Sunday, October 17, 2010

The Telephone Conversation
The racial prejudice is subtly handled by the speaker. The prejudice is brought out in casual conversation over the telephone between the speaker who is a native of Africa and the white woman of English origin. The speaker prudently confesses to the landlady about his origin which unsettles the landlady. The interest of the poem lies in the portrayal of landlady and the speaker. She is pictured as a lady of some sophistication, who practiced politeness. The speaker is presented as a victim of colour prejudice, triumphs by presenting her as a somewhat comic character. He teases her by detailing the colour of various parts which angered the landlady. At the end we see the speaker laughing at the exasperation of the landlady. The conversation between the two does not give the impression anywhere that he was writing a propagandistic poem, presenting himself as a victim of racial prejudices and the landlady as a symbol of racism .The subject may not be pleasing but it is presented in a pleasing way. The tone of the poem is ironical which contributes to make the poem effective.
Moschus Moschiferous
A.D.Hope laments the killing of the musk der for the purpose of extracting from their bodies the musk pods used for making perfumes.Man’s intllect has been a curse to the other living creatures. Music brought harmony to this world but the poet shows the mususe of music to bring disharmony. Hppe’s referenct to        St. Cecilia has a purpose in the poem. It shows the sanctificaton of usic by her. He subtly condemns the act of the hunters. The hunters who are tempted by the civilized crowd for noney are involved I killing the deer for their greed of money. The poet is against the perversion of music that has divine sanctity. But this disapproval of the abuse is expressed with delicate and artistic dexterity. The ravishing music marks the demise of these innocent creatures of God’s creation. The profit of the urbanites has affected the hunters. The unasked question Pope has in this mind is whether Cecilia and her followers being aware through this poem of the misuse of music, can do anything to stop such a perverse practice. The appeal is made on a day sacred to her.

Friday, October 15, 2010

Notes of I and III semester

The Cop and the Anthem
The cop and the anthem has only one character who is given the protagonist "Soapy". Furthermore no last name is given. It is made clear that Soapy is homeless, a member of the substantial army of underclass men and women who had flocked to New York City during the earliest years of the 20th century. The short story's narrative is set in an unstated day in late fall. Because the city tree deciduous leaves are falling and there is a hint of frost in the air, Soapy faces the urgent necessity of finding some sort of shelter for the winter.O Henry uses characteristically high flown language to describe Soapy's desperate plight. As with many other homeless people in the United States. Soapy is psychologically experienced in thinking of the local jail as a de facto homeless shelter. He therefore develops a series of tactics intended to encourage the police to classify him as a criminal and arrest him. Soapy's plot include swindling a restaurant into serving human expensive mea, vandalizing the plate-glass window of a luxury shop, repeating his eatery exploits  at a humble diner, sexually harassing a young woman, pretending to be publicly intoxicated and stealing another man's umbrella. However all these attempts are quickly exposed as failures? The upper-class restaurant looks at Soapy's threadbare clothes and refuses to serve him. A police officer responds to the broken window but decides to pursue an innocent bystander. The diner refuses to have Soapy arrested and instead has two servers throw Soapy out onto a concrete pavement. Soapy's failures to earn his desired arrest continue. The young woman far from feeling harassed proves to be more than ready for action. Another police officer observes Soapy impersonating a drunk and disorderly man, but assumes that the exhibitionist conduct is that of a Yale student celebrating their victory over " Hartford college" in football. Finally the victim of the umbrella theft relinquishes the item without a struggle. Based on these events Soapy despairs of his goal of getting arrested and imprisoned. With the autumn sun gone and night having fallen, Soapy lingers by a small Christian Church, considering his plight. As O Henry describes these events, the small church has a working organ and a practicing organist. As Soapy listens to the organ play an anthem, he experiences a spiritual epiphany in which he resolves to cease