack London wrote a short story about pure foolishness and the consequences of failing to snap to reality. The story is called “To Build a Fire”. It is about a nameless man who decides to travel in the subzero climate of the Yukon Trail, which is between Alaska and Canada. He also brings along his wolf dog as his only companion, although they are far from intimate and loving towards each other. As he is traveling along throughout the story, he continues to receive signs that he shouldn’t be out there. For example, right from the start he “…spat again. And again, in the air, before it could fall to the snow, the spittle crackled” (London 107). For any rational person, that would send a flag right up and they’d turn back to civilization until weather permitted them to continue. But not for this man, he knew it was cold and even kept track of the temperature in his head as he walked on. Not only did he ignore his own frostbite, but he also ignored the advice of an old...
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...were. Every morning, they go into a store to use the bathroom to get ready for the day. At least three nights a week, they try and go to a friend’s house to take a shower and wash their clothes. Her mother is looking for a job, but it’s hard to get hired when they don’t always have the cleanest clothes and an address. Lucy is just one child affected by homelessness, but there are many more, just like her. Unemployment is a major factor in homeless families ending up on the streets. The U.S Department of Labor claims that in 2010 there were at least 9.8 million families with an unemployed member. When the economy crashed, many people lost their jobs or received reduced hours. For many families, that caused them to get behind in paying rent or the mortgage. It was especially bad for the minimum wage workers who were already on the verge of homelessness before they lost their jobs. Another problem contributing to homelessness is the mortgage crisis. A Medill School report found that in October 2007, Illinois ranked tenth in the country for home foreclosures (Marlow). More people are losing their homes, and they have no way to get new ones due to things like unemployment or underemployment. Consequently, more heads of households are dragging their children with them into homelessness. The median home price is around 150,000 dollars. That is too much money for some families to pay after they just lost...
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...mastered it, but just as you get well underway in following, it turns a back-somersault and there you are. It slaps you in the face, knocks you down, and tramples upon you." (Gildman, p. 71) The story of the Yellow Wallpaper tells us about the madness of the “nameless” main character as she is suffering from a nervous depression. Her husband john, a physician, takes her to a leased summer home to try to relieve her with rest-cure. Rather than curing his wife from her disorder, John worsens the effects sending her into a severe depression. The role of the yellow wallpaper plays a dominant role in the story reviling her insanity through her writings, her husband’s treatments that worsen her health; and the lady behind the wallpaper. The narration in the Yellow Wallpaper is written in a unique first person point of view. Because of this we are able to see the deterioration of her state throughout the whole story. The narrator of the story is isolated from the outside world only exposed through a barred window to look out. She has no contact with the outside world, except john and their housekeeper Jennie, which leads her to writing. John does not want his wife to write because he thinks it will diminish her treatment, but she does anyway, which is exhausting for her to do it in secret. As the narrators writings further in the story we start to see her sense of sanity diminish. She becomes delirious from her sense of normality. At first the yellow wallpaper was just ugly to the...
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...Philosophy Paper What would the world be like as a clone? Nameless, parentless, with no idea of who you are, why you are here, or what your purpose is? Mankind is getting closer and closer to the point where we can clone humans; however, there are many potential repercussions of this research. Human life has always had some parental identity that allow us to determine our own identity. If we took this away and turned the process of human development into a science experiment there may be serious negative effects for those involved. It is important for us to understand what makes up identity so we take better care of those who are unsure of their own. For the purpose of this paper we will discuss cloning as a movie clone, an immediate exact replica in every way. The two beings have all the same features, physically they will look exactly the same and mentally have all of the same memories. Let's say a man goes into a doctors office for a simple outpatient surgery. Unknown to the patient, he is cloned while unconscious. The clones are put in two identical rooms in the same exact positions. The clone is an exact replica mind and body, but they know nothing of the cloning experiment. The world now has two men who are the exact same in every way and think that they are the original person, as they don't know they are cloned. These two men are the same person while unconscious and even after they awake, they have the same body and same memories. When put in the...
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