Title of the Course Core Course BEN-DSC09: AMERICAN LITERATURE – PAPER II

Category of Year & Semester Credits Subject Code

theCourse
Third Year & Fifth 4
Semester

Hours: 90

Objectives: To enable the students to understand the trends in American literature through the study of
seminaltexts and its contribution.

Course Introduction The emergence of America as a super power. African-American History. America and
(to be considered Russia.The Great Depression
forinternal
assessme
nt

tasks only)

Course Components UNIT 1: Poetry

“A Hillside Thaw” Robert Frost

Carl Sandburg
“Chicago”
Marianne
“Poetry” Moore Robert
Lowell Robert
“Skunk Hour” Hayden Sylvia
Plath Langston
“Runagate, Runagate”
Hughes
“Mirror”
Joy Harjo
“Harlem”

“Perhaps the World Ends Here”

UNIT 2: Prose

“The Figure a Poem Makes” Ro

“The Man of Letters in the Modern World” bert Frost

Allen Tate
“I Have a Dream”
Martin Luther King
“The Black writer and the Southern
JrAlice Walker
Experience” from In Search of our

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 Mother’s Garden

UNIT 3: Drama

3.1 The Glass Menagerie Tennessee Williams

UNIT 4: Short Story

“A Journey” Edith Wharton

Ernest
“The Snows of Kilimanjaro”
Hemingway
“The World's Greatest Fisherman” Louise Erdrich

“Living Space” Isaac Asimov

UNIT 5: Fiction

5.1 To Kill a Mocking Bird Harper Lee

Learning Outcomes: After doing the course, students will be able

➢ to evaluate new forms of space, identity, and writing that transformed canonical English
literarystructures

➢ to assess thematic aspects of literary texts as a part of cultural and historical

movements inAmerica.

Prescribed Texts/Web Sources:

i) 2.2 https://stormfields.files.wordpress.com/2014/12/tate-man-of-letters-1952.pdf
ii) 2.3 https://archive.org/stream/in.ernet.dli.2015.458777/2015.458777.Literary-Essays_djvu.txt
iii) 2.4 In Search of our Mother’s Garden -Alice Walker
iv) 4.1 https://loa-shared.s3.amazonaws.com/static/pdf/Wharton_Journey.pdf
v) 4.4 https://nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com/sffaudio-usa/usa-pdfs/LivingSpaceByIsaacAsimov.pdf

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FURTHER READING: (to be considered for Internal Assessment tasks only)

➢ The Great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald

➢ “After Apple Picking” by Robert Frost
➢ “The Walls do not Fall” by Hilda Doolittle
➢ “One Art” by Elizabeth Bishop
➢ “Anecdote of the Jar” by Wallace Stevens
➢ “the Cambridge ladies” by e.e.cummings
➢ “Persephone Falling” by Rita Dove
➢ The Hairy Ape by Eugene O’ Neil
➢ All My Sons by Arthur Miller
➢ As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
➢ The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan

BOOKS & WEB SOURCES FOR FURTHER REFERENCE

➢ The Cambridge History of American Literature

➢ Parini, Jay.The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature, Volume 3, OUP, 2004.
➢ Burt, Daniel S.The Chronology of American Literature
https://books.google.co.in/books?id=VQ0fgo5v6e0C&printsec=frontcover&dq=american+l
iterat ure&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwitjKyP-
LzpAhVWXSsKHRgIDK0Q6