Harlem: A Dream Deferred – Langston Hughes

2013/12/15

This is a good piece of writing about Harlem Renaissance. 
I found this very long time ago and I didn't keep the link. 
If this is yours, please inform me so I can include your name as credit. 

Lorraine Hansberry took the title of A Raisin in the Sun from a line in Langston Hughes’s famous 1951 poem “Harlem: A Dream Deferred.” Hughes was a prominent black poet during the 1920s Harlem Renaissance in New York City, during which black artists of all kinds—musicians, poets, writers—gave innovative voices to their personal and cultural experiences. The Harlem Renaissance was a time of immense promise and hopefulness for black artists, as their efforts were noticed and applauded across the United States. In fact, the 1920s are known to history as the Jazz Age, since that musical form, created by a vanguard of black musicians, gained immense national popularity during the period and seemed to embody the exuberance and excitement of the decade. The Harlem Renaissance and the positive national response to the art it produced seemed to herald the possibility of a new age of acceptance for blacks in America.

Langston Hughes was one of the brightest lights of the Harlem Renaissance, and his poems and essays celebrate black culture, creativity, and strength. However, Hughes wrote “Harlem” in 1951, twenty years after the Great Depression crushed the Harlem Renaissance and devastated black communities more terribly than any other group in the United States. In addition, the post–World War II years of the 1950s were characterized by “white flight,” in which whites fled the cities in favor of the rapidly growing suburbs. Blacks were often left behind in deteriorating cities, and were unwelcome in the suburbs. In a time of renewed prosperity, blacks were for the most part left behind.

“Harlem” captures the tension between the need for black expression and the impossibility of that expression because of American society’s oppression of its black population. In the poem, Hughes asks whether a “dream deferred”—a dream put on hold—withers up “[l]ike a raisin in the sun.” His lines confront the racist and dehumanizing attitude prevalent in American society before the civil rights movement of the 1960s that black desires and ambitions were, at best, unimportant and should be ignored, and at worst, should be forcibly resisted. His closing rhetorical question—“Or does [a dream deferred] explode?”—is incendiary, a bold statement that the suppression of black dreams might result in an eruption. It implicitly places the blame for this possible eruption on the oppressive society that forces the dream to be deferred. Hansberry’s reference to Hughes’s poem in her play’s title highlights the importance of dreams in A Raisin in the Sun and the struggle that her characters face to realize their individual dreams, a struggle inextricably tied to the more fundamental black dream of equality in America. The underlying theme of Hansberry's Raisin is in the question posed by Langston Hughes' poem "Montage of a Dream Deferred," when he asks, "What happens to a dream deferred?" and then goes on to list the various things that might happen to a person if his dreams are put "on hold," emphasizing that whatever happens to a postponed dream is never good.


Elizabethan Era

2013/12/09

I found this very long time ago and I didn't keep the link. 
If this is yours, please inform me so I can include your name as credit. 

o   Also known as the ‘Golden Age’. This represented the apogee of the English Renaissance and saw the flowering of poetry, music and literature.

o   The Elizabethan Age is viewed so highly because of the periods before and after. It was a brief period of largely internal peace between the English Reformation and the battles between Protestants and Catholics and the battles between parliament and the monarchy that engulfed the seventeenth century

o   England in this era had some positive aspects that set it apart from contemporaneous continental European societies. Torture was rare, since the English legal system reserved torture only for capital crimes like treason—though forms of corporal punishment, some of them extreme, were practiced

o   Education would begin at home, where children were taught the basic etiquette of proper manners and respecting others. It was necessary for boys to attend grammar school, but girls were rarely allowed in any place of education other than petty schools, and then only with a restricted curriculum. Petty schools were for all children aged from 5 to 7 years of age. Only the most wealthy people allowed their daughters to be taught, and only at home. During this time, endowed schooling became available. This meant that even boys of very poor families were able to attend school if they were not needed to work at home, but only in a few localities were funds available to provide support as well as the necessary education scholarship. Boys from families of nobility would often be taught at home by a private tutor.

o   The role of women in society was, for the historical era, relatively unconstrained; Spanish and Italian visitors to England commented regularly, and sometimes caustically, on the freedom that women enjoyed in England, in contrast to their home cultures. England had more well-educated upper class women than was common anywhere in Europe.

