A collection of thoughts

Margaret Atwood has quickly become my favorite author in a way that I've never expressed toward an author before. She captures my beliefs toward the world in each one of her works. She puts a voice to my thoughts in a beautifully tragic way. The best authors are relatable with something meaningful hidden inside themselves. Margaret Atwood stands for women and works to uplift them through the telling of their true existence. A woman does not live through luxury and fragility, but must endure the hardships that men cast aside. They must pick up the pieces that are considered to be "beneath" men, meaning most of the struggles of life. 

As shown in her work The Blind Assassin, the Chase sisters live lives of extreme wealth and privilege. They are mocked by their neighbors for their selfishness and ego, despite being sheltered children.   As they grow, their family name holds less and less power and their financial situation quickly becomes unstable. Laura is too young to be burdened by the struggles of adults, so the responsibility falls on Iris. She must essentially sell herself away to her father's friend in order to keep her own family business thriving and provide for her family. 

Iris must be happy and beautiful while missing the death of her father, losing touch with her sister and abandoning the woman that raised her. Through all of this, her husband ignores, belittles and torments her. She is presented in the tabloids to have a life with no room for imperfection, but in reality, this situation is a prison, not her escape. Throughout the novel, with the use of a frame story, Iris tells of how happy she is that her husband died young and she was capable of escaping this situation. Before the reader has met Richard, Iris has told us that he is not a man that she wanted in her life and she was willing to sacrifice to rid herself of him.

It matters how people feel in the situation that they are in. It matters how women feel when all of their actions are dictated for them. As a society, we often overlook these decisions and look at the overall standings. In the middle of the #MeToo movement, this novel is eye-opening. A life spent with everything likely came from years of suffering from others' demanding opinions and decisions. We rarely choose a life for ourselves. When others have everything it is likely because they have nothing keeping them together. When we project outwards, how are we supposed to care for what's inside?

Lazy River Writing Prompt Response

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/12/18/the-lazy-river

Prompt: Analyze “The Lazy River” and how Zadie Smith uses the metaphor of a lazy river to create the mood of the short story.

The concept of a lazy river is quite interesting. It's a bunch of people going around and around in water. Most people use floaties in order to just lay on the water and relax. You are simply and literally going with the flow. You don't play games or swim around with your friends, it's family friendly and there's no real effort into getting into this circular water path. There is a constant current that isn't too strong, but it is just enough to keep you moving at a constant speed. Zadie Smith compares real world attitudes and life to a lazy river. In order to set up for the rest of “The Lazy River” she opens the story by explaining how we as human beings relate to those who vacation to places and enjoy a lazy river.
The beginning of this story is written in the second person to show the reader that they too are a part of the story and they can place themselves in the shoes of the characters. She says that as a human being just try to float along and rarely take risks in order to better themselves or make life challenge. The story starts off with “We’re submerged, all of us. You, me, the children, our friends, their children, everybody else. Sometimes we get out: for lunch, to read or to tan, never for very long. Then we all climb back into the metaphor” which creates the negative tone about how we deal with the same things without much challenge or new experience because the lazy river is our place of comfort. As Zadie Smith tells a story about how a family goes on vacation she goes into this metaphor. During vacation it is all about new experiences and excitement. By the family being in their phones constantly, they aren't enjoying new experiences because they stuck in what they are always stuck in.
Zadie Smith wants the reader to feel despair and shame as they read this story. The adults in the story use their phones to entertain them when they are no longer in the river. These families are on vacation, a time in which people get away from day to day life and enjoy the new surroundings. Zadie Smith is criticizing social media and electronic devices. When the two girls are taking photos Smith writes “this business of photographs is a form of labor that fills each day to its limit, just as the Lazy River fills ours. It is an accounting of life that takes as long as life itself” criticizing the point of taking photos because it is just another way of filling and wasting our time. As I read this I started to think about how photos are useless. We take time in the present to hopefully recreate the memories for the future when we could just enjoy the feeling in the moment because all that really matters is the moment we are in. The point of life is to enjoy new things and not to get stuck in this “lazy river” called life because that's when you end up at the end regretting everything.

