Jhon Lopez

The article “How to Read a Poem” says that a reader must “complete” what the poem has begun. This could mean that the reader has to find the meaning of a poem through certain reading strategies. Reading the poem aloud multiple times helped me get a better understanding of it. The poem “The Lake Isle of Innisfree”, by William Butler Yeats, discusses how the speaker longs to build a life on Innisfree, where he would be able to find peace in nature. Innisfree can symbolize the ideal image of nature and offers a deep spiritual fulfillment that an urban city can’t. Innisfree offers the speaker an escape from reality, like a daydream. The poem states“And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow”. What Yeats mean when peace comes like a “slow drop” is that achieving a peaceful life is a long and slow but calming process that requires patience. However, the urban life is preventing the speaker from creating a peaceful life. The poem states. “While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey I hear it in the deep heart’s core”, the “roadway” and “pavements” symbolize the boredom that comes with urban life. The gray color of the pavement shows how dull the city can be. The speaker demonstrates how the ugliness of urban life is unlike the beauty of nature by how he describes them.

This week’s activities and reading helped me understand the structure of sonnets. Shakespearean sonnets, or Elizabethan sonnets, are typically 14 lines in length and follow a specific structure. They are divided into 3 quatrains and end in a couplet. Quatrain 1 would rhyme in abab, quatrain 2 in cdcd, quatrain 3 in efef and the couplet would rhyme in gg. The first 3 quatrains establish a theme or problem and then resolve it in the last 2 lines, the couplet. For example, in the first 3 quatrains of Sonnet 130, “My Mistress’s Eyes Are Nothing like the Sun” by William Shakespeare, the speaker discusses the qualities of the woman he is in love with. The speaker compares her to the things of nature. However, the woman is unlike the beautiful things of nature, she doesn’t have any heavenly attributes. In a way, the speaker describes her in an unattractive manner. In the last 2 lines of the poem, the speakers reveal that he still loves her for who she is, not because he can compare her to beautiful things. Overall, knowing the format of a poem makes it easier to understand them. 

My research essay focuses on Langston Hughes’ “Salvation”. My thesis statement is “Throughout the narrative, Hughes uses verbal, dramatic, and situational irony”. Hughes’ use of irony is evident in the sarcastic and mocking tone he uses, this is an example of verbal irony. Dramatic irony is used by letting the readers know the outcome of the situation in the first sentence of the narrative, “I was saved from sin when I was going on thirteen. But not really saved”. And the religious revival is an example of situational irony because instead of strengthening Hughes’ connection with Christianity, he loses faith completely. I believe that a biography of Langston Hughes would be most appropriate for my essay. Using the BMCC database, I found an autobiography that discusses Hughes’ early life. The biography mentions that Carrie Hughes, Hughes’ mother, left him at a young age with his grandmother’s friend, Auntie Reed, and her husband. They were described as being devout Christians who constantly pressured Hughes to join the church, and the narrative “Salvation” explains the result of this. The incident in the religious revival event marked the beginning of his disbelief in religion.

In “The Story of an Hour”, by Kate Choppin, Louis Mallard has a heart problem and is therefore carefully informed of her husband’s death. Ms. Mallard does not take this news lightly, she begins to cry and heads up to her room where she can be alone. She sits in front of an open window. There she sees trees and can hear the apprenticing rain. She feels at peace and begins reaping the word “free”. For the first time in a long time, Ms. Mallard feels a sense of freedom and relief over the death of her husband. She can see the years ahead which belong to only her. But all of this is suddenly taken away from when were husband, Brently, came back. Brently had not been an accident, and Ms. Mallard dies of a heart attack brought on by happiness.  The themes in “The Story of an Hour” closely relate to “The Wife”, by Emily Dickinson. They both discuss the topic of how many women were unhappy in their marriages at the time. The poem states “She rose to his requirement, dropped The playthings of her life”. Women in marriages had to take surrender to another’s demands. In this case, when Ms. Mallard no longer had to follow someone else orders, she felt relieved and free from marriage.

O’Connor states that in “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”,  readers “should know what is going to happen in this story so that the element of suspense in it will be transferred from its surface to its interior”. If you know what happens in the story, then upon reading it you can see clear signs of foreshadowing that hints at how the story will end. The first sign of foreshadowing has to do with how the grandmother was dressed. She was described as being elegantly dressed and even mentions how if she were to die she would still keep her “ladylike” appearances. The grandmother unintentionally prepares herself for the exact incident she mentions. Another sign of foreshadowing is when they notice a graveyard fenced in on a hill where a plantation used to be. The grandmother refers to it as a “family graveyard” and has “five or six graves”, one for each family member. The graveyard represents the family and their impending death.  

