Analysis of two poems; Prayer Before Birth and Easter Monday

Analysis of two poems; Prayer Before Birth and Easter Monday In this essay I will be analysing two poems. Both poems reflect upon the theme of war. I will be analysing them through their meanings, forms and show how the poets use language to express their ideas and feelings. I have decided to look at the poems Prayer Before Birth by Louis MacNeice and Easter Monday by Eleanor Farjeon. Louis MacNeice was born in 1907, he died in 1963. His mother died when he was young and her death got to him deeply. He studied at Oxford and was one of a group of poets here who became famous. He was intensely affected by the political events of the 1930’s and also by the Second World War. This poem is about an unborn child praying that it†¦show more content†¦What he prays for is to be an individual human being in a world where people respect each other and show human kindness. If the world can’t be like that ‘otherwise kill me’. Prayer Before Birth is a poem of eight verses written in a very unusual form with a contrasting number of lines in each verse from two to ten which creates a varied rhythmic affect, this is a prayer and it to has ritualistic quality with the phrase ‘I am not yet born’ beginning in each verse apart from the last. He uses many language techniques to put across his feelings. Similes are one of them; â€Å"like water†, the use of this is that it creates an image. He also uses repetition this is used to make a point. Eleanor Farjeon was born in 1881, she died in 1965. She wrote for children and wrote poetry for adults. Many of her poetry for adults are sonnets. She went through the Second World War and this is what she talks about in many of her poems. She met another poet with whom she fell in love. His name was Edward Thomas and he was killed in action at war in 1917. This is whom this poem is about. She was a friend of both Thomas and his wife Helen and the wife new and accepted the relationship of Thomas and Eleanor. The poem is a poem in which she expresses great love and a great sense of loss, but she does it in a very quiet,Show MoreRelatedLogical Reasoning189930 Words   |  760 Pagesreasonable one? Yes, because it is based on high-quality reasoning. Is it the best decision—the one an expert would have made in your place? You don’t know this, but yes, the experts do say that stream water will be safe if you boil it for a minute or two. Giardia is caused by protozoa which can’t live for long at high temperature. Other micro-organisms can survive this heating, but they usually won’t cause any human illness. The reason people use water-purification tablets instead of boiling is for

Loyal Disobedience - A Social Tract of Euripides in Medea...

Loyal Disobedience-A Social Tract of Euripides In ancient Greece the females were considered to be conniving and deceiving whisperers, and men almost never trusted their wives. The ideal woman was an obedient and placating wife. They believed that the female should be strong but still yield to the power of the male in charge, whether it was older brother, father, or husband. Euripides often used females in uncommon ways; he did not simply show them as complacent animals. Women in Euripides plays were used for social commentary. They were not just simple characters; they could be both agathos and kakos. The females in the works of Euripides were extremely strong and devious and they were loyal but at the same time†¦show more content†¦Having no other option Menelaos goes to the house of Theoklymenos to beg for food. He is turned away and Helen enters the scene having just returned from the oracle. They meet each other and it is not love at first sight as Helen was promised. Nevertheless Menelaos soon believes tha t his new-found wife is the real Helen.. She has remained loyal to him unlike his deceitful apparition. He wants to take her away and she disobediently refuses. Helen comes up with a plan of her own to reunite the two, a unique twist in the typical hero-rescues-damsel story. The roles have been changed and Helen is in charge. She, like Thenoe, is not an obedient female-she is loyal. Helen then turns to Theoklymenos and play-acts as if her husband has died. She feigns obedience to her (soon-to-be) husband to lure him into allowing the plan to work. My new-found husband I am duty bound to revere the memory, the intimacy of my first marriage. Ive loved Menelaos so much that I could die with him-but then what benefit would my death bring him in death? ...And for your kindness to me and to Menelaos you shall find me exactly the sort of wife that you deserve (Helen 1492-1501). She is placating the Egyptian king with stories of how she wishes to honor the passing of Menelaos. She is portraying the qualities most commonly considered to be agathos in a female. She is

