Essay of Analysis of "The Odyssey" and "Siren Song"

The Odyssey and the poem "Siren Song" both portray sirens; however, in The Odyssey, the focus is on resolving the "problem" of the sirens, no differently than any other obstacle on his journey, whereas "Siren Song" focuses on the siren as more than merely an obstacle. They share, however, the preying of the siren upon hubris and the desire to be special, as well as, by what happens, illustrating the allure of the sirens in spite of the pain that may be suffered to get there.

The Odyssey initially describes the actions of Odysseus much more than the sirens. The beginning discussion does not describe the sirens at all; it merely states that they were approaching the island of the sirens, and then for the first ten lines it does not even begin to consider the sirens. Instead, the text talks about the actions of Odysseus, who "sliced an ample wheel of beeswax [...] and I stopped the ears of my comrades one by one." Indeed, the only understanding of the sirens comes from their speech; this perspective originates from The Odyssey's point of view. Unlike "Siren Song," The Odyssey focuses on the person who opposes the sirens, Odysseus, more than the sirens themselves. This leads to the Sirens lacking any special quality that would make them any different than any other obstacle - there is nothing personal about them. This is in contrast to "Siren Song, " which focuses almost exclusively on the siren. The point of view is of the siren rather than Odysseus; the differing point of view leads to a differing focus.

Despite this differing focus in point of view, the two poems illustrate very similar themes. Firstly, they illustrate the allure of being a hero when one has hubris. In The Odyssey, the Siren's play up Odysseus' ego, calling him "Achaea's pride and glory!" Similarly, the sirens ask the victim to "help me!" similarly enhancing the victim's ego by the expression of being a damsel in distress who requires a hero (whether Odysseus or any other sailor) to save her.. The sirens also use an emphasis on the uniqueness of the victim to enhance the appeal to the victim's hubris. The sirens appeal to Odysseus in The Odyssey by proclaiming that "never has any sailor passed our shores," demonstrating that Odysseus would be the first (and therefore worthy of note); similarly, in "Siren Song," the sirens say that "only you, only you can [help me] / you are unique," emphasizing the person's separation from the typical and mundane both by the statement that the person is special as well as the repetition of the pronoun "you," which, in the singular, separates the listener from any others. Thus, the sirens use similar strategy in both poems.

Finally, the outcome for the sailor is the same, although differing in degree: the allure of the siren causes pain. Odysseus has to be bound "faster with rope on chafing rope," the tactile imagery of which illustrates the pain of Odysseus. This same pain is experienced by the victim in the other poem, illustrated by the shift between "you are unique" and "at last" that implies that the victim was eaten. In both cases, the sirens were sufficiently alluring to cause the sailor to want to seek them, and in both cases the sailor experiences pain, albeit that Odysseus, due to his intellect, only experiences chafing rope rather than death. Thus do the sirens result in similar outcomes for anyone they attempt to seduce, and the only thing that varies with their extent of success is not the outcome itself, but rather the degree of it.

The two poems portray sirens from entirely different perspectives. The Odyssey focuses on them from the perspective of a hero, thus making them equivalent to an inhuman obstacle, essentially de-personifying them, whereas "Siren Song" focuses on them from the perspective of the sirens themselves. In both cases, however, the tactics of appealing to the desire to be a hero and the result of pain for the victim who attempts to be a hero are the same. Despite the differing points of view, the ultimate portrayal of the Sirens are the same.

But Now, I Do Know Everything

Me of just two years ago,
Why were you so foolish?
Why did you think you knew everything?
There were so many people who had more experience than you.
There were people two grades ahead of you who had the same
experiences that you were going to have.
Why did you think that you were so much better
than them, that you could avoid the stress they had?
It was a statistical certainty that you were not
to be so much smarter than those of the years above you
that you would be able to avoid the fate to which they had succumbed.
Your idiocy has taught me many lessons, and now,
I am not nearly as foolish as you were, little child.
I have learned what you did not know.
I have spent years after I was you, understanding
what you did not and experiencing
so many new things that now,
now, I do know everything.

