The Jazz Age The 1920s were the beginning of the Jazz Age, when musicians were experimenting with the earliest forms of jazz music. The sound came with the blacks migrating from New Orleans and mixed with the already established ragtime style. In ‘‘Jazz Fantasia,’’ Sandburg praises musicians of 1920, who had just begun to play…
Tag: The United States of America
Jazz Fantasia: Summary
Line 1 “Jazz Fantasia’’ begins with the drums, the instrument most critical to any jazz musical performance. The drums lead the music by their steady rhythmic beat. They set the tone and mood: the cadence of a dance or shuffle. The rhythm of the first part of the fantasia starts out a steady andante (moderate)…
Elena by Pat Mora: Analysis
Pat Mora’s poem ‘‘Elena’’ is a work in which the narrator expresses her sense of isolation from her children. Elena pinpoints language as the source of this growing divide, faulting her Spanish as insufficient, and demonstrating the problems in understanding that the English language generates in her household. Her children speak English well; she does…
Elena by Pat Mora: Themes
Language and Languages Mora’s poem ‘‘Elena’’ is concerned with the narrator’s native language of Spanish and the English language of her adoptive country, the United States. For Elena, these two languages are symbolic of the conflict between the familiarity of her native land and the challenges posed by relocating to a new country. The Spanish…
Elena by Pat Mora: Poem Summary
Lines 1–7 Mora’s poem ‘‘Elena’’ does not follow any patterns in terms of formal structure and is not divided 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). There are, however, lines that are linked in terms…
Classic Ballroom Dances: Analysis
‘‘Classic Ballroom Dances’’ consists of four four-line unrhymed stanzas. The poem has no strict metrical form. It consists of a single incomplete sentence, using semicolons to link together a series of images that, together, form a gloss (an interlinear explanation, or a description inside the poem’s lines) on the poem’s title. The title itself is…
The Wives of the Dead – Analysis
Although “The Wives of the Dead” is a story about events surrounding two widows in early eighteenth century colonial America, it is the narrator who sets the tone of the story and filters information in such a way as to shape the reader’s understanding of events. The narrator is not Hawthorne but a persona created…
The Wives of the Dead – Setting
Eighteenth-Century Newspapers Hawthorne sets his story in the early eighteenth century in Massachusetts’ Bay Province, and his two principle characters, Margaret and Mary, learn of their husbands’ fate through men who visit them at their home. As one can imagine, news traveled slowly more than three hundred and fifty years ago. British censors kept a…
The Wives of the Dead – Imagery – Literary Devices
Romance “The Wives of the Dead” is an American romance. The term “romance” emerged during the Middle Ages and often referred to stories with farfetched plots and exotic settings, involving knights and their quests, and chivalric behavior. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the term became synonymous with stories emphasizing emotion and subjective experience. Classical…
The Wives of the Dead – Central Ideas – Themes
Loss Hawthorne’s story illustrates how a person’s response to death and loss reveals true character. Both women mourn the loss of their husbands. However, Mary’s “mild, quiet, yet not feeble character” and her faith enable her to endure the emotional torment of her husband’s death with more equanimity than Margaret. She prepares a meal and…