week 11

This blog will be over the play "Trifles" by Glaspell. In the play, Mrs. Peters and Mrs. Hale both start off very quiet, only speaking when spoken to by the men in the play. As the play progresses and Mrs. Peters and Mrs. Hale get more time alone, I begin to notice that Mrs. Peters is more concerned with legalities than Mrs. Hale. Mrs. Peters is often keeping herself from saying or doing things she wants to do by thinking about those legalities. She even steps in and corrects Mrs. Hale a time or two for letting her emotions get the best of her. Mrs. Hale seems to me to be more caring for the situation that Mrs. Wright is in. She is more inquisitive about what is going on and what took place in the Wright's home. Mrs. Hale is taking in her surroundings, and with the feelings of loneliness and sadness that she is getting from the house, she starts to blame herself for never coming over to spend time with Mrs. Wright or to help her with things on the farm. Mrs. Hale seems to take it personally when she hears the men joking about how messy the house was. She finds it rude that they would carry on about Mrs. Wright in such a way when she knows how much work it can be to keep up a house and a farm. She seems to understand that the work can be even more daunting when you are sad, or feel lonely, without the joys of children around. I think Glaspell made the two women so different so that anyone who read or watched the play would see both points of view. Whether to intervene or just to let things play out as they might, with Mrs. Hale being the one who would intervene and without Mrs. Hale, Mrs. Peters might just let things go. Their differences contribute to the conflict of the play because you can see both points of view. Do you stick to legalities even if inside you feel like it is right for you to intervene? Or do you push the rules aside and do what you think is the right thing? This is a question that can be applied to so many different situations, not just the one that is posed in the play. The resolution of the play is that there must be a balance. There is not always black and white, right and wrong. Sometimes, you need a little bit of both, a grey area. Which is why, in the end, Mrs. Peters and Mrs. Hale meet somewhere in the middle and hide the bird that they found in the box from the men.

Figurative speech in Taylor Swifts "Back to December"

In this song there are several lines of figurative speech that stick out to me. First, "the last time you saw me is still burned in the back of your mind" sticks out. Obviously she is not talking about something actually being burned in to the back of someone's brain, she is referring to a mark that she left on him, a metaphorical mark. She left him with a scar by the way that she treated him and that feeling that he had will never leave him, as if it were a scar from a burn that never goes away. Then there is a line, "you gave me roses and I left them there to die" that may or not be true that he did actually give her roses, but I don't think the meaning is literal. I think that she is referring to the way that he loved her, he was sweet and nice and did things that anyone would hope for like giving roses, and she left them there to die. She left his feelings and the way he treated her and she turned her back and let them die. Then tying in to the title of the song the chorus is "I go back to December all the time". Again, she is obviously not literally going back to December because we cannot time travel. She is saying that she thinks of that time which was in December when she decided to leave him. Following that she sings, "then the cold came, the dark days when fear crept into my mind". Fear did not actually creep into her mind, she means that the feeling of fear came over her, and that they were dark days because of that fear. Lastly there is a line in the song where Taylor sings "So if the chain is on your door, I understand". There is not actually a chain on any door that Taylor is trying to get in to. She is saying that if it is absolutely impossible for him to forgive her and come back and give her a second chance, she doesn't blame him, she would understand. She knows how much she hurt him, but she feels very sorry and hopes that he hasn't locked her out of his life forever.

Lies by Martha Collins

In the poem "Lies" by Martha Collins she uses a play on words. She uses the words lie and lay in many different ways. I had to read the poem many times before I got a sense of what she could be meaning. First I would like to examine what she means when she is using the word "lie". She uses it in a couple of different ways. First she uses it as an action, to lie, to not tell the truth. She questions what a lie really is, or what it means when someone lies. She also uses it as a form of laying down during intimate moments. The majority of her use of this word though I believe is focused on what lying is, and what it means to be dishonest. I think that she talks about omission as a form of lying or being dishonest. She questions it more than makes a statement about it. She is basically wondering if omission is a form of lying, or maybe is it more of a lie if you say something but you do not know for sure that you saw it. After reading this poem several times I was able to come to the conclusion that she is questioning what the best way to handle some situations are and in the end she knows that to say something, even if you think that you could be wrong, it is better to say it than to not say anything at all. I know this because of the last line in the poem where Collins writes, "if we must lie, let's not lie around.". I can honestly say that these poems, while they take more time to understand, really make me appreciate the English language and the ability to play on words.

stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone

I am choosing the poem "Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone" by W.H. Auden. The speaker in this poem is a female. It could be a male but I am interpreting it as a female. I think the speaker is a female because of line 6 where the speaker says "He Is Dead". Reading the poem I get the feeling that the speaker is the partner of a man who has died, someone she loved dearly. She seems to speaking to a higher power. It is as if she is crying out, to anyone who can hear her. It is not one specific person or thing she is crying to, it is everything, everyone who can hear. She mentions not wanting to hear things that she used to such as a dog barking or a piano playing. She wants for time to not exist, for phones to not work. She wishes the sun and the moon and all of the stars away. There is no more good that can come from any of them, she says. She is desperate, she is hurting. She hurts so bad that nothing else matters anymore. She wants for the world that she lived in with him to not exist anymore because nothing in it matters if he is not there with her. She is so sad. The poem doesn't say anything to orient us to a specific place or time in which the speaker is. I imagine it to be shortly after the news of her husbands death. I imagine the situation to be a wife who just wants to get the funeral over with, because nothing matters. The tone is that of solemnity.

"Home Burial"

There are two speakers in this poem, and you do not learn that they are involved until line 35. They have lost a child, who is buried on a hillside. The man speaking knows how burdened the woman speaker is. He just does not know how to talk to her about it. He begs for her to tell him what he can say, to teach him how he can speak to her, to help ease her mind. She does not want to talk about it. She is someone who carries her grief in silence, not talking about it, just holding it all in. He is the opposite, he wants to talk about the loss, to express their feelings and to learn how to help each other through a difficult time. He feels hurt that she won't let him in, and he feels that she is not honoring their child's memory by behaving the way that she is. She takes offense to what he says to her, taking it as criticism rather than an expression of his own feelings. She thinks that he is cold, she doesn't understand how he can talk about it, how he can function. You come to find that the man is someone who is trying to move on with his life, do what he has to do in order to carry on, maybe that means suppressing some of his own feelings, because why dwell on what you cannot change? She does not see it this way, she can't stand the way he talks about ordinary things while in the face of such a tragedy. She can't be around him because of it. I don't feel like one attitude is portrayed as "better" than the other. I think this is more of a story of how a couple is struggling to make it work in the midst of tragedy. He doesn't understand why she is grieving the way that she is, or how to talk to her about it. This is made apparent in lines 45-47 when he is telling her he doesn't know what to say. He is trying to talk her in to staying home with him, to work it out, in lines 56-59. She finally explodes, and tells him how she was disgusted to see that he was physically able to dig his own child's grave in lines 73-78. I know that she is in disbelief that he can carry on with every day conversation because she remembers what he said, so vividly, when he came inside from digging the grave in lines 92-93.

"A Certain Lady"

The speaker in the poem seems to be talking to a man that she loves. This man is also very selfish. He talks about himself a lot, which makes him seem very egotistical, the type of man that loves the fact that she will hang on his every word that he speaks. All of these things make me dislike him. I dislike that he brags about his encounters with women. He seems to only speak of himself and his adventures and everything that is good in his life, while ignoring the feelings of the speaker. You only discover the unhappiness of the speaker when you have gotten through most of the poem, about lines 11-12 is when it begins to become obvious. Reading the first parts of the poem, in my head I heard a voice speaking that sounds like a woman in love. I would express disgust towards the man being spoken to. I envision the speaker using a tone of sadness in the last two lines. The speaker seems like a woman who is confused, and hurt, and scared to tell the truth about how she feels. The most crucial parts to the poem are in the beginning when you can tell that the speaker daydreams about the man that she is speaking to, and then in line 9 when she states that she is aware of what he thinks of her. In lines 11-12 she says that he will never know all the straining things within her heart, which makes it obvious that he doesn't pay attention to her at all, he is just interested in being adored. The last two lines of the poem are also crucial as the speaker says that he will never know what goes on while he is away, meaning that he will never change, he will never ask her about herself, he is not interested at all in knowing about her life.