·         Satire of class system of Elizabethan Era

o   Theater was treated as high culture with William Shakespeare at his peak, as well as Christopher Marlowe and many other playwrights, actors and theatres constantly busy, the high culture of the Elizabethan Renaissance was best expressed in its theatre. Historical topics were especially popular, not to mention the usual comedies and tragedies

o   During the Elizabethan era, people looked forward to holidays because opportunities for leisure were limited, with time away from hard work being restricted to periods after church on Sundays. For the most part, leisure and festivities took place on a public church holy day. Every month had its own holiday, some of which are listed below:
·         The first Monday after Twelfth Night of January (any time between 7 January and 14 January) was Plough Monday. It celebrated returning to work after the Christmas celebrations and the New Year.

·         In medieval and Tudor England, the Twelfth Night marked the end of a winter festival that started on All Hallows Eve — now more commonly known as Halloween. The Lord of Misrule symbolizes the world turning upside down. On this day the King and all those who were high would become the peasants and vice versa. The common theme was that the normal order of things was reversed.

·         Shakespeare's play Twelfth Night, or What You Will was written to be performed as a Twelfth Night entertainment. The play has many elements that are reversed, in the tradition of Twelfth Night, such as a woman Viola dressing as a man, and a servant Malvolio imagining that he can become a nobleman.

To Autumn - John Keats

2013/12/04

SEASON of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
        Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
    Conspiring with him how to load and bless
        With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
    To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees,
        And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
            To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
    With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
        And still more, later flowers for the bees,
        Until they think warm days will never cease,
            For Summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.

                                            
Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store? 
        Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
    Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
        Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
    Or on a half-reap’d furrow sound asleep,
        Drows’d with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
            Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:
    And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
        Steady thy laden head across a brook;
        Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,
            Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.

                                            
    Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
        Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,—
    While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
        And touch the stubble plains with rosy hue;
    Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
        Among the river sallows, borne aloft
            Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
    And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
        Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
        The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;
           And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.




MEANING OF DIFFICULT WORDS
1.      O’er-brimm’d – overflow
2.      Drows’d – full
3.      Poppies – opium(drugs)
4.      Swath – The width of a cut made by a sicke. Eg: tall grass
5.      Gleaner – Someone who picks the harvested fruits
6.      Cider - an alcoholic drink made from the fermented juice of apples
7.      Gnats – small insects
8.      Sallows – a willow tree/to turn yellow
9.      Bourn – a boundary/a small hill
10.  Treble-soft – the pitch
11.  Red-breast – a bird that sings
12.  Garden-croft – a small patch of land adjacent to the house. Used as a kitchen garden/ herb garden


POETIC/LITERARY DEVICES
1.       Images
    • Budding flowers
    • Ripe fruit
    • “To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees.” This imagery gives about the season such that apples are picked in the fall and you get a mental picture of a place during the season. In the first stanza, there are pretty mental images of fall, but by the final stanza, you have images of noisiness and leading into the next season, which represents the progression of death, from good to bad.
2.      Metaphors
o   “Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft”- to compare the sounds made in autumn to music. Keats compares the noises made by hedge-crickets to musical notes.

3.      Personification
o   Used in the second stanza of “To Autumn”. Autumn is brought to life as a person by giving the season human characteristics and even physical features.
o   “And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue”. Normally, a rosy hue would refer to a person being cheerful and happy and stubble would signify a male’s facial hair. Here, they personify clouds in order to symbolize how death can destroy all former happiness.

4.      Rhetorical question
o   “Where are the songs of spring? Ay, where are they? This is a simple question merely asking when are there going to be more births and less deaths. Spring represents a new beginning and birth. At this season, death opens the question of “where did my life go?”
5.      Diction
o   Many of the words used by Keats in this poem have connections to fall and the harvest season. A granary is a place to store grain after being husked. A gourd is the hard shell of fruits, normally picked during the harvest season. Cyder-press is also used which is a crusher used to make cider. By using this, Keats has the characteristics of fall and what people normally do during the season

6.      Similes
o   “And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep” (19)

7.      Repetition
o   “[…]to set budding more/ And still more” (8)



STANZA BY STANZA ANALYSIS
STANZA 1: The speaker addresses autumn as if it were a person. He notes the autumn and the sun are like best friends plotting how to make fruit grow and how to ripen crops before the harvest. The ripening will lead to the dropping of seed which sets the stage for spring flowers and the whole process starting over again. He tells about the bees that think summer can last forever as they buzz around the flower.