7 AP Style M/C Questions

Meet the PresidentBy Zadie Smith

“What you got there, then?”
The boy didn’t hear the question. He stood at the end of a ruined pier, believing himself quite alone. But now he registered the presence at his back, and turned.
“What you got there?”
A very old person, a woman, stood before him, gripping the narrow shoulder of a girl child. Both of them local, typically stunted, dim: they stared up at him stupidly. The boy turned again to the sea. All week long he had been hoping for a clear day to try out the new technology—not new to the world, but new to the boy—and now at last here was a break in the rain. Gray sky met gray sea. Not ideal, but sufficient. Ideally he would be standing on a cairn in Scotland or some other tropical spot, experiencing backlit clarity. Ideally he would be—
“Is it one of them what you see through?”
A hand, lousy with blue veins, reached out for the light encircling the boy’s head, as if it were a substantial thing, to be grasped like the handle of a mug.
“Ooh, look at the green, Aggie. That shows you it’s on.”
The boy was ready to play. He touched the node on his finger to the node at his temple, raising the volume.
“Course, he’d have to be somebody, Aggs, cos they don’t give ’em to nobody”—the boy felt the shocking touch of a hand on his own flesh. “Are you somebody, then?”
She had shuffled around until she stood square in front of him, unavoidable. Hair as white as paper. A long, shapeless black dress, made of some kind of cloth, and what appeared to be a pair of actual glasses. Forty-nine years old, type O, a likelihood of ovarian cancer, some ancient debt infraction—nothing more. A blank, more or less. Same went for the girl: never left the country, eighty-five-per-cent chance of macular degeneration, an uncle on the database, long ago located, eliminated. She would be nine in two days. Melinda Durham and Agatha Hanwell. They shared no more DNA than strangers.
“Can you see us?” The old woman let go of her charge and waved her hands wildly. The tips of her fingers barely reached the top of the boy’s head. “Are we in it? What are we?”
The boy, unused to proximity, took a single step forward. Farther he could not go. Beyond was the ocean; above, a mess of weather, clouds closing in on blue wherever blue tried to assert itself. A dozen or so craft darted up and down, diving low like seabirds after a fish, and no bigger than seabirds, skimming the dirty foam, then returning to the heavens, directed by unseen hands. On his first day here the boy had trailed his father on an inspection tour to meet those hands: intent young men at their monitors, over whose shoulders the boy’s father leaned, as he sometimes leaned over the boy to insure he ate breakfast.
“What d’you call one of them there?”
The boy tucked his shirt in all round: “AG 12.”
The old woman snorted as a mark of satisfaction, but did not leave.
He tried looking the females directly in their dull brown eyes. It was what his mother would have done, a kindly woman with a great mass of waist-length flame-colored hair, famed for her patience with locals. But his mother was long dead, he had never known her, he was losing what little light the day afforded. He blinked twice, said, “Hand to hand.” Then, having a change of heart: “Weaponry.” He looked down at his torso, to which he now attached a quantity of guns.
“You carry on, lad,” the old woman said. “We won’t get in your way. He can see it all, duck,” she told the girl, who paid her no mind. “Got something in his hands—or thinks he does.”
She took a packet of tobacco from a deep pocket in the front of her garment and began to roll a cigarette, using the girl as a shield from the wind.
“Them clouds, dark as bulls. Racing, racing. They always win.” To illustrate, she tried turning Aggie’s eyes to the sky, lifting the child’s chin with a finger, but the girl would only gawk stubbornly at the woman’s elbow. “They’ll dump on us before we even get there. If you didn’t have to, I wouldn’t go, Aggie, no chance, not in this. It’s for you I do it. I’ve been wet and wet and wet. All my life. And I bet he’s looking at blazing suns and people in their what-have-yous and all-togethers! Int yer? Course you are! And who’d blame you?” She laughed so loud the boy heard her. And then the child—who did not laugh, whose pale face, with its triangle chin and enormous, fair-lashed eyes, seemed capable only of astonishment—pulled at his actual leg, forcing him to mute for a moment and listen to her question.
“Well, I’m Bill Peek,” he replied, and felt very silly, like somebody in an old movie.

1. What is the theme of this passage?
• A. Nationalism
• B. Self Discipline
• C. Friendship
• D. Motivation
2. What is the tone?
• A. Hopelessness
• B. Benevolent
• C. Nostalgic
• D. Bitter
3. What does the setting symbolize?
• A. Imagination
• B. Creativity
• C. Death
• D. Mental Health
4. What literary device is being used in the line "A hand, lousy with blue veins, reached out for the light encircling the boy’s head, as if it were a substantial thing, to be grasped like the handle of a mug?"
• A. Imagery
• B. Simile
• C. Metaphor
• D. Illusion
5. What is the purpose of the title?
• A. Explain what is happening in the passage
• B. Name the Characters in the passage
• C. Separate the experiences of the narrator and the reader
• D. Develop tone
6. The phrase "Them clouds, dark as bulls. Racing, racing. They always win." (line 47) means:
• A. The Storm
• B. Hopelessness
• C. Reality
• D.Negativity
7. What is the setting of this passage?
• A. A meeting between adults
• B. A virtual world
• C. A child's imagination
• D. The Oval Office

Knowing Zadie Smith

Analyzing and criticizing someone's work is a strangely intimate action. It requires the reader to understand the workings of another person's mind. They must understand how a stranger's mind came to produce the artwork that they did. It's necessary to understand the author's experiences and circumstance.  The same words or sentences can have vastly different meanings depending on who wrote them and the context of their life. Understanding Zadie Smith and her experience through life is crucial to being able to understand her work and ideas. With such a unique background, this comes with more difficulty than a more average writer. 