DTT and the Environment free essay sample

An examination of the effects of DDT on the environment. This essay contains the history of the pesticide DDT and its uses within the environment. DTT is a harmful pesticide which has been detrimental to the environment, and has caused a decline in a variety of species. The author focuses specifically on the effects of the pesticide on the environment. As earths population grows so does the demand for food, and the use of pesticides has become essential in meeting this demand. The first important synthetic organic pesticide was a chlorinated hydrocarbon, dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane or DDT. DDT was discovered in 1939 by Swiss chemist Paul Meller. In its early days, DDT was a popular pesticide because it was toxic to a wide range of insect pests, yet it appeared to have low toxicity to mammals. DDT was also persistent, which meant the pesticide didnt break down rapidly in the environment and therefore did not need to be reapplied often and since DDT was insoluble it did not wash off by rain or other weather conditions. We will write a custom essay sample on DTT and the Environment or any similar topic specifically for you Do Not WasteYour Time HIRE WRITER Only 13.90 / page Although gradually throughout time it was discovered that many insects had developed resistance to DDT, and it was discovered that DDT did in fact pose to be harmful to the ecosystem. This discovery created wide public interest and made people aware that chemicals were polluting the environment. As a result DDT was banned for use in North America and other countries in the early 1970s. Though pesticides, such as DDT, may decrease the number of insects, throughout history it has been proven that there is a detrimental effect upon the environment, animals and humans as a result.