STANZA 2: Describes the period after the harvest, when autumn just hangs out around the granary where harvested grains are kept. Most of the hard work has already been done, and autumn can just take a nap in the fields, walk across books or watch the making of cider.

STANZA 3: Autumn sound with those of spring. The sounds that are presented are not only those of autumn but essentially the gentle sounds of the evening. As the night approaches, within the final moments of the song, death is slowly approaching alongside of the end of the year. The last stanza reminds reader that the seasons are a cycle, widening the scope of this stanza from a single season to life in general.


CRITICAL APPRECIATION
In ‘To Autumn’, a super-facial reading would suggest that John Keats writes about a typical day of this season, describing all kinds of colorful and detailed images. The author makes an intense description of autumn at least at first sight. Although John Keats’s first impression was simply describing the main characteristics of autumn and the human and animal activities related to it, a deeper reading could suggest that he talks about the process of life. Autumn symbolizes maturity in human and animal lives. Some instances of this are the ‘full-grown lambs’, the sorrow of the gnats, the wind that lives and dies, and the day that is dying and getting dark. As all we know, the next season is winter, a part of the year that represents aging and death, in other words, the end of life. However, in my opinion, death does not have a negative connotation because Keats enjoys and accepts ‘autumn’ or maturity as part of life, though winter is coming.


READING MATERIAL
In both its form and descriptive surface, “To Autumn” is one of the simplest of Keats’s odes. There is nothing confusing or complex in Keats’s paean to the season of autumn, with its fruitfulness, its flowers, and the song of its swallows gathering for migration. The extraordinary achievement of this poem lies in its ability to suggest, explore, and develop a rich abundance of themes without ever ruffling its calm, gentle, and lovely description of autumn. Where “Ode on Melancholy” presents itself as a strenuous heroic quest, “To Autumn” is concerned with the much quieter activity of daily observation and appreciation. In this quietude, the gathered themes of the preceding odes find their fullest and most beautiful expression.

“To Autumn” takes up where the other odes leave off. Like the others, it shows Keats’s speaker paying homage to a particular goddess—in this case, the deified season of Autumn. The selection of this season implicitly takes up the other odes’ themes of temporality, mortality, and change: Autumn in Keats’s ode is a time of warmth and plenty, but it is perched on the brink of winter’s desolation, as the bees enjoy “later flowers,” the harvest is gathered from the fields, the lambs of spring are now “full grown,” and, in the final line of the poem, the swallows gather for their winter migration. The understated sense of inevitable loss in that final line makes it one of the most moving moments in all of poetry; it can be read as a simple, uncomplaining summation of the entire human condition.

Despite the coming chill of winter, the late warmth of autumn provides Keats’s speaker with ample beauty to celebrate: the cottage and its surroundings in the first stanza, the agrarian haunts of the goddess in the second, and the locales of natural creatures in the third. Keats’s speaker is able to experience these beauties in a sincere and meaningful way because of the lessons he has learned in the previous odes: He is no longer indolent, no longer committed to the isolated imagination (as in “Psyche”), no longer attempting to escape the pain of the world through ecstatic rapture (as in “Nightingale”), no longer frustrated by the attempt to eternalize mortal beauty or subject eternal beauty to time (as in “Urn”), and no longer able to frame the connection of pleasure and the sorrow of loss only as an imaginary heroic quest (as in “Melancholy”).

In “To Autumn,” the speaker’s experience of beauty refers back to earlier odes (the swallows recall the nightingale; the fruit recalls joy’s grape; the goddess drowsing among the poppies recalls Psyche and Cupid lying in the grass), but it also recalls a wealth of earlier poems. Most importantly, the image of Autumn winnowing and harvesting (in a sequence of odes often explicitly about creativity) recalls an earlier Keats poem in which the activity of harvesting is an explicit metaphor for artistic creation. In his sonnet “When I have fears that I may cease to be,” Keats makes this connection directly:

When I have fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has glean’d my teeming brain,
Before high-piled books, in charactry,
Hold like rich garners the full ripen’d grain...