Strophe  195 Our sorrows defy number;  all the ship’s timbers are rotten; taking of thought is no spear for the driving away of the plague  There are no growing children in this famous land;  there are no women bearing the pangs of childbirth.  200 You may see them one with another, like birds swift on the wing,  quicker than fire unmastered,  speeding away to the coast of the Western God.   The chorus sings about their experience in the plague. The plague they were referring to was one that devastated Athens during the Peloponnesian war. The illness ravaged the city when it was at its peak, leaving it in turmoil. Line 195 explains how sorrowful the people were. And they go on to sing about how the plague affected their population. People were dying at alarming rates. Lines 200-202 shows that people were dying fast, like quicks birds flying towards “the coast of the Western God”,  the Western God is seen as death since the sun sets in the west. A simile when the people were compared to a “bird swift on the wing” to give the audience an idea of how fast they were dying as a result of the plague.

“Araby”, by James Joyce, is a short story about a boy who falls in love with his friend’s sister. They don’t know each other too well, but the boy thinks about her constantly and eventually asks him if she wants to go to Araby, a bazaar, with him. She tells him that she is unable to go with him, so the boy says he’ll go to the bazaar by himself and get her something in hopes of impressing her. Determined to win her over, he heads off to the bazaar arriving there later than he expected. When he gets there, the bazaar is nothing like he expected. The place was dark, nearly all the stalls were closed and he felt out of place. By the end of the story, he fails to buy her a gift. The lovestruck boy experiences a disappointment so overwhelming that the narrator loses his innocence because of his love interest and the bazaar, which was a movement from childhood to adulthood for him.

The Lesson, by Toni Cade Bambara, depicts a scene of a group of kids from Harlem who are taken to f F.A.O Schwarz by Miss Moore, an educated woman who teaches kids in Harlem. Sylvia is a rebellious girl who has resentment for Miss Moore. Sylvia also seems to know more about inequality than the rest of the group. When they arrived at the toyshop, Sylvia is shocked at how expensive the toys are. Sylvia talks about how there are better ways to spend money and she cannot justify spending the amount of money on toys. Immediately after entering the toy store, she hesitates to enter because she feels out of place. By the way Mercedes comments on the toys, it is clear that she comes from a wealthier family. She also mentioned how she has a desk, something the other kids in the group don’t have, and how she is much more comfortable with the prices at the shop. Whenever Mercedes talked about her family’s money, she would be mocked by the kids in the group. Sylvia comes from a lower class family while Mercedes comes from an upper family, and they both have opposing views on the price tags.

In Salvation, Langston Hughes recounts the story of how he lost his fate, which changed him by the end of the story. In the story, 13-year-old Hughes attends a church revival with his Auntie Reed. Hughes’ Aunt told him that he will see Jesus during the revival, and he literally expected to see Jesus. You can also tell how optimistic Hughes was at the beginning by the way he adds exclamation points in his writing. Hughes was sitting there at the church with a group of people, and one by one they would go up to the altar until it was just him and a boy named Westley. Eventually, Westley gives up and lies about being saved, leaving Hughes alone. Hughes by that point starts to feel ashamed of himself for holding everyone up, so he ultimately decides to lie about seeing Jesus. You can clearly see how disappointed he was. The amount of guilt he was feeling was too much for him that he cried alone in bed that night. Hughes does not only feel betrayed by Jesus, but also by his elders who lied to him. 

After reading “The Handsomemest Drownested Man in the World”, I came to the conclusion that the drowned man was a godlike figure, in size and beauty, that changed a small, mundane village to an open and rich world after the villagers gave the drowned man their own story and identity. The man arrived at the island dead, and by the end of the story, Esteban’s legends grew and had an effect on the people as well. The people vowed to transform their village someplace worthy of him, they would have to build “wider doors, higher ceilings, and stronger floors”. Esteban inspired the villagers to become better people. I think this reading was assigned to us because the class can be seen as the village in the story. And by the end of the semester, we would have grown and will have a better understanding of things we read. I enjoyed this story. In the beginning, I was immediately hooked, I wanted to know more about the drowned man and felt like I was giving more than a satisfying answer.