Malcolm Gladwell The Power Of Context free essay sample

In the passage from The Power Of Context, Gladwell explores the behaviors of people and links them together to form a rather controversial argument about whether it is the surroundings of a person that causes him or her to do wrong or whether it is the person’s moulding of their mind that causes them to do so. However, I have come to loggerheads with many aspects of Gladwells’s discussion and examples written on in the passage as I, for one, do not feel like the experiments or the specimens that are illustrated in the Power Of Context are sufficient in terms of content and relevance in order for him to think that he’s figured out the main reason behind the thought-process of criminals or even what these ‘tipping points’ that can apparently change the entire anatomy of a person’s thoughts and intentions. I think that a human being’s mind holds much more complexity and can’t easily be defined using two relatively simple experiments and the example of Goetz in the train station. We will write a custom essay sample on Malcolm Gladwell: The Power Of Context or any similar topic specifically for you Do Not WasteYour Time HIRE WRITER Only 13.90 / page The three examples provided in The Power Of Context-apart from being extraneous- are also rather different circumstances for the reader to be able to relate to them and understand what Gladwell is going on about. The degree of the ‘tipping point’ or the circumstance that people find themselves in when Gladwell examines them are not consistent with the point he is trying to make. These ‘tipping points’ are different in each example and even the people used in each example have different backgrounds; not letting the reader assess for themselves what they really think about Gladwell’s argument about whether Social Context is more important than the way a person was brought up and what values have been instilled into this person. If the backgrounds of the people used in the experiments were relatively similar, it would make Gladwell’s point much easier to understand. Gladwell openly states that Goetz did have a troubled upbringing being ‘the focus of his father’s rage’ (Gladwell, pg.158). On the other hand, the subjects used for the Stanford experiment came from ‘good schools and happy families and good neighborhoods.’(Zimbardo, pg162). If the same ‘type’ of people were used in all three experiments displayed, it would make it easier to understand Gladwell’s point, as the reader would be able to see the different reactions in each different situation using a common personality. We would have truly been able to see whether it is the situation a person is in that causes him/her to act a certain way or is it the person themselves who reaches this particular ‘tipping point’ that overrides everything they have been taught to do or not to do. I also feel that the degree of severity in each example varies tremendously, making the experiments less credible. By the degree of severity, I mean that the level of ‘change’ or the ‘tipping point’ that the subjects are put into compared to their daily lives varies tremendously. Certain social contexts like being trapped in a jail cell would make a human being show much different and extreme reactions than the other ‘tipping points’ like being in the presence of broken windows and graffiti. For the sake of understanding, if we took the same person who doesn’t have any emotional imbalance and has lead a ‘normal’ life, and we put him in all of three situations that Gladwell uses, we would see different results that displayed how different the changes between the contexts are. We would expect the person to get a bit hysteric when being put in a jail cell for a couple of days, we would expect the person to stop for the injured man on street if he wasn’t late and vice versa, but we most certainly would not expect the same person to shoot 4 men who try to pull off a casual robbery. The circumstances in each case are way too different to be counted as valid reasoning for Gladwell’s argument a human being would react differently in each of those situations. I personally feel that it further complicates Gladwell’s argument about whether social context affects a person more than the upbringing of the person themselves. This is because we did not get the results we expected in the Goetz experiment and if an experiment in which the relatable tipping points were used, we would have been able to understand the argument further. In the NYC Subway example with Goetz, Gladwell contradicts his main point by giving us a background of Goetz’s life. The background doesn’t justify the shooting of the muggers on the train but what it does is invalidates Gladwell’s ‘Broken Window’ theory(James Q. Wilson, pg155). Even though the ‘Broken Windows’ theory was vital in reducing the Subway crime rate, giving an example like one of Goetz was irrelevant as it potrays someone who is quite literally a ticking time bomb waiting to explode reacting to the circumstances. Yes, the broken windows and graffiti had a lot to do with the crime in the Subway but I do feel that Gladwell could’ve used a much more effective example to keep his main idea alive in the reader’s minds. The Social Context is definitely comprehendible and makes a valid point, but the story of Goetz does not. It suggests that it was the troubled childhood that Goetz had that caused the shooting and not the social context which in this case was the robbery. The concept of being put in a jail cell is numbing. Certainly numbing enough to cause a person to change his mindset. Even though it was a mock prison and all the prisoners knew that they were getting out eventually, the concept of prison was enough to cause the prisoners to start to lose the plot and cause the prison guards to do things that they probably haven’t done before. This experiment did support Gladwell’s claim completely and really helped me understand what Gladwell was going on about. The surroundings of the prison was enough to change the behavior of the ‘prisoners’ and the ‘guards’ to such a great extent that they would show behavior that they have never shown before. This spoke volumes of how if the situation is extreme enough, it can change even the most ‘normal’ people who were chosen for the experiment. The average person is not used to being locked up in a 44 cell with guards that order to do some awful things, so I feel that more than the surroundings that were causing the change in behavior it was the change in surrounding from their normal, comfortable life that caused the extreme reactions. We’re talking about people with the normal levels of emotion and compassion. People with families who give and take love. Thus the huge change in their behaviors compared to what we were expecting. From their normal lives where they are constantly in a mode to excel and succeed at everything they do, they were put in a place where all they needed to do was survive. And a person’s survival instincts can bring out emotions and reactions that one has never seen before. If Gladwell had written about more experiments where the result of the experiment superseded what we were expecting, he could have been able to make his point about social context being more important than a person’s inbred behavior. I did not feel that in the Good Samaritan experiment, the seminarians could be judged on their level of compassion just by them having to give the reason of why they wished to study theology as personalities or the level of ‘good’ in a person can never be classified into different sections or be graded. The reason why a person chooses to study a particular interest does not have to be related at all to whether that person is helpful or is giving or not. Thus, even though the only thing that mattered was whether the student was late or not did not speak much about Social Context affecting our behavious. It just said who prioritized being late for the lecture over helping someone in need. If a person really is helpful and really did want to help the man in need, he would. No matter how late he is for the lecture, he would still help. Yes, some people helped out only because they had time and had just enough amount of compassion in order to help the man out, but there would also have been the few who helped out regardless of whether they were late. And they are the few who are undeterred by their surrounding and do what they want to do because of the way they were brought up and because of the way their minds were moulded and most certainly not because they had a extra couple of minutes where they thought they’d do a good deed. I feel thatGladwell could have been able to unravel something truly astounding if he had been able to shine light upon examples that had much better context. I feel that his main idea about how the smallest of things can cause big results – does certainly have substance behind it but Gladwell wasn’t able to back up his claim according to me. The Broken Windows theory wasn’t just a fluke; it was very well thought about and even though there were other major ramifications made to solve the crime problem, the Broken Windows theory was vital in doing so. All in all, we did learn that the different levels of severity cause people to do some amazing things, but I feel that this is at-the-end-of-the-day is how a normal human being would react because everyone does have a ‘tipping point.’ It’s just the matter of how extreme the circumstances need to get for them to ‘tip’ over. Works Cited- Gladwell, M. â€Å"The Power Of Context: Bernie Goetz and the Rise and Fall of New York City Crime.’’ The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make A Big Difference. Boston: Little, Brown, and Co.,2000. 133-68.