Other Poems: "When Humans Do Change The World"; "Hungry"

We don't have to worry about the world.

We don't have to worry about the world.
Let's burn that coal and live vicariously.
We can live unsustainably.
Who needs to be an environmentalist?
The world gives us sickness and vile diseases.
Who needs all the troubles it gives us?
Who needs all the benefits it gives us?
The world gives us water and healthy sustenance.
Who needs to go on living - existing?
We will die uncontrollably.
Let's frack that gas and party uninhibited.
We don't have to worry about the world.
We're already doomed.

Hungry

I am hungry. This annoys me.
Lunch is not for hours yet.
While I want to, I can't eat now,
so I guess I should not fret.

Periods pass. Later now.

Need food. Want now.
Lunch soon. Not now.
No food. Me sad.
Can't wait. Want bad.

Lunch now.

Food.

Chew, chew, chew... swallow.

I am satiated by my consumption of food,
and my fluency has now increased.
I apologize if earlier I was rude,
and abbreviated in my speech.
When I am edacious with respect to my eating,
and when I have built up a large appetite,
I tend to get somewhat animalistic -
I'm still human, even at my intellectual height.

When Humans Do Change The World

(1)   We
(2)   began
(3)   slowly
(4)   as cavemen
(5)   and then we developed agriculture.
(6)   Then we developed civilization,
(7)   but we still used our resources wisely.
(8)   Then came the Greeks, who developed culture and all that comes with it,
(9)   and the Romans, who developed the military and managed to form an empire, until it collapsed
(10) and all of that ended.
(11) Then, there was a period where things went slowly,
(12) when developments were far and few between,
(13) until the Renaissance, at which point things began to pick up again.
(14) Then came the industrial revolution, at which point things began to get faster and faster and we were developing more and more
(15) and we came out with technological development after development, exploiting our resources and killing off species and destroying ecosystems, but we didn't care about that, because we could become sustainable later, and so we came up with radio, television, the Internet, iPods, and then we changed the climate
(16) and it all stopped.

You'll see.

Bags packed, clothes away.
Phone, wallet, Ipod - 'kay.
You sure you have everything?
Hey, no need to snap at me!

I KNOW you've been away before.
I KNOW you've flown across the world.
But still, you know, can't check too much
for what you choose to bring and such.

You've been away for weeks, and farther,
but this is tough for me and your father.
This time it's like you're gone forever -
like you've died, and gone into the ether.

I know we'll have Facebook and also the phone,
and of course there's your younger brothers - your clones.
But still. I worry. Can you blame me?
Wait 'till your own children go - you'll see.

Now you call me silly.
Now you say I worry.
But many years later, when you're older,
grown to love them, and expect them -
Then, when you love them most,
they'll leave.
And then you'll see.

What Stays Behind Afterwards

           appear in the middle of an infinite timeline.
We live our childhood, the time when we sniff
every rose, because every one is new, and
we are far from death, with nothing to fear.
Then we grow up, and have lives to manage, where
every detail is important, because this is our opportunity
to make something of ourselves. We have to make
our mark, and eventually, we will be old, and then
we will be fast-approaching the ends of our lives,
and by that point it will be too late, because,
suddenly, even though time will continue on
without us, suddenly, we

S&S 13: Exercise 1

1. A because of the phonetic similarity of guide and guard as well as the lack of unnecessary verbosity in the second line.
2. B because "Apollo's lute" sounds more musical than "the lute of Phoebus" due to the 'l's in "Apollo."
3. A because "over" and "snow" continue the long 'o' sounds from prior in the line.
4. B because of more "l" sounds in a passage mentioning "bells"
5. B because it sounds more "murmur-y" and with the multitude of 'm's and many short syllables.
6. B because the "warbles" sounds more musical than "sings," more euphonious, whereas the latter line is more cacophonous (when describing the failure of the lark to be musical).
7. B because the list of items, particularly with 'b' sounds, enhance the harshness of the items.
8. A because the repeated 's' sounds are appropriate for "softly" washing one's hands.
9. B because of the more onomatopoeic word "tolls" (vs. "sounds"), among other sounds.
10. B because the "stinks and stings" contrasts more strongly with the "gilded wings" because of the harsh, cacophonous "st" sounds.

