Compare and contrast Blake and Wordsworths view of London Essay Example for Free

Compare and contrast Blake and Wordsworths view of London Essay The poets Blake and Wordsworth both wrote poems about Englands capital city, London. The poets themselves each came from different backgrounds which may have influenced their view of London. Wordsworth was born and brought up in the Lake District and spent the majority of his life there, which may have led him to concentrate on the natural features of London. In contrast Blake was more aware of the industry and poverty of the capital City. He had lived all his life in London, receiving little formal schooling and even witnessing the death of his brother from consumption. Wordsworths poem Composed upon Westminster Bridge presents a calm and relaxed view looking across the water and the city. He writes about what he sees and views London as a majestic royal palace. Wordsworth reflects upon his subject with deep felt emotion, seeing it as a spiritual place of peace. Dull would be the soul who could pass by, a sight so touching in its majesty. He describes a special morning when the city seems to be asleep and is in awe of the tranquillity never saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!. Wordsworth is therefore commenting on the natural beauty that he sees rather than the daily life behind this scene. In contrast Blakes poem is entitled London. Talking directly about the city itself it is the account of a person walking down the street saying what he sees. He is more concerned with the people who make up the City. Instead of seeing beauty he sees pain in the emotions of the people he meets. In every cry of every man. Blake concentrates on the oppression and poverty of the city. He blames the Church and authorities for their lack of attention and care for the people of London. Every blackening Church appals. The tone of the poem shows a lack of awareness; some safe inside while pain goes on outside, and the hapless soldiers sigh runs in blood down Palace walls. In keeping with this pessimistic view, Blakes poem is structured in a methodical and measured tone. It is written to a steady beat in four stanzas. This has the feel of a walking pace as he wanders around the city viewing its misery. Blake uses repetition to emphasise his point in every cry, in every voice. It is a formal bleak approach giving the bare facts as he sees them. Wordsworths poem is altogether more flamboyant. As a romantic poet he writes this poem in the form of a sonnet. This style is mainly used in love poetry. This structure emphasises the way Wordsworth concentrates on the physical aspects Wordsworth views around him. One line flows into another in an informal way. It is descriptive and reflective but does not attempt to look beyond the outward appearance all bright and glittering in the smokeless air. Wordsworth as a rich man, the son of a lawyer, views London on face value. He looks down upon the city from his lofty position unaware of the poverty below. His tone is full of grandeur earth has not anything to show more fair. He feels moved in his spirit and in harmony with his environment. Wordsworths tone is full of wonder, focusing on the magnificent buildings and seeing the city itself as a living being full of emotion. Blake expresses his feelings of frustration and sadness. He describes chartered streets and chartered Thames, which emphasises how everything has been taken over and oppressed. He comes from a lower middle class background; the son of a hosier and the tone of this poem expresses his awareness of the poverty around him marks of weakness, marks of woes. This sadness turns to aggression as the poem proceeds, criticising the Church and even the corruption of marriage. And blights with plagues the marriage hearse. There is a hopelessness and desperation expressed within this poem. Blake refers to mind-forged manacles, the metaphorical chains in which the peoples minds are held. This is typical of the negative images used throughout. The one beat rhythm and child-like tone emphasises the steady march towards an inescapable fate. This language underlines the lack of control which people have, their lives grinding out a pre-set pattern. Everything is owned each chartered street. Even the Church is blackening, sinful, cruel, with a lack of purity and care. The oxymoron marriage hearse shows the conflict within society the hypocrisy of marriage whilst poverty encourages prostitution to flourish the youthful harlots curse. The words are stark and shocking, exaggerating the problem to gain our attention blasts the new-born infants tear. The language used by Wordsworth is full of splendour never did the sun more beautifully steep. He paints pictures with his words, using the images of the shining sun, the gliding river the beauty of the morning. He extends a simile of the city by personifying it as clothed in sleep. The city now doth like a garment where the beauty of the morning, silent, bare. Wordsworth creates a feeling of awe and wonder at the beauty of creation. He uses the metaphor of the city like a mighty heart lying still. The sounds evoked by Wordsworth poem are very peaceful and calm the river glideth, the morning silent. In contrast Blake uses sharp sounds which are onomatopoeic in nature blasts, curse, cry. He uses a strong heavy rhythm emotive of the oppression felt with repetitive force and mark in every face I meet, marks of weakness, marks of woe. The tone of Wordsworths poem is soft and lilting a sight so touching, a calm so deep. This is set against the harsh cry of Blakes London. The approach used by these two writers promotes a different response from the reader. Wordsworths flowery imagery encourages a warm view of London. He is optimistic in his approach, concentrating as he does upon the immediate sights and sounds of a peaceful morning scene. Blake however conjures up a feeling of misery for the plight of the people of London locked in a prison of poverty which he blames on the establishment who have no care for their situation. Blake concentrates on social injustice, perhaps borne out of his own upbringing, whilst Wordsworth seems unaware of anything but the natural beauty of the environment and not its inhabitants. Two seemingly different views of one city seen from varying perspectives.