In this poem, the act of creation is pictured as a kind of self-harvesting; the pen harvests the fields of the brain, and books are filled with the resulting “grain.” In “To Autumn,” the metaphor is developed further; the sense of coming loss that permeates the poem confronts the sorrow underlying the season’s creativity. When Autumn’s harvest is over, the fields will be bare, the swaths with their “twined flowers” cut down, the cider-press dry, the skies empty. But the connection of this harvesting to the seasonal cycle softens the edge of the tragedy. In time, spring will come again, the fields will grow again, and the birdsong will return. As the speaker knew in “Melancholy,” abundance and loss, joy and sorrow, song and silence are as intimately connected as the twined flowers in the fields. What makes “To Autumn” beautiful is that it brings an engagement with that connection out of the realm of mythology and fantasy and into the everyday world. The development the speaker so strongly resisted in “Indolence” is at last complete: He has learned that an acceptance of mortality is not destructive to an appreciation of beauty and has gleaned wisdom by accepting the passage of time.



BIBLIOGRAPHY

The Solitary Reaper - William Wordsworth

2013/12/01

Behold her, single in the field,
Yon solitary Highland Lass!
Reaping and singing by herself;
Stop here, or gently pass!
Alone she cuts and binds the grain,
And sings a melancholy strain;
O listen! for the Vale profound
Is overflowing with the sound.

No Nightingale did ever chaunt
More welcome notes to weary bands
Of travellers in some shady haunt,
Among Arabian sands:
A voice so thrilling ne'er was heard
In spring-time from the Cuckoo-bird,
Breaking the silence of the seas
Among the farthest Hebrides.

Will no one tell me what she sings?--
Perhaps the plaintive numbers flow
For old, unhappy, far-off things,
And battles long ago:
Or is it some more humble lay,
Familiar matter of to-day?
Some natural sorrow, loss, or pain,
That has been, and may be again?

Whate'er the theme, the Maiden sang
As if her song could have no ending;
I saw her singing at her work,
And o'er the sickle bending;--
I listened, motionless and still;
And, as I mounted up the hill,
The music in my heart I bore,
Long after it was heard no more


MEANING OF DIFFICULT WORDS
1.      Binds - to fasten or secure with a band or bond.
2.      Melancholy- a gloomy state of mind, especially when habitual or prolonged; 
depression, sober thoughtfulness
3.      Profound- penetrating or entering deeply into subjects of thought or knowledge; 
having deep insight or understanding: a profound thinker.
4.   Hebrides- a group of islands (Inner Hebrides and  Outer Hebrides) belonging to Scotland.
5.      Plaintive number- the melancholic sad songs which flow from the reapers heart one after another



POETIC/LITERARY DEVICES
1.      Hyperbole
o   Breaking the silence of the seas among the farthest Hebrides- The voice of the girl was so sweet that it broke the silence of the seas and of the far of islands on north-western coast of Scotland. These islands are never disturbed by any storm but the voice of the girl had intruded the silence of these group of  islands   
o   O listen! For the Vale profound is overflowing with the sound – he says that the whole deep valley is echoing with her sweet song

2.       Metaphors
o   In the spring time from the Cuckoo-bird – used as a comparison to the maiden’s voice. The poet says that such a sweet voice was never heard from the cuckoo even in the Spring season
o   The voice of a ‘nightingale’- Nightingale is considered as a sweet-voice bird. The poet says no nightingale has so far sung as melodious a song as the girl sings

3.      Rhetorical questions
o   Will no one tell me what she sings?
o   That has may been, and may be again?

4.      Imagery
o   O listen! For the Vale profound is overflowing with the sound




STANZA BY STANZA ANALYSIS
FIRST STANZA: The poet, William Wordsworth, introduces us to the subject of the poem, the solitary reaper. She is standing alone in the field, reaping and singing. She sings a morose, gloomy song while she cuts and binds the sheaves of grain. It seems to the poet as if the surrounding valley is brimming over with the song of the reaper.

SECOND STANZA: According to the poet, the reaper’s song surpassed, in its beauty, the sweet notes of the nightingale that welcomed tired groups of travellers into an oasis in an Arabian desert.
The voice of the harvester was more breath taking than that of the cuckoo singing in spring in the Hebrides islands.