S&S 12: Notes

• Rhythm = practical, meter = ideal
• Accented produced by stress ("force of utterance"), duration, pitch, juncture (by pos. in Latin)
• Rhetorical stresses: to make intentions clear in speech/prose
• End-stopped line vs. run-on line: by punctuation vs. natural pause or no pause
• Caesuras: mid-line pause, grammatical nor not
• Free verse: no meter, typical today; prose poem: ignores even line, like prose
• Feet --> Lines --> Stanzas; identification = scansion
• Foot Types
• Duple: Iambic (iamb), trochaic (trochee), spondaic (spondee)
• Triple: Anapestic (anapest), dactylic (dactyl)
• Spondee never used entirely, trochee rare, dactyl only in Latin
• Line Types:Monometer, dimeter, trimeter, tetrameter, pentameter, hexameter
• Regularity vs. metrical variations
• Substitution (swap foot)
• Extrametrical syllables (adding at edge of line)
• Truncation (cut off, as int() in CPU)
•  Virtue
• Some lines clearly have identifiable pattern
• Added stress from tradition; not three consecutive unstressed, but rather artificial meter
• Extra syllables not counted: extrametrical syllable
• Adjust: some swapped for trochees (don't force a fit)
• Words can be broken easily
• Main points
• Not always necessary, even for rich understanding, but can emphasize and identify
• Scansion reveals meter, not rhythm properly, because oversimplified
• Feet have no meaning other than separation within lines
• Perfect meter != good poetry
• Expected rhythm vs. heard rhythm (self-explanitory)
• Grammatical vs. rhetorical pauses (commas vs. no comma)
• Blank verse: Unrhymed iambic pentameter; typical for old English poetry

Paragraph of Analysis of "To His Coy Mistress"

     The relationship between "To His Coy Mistress" and the  "live fast, die young, make a pretty corpse" is all-too clear in the second stanza, exhibited by gruesome imagery that contrasts with the rest of the poem. Whereas the first stanza laments that the speaker cannot focus on the object of his affection's beauty for all eternity, expressing in an admiring tone, and the last stanza states in a passionate tone his desire to live in the moment, the second stanza has a much less affectionate tone. He discusses the "deserts of vast eternity" (24), i.e. death, similarly referencing a "marble vault" and  "worms" (26-27). This discussion of death is a complete reversal of the rest of the poem, intended to shock the object of his affections from her comfortable refuge of her coyness into his awaiting arms. In other words, he intends to make his mistress uncomfortable so as to reduce her coyness and increase his attractiveness in the grand scheme of things. He is telling her that she will certainly make a pretty corpse, but that the only one to enjoy this pretty corpse will be the worms, causing her "quaint honor [to] turn to dust" (29). He is telling her not to waste his affections by holding him away until he dies, at which point so would his affections as "all [his] lust" turns "into ashes" (30). Rather, the two of them, by the speaker's thinking, should enjoy the time they have, else her beauty will ultimately have had no purpose- the "beauty [that] shall no more be found" will have been wasted (25). So as not to simply jar her from her complacency and cause her to hate him, he provides himself as a solution for her newly discovered problem of her beauty's ephemeral nature.

Paragraph of Analysis of "Woman Work"

Thesis: The first fourteen lines compose an urgent, rapid tone representative of the woman's life that slows and relaxes in the latter half of the poem.

In the first half of the poem, the women talks about all of the things she has to do. She says that she has "got the children to tend / the clothes to mend / the floor to mop / the food to shop" (1-4). The implication behind repeated, anaphoric "got" is that it is an obligation; the repeated infinitives mimic the imperative meaning of the phrase "to do." The rhymes of the poem draw attention to the repeated infinitives and to the short, clipped style of the poem, in turn illustrating the rapid events and necessities of the woman's life. These come together to form the stressed tone of a lady with too many things to do to relax, a situation altogether too common in the typically rushed lifestyle of the modern day.