Slaughterhouse-Five Essay: Three Themes of Slaughterhouse-Five

The Three Themes of Slaughterhouse-Five Kurt Vonnegut did a great job in writing an irresistible reading novel in which one is not permitted to laugh, and yet still be a sad book without tears. Slaughterhouse-five was copyrighted in 1969 and is a book about the 1945 firebombing in Dresden which had killed 135,000 people. The main character is Billy Pilgrim, a very young infantry scout who is captured in the Battle of the Bulge and quartered to a slaughterhouse where he and other soldiers are held. The rest of the novel is about Billy and his encounters with the war, his wife, his life on earth, and on the planet Tralfamador. There are 3 themes in the novel Slaughterhouse-Five, that stick in the readers mind as they read through this novel. Perhaps the most obvious theme in Slaughterhouse-Five, is the war and its contrast with love, beauty, humanity, innocence, etc. Vonnegut manages to tell the reader in Slaughterhouse-Five, that war is bad for human kind and that it would be better for people to love one another. To find the war's contrast with love is quite difficult, because the book doesn't talk about any couple that was cruelly torn apart by the war. For example, Billy didn't seem to love his wife very much. Vonnegut expresses it very lightly and uses the word "love" very rarely. Yet when he does, he uses it effectively. He tries to look for love and beauty in things that seemingly are neither lovely nor beautiful. For example, when Billy was captured by the group of Germans, he didn't see them as a cruel enemy, but as normal, innocent people: "Billy looked up at the face that went with the clogs. It was the face of a blond angel, of a fifteen-year-old boy. The boy was as beautiful as Eve" (... ...e eyes of Tralfamadorians: "When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in bad condition in the particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments. Now, when I myself hear that somebody is dead, I simply shrug and say what the Tralfamadorians say about dead people, which is 'So it goes,'" (Vonnegut, p.27). Even with the contrast and the differences between these three themes, Vonnegut makes them all mesh in this novel. If Slaughterhouse- Five was the first novel the reader has ever read, they would appreciate this style of writing and black humor that Vonnegut portrays throughout Slaughterhouse- Five. It would make the reader wish that they would have discovered him earlier and read his books long before now. Vonnegut, Kurt Jr. Slaughterhouse-five. NewYork: Dell Publishing Co. 1969.