THIRD STANZA: The poet, however, does not understand the words of the reaper's song. He starts to speculate on the subject of the song. He thinks that perhaps it is about an ancient incident which occurred in a distant land or a battle which may have taken place years ago.
He further wonders, whether the song has something to do with the day to day life of the solitary reaper. He thinks that she might be singing about grief and sadness which has occurred and might return.

FOURTH STANZA: To the poet, it seemed that the song of the solitary reaper would not end. She sang as she worked, bending over her sickle. For a long time the poet listened to the song, enchanted and transfixed. As he moved up the hill, he continued to carry the music in his heart even after he could no longer hear it.



CRITICAL APPRECIATION
The Solitary Reaper is a delightful lyric by William Wordsworth. Wordsworth-known as a great lover and preacher of nature- had impresses us by the imaginative and philosophical quality of his thoughts. This poem talks about a man’s experience when he travelled to a field in Scotland and saw a lady. He was mesmerised by the song she sang. The song captured his attention even though he doesn’t understand what she was singing. He says that the sound is more welcome than any chant of the nightingale to weary travellers in the desert, and that the cuckoo-bird in spring never sang with a voice so thrilling. The poet could not make out the theme of the song. He, however, thinks it is about some unhappy incident of the past or a battle fought long ago or about some misfortunes of our daily life like loss, pain or death. Such a simple incident strikes the reader (this poem is published 2 years after the encounter)




READING MATERIAL
The poem 'The Solitary Reaper' was written by William Wordsworth in the Romantic Era. Most of William Wordsworth poems are filled with his passionate belief in the beauty and power of nature. He described nature not as something beautiful, but as an expression of the 'spirit' and the 'music of humanity'. The poem describes one of Wordsworth's early experiences in nature that is a source of both joy and tranquillity, as the lonely girl reaped corn in the Scottish field.


History of the Poem

This poem can be considered as a lyric, supposed to be written in the year 1807. As you go through the solitary reaper explanation you get to understand that the poem was not inspired by an actual sight, but by the description of a solitary reaper which was given in Thomas Wilkinson’s “Tour in Scotland”.
 More info about the poem
  • The journal of a traveller and the diary of his sister remind the poet of such experience and the alacrity that had brought him.
  • So he was inspired to write this wonderful poem.
  • This is one of the finest lyrics that Wordsworth ever produced.

Explanation of The Solitary Reaper

The poem beautifully sets the atmosphere for introducing the readers with a young lonely reaper who dwells in the highlands, reaping the corn and singing a sad song. 'The Solitary Reaper' is a description of a melodious sound that is heard in the atmosphere. Its mood can be described as one of relaxation, depression and gentleness. The poet might have idealized the solitary reaper as a Scottish maidenHe wonders that her song is more appealing and musically perfect then that of a nightingale or a cuckoo. The poet seems to be highly influenced by the soft melancholy, sadness and wistfulness of the song that he hears. The song has left unforgettable impressions and has dwelled into the innermost chords of the poets mind.
It has to be clarified that Wordsworth has projected a democratic note so far as the theme of this poem I concerned. He preferred a simple familiar girl of a peasant as the subject of his poem. This is something uncommon in the history of English poetry because most of the poets of the eighteen century were concerned in portraying “town life and towns people. Wordsworth expressed his democratic view towards mankind by bringing forth this simple Scottish maiden, who happens to be the central character and theme of the poem. In his own words, he “loses incidence from humble and common life a themes for his poems”. The central idea of this poem is that the song sung by a forlorn Scottish girl appears more thrilling and enchanting than that of nightingale or the cuckoo. As the poem progresses, one can feel an eerie, sober melody and soft melancholy that continues and blends with the theme of the poem.
I listened, motionlessly and still:
And as I mounted up the hill
The music in my heart I bore,
Long after it was heard n more. 

Salient Features of the Poem

  • This poem illustrates Wordsworth’s theory of poetry.
  • Wordsworth is able to produce great pieces of poetry when his emotions get recollected in tranquility.
  • He and his sister Dorothy had encountered many search reapers singing while at work in remote parts of the highlands of Scotland during their tour.
  • This poem presents Wordsworth's democratic view towards life
The poem is simple yet romantic, pure yet serene. There is no art in the poem but imaginary and magical musical tone is sufficient enough to make the readers go into depths of Wordsworth poetry.


BIBLIOGRAPHY