Paragraph of Analysis of "One dignity delays for all"

Thesis: This poem takes a cynical tone towards the general populace because they value the dead more than the living.

Dickinson focuses her poem on a funeral, ironically the area that she feels people center their attention too much on. She spends two stanzas presenting this image, from the "coach [...] and footmen" (5) to the "dignified Attendants" (9). In doing so, she illustrates for the reader how much people value the dead, and how much time they spend on a mere corpse. By contrast, Dickinson does not mention the living being that the corpse once was, just as those who might see a funeral procession passing by and feel pity for the corpse would not consider the same person worthy of thought if they happened to pass on the street. Dickinson illustrates by her focus how people have internalized these relative importances to be considered normal, despite the ridiculousness of valuing a body over a living person.

Analysis of "I never saw a Moor" and "'Faith' is a fine invention"

Thesis: Whereas "I never saw a Moor" discusses the existence of God directly, "'Faith' is a fine invention" is a commentary on human views of God and science rather than on the subject itself. The two poems connect in that the opinions that Dickenson analyzes in the latter poem are presented in the former.

• "I never saw a Moor" argues directly for the existence of God.
• There is parallel structure between the first and fifth lines, "I never saw a Moor" (1) and "I never spoke with God" (5) as well as with "yet" in lines 3 and 7. 
• This structure serves to illustrate Dickenson's argument that God exists.
• Dickenson claims that she can be as sure that God exists as she can be that any place she has not seen can be, because she is taking both purely on faith, yet it would be ludicrous to deny the existence of the sea.
• "'Faith' is a fine invention", on the other hand, refers to people's viewpoints on God.
• Rather than making direct claims with "I" as she does in the former poem, Dickenson refers to "Gentlemen"; the different pronoun indicates that she is not considering her own feelings, but general human emotion.
• This poem states that people tend to consider God relevant to their day-to-day lives, but irrelevant to science and its "emergencies."
• "When Gentlemen can see" (2) is contrasted with "In an Emergency" (4) by means of the conjunction "But" (3). Thus, the things that people can see, where faith is acceptable, is different than the world people cannot directly observe, in which faith is thrown to the wayside in favor of science.
• This opinion is often how people reconcile science and religion, and Dickenson references this reconciliation in this poem, but does not refer to her own feelings on the matter.
• While Dickenson is critical of the reconciliation of God and science in "'Faith' is a fine invention", she illustrates this opinion herself in "I never saw a Moor".
• Her first poem argues for God on the basis that there are things that science takes for granted (despite a lack of personal experience).
• Thus, she believes in scientific principles, because she will take evidence of photographs as data that illustrates the existence of foreign places.
• However, she also argues for God; therefore, she is arguing both for God and for science, and is therefore expressing an opinion that God can exist in a world with scientific principles - and is therefore displaying a reconciliation of God and science, of faith and empiricism, despite so criticizing this approach in her latter poem.

Analysis of "Out, Out-"

Thesis: The allusion to Macbeth in the title of Robert Frost's "'Out, out-'" is a fitting comparison for the theme of the poem of the fickleness of life represented in Frost's use of dashes, exclamations and an anticlimactic conclusion.