Blankets and Security and Spirituality Essay

There are many themes explored in Craig Thompson’s award-winning graphic novel Blankets, but perhaps its chief theme is that of spirituality. Particularly, the text explores how spirituality can be distinct from religion: religion is illustrated as a blunt instrument with which individuals divide themselves, whereas the positive spirituality advocated by Thompson grows out of human experiences, such as his first love. In this sense, the modified view of spirituality overlays traditional religious thought: the titular quilt blanket takes on a totemic significance, like that of a saint’s body part. This is fitting enough, as Thompson presents the relationship with Raina as something sanctified and, not coincidentally, outside the realm of religion. Fittingly enough for a meta-narrative such as this, art forms the basis for Thompson to impose his own distinct narratives over the unfavorable narratives around him. This belief in transformative power becomes important when he discovers his blossoming sexuality: he must realize it is not embodied by the abusive babysitter of his past, but in the relationship he possesses in the here and now. Raina represents the clearest presentation of actual spirituality in the text: she presents the stability that Thompson craves so much, which is the only thing that really allows him to take solace. It is not coincidental that the two begin their relationship at Bible Camp: in a camp that is ostensibly devoted to finding spiritual fellowship, both Thompson and Raina feel like they do not fit in. Accordingly, they must develop their own fellowship with each other, substituting their unique friendship (and eventually erotic love) in place of the relationship with God that the camp is supposed to offer. This is one of the spiritual notions that Thompson hammers home quite effectively: the heart of a true spiritual relationship is one of interaction. Traditional spiritual models rely on following God’s will without having a real relationship with anything other than a personal interpretation of God as a social construct. Romantic love fills that need when spirituality falters. Raina’s place as a saint-like person seems quite intentional in the text. The work culminates, after all, with Thompson finally willing to forge his own path in life†¦but by naming the work after the blankets on which he laid beside Raina, he situates the work as a kind of return to the grace and serenity he discovered in his relationship with her. In this sense, the ending of the work represents a kind of spiritual pilgrimage that Thompson is undergoing, with a remnant of Raina to guide him. In the spiritual spectrum, she seems like a successor to the understanding of Mary offered by Thompson’s religious upbringing. In that conservative religious view, Mary represents the glory of women, but also their aloof subservience to the greater glory of men: Mary is great because she delivered Jesus, but because of that sanctified relationship, a relationship with her is denied to mortal men. Raina, then, represents the spirituality that Thompson is able to interact with. She also represents an opportunity to restore sexual equality to spirituality, as she is not aloof, nor is she playing second fiddle to men. This continues the theme of spirituality as a matter of unity, rather than divisiveness. The final confrontation with his parents represents the final necessary aspect of spirituality: a willingness to seek commonality in all living creatures. This is the nature of their dispute, after all: a difference in beliefs. However, by bringing this conflict out into the open, Thompson is asserting the sovereignty of his own beliefs. They do not fully define him, as religious beliefs define their followers, because the innate aspect of Thompson’s spirituality is that it is constantly evolving. Raina helped him discover it, but she does not represent the be-all, end-all of it. Similarly, Thompson’s pilgrimage at the end is not to literally find Raina, but to use his memento of the time they shared as a way of finding a new relationship that will further help challenge and evolve his notion of spirituality. Interestingly, Thompson does not decry all religion as the enemy of spirituality. However, he does emphasize that religious dogma is often used as an excuse to shut one’s self off from the world. In confronting his parents, Thompson is quite clear: his spiritual beliefs will not be quieted, nor will they be closeted, any longer. Blankets is a work that is certain to endure for many years to come. The reason for that is not lofty ambition to tell an epic story, but rather, a commitment to following the fault lines of human intimacy and romantic relationships all the way to their inevitable quakes. Unwilling to move the camera away (so to speak), Thompson does the audience one better by showing the slow process of picking up the pieces and trying to rearrange a Picasso-esque jumble into a self-constructed identity that he can actually recognize in the mirror. Raina helped him discover what spirituality really represented: not the missing piece, but the knowledge that pieces are missing. And all that is required of true spirituality is an ongoing commitment to never stop seeking completion.

The War On Drugs Ruins The Economy - 1781 Words

Nguyen 1 Linh Nguyen LSP 200 Professor Ashley Bohrer Final Paper November 21, 2015 The War on Drugs Ruins the Economy The global War on Drugs has existed for four decades as a movement of prohibition of drugs with military intervention with the aim to decrease the illegal drug trade. Nevertheless, instead of avoiding growing of drug supply and demand, the war brings about many unintentional consequences that include the creation of a profitable illicit market and mass incarceration. This criminal market caused variety of negative impacts on the economy. In this paper, I will argue that the War on Drugs is costing billions of tax dollars and a misuse of government budget. After forty years since the War on Drugs began, the U.S government has spent up to one trillion dollars of taxpayers’money on mass incarceration, drug law enforcement and prohibition. The drug war caused the prison population to increase significantly. According to Richard Branson in his article, â€Å"War on drugs a trillion-dollar failure†, America leads the world in the number of incarcerated citizens, 2.3 millions prisoners and more than a half of a million are serving sentences for drug offense. People of color with a minor or non-violent drug offense are the main victims of the drug war. Increasing imprisonment and extensive prison sentences is the burden of the economy. The government spends a lot of money on arresting and incarcerating of millions of people each year. According to the report â€Å"StateShow MoreRelatedEssay Obstacles That Weaken Democracy 1652 Words   |  7 Pagesinefficient economy. Building a perfect democracy probably will never occur, but there are ways of meeting people’s expectations of it. As presented by Jesà ºs Silva-Herzog, a Professor of law at the Instituto Tecnologico Autonomo de Mexico, people have expectations for a democracy which are not met, meaning that the democracy fails to the people. 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