to be homeless, end his life as a tramp afflicted with unemployment, and regain his self-respect. Soapy recalls that a successful businessman had once offered him a job. Lost in reverie, Soapy decides on the very next day he will seek out his potential mentor and apply for a job. As Soapy stands on the streets and considers his plan for his future, however, a policeman taps him on the shoulder and asks him what he is doing. When soapy answers "nothing", his fate is sealed:  he has been arrested for loitering. In the magistrate's court on the following day, he is convicted of a misdemeanor and is sentenced to three months in Ricker's island, the New York City Jail.                                          
                                                               Strong Mercy
The poet’s heart is full of many a desire, and his soul cries for their realization. But God is His Mercy refuses to grant the worldly desires of the poet. Such desires are all sinful, and God’s mercy is seen in the fact that by refusing to grant such desires, He helps the poet in the process of self-purification which is essential for re-union with the divine. Thus God is merciful and removes the obstacles which come in the way of man’s spiritual quest. God has shown this mercy throughout his life. In this way, he has made the poet more worthy of enjoying his manifold gifts which lie scattered all around him. The sky and the light, symbolizing the beauty of nature, his own body, his mind and life, are all the noble gifts of God, given to him unasked. Man can enjoy them and be really worthy of them when he has attained self-purification. Worldly desires are dangerous and sinful, and God in His Mercy saves him from the dangers and enables him to enjoy his great gifts. The poet has been searching for God has been searching for God sometimes lazily, sometimes mire actively, but he has not been able to find him as yet. He has not yet achieved the necessary self-purification and spiritual maturity. Man considers that God is cruel and hides Himself from His devotees. But in reality, it is not so. God is kind. Gradually he makes man more and more worthy of full spiritual realization, by refusing to grant his worldly desires and thus helping him in task of self-purification. Man thus grows nobler and purer and proportionately nearer to God and His love.
THE MEADOW MOUSE
Rothke’s ability to create interest keeps the readers emotionally invested in the poem. He does this through expectation, suspicion and discovery. The reader suspects that the mouse will escape. Why? The persona could have put the mouse in a cage, but instead put the mouse in a box covered with a nylon stocking, sometimes easy to chew through. Also there are two possible outcomes. The persona states: do I imagine him no longer trembles / when I come close? In other words, “is my meadow mouse now more comfortable with me than before?” this hints the mouse might accept captivity, but its certain. The mouse may yet escape. The reader discovers that the dangerous encounters of this particular meadow mouse concern us more than the dangerous encounters of his fellow meadow mice. This is obviously due to the fact that the persona has had a close encounter with the mouse and not the others, and in turn, we the readers, have encountered this mouse through the poem, and not any of other mice. This realization strikes us when Roethke describes the real dangers of the mouse’s own natural environment- hawks, owls, shrikes, snakes and tomcats, not in respect to all mice in general, but only to the persona’s meadow mouse. However Roethke takes it one step further. Roethke makes a human correlation, a discovery about human conditions and parental worries over a child. Even though the world is fraught with danger, in the natural scheme of things, every parent knows their child will leave the safe environment of home to seek his or her own fortune in this dangerous world, and even though the dangers are real, a parent must let the child go, and yet Roethke takes it one step further.In the last verse Roethke broadens the focus of his poem by narrowing his discovery down to three examples that embody vulnerability: fallen nestling, gasping turtle, and stunned paralytic. The first two fallen nestling and gasping turtle retain the animal element and fragile nature of a baby animal in the wild, but the third, stunned paralytic, is the one example that drives home the message. In the human element that makes the poem about a meadow relevant. In the end it is human element(the paralyzed person on the verge of drowning helplessly in the bathtub) which places the reader on the level of “all things innocent, hapless, forsaken.”
