Lines 1–5 In the first lines of ‘‘Shoulders,’’ Nye gives the reader a focal point: a father carrying his sleeping son on his shoulder in the rain. He looks both ways and carefully crosses the street. The reader immediately knows he is a gentle and careful father, protective of his son. He is aware of…
Author: JL Admin
A collection of high-quality academic essays.
On My First Son by Ben Jonson – Analysis
David Riggs, in his fine biography of the playwright and poet Ben Jonson, Ben Jonson: A Life (1989) writes, ‘‘By the time of [Jonson’s] death . . . he had become the most celebrated poet of his age, a man who outshone even Shakespeare and Donne in the eyes of his contemporaries.’’ Jonson’s popularity in…
On My First Son – Poetic Devices – Rhyme Scheme
Epigram ‘‘On My First Son’’ is included in Jonson’s 1616 collection Epigrams, and is a good example of the genre of epigrams. The word ‘‘epigram’’ comes from two Greek words that mean ‘‘to write on’’ or ‘‘to inscribe.’’ In the Classical world of Greece and Rome, an epigram was literally an inscription, often serving as…
On My First Son by Ben Jonson: Themes
Grief In ‘‘On My First Son,’’ Jonson provides a glimpse into deep, fatherly grief over the loss of his first child, Benjamin, who died from the plague on his seventh birthday. Through simple, straightforward language, Jonson expresses this grief while, at the same time, attempting to assuage it. In the first two lines of the…
On My First Son by Ben Jonson: Summary
‘‘On My First Son’’ is a poem of twelve lines, written in response to the death of Jonson’s first son, Benjamin, a victim of plague. The poem is written in couplets, with the following rhyme scheme: aabbccddeeff. The poem is also written in regular iambic pentameter. Iambic simply means that an unaccented syllable is followed…
The Old Stoic by Emily Bronte: Analysis
The main unanswered question about Bronte¨’s ‘‘The Old Stoic’’ is how it is to be understood in relationship to Gondal, the fantasy realm created by Emily and her sister Anne. The problem concerns all of her poetry, the bulk of which comes from two manuscript notebooks in which she made fair copies in 1844 of…
The Old Stoic by Emily Bronte: Themes
Salvation As positively as Stoicism was viewed by the educated middle class of nineteenth century Britain, that culture was nevertheless a deeply Christian one, and it was quite usual for Christian ideas to insinuate themselves into Victorian endorsements of the ancient philosophy. Bronte¨ does an excellent job of avoiding this temptation, but she moves in…
The Old Stoic: Summary
In three stanzas, Bronte¨’s ‘‘The Old Stoic,’’ also known by its first line, ‘‘Riches I hold in light esteem,’’ briefly invokes several commonplaces about Stoicism (a form of Greek philosophy popular in the Hellenistic and Roman eras), appeals for the grace of Stoic liberty, and seeks to find a type of salvation within Stoicism. The…
Mushrooms by Sylvia Plath – Analysis
A birth myth or birth tale is a story about the often miraculous birth and infancy of a hero or, in some cases, an entire race of people or a nation. In the case of a hero, the baby is deprived of his true parents and heritage and is cast by fate into a different…
Mushrooms by Sylvia Plath – Feminist & Civil Rights Movements
The Women’s Rights Movement Plath wrote ‘‘Mushrooms’’ in post-World War II England. During the war, both in England and the United States, many men of working age went away to fight in the war and women were left to run businesses and work in industry. Furthermore, many men died in combat, so women were needed…