Zadie Smith was born in London, but her parents were American and Jamacain. On October 25, 1975, Smith was born to two immigrants as Sadie. Later this was changed to "Zadie" when she was 14. Her parents divorced when she was young and remarried. Her siblings and she grew up surrounded by the arts. Her two brothers became popular rap artists, while she wanted to pursue journalism. 

She was given the oppurtunity to study English literature at Cambridge. She was noticed for her short stories published in The Mays Anthology. By twenty-one, Zadie was given a six-figure advance for two books she was writing while continuing her studies in Cambridge. Critics took notice of this prodigy and were met with amazing results. On this advance, she published White Teeth in 2000, winning numerous awards and sold over a million copies. She was an instant success and impressed critics and audiences. At such a young age she was able to get two books published and popularized to become wildly successful. 

Smith remains constantly critical of her work. One of the main complaints about her own books is that she does not stray from the ordinary third person, past tense that is so common in writing. Her most recent novel NW uses present tense for a portion of the novel. The end consists of Smith's attempts to manipulate the language. She modifies the font for different media and changes the placement of words to represents the objects she is writing about. The chapters are shortened to only a few words in places. She tries to break from the traditional style of writing which came with a list of rules that were considered unbreakable. Her books become visual pieces of art as well as the literary masterpiece she has produced.

Zadie Smith has lived a less than average lifestyle. Being the child of divorced immigrants puts the world in a unique perspective. Her early success and the amount of it creates a divide between her and her peers. Her background is not relatable, but gives her reader's insight into who she is and how she views the world around her. Her stories gain perspective and insight. She has built an amazing life with the talents and experiences she was given. The details of her path to success are almost more important than her present situation. These things bring light to her ideas and give even more meaning to her work.

Coming Together

After finishing my most recent novel last week, I began Blind Assasin by Margaret Atwood over the weekend. I have anticipated this novel all year. Since reading the Handmaid's Tale I have read Ms. Atwood's poetry and placed many of her novels on my "to-read" list. With the community reads event quickly approaching, I moved this novel to the beginning of my list and immersed myself in the beautiful literature that Margaret Atwood produces.

The beginning of the book begins with a suicide. It opened with the main character experiencing the death of her sister, Laura. There was little thought from the character about losing a loved one or what her sister's intentions were in this suspicious scenario. Instead, both the character's thoughts and Atwood's selection of detail revolve around the unnamed main character's reputation and suspicions. The only information the reader is given about this character is her ties to her deceased sister. Despite this being our only link to the character, they purposely avoid the subject, focusing on the character's extravagant lifestyle. She references her husband to warn him to write a "statement of grief". 

Margaret Atwood does something unique with the format of her writing. The book opens with a narrative focused on this unnamed character. In the second chapter, the form changes to that of a  newspaper. It is a report on Laura's death, referencing her famous sister. The report itself focuses on Laura's sister without using her name. The main character is referred to as "Mrs. Richard E Griffen", using her husband's name instead of giving her a name. This character overwhelmingly holds the attention of the reader, but Atwood does everything in her power to keep the reader from knowing the identity of the focus of her novel.

The chapter following this introduces the "blind assassin". The chapter is labeled "The Blind Assassin: The hard-boiled egg. It is the dramatic telling of a story within a story that takes place outside of our galaxy. There is a battle for land that is claimed to be sacred by five different tribes. Each claims the land that an ancient battle took place and killed all that were in it. There is a pile of stones, but no lasting memory of what took place or what was before. No tribe knows the origin of the stones or who won the war, but each takes responsibility for holding it sacred and continuing traditions to honor who died there. The story continues in other forms of writing from there, each from different viewpoints and forms of media.

This story telling is a way of not revealing details too quickly. The reader becomes immersed in the feelings of a story and the author is able to withhold detail without boring the reader. The connections are difficult to find, but become clearer as the story continues. The main character is dealing with grief and finding solace inside herself to cope. She cannot focus on the death of her sister or how to grieve because she is forced to focus on her appearance and hide her true feelings. Even the reader is left in the dark of her own identity.