• The dashes in the poem have multiple means by which they illustrate the fickleness of life.
• The quotation "Little - less - nothing! - and that ended it" (31) shows several of these purposes.
• Firstly, the dashes sound like gasping, and in the poem, the boy is dying - thus, gasping is an appropriate phonetic choice.
• Secondly, the dashes show emotion, the grief and anxiety which would surely be present in such an event as an amputation.
• Thirdly, the visual shape of the dash, a long line, is indicative of a long, slow event that consumes time as the dash consumes space, which could be illustrative of a long, slow last breath - thus, even visually, the dashes illustrate the end of the boy's life.
• Finally, although this was certainly not the original intent of the author given the time in which the author lived, the dashes lead to sounds that are similar to that of a modern-day heart monitor, where words are beeping: the short words would be heartbeat beeps, and the flow of words at the end could be the long beep after the patient's death; although this was not Frost's intention, the poem takes on additional meaning today.
• The exclamation points serve a similar intent, but to a lesser extent.
• After the boy loses his hand, the narrator makes the exclamatory interjection, "But the hand!" (17).
• This shows the emotion in the poem, as it is expressed not only by the characters, but by the narrator through exclamation.
• The exclamation points also add to the phonetic gasping, as, in the way Frost uses them, they cut short a sentence in a crescendo up to that point.
•  Finally, the poem concludes anticlimactically, relating the quickness of death to the fickleness of life indicated in the title.
• The conclusion of the poem is that the death's observers "turned to their affairs" (33); in other words, they moved on.
• This illustrates the fickleness of humans, and therefore how not only is death unexpected, but life changes quickly as well.
• Thus, the image presented in the titular allusion to Macbeth of a candle flickering is an accurate one: a candle dies easily with the smallest of winds, and when it does so, one simply obtains another candle.

Analysis of "The Unknown Citizen"

Thesis: W. H. Auden used his poem "The Unknown Citizen" to criticize the shift of American ideals away from individualism, towards normality and standardization.

• The title of the poem, "The Unknown Citizen," is indicative of how the person's normality caused him to lose his distinction from everybody else.
• The source of all the information about this man was the "Bureau of Statistics" (1).
• This shows how people cease to be people when they are entirely typical; instead, they are simply another "statistic": if everyone is normal, no one sticks out.
• He is unknown because he is statistically normal, and so his lack of individuality, of self-expression, was ultimately, in the eyes of Auden, his downfall.
•  Auden contrasts that the person is "unknown" with how excellent he was a a citizen in order to criticize not only the viewpoint that conformism is good, but to criticize society for holding this viewpoint.
• About him, there was "no official complaint"; indeed, "he was a saint" (2, 4).
• This shows the ideals of the time: all of his viewpoints are perfect for what everyone believes is right.
• Therefore, when Auden criticizes the viewpoint of conformism, he is attacking the societal ideal of his time.
• Auden concludes his poem with a strongly ironic statement that punctuates his point.
• He ends with that "had anything been wrong, we should certainly have heard" (29).
• The irony is the contrast of this with the title: if the person is "unknown" then the collective speaker would never have heard that anything was wrong because they never would have heard of him.
• Here Auden is stating that it if one is unsatisfied with conforming, one cannot complain and still be considered a conformist, because to complain would be to resist the ideal off conformism and thereby display a nonconformist viewpoint.

Analysis of "Cross"

Thesis: The multiple denotations behind the title of the poem "Cross" lead to progressively deeper interpretations of the poem that illustrate a more and more dangerous world for the speaker.

• One meaning behind the title is that the speaker is a cross-breed of different races.
• His father is "a white old man" whereas his "old mother's black" (1-2).
• This would imply at best a difficult life any time prior to or within the lifetime of Langston Hughes.
• This interpretation of "Cross," being the simplest interpretation, tells us the least about the nature of the poem, and similarly only illustrates the danger of being half white, half black to a minimal extent.
• A deeper  meaning would be that the speaker is cross at his parents for creating him as a biracial creature.
• The speaker discusses how "if [he] ever cursed" his mother and father, then he would redact his statements (3, 5).
• This illustrates the emotional strife associated with being biracial: he does not have an inherent internal association with either race, and so he does not know which race he should choose to live as.
• This is a deeper interpretation of "Cross," and gives us a deeper understanding of the speaker; it allows us to understand the internal struggle that the speaker must live with every day.
• Finally, "Cross" is an answer to the final rhetorical question in the poem.
• The final stanza asks, "I wonder where I'm gonna die / being neither white nor black?" (11-12).
• Under this interpretation, Hughes is implying that the speaker is going to end his life by being crucified - an understandable fear for blacks if the speaker lives in the time of the KKK, when the idea of the amalgamation of the races terrified many whites.
• This is both the deepest and darkest interpretation of the title, elaborating on how being a biracial person in a time when racial mixing was feared is physically dangerous and could easily lead to the speaker's painful death.