AN ELEMENTARY SCHOOL CLASSROOM IN A SLUM
Stephen spender educated at oxford was deeply conscious of the suffering of the people. In this poem he talks about the plight of slum children who are given promises in a school that could never be fulfilled. The children come from a confined congested unhealthy area where they do not have their faces freshened and enlivened by strong winds blowing from the sea. Their disheveled,uncombed hair, growing over their roots. There is a tall girl with her head bowed down in troubled thought, a thin undernourished boy with furtive eyes, a young child who seems to have inherited the disfiguring disease of the father, and a sweet and young boy lost in dreams of open spaces where the squirrels frolicked among the trees.The walls of the classroom are the color of sour cream and decorated with gifts presented to the school. Over such was a usage of Shakespeare whose refined dome of forehand symbolizes serenity and power. There is another scenic picture of a Tyrolese valley which offers a world of beauty to the observer. Yet for the children the windows of the classroom reveal to their world, not the virtual world of Shakespeare or the Tyrolese valley. The windows of their dingy classroom, everything is smeared with fog and the outside world looks dismal and dreary. This is in contrast to the starry world created by the words of Shakespeare.The two pictures on the walls of the school and the world of the children are miles apart and the poet feels that the map of the beautiful Tyrolese valley, with pictures ships and Shakespeare’s clarity of thought and expression which creates a world of beauty, love of joy of courage and nobility of good triumphing over the evil had nothing in common to the school children, given their background of grinding poverty is a bad example for it deceives. It tempts the children to steal away from their world of their origin to a world impossible of attainment. The poet compares their bodies with a heap of refuse matter thrown out of a metal wine, because they are starved and undernourished to the extent that their bones seem to stick out of their skins. All their time is spent in the slums and the world they live in is the slums. Therefore let the dream they have engineered by Shakespeare and map the map of the zyolese valley be blotted out by the judgment that has condemned there to everlasting confinement in the slums.This can only be changed if important people connected to children’s education like governors of boards of education, teaches inspectors of school and visitors intervene to improve the life of the life of the students, if they would, then the map that symbolizes the creative world of beauty and joy would become the window opening out, to them a new world. The poet appeals to the important officials to break down the barriers that confine the children  and release them so that they can wander in the green fields, in  a world of joy and beauty and with this kind of freedom can express freely and openly those thoughts that are worthy of finding a place in books. This would induce the children to speak in a language that has the glory and the brightness of the sun in it.
RICHARD CORY
It is from children of the night- Most popular poems recalls the economic depression of 1893. At that time people could not afford meat and had a diet of day- old bread selling for less. This hard times experience made the people of the town even more aware of Richard’s difference from them, so much so that they treated him as royalty. Although people were surprised that Richard came to town dressed “quietly” and that he was always was human- i.e. he did not act superior. But the people distanced themselves from him. The word like crown, imperial, grace, fluttered pulses, glittered suggests the difference. The people of the town never stopped to consider why Richard spoke the way he did, why he came to town by saying “good morning”. The people felt as if he had come to make them wish that they were in his place .Richard Cory was wealthy but not rich in life-core. Wealth always cannot bring happiness. The isolation, the loneliness disturbed him. The people of the town never realized the value of their mutual support and togetherness, which has made them strong enough to face the difficulties in life. So one hot breezeless “summer night”, Richard Cory lay awake, unable to sleep. Depressingly lonely he ended his life. The towns’ people did not understand about Richard’s suicide, that there was a price in human rather than in a monetary sense, that he paid for being perceived to be “richer than the king”.                                                        
                                                                    Zebras
The poem describes the movement of a heart of Zebras. The dampness of the ‘dark woods’ and the description of the break of dawn with the sun’s rays fluttering througnt the green plains. The description enhances the beauty of the poem. The setting is natural which brings harmony and peace. The Zebras galloping herald the break of day. The vibrations the zebras’s generate is suggested by the expression ‘Elecric tremors’ – The employment of this modern imagery hold our attention.The herd of Zebras relish the freshmess in the air there in perfect harmony between nature and the harmonious movement of the zebras. The term ‘engine of beauty’ suggests the primordial power of the animal as it gallops around.