Mid-Term Literature

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1. How nature is presented in the literature?

Nature is presented in literature differently. It depends on the authors imaginations of nature.


Nature is a very common theme in literature. Authors such as William Blake presented nature
in interesting ways in his poems. William Blake was a visionary. He hates institutions. He was
deeply religious. He generally saw things differently than other people. For example in a poem
“ Sick rose” rose is presented as a natural object of obsessive love. Rose is the most important
symbol in that poem. Generally the worn also has a “dark secret” desire to consume the rose
suggesting that the worn can be read as a symbol of represented sexuality. In a poem Poison
Tree” nature is represented a bit different. The Garden of Love is another allegorical poem
satirical of the Church. It is an attack on the morality which puts restrictions on sexual love.
The speaker finds that a great change has come over the Garden of Love. He finds that a field
of activities which should be spontaneously enjoyed has been made ugly by the interference of
religious notions which insist on man’s guilt and shame. The Church has spoiled the beauty and
natural vigour of the pleasures which were once there to be enjoyed and substituted reminders
of man’s morality and eventual corruption, which are consequences of sin. In The Garden of
Love, there is a strong condemnation of the Church in its approach to sexual matters, and it is
difficult not to agree with the attack made by the poet. The speaker here relates a personal
history: he talks of “my joys and desires” as being “bound”. He has now reached a position
where he can see that what has been done to him was an evil. The tone of the poem is indignant,
and the “priests in black gowns” are sinister figures. The obvious solution is to remove the evil
by changing his notions about sexual matters and so liberating himself from the prohibitions
imposed by the Chapel. But it may be too late for that. The nature is also a strong aspect of John
Keats’s ballad La Belle Dame Sans Merci”. This is also is not surprising because nature can do
many things within writing. At the time he wrote this, it was often being used to create sublime
images in order to affect the emotions and experiences of not only the narratives but also the
people reading them. John Keats’s poem is no exception to this as nature works in a variety of
ways thoughtful the piece.

2. How metaphors are presented in the literature?


As far as everybody knows metaphors describes an object or action in a way that isn’t
literally true it is a symbolic way.
The second poem which contains extended metaphor is a poem by the English poet John
Donne, most likely written in the 1590s “The Flea”.
“The Flea” is a poem by the English poet John Donne, most likely written in the 1590s. In
“The Flea,” the speaker tries to seduce his mistress with a surprising (and potentially gross)
extended metaphor: both he and she have been bitten by the same flea, meaning their
separate blood now mingles inside the flea’s body. Having sex is no different, the speaker
argues, and no more dishonorable. Though the metaphor is intentionally pretty crude,
maybe even juvenile, the speaker infuses the poem with religious undertones: the union of
speaker and mistress in the flea is like the Holy Trinity. In this way, the poem is both serious
and silly, elegant and vulgar. It is as much a display of wit and erudition as a serious attempt
to seduce the mistress.

In meditation XVII John Donne also uses metaphors.

In this meditation, Donne asserts that all humans are interconnected. What happens to one
person affects everyone else, because we are all part of God's kingdom and creation. Donne
writes, Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind. Donne uses a
famous geographic metaphor to describe the interconnectedness of all people, stating that
no man is an island, entire of itself, every man is a piece of the continent. It is easy to
visualize ourselves as a series of completely individual islands, a group of archipelagos,
separate from each other, but Donne says that is not true. We are all part of a larger whole
and dependent on each other. Therefore, we all participate in everyone else's suffering. In
Donne's time, a church bell was rung every time a person died to let the community know.
Donne states in his meditation that every time he hears the bell toll, he considers it to be
tolling for him. We, too, should do the same. He states, therefore never send to know for
whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee. This isn't only because we all ultimately will die, but
because we all lose out on gifts and talents when a member of the community dies—we as
a whole are diminished. Donne argues that it is not morbid to think of other people's
sufferings as our own, because we all grow stronger and more compassionate as we take on
suffering. Donne calls on his listeners to crawl out of their self-absorbed shells and realize
they are part of a larger humanity.

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