Jotted Lines

A Collection Of Essays

Menu
  • Literature
  • Media Studies
  • History
  • Management
  • Philosophy
  • Economics
  • Gender Studies
  • Psychology
  • Law
Menu

Tag: The United States of America

Upon the Burning of Our House – Analysis

Posted on April 22, 2020April 22, 2020 by JL Admin

Bradstreet’s ‘‘Upon the Burning of Our House, July 10th, 1666’’ swings like a pendulum between Bradstreet’s Puritan beliefs and her deep emotional turmoil regarding the loss of her home. While it is tempting to try to assess whether or not Bradstreet’s sorrow is successfully mitigated or addressed by her faith, such an exercise would not…

Upon the Burning of Our House – Tone – Rhyme Scheme – Literary Devices

Posted on April 22, 2020April 22, 2020 by JL Admin

Lyric Poetry  ‘‘Upon the Burning of Our House’’ is considered a lyric poem. A lyric poem is one in which the poet explores personal feelings and thoughts rather than telling a story. Typically short in length, lyric poems do not necessarily adhere to any formal structure. Modern lyric poems may be written in unmetered, unrhymed…

Upon the Burning of Our House: Themes

Posted on April 21, 2020April 21, 2020 by JL Admin

Loss  Bradstreet’s ‘‘Upon the Burning of Our House’’ is concerned primarily with the poet’s great sense of loss, along with her attempt to mediate this pain through her faith in God. Throughout the middle third of the poem, Bradstreet offers an emotional itemization of her material losses and suggests the psychological toll such losses have…

Upon the Burning of Our House: Summary

Posted on April 21, 2020April 21, 2020 by JL Admin

Lines 1–6  Bradstreet’s ‘‘Upon the Burning of Our House, July 10th, 1666’’ is not formally broken into stanzas. (A stanza is a unit of poetry, or a grouping of lines that divides the poem in the same way that a paragraph divides prose. Bradstreet’s poem appears on the page as a fifty-four-line poem without any…

Sympathy by Paul Lawrence Dunbar: Analysis

Posted on April 19, 2020April 19, 2020 by JL Admin

Dunbar was often called the Negro Poet Laureate at the beginning of the twentieth century, but by the 1950s he was seen as an embarrassment to many readers because his dialect poems called up plantation stereotypes of African Americans. In his day, white readers embraced his dialect poems (‘‘The Party,’’‘‘When Malindy Sings’’) as the authentic…

Sympathy by Paul Lawrence Dunbar – Themes

Posted on April 18, 2020April 18, 2020 by JL Admin

Racism  The central metaphor of the caged bird in ‘‘Sympathy,’’ with the bird forced to perform within confinement, could be taken as suggesting the slavery African Americans endured in the United States for two and a half centuries. Though Dunbar lived after the emancipation, the legacy of slavery continued through various social, legal, and psychological…

Sympathy by Paul Lawrence Dunbar – Summary – Meaning

Posted on April 18, 2020April 18, 2020 by JL Admin

Stanza 1  LINES 1–3  ‘‘Sympathy’’ is a lyric in iambic tetrameter, seven line stanzas of four metric feet per line. The last line of each stanza is shorter, with three feet. The first line establishes the poem’s controlling metaphor of the caged bird looking at a spring day, which mirrors the speaker’s situation. The speaker…

Shoulders by Noami Shihab Nye – Analysis

Posted on April 17, 2020April 17, 2020 by JL Admin

In addition to being a poet, Nye is a songwriter and singer. In her poem ‘‘Shoulders,’’ Nye employs several musical devices to develop the tone and message of her words.  Upon a first read, Nye’s poem seems to be very simple—little more than a thought jotted down on paper. But even the simplest poems are…

Shoulders by Noami Shihab Nye – Symbolism – Poetic Devices

Posted on April 17, 2020April 17, 2020 by JL Admin

Symbolism  Nye’s poem is a word picture of one very brief moment in time: A father carries his son across a street to safety. But everything in that slice of life is representative or symbolic of something bigger. The father is Everyman (the representative of humankind in medieval morality plays). He is every person in…

Shoulders by Noami Shihab Nye – Themes

Posted on April 16, 2020April 16, 2020 by JL Admin

Universal Love  Much of Nye’s poetry is about humanitarianism and people caring for one another. ‘‘Shoulders’’ is no exception. A father carries his son across the street. He looks both ways, twice. He is very careful to get his boy safely to the other side. In lines 13–16, Nye says that people must be willing…

Posts navigation

  • Previous
  • 1
  • …
  • 31
  • 32
  • 33
  • 34
  • 35
  • 36
  • 37
  • …
  • 58
  • Next
©2025 Jotted Lines | Built using WordPress and Responsive Blogily theme by Superb