Gatsby: A Character Study

Jay Gatsby in The Great Gatsby is a man that carries mystery and poise as he moves from one asdaventure to the next. He is above the ordinary, but not quite unreachable. Rumors circle about him and no one is quite sure of his standing in relation to the rest of the world. He is respected and praised for the man he has built himself to be, but there is no way to pin the work that he has done as no one has a clear picture of the beginning. Gatsby presents himself as a man of prestige and value, but has built this life simply to impress a woman who has already lived a fulfilled life without him.
Gatsby is a rich, educated man that spends his days throwing lavish parties and having more guests than he has the oppurtunity to meet. He presents his accomplishments to hundreds of strangers every night on the offchance that one particualr woman will venture out of her small. comfortable corner of the world to come see him, a man she has forgotten existed. Gatsby displays his success for the world rather than focusing on bettering himself and propelling himself forward.
Gatsby is stunted by his love for Daisy. He uses the feelings he has created for her as an excuse to not move forward in life. He ignores advances from women at his parties and denies oppurtunities to keep himself safe in order to save himself for Daisy. He wants to stay near her and be available when she inevitabley calls upon him.This thinking grounds Gatsby directly where he is, keeping him from doing the things that will propell him into his future.
 This stagnant behavior adds to the rumors surrounding Gatsby's name. The question of why Gatsby chose to stay in West Egg and continue to live in this area even once he has outgrown his surrounding breeds rumors and lies about Gatsby's intentions. There must be something grounding him to this specific shore and it is impossible to tell what without the use of fiction.
Gatsby has made a man out of himself without the help of others. He abandons his parents in an act of rebellion and refuses to return home to ask for favors. He becomes a decorated soldier without taking orders from a general and builds a career from nothing but the clothes on his back. He becomes a wealthy man with money to give and spend, but all of this success leaves Gatsby depressed and lonely as he is still chasing and brooding in his biggest failure, the loss of the woman he fell in love with. All of his accomplishments amount to nothing when placed next to his true desires in life, the affection of the woman he gave himself to and devoted his life to. She has married a man she approves of and loves and moved from Gatsby to pursue a life of comfort, while Gatsby lives lavishly and lonely without Daisy to accompany him.
The best moments of Gatsby's life are spent ruining Daisy's. He disrupts her family, including the small child she has birthed and raised. He attempts to displace her from the comfortable lifestyle she has always known to move her into his life and home. He expects her to drop everything to give herself to him. Daisy has built her own life based around Tom and the family she wanted to create with him. Her instability is what appeals to Gatsby. The act of moving her from everything she has known excites Gatsby and propels his pursuit in her. Daisy must lose everything in order to grant Gatsby happiness.

A Burden

New Year 

By Rachel Coye

Listen to the after-work shovels and snow brushes
on my quiet winter street. Nasal congestion. Loose boots.
The whole country is outraged and outspoken and you should be too

because if you’re not, then you’re not doing your part.
People are having a hard time. At work, patients cry
almost every day. I make sure they have tissues;

I get them a glass of water. I say, That’s terrible or That’s hard.
It is hard to be at the hospital, to live in a room that’s not yours
and have people coming to check your blood pressure all the time.

You get bad news, you have medical bills, no sleep. Your pain
exists on a scale from 0 to 10. When I saw the sac on the ultrasound screen,
I whispered, There’s nothing in there. A tiny hollow space. I have a bad habit

of saying I’m sorry when I mean to say something else and when
I cried in front of the nurse I said, I’m sorry, but
I meant to say something that I still don’t have words for.

It’s a soft pain, looking at a toilet full of blood, taking Tylenol
and calling in to work for a personal day. It’s not a special pain,
but I’ve just never felt it before. Tomorrow, I will get up

and do all the things that I’ve been meaning to do. I will put a bra
on. The houses on this street were all built by a man who
died five years after finishing this one. He didn’t have a good reputation.

I am a homeowner, it’s part of the American Dream.
This is not the worst thing that’s ever happened. The nurse
put the Kleenex box in front of me and said, It sucks, it sucks.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Illness and disease break down our body and spirit. This sickness isolates us and creates an experience that almost negates the will to continue on. A disease acts as it should in dibilitating the weak and taking over thoughts, actions and function. (ADD MORE) The speaker in New Year by Rachel Coye finds strength to continue into the new year and overcome her illness by remembering her past and her patients
The first half of this poem deatils the speaker's involvement in other's life. It narrates the pain and hardships that her patients must endure from an outside perspective. It focuses on her response to their suffering or the narrative she must create between herself and her patients to understand what they are going through and make their suffering heard. She exists to comfort these people through their illnesses.
The fourth stanza includes a shift from the person helping others to the person requiring assistance. The narrative changes from "That's terrible" to being the person apologizing. The speaker changes from narrating the repetitiveness of a hospital to discussing the disbelief of a tumor growing inside her with little transition between the two. This highlights how large of a change this is to the speaker. Her entire life changes from the boring, repetition that accompanies a day job into a patient fighting for life and battling the end. This quick, almost nonexistant transition emphasizes just how impactful this event was on their life. The focus of the poem also shifts after this stanza to discussing the speaker's life living with the described disease as the patient rather than the carer.
The timeline in this poem is unclear. The speaker spends four stanzas discussing their life as a nurse, healing others and comforting their pain, then three speaking about her battle with this pain and by the end of the poem, we see the beginnings of a recovery. The speaker is growing stronger and setting goals to mark progress and success. This represents the speaker's lifetime. A large portion of it is spent in her career, making a difference in other's lives, until the unthinkable consumes their life. The focus shift represents just how much of the speaker's life is dedicated to battling this disease. The last glimpse into this character's life is spent positively hoping for positive change and healng.
The first stanzas about her patients give light to how much the speaker has given to the sick. She has dedicated her life to caring for them and comforting them through the worst moments in their life. Her patients translate into strength when she finally much face the same fate as these patients. She recognizes how many times they have been hurting and needed her and uses this as a jumping off point to pull herself out of the disease that is taking over. She uses her hospital experience to grow from her illness rather than be consumed by it.
The juxtaposition between the speaker's disease-ridden life and her average, worry-free one is jarring, but effective in allowing the reader to feel proud of the speaker's success. In a few short lines the speaker has grown from blood-stained toilets to being capable of dressing themselves in clothes they want to wear and living in the home they dreamed of inhabiting.
This poem is about overcoming adversity and the power of others in this struggle. It is difficult to survive in this world without the help from others. The speaker's experience in this field gives them the power to overcome their own disease and struggles. Understanding the pain that will come with their illness and knowing that it is surivable is enough to motivate them to want to continue and recover.

Nitpicking

A Fable

BY MATTHEW PRIOR

In Aesop’s tales an honest wretch we find,
Whose years and comforts equally declined;
He in two wives had two domestic ills,
For different age they had, and different wills;
One plucked his black hairs out, and one his gray,
The man for quietness did both obey,
Till all his parish saw his head quite bare,
And thought he wanted brains as well as hair.

The Moral

The parties, henpecked William, are thy wives,
The hairs they pluck are thy prerogatives;
Tories thy person hate, the Whigs thy power,
Though much thou yieldest, still they tug for more,
Till this poor man and thou alike are shown,
He without hair, and thou without a crown.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Prior hides his political views in a beautiful poem focused on conformity. This poem is broken into two sections, one metaphorical and one explaining and analyzing this metaphor, separated by two words, "The Moral". The contrast between the metaphorical and the literal appeals to many different types of people. There is a universality in this poem that includes all readers.  He was not writing for the rich, intelligent class or the poor, illiterate, but rather anyone that could understand even a line of this poem. It was designed to give a message and the expansion on this first stanza produces the desired effect.
The first stanza is a metaphorical response to the way the king has treated his thrown. The author believes that, like a man with two wives, the king is trying to please everyone while only diminishing his own ideals and thoughts. He gives up himself to appease the two people that he is devoted to. The idea of  "wives" implies that these people have power over the man. They are part of the decision-making process in anything that the character does, even his own characteristics. He is trying to please both of these two sides at his own expense. The wives feel as if this man is indebted to them, owing them pieces of himself to please them. In this fight for control, the man who is supposed to be bringing these two sides together ends with nothing.
In the second stanza, Prior does some of the work for his readers by providing an analysis of his own poem. He interprets the meaning and explains his own intentions. He reveals how separated the two parties of his government are and what it is doing to both his king and his country. These groups are taking the pieces of the government that they can get a hold of, each taking different pieces and ideas for their own. This creates a divide and leaves the king without the power he once had. The "hair" of the first stanza represents laws and shifts in power throughout the years. Prior compares it with "a crown" in the last line, but this is a metaphor for the king's power and control over his own country in the wake of these selfish parties.
The format of this poem produces an interesting viewpoint of politics in the 17th century. Prior's deliberate choice in writing the second stanza emphasizes the importance of this political issue to the author. He includes an explanation of his poetry in simple terms to reach as many people as possible. He wants the information contained within his poetry to mean something to those who may not be able to think metaphorically or process this information without the insight that the author provides. Prior wanted to reach the largest audience possible by making his work accessible to anyone who could read English. He separates these two stanza's with the words "The Moral" because the second stanza isn't simply a summary of the stanza before it, but a way of thinking. It is something a person can align themselves with, create ideas based on and build their own viewpoint off of. It is the "moral" because it is not a matter of opinion to prior, but a truth that, once accepted, will create a better, more well-rounded person. Prior believes this is the right way of thinking and accepts less than this opinion as an insult.

Remembrance of an End

A Complaint

BY WILLIAM WORDSWORTH

There is a change—and I am poor;
Your love hath been, nor long ago,
A fountain at my fond heart's door,
Whose only business was to flow;
And flow it did; not taking heed
Of its own bounty, or my need.

What happy moments did I count!
Blest was I then all bliss above
Now, for that consecrated fount
Of murmuring, sparkling, living love,
What have I? shall I dare to tell?
A comfortless and hidden well.

A well of love—it may be deep—
I trust it is,—and never dry:
What matter? if the waters sleep
In silence and obscurity.
—Such change, and at the very door
Of my fond heart, hath made me poor.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Upon first read of this poem, it is clear that the speaker must learn to live on a type of love they are not comfortable or familiar with. The "change" that is spoken of is the way the speaker receives love and affection from the person they care about. It has changed from a never-ending stream of reminders that what they are part of is real and mutual to a still, silent love that may not include this constant reassurance and stability that the speaker craves. The hardest part of love is when the emotion lingers after the relationship has ended. Love does not require action, but happiness can require demonstrative love. 

The first stanza discusses the puppy love that the speaker shared with the addressee not long ago. This attachment was filled with excitement and passion. The speaker reminisces the times when their connection was constant, "not taking heed/Of its own bounty, or my need".  Their relationship consisted of performative gestures, constantly giving to one another and receiving gratitude in return. There was no shortage of this kind of affection in the speaker's life. The speaker becomes accustomed to this lifestyle. A love that was in "flow" because, like a river, it did not stop coming. 

Like all other pieces of life, it did, however. The second stanza begins to change tense and the tone of the poem becomes melancholy and nostalgic. Halfway through this stanza, the tense changes from past to present. The reader is now exposed to the speaker's present reality. The speaker asks the question "what have I?" to convey that what was there before, isn't. The vivacious love that was described no longer exists the way that it used to. It cannot be described the same way. The author uses this change in tense to signify a change in the speaker's life. With this stanza comes an introduction to the harder part of love. 

It is the part that is not written about. Love still exists even when the relationship does not. The relationship between the speaker and their significant other has experienced change that is powerful enough to redefine the way the speaker discusses love. The flowing river no longer exists in this present, but is now a stagnant well. Their relationship still contains love, though it is not active love. The speaker says the well is "never dry", meaning it is possible for the speaker to recall their relationship and the fondness is still present in the speaker's life, but likely they have no way of reforming a bond that was lost. The core of the relationship is there, but the actions no longer match the amount of love or, in the analogy, water. They no longer act on this emotion, causing the lack of "flow" in this new stage of their relationship. The focus of their love has changed and morphed into "silence and obscurity". The speaker mourns the love they used to share and attempts to heal the deep, metaphorical wounds that were left behind.

In a period of poems about romance, this poem focuses on the loss that coincides with love. Loving deeply results in hurt as the last line points out "Such change, and at the very door/Of my fond heart, hath made me poor". This poem focuses on how difficult it can be to know love and watch it slowly disappear or fade. "The Complaint" that the poem highlights is the hardships that accompany love. Happiness dependent on another person is the fastest way to destroy yourself. 

Outsiders

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/01/29/the-boundary

The Boundary by Jhumpa Lahiri

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Relating to someone with a much different, more difficult past is hard to relate to, but there are mediums that bridge that gap. These stories, songs and emotion that travels between people is the easiest way to relate and learn from others. Jhumpa Lahiri's Italian story The Boundary is able to overcome this barrier and present to the reader the ideas we associate with home and how difficult they can be to settle with. The ever apparent contrast in Jhumpa Lahiri's The Boundary highlights the struggle that immigrants must endure after moving to an unfamiliar country. 

Lahiri presents to the reader a young narrator, assisting his father and family in caring for a vacation home owned by a faraway man of wealth. The narrator's own family lives in a small cottage behind the grand home. The narrator's family is an immigrant family that works to care for another home and his guests. They are presented as outsiders. The narrator remarks that "The owner lives abroad, but he’s not a foreigner like us. In the second paragraph, the narrator has already remarked a stark difference between themselves and the others in the story. They are the people that do not belong and they accept this fact. They have hidden to this secluded home in the desert to get away from the prejudices that come with this thought. 

The visiting family has invaded this space as many other have and claimed it as her own story to write. The mother of the guest family doesn't go out and celebrate the festivities with her family, but instead stays home and writes about the narrator and their family. The story ends with the narrator finding "shopping lists in the faint, small script that the mother used, on other sheets of paper, to write all about us" referencing the days she spent bathing in the sun scribbling away on her notepad. The narrator and their family have now become characters in a story that they were not allowed to tell themselves. Similar to how immigrants lives are written off in government and media, a woman with the money to afford vacations and a big family takes the right to write about a subject that isn't allowed to put in their own thoughts or feelings. She likely discusses the tranquility of the home or how happy those working are, but in reality, the narrator's family has suffered hardship and has come to this home planted in the middle of an empty desert to escape others' assumptions about them. This woman revokes the narrators right to tell their own story. They lose their voice in the telling of their own life.
The way that the family speaks about the landscape and the ambiance of the home is similar, but opposite, of how the narrator sees it. They each speak of the quiet, the lack of people, the empty desert. The visiting family uses words like "peaceful" and "relaxing", while the narrator wonders "what they know about the loneliness here. What do they know about the days, always the same, in our dilapidated cottage?...Would they like the harsh quiet that reigns here all winter?" It is the contrast of being an outsider. In this situation, however, the outsider is the person that calls this place home. The narrator is still treated as someone who does not belong here and is unwelcome. They are left with only the quiet and the desert when everything settles, compared to the pretty, expensive life that this family possesses.
These two families are the only people for miles and the focus of this story. Still, they are given significantly different circumstances that change their view of their surroundings. A relaxing getaway can be a prison depending on past experiences. When surrounded by hate and fear and being forced away from home, an empty desert can seem isolating and lonely. A child growing up with their only interaction coming from school and week-long visitors, it can be extremely hard to love home. This is a life that some are forced to live to escape hate and overcome bias.

A Snapshot

Harlem Shadows
By Claude McKay

I hear the halting footsteps of a lass
In Negro Harlem when the night lets fall
Its veil. I see the shapes of girls who pass
To bend and barter at desire's call.
Ah, little dark girls who in slippered feet
Go prowling through the night from street to street!

Through the long night until the silver break
Of day the little gray feet know no rest;
Through the lone night until the last snow-flake
Has dropped from heaven upon the earth's white breast,
The dusky, half-clad girls of tired feet
Are trudging, thinly shod, from street to street.

Ah, stern harsh world, that in the wretched way
Of poverty, dishonor and disgrace,
Has pushed the timid little feet of clay,
The sacred brown feet of my fallen race!
Ah, heart of me, the weary, weary feet
In Harlem wandering from street to street.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Claude McKay is able to take a picture of 1920's Harlem and present it to his reader's in his poem Harlem Shadows. He writes about what he watches in the dark nights of Harlem. McKay is able to show us in a three stanza poem the injustices that black people faced in his lifetime. They were forced to act in a way that was distasteful just to keep from drowning in the darkness of what is happening around them. They must play to "desire's call" or bend their bodies to appeal to men's lust to sustain themselves. McKay allows the speaker to sit and repeat what is happening before him to express his hurt that the children in Harlem are fighting to survive in ways that are not in line with the pride and faith in his people.
McKay emphasizes the fact that these girls he is seeing and writing about are children. He uses words like "timid" and "girls" to ensure the reader knows that the people he is speaking about are not old enough to be forced to care for themselves. They belong inside being taught and cared for by a parent or someone responsible enough to make decisions that will not be harmful. They wander instead, making decisions that may not be healthy and hurting themselves in the process. The girls in this poem are not able to take care of themselves, but must do so in the only way they know they have control of.
The act that these girls are committing is not mentioned in the poem. It is implied, but even to McKay what is happening on these streets before him is something disgraceful and unmentionable. He says these girls must "bend and barter at desire's call", implying that they are attempting to catch the male gaze. They are earning a living by doing this service. The streets are a place where it is unavoidable to watch a girl attempt to take control of herself by selling it to someone else. The speaker is expressing sympathy towards those who must live a life they are not happily living. They are simply moving "street to street", stuck in an endless loop of this destructive behavior. There is no way to escape this lifestyle because there is no other choice available to them.
The choice to earn a living in a way that is respectable is taken from these girls when they are young by a world ravaged by cruelty and without justice. McKay understands these women because he knows that in a world "Of poverty, dishonor and disgrace", there is no possibility to thrive. Life is about staying alive however possible for these young girls in Harlem. The world has cast them away, deemed them unworthy of a happy lify and forced them to use the only thing they have control of to sustain themselves. McKay remarks that society is depriving young black women, along with other minorities of wealth, honor and respect. They have no way to earn these things back for themselves and instead must fight against them.
Claude McKay can clearly point out the symptoms of the predjucidice and injustice that are present inside his own community. This poem was written during a time where black people did not have a voice to demand change. McKay recognized that the voice of those he called his own community was taken from them and he used his poetry to give them some of that power and control for that. In Harlem Shadows he pulls the darkest pieces of his community and pulls them into the light. Even in his own community these women were disgraceful, but McKay recognizes the lack of choice and the need that they represented. He gave them a voice and spoke for them to invoke change and conversation.

Author's Voice

Carol Joyce Oates is a praised author capable of writing stories that leave readers on the edge of their seat thinking about what happens next. Even as the story comes to a close, her words linger and her readers continue to ponder what they just experienced. Her stories are an experience. Reading her work is not going from one plot point to the next, but delving deep into her words and understanding the world she has created on a deeper level.
One of the most notable examples of her work is Where are you going, Where have you been?. This thriller descends quickly from a fun-loving teenager enjoying her summer to what likely results in a murder. The reader empathizes with Connie and her situation.
To contrast this downward spiral of a plot, Carol Joyce Oates' Heat is one of the darkest ways to approach a child's murder. The unnamed narrator looks back on her past with two twins in her hometown. She describes their young friendship, but quickly shifts the story to discuss the murder of these two girls and their funeral. She looks back on her childhood and how she thought about the events surrounding her at the time.
These two stories focus on the point of view of a young girl. They are put into unimaginable situations and their reactions are explored. Joyce Carol Oates likely draws from experience and uses her own childhood to imagine how a young girl would process such horrid information. These young girls present their emotions to the reader while they go through something that's impossible to compare. Oates has an understanding of the human experience and writes these characters in a way that is relatable despite their circumstances being so far from normal.
Despite their similar structure, Heat focuses on how a young girl dealt with understanding death and realizing that the world is not as happy and carefree as a child might like to believe. Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? surrounds a girl being tested against a horrible event and must react to a life or death situation. Both characters must learn to confront death, but one must do it to survive and the other must learn to survive with it's burden.
The narrator in Heat tells the story by looking back on her past. The events have happened long ago, but they still bother her. She creates her own idea of what happened during her friends' murder. She imagines the details of the worst event that's happened to her all the way down to the way he smelled. She deals with death by attempting to understand it.
These stories have a similar beginning. Oates' puts young girls in a situation they shouldn't be forced to deal with. She analyzes their reactions and puts them on display for the reader. The differences come in the approach and the tone she creates around the story.

http://www.classicshorts.com/stories/heat.html

Living Without Fire

Autumn
By Louise Glück

The part of life
devoted to contemplation
was at odds with the part
committed to action.
*
Fall was approaching.
But I remember
it was always approaching
once school ended.
*
Life, my sister said,
is like a torch passed now
from the body to the mind.
Sadly, she went on, the mind is not
there to receive it.

The sun was setting.
Ah, the torch, she said.
It has gone out, I believe.
Our best hope is that it’s flickering,
fort/da, fort/da, like little Ernst
throwing his toy over the side of his crib
and then pulling it back. It’s too bad,
she said, there are no children here.
We could learn from them, as Freud did.
*
We would sometimes sit
on benches outside the dining room.
The smell of leaves burning.

Old people and fire, she said.
Not a good thing. They burn their houses down.
*
How heavy my mind is,
filled with the past.
Is there enough room
for the world to penetrate?
It must go somewhere,
it cannot simply sit on the surface—
*
Stars gleaming over the water.
The leaves piled, waiting to be lit.
*
Insight, my sister said.
Now it is here.
But hard to see in the darkness.

You must find your footing
before you put your weight on it.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/12/11/autumn

Louise Gluck writes about a person looking for hope and happiness alongside their sister in Autumn. This time in the speaker's life should be easy and relaxed, but instead, they describe not feeling and the pessimistic ideas that have been going through their mind. The speaker relates their sister's ideas to themselves and attempts to find hope for themselves in this piece.
There is an internal battle inside the speaker. The first stanza describes a struggle within themselves. Possibly their own personality fighting a thought or mental illness. They spend their time remaining still and think while they want to experience or do something. They want "action". They also describe "contemplation" as a part of their life, however. It is not something happening to them, but a part of their own experience with life. They don't describe the feelings they have as a result of something, but instead their own feelings and tendencies. They are constantly at odds with themselves.
The speaker clearly looks up to their sister. She acts as a guide. There is a point in the speaker's past that has changed their point of view on the world. They speak about their memories, saying they "remember (fall) was always approaching". When looking at the past, thoughts can become skewed. The speaker's thoughts are likely reflective of the longing they feel for a past that they don't remember. They are nostalgic for something that's missing from their lives. Their sister, likely with similar experiences, must walk them through an unfamiliar experience. There is a commonality between the two of them that they don't have to talk about. Their sister knows what they are going through despite them not knowing how to explain it themselves.
In the third stanza, the poem shifts from their internal thoughts to their sister's thoughts and advice. The poem now focuses on how the speaker interprets their sister's words and relates them to their own thoughts. The analogy of fire is started in this stanza and moves throughout the piece. It symbolizes happiness and livelihood. It is meant to spread and grow, but, as stated in the second stanza, "it has gone out". Their family is left with little fire in it. It's suggesting that the torch is "flickering" similar to a young child losing his toy only to have it brought back to him. Their surroundings are bleak however as there are no children to spread that joy and spark a flame.
The title of this poem, Autumn, symbolizes a close to something. Autumn is a time before winter, it symbolizes a coming end. This could represent an end to the speaker's way of thinking. This is supported by the last stanza that gives the reader hope for the main characters. It could also represent a sorrow approaching. Winter is symbolic of depression and sadness. The poem takes places in the summertime and the speaker is not experiencing life to the fullest. The idea that autumn is coming means that something is coming to either take away or add to her life. It represents a future.
Autumn discusses losing feeling in life. There is the idea constantly that the two characters in the story cannot change their situation. They speak about how aging should deter them farther from the flame which has already been associated with happiness and feeling it. Their future is laid out for them and it is not what they want to see in it. They are accepting how the rest of their life will be. The last stanza discusses hope. It is a change in the tone of the poem that encourages a happy ending. Their sister highlights "insight" as a way to "find your footing". Knowing the things she is sharing is key to being able to overcome the bleakness in the future.