Analysis of "Break of Day"

Thesis: The sudden use of a break at the end of each stanza illustrates with sound the wrongness of a lover leaving his or her companion immediately at the crest of dawn.

• The change in the meter from the first two rhyming couplets to the last couplet in each stanza causes the reader to stumble somewhat, emphasizing the wrongness and immorality of the conclusion of the stanza and thereby the night.
• In each stanza, the first four lines use iambic tetrameter, as in "Must business thee from hence remove?" whereas the last two lines use iambic pentameter, as in "He which hath business and makes makes love, doth do" (, 17).
• The change in meter towards the end of the stanza sounds improper compared in its abrupt shift, just as the abrupt shift from lover to a person with business is wrong.
• Furthermore, both of them take place towards the end of the event, but not when the event should end: the shift takes place near the end of the stanza, but not quite at the end, and the leaving takes place towards the end of the night, but not quite at the end.
• Similarly, the first stanza shifts from four lines of rhetorical questions to a statement, a shift that similarly emphasizes the contrast between the smooth beginning of the night and its rough ending.
• The rhetorical questions of "'Tis true, 'tis day; what though it be?" last the first four lines, providing a smooth, almost seductive tone to the beginning of the stanza that is interrupted by the implied command behind "Love [...] should [...] keep us together" (1, 5-6). 
• The seductive tone is best illustrated by "why should we rise because 'tis light? / Did we lie down because 'twas night?," because the speaker is arguing persuasively without seeming like arguing, just as seduction is persuasion without seeming to be; this contrasts harshly with the significantly less soft-spoken command-like conclusion
• The difference between the beginning of the night and the end is fully illustrated by the difference between the seductive question and the businesslike command.
• This line of questioning's end follows the same pattern as the metric shift, thus emphasizing the difference between the beginning of the stanza and the end, and thereby beginnings and endings in general.

Analysis of "Ballad of Birmingham"

Thesis: In “Ballad of Birmingham,” the greatest purpose of author Dudley Randall is to make the reader associate himself or herself with the mother in the poem, allowing the reader to gain a sense of empathy for the mother and by extension for the cause of civil rights.

• The use of direct quotations and the repetition within these quotations makes the mother and child relationship known to the reader, invoking feelings that are inherent to such a relationship.
• The child’s use of “mother dear” in the first line instantly allows the reader to understand the child as a child, and to feel the caring emotions that are inherent with children; this is reinforced with the later repetition of “mother” (1, 9).
• The specific repeated use of “baby,” a term of endearment that all mothers use, would allow any parent to understand instantly the worry the mother feels for the child (5, 13).
• The repetition of both of these terms in each quote, including the use of “baby” at the conclusion of the poem, reinforces the feelings that such a relationship creates by consistently referring to the relationships (31).
• The description in the fifth stanza either serves to enhance childlike innocence, causing the loss to seem even greater, or to emphasize the mother’s love for the child, depending on the interpretation of “she,” which refers ambiguously to either the mother or the child.
• If “she” is interpreted as the child, then an image appears of a child dressing up for church, enhancing the feelings of innocence that come inherently with children with the purity that comes with church, amplified by the use of “white” to describe her gloves and shoes (19-20).
• If “she” is interpreted as the mother, then the image becomes one of a mother carefully brushing her daughter’s hair, then dressing her up, kneeling down to the child’s height to do so; this image of a mother kneeling in front of her child to tenderly put on her gloves is a scene that could characterize the love between the mother and the child and thus act as an almost holy image that is shattered by the bomb at the end of the poem.
• The ambiguity causes one who looks sufficiently closely at the poem to see the ambiguity to see both of these images with similar effects, and even in one who simply reads over the poem sees, to a lesser extent, the image that doesn't correlate with his or her interpretation of "she," despite that the reader didn't actually understand the ambiguity as ambiguous.