Anorexia nervosa is a complex disorder with causes that are not completely understood. But what is well documented is the effect on the body that results from the cycle of self-starvation and purging food, such as sallow skin, brittle bones, loss of hair, tooth decay, and, in some cases, heart failure. Females are most susceptible…
Tag: Ireland
Anorexic by Eavan Boland – Poem Themes
Self-Alienation Anorexia nervosa is a disorder that occurs more often than most people think, yet it is odd in that it is self-inflicted. The “normal” human being would abhor the idea of giving himself or herself cancer, AIDS, or any other serious disease, but many of those same humans withhold proper nutrition from their own…
Anorexic by Eavan Boland – Poem Summary
Line 1 The first line of “Anorexic” shocks the reader with its bluntness and sets the tone for the entire poem. The word “heretic,” meaning something contrary to accepted beliefs, implies a religious theme, since it usually refers to something or someone that opposes the doctrines of Christianity. This subject will return later in the…
Follower by Seamus Heaney – Analysis
Heaney’s ‘‘Follower’’ laments the loss of contact with a tradition of family, of place, and of long ages past that nevertheless sits beneath and sustains his poetical work. The boundary between the traditional way of life that has shaped human culture and modernity was drawn for the educated classes of Europe toward the end of…
Follower by Seamus Heaney – Setting
Heaney’s ‘‘Follower’’ concerns the transition from a traditional way of life to a new way of life embedded in modernity. For Western civilization as a whole, this process began during the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution in the late eighteenth century. For Heaney’s family and for the poet himself, this change occurred in the course…
Follower by Seamus Heaney – Structure – Literary Devices
Metrical Effects Traditionally, poetry in English is marked by a special cadence or rhythm of the language used known as meter. For this purpose every syllable is said to be either stressed or unstressed. The meter consists of the repetition of metrical units known as feet: an iamb, for instance, is a foot consisting of…
Follower by Seamus Heaney – Themes
Tradition Much of Heaney’s work is devoted to what, for want of a better word, may be called tradition. Tradition is the set of customs that are inherited by a culture and give it its identity. In ‘‘Follower,’’ Heaney makes the particular craft of farming—his father’s excellence at its tasks, as well as the close…
Follower by Seamus Heaney – Summary
‘‘Follower’’ consists of six four-line stanzas, or quatrains. Each stanza follows an abab rhyme scheme, meaning the first and third line of each stanza rhyme, as do the second and fourth. No particular metrical scheme is followed, and the length of the lines is determined by the ideas they contain and by grammatical breaks. Stanza…
Dante and the Lobster: Analysis
In a story with Dante in the title and in which the protagonist bears a name taken from Dante, readers expect allusions to the greatest of medieval poets. In “Dante and the Lobster,” the work that in many ways commences Beckett’s career as a writer, Beckett provides these allusions in significant numbers. However, it is…
Dante and the Lobster: Setting
Samuel Beckett wrote this story in the early 1930s, at the very start of his writing career. Those years were a tumultuous time in Beckett’s life (he was aimless and dissatisfied and did not settle down until he moved to Paris permanently in 1937), but it was a traumatic time in Europe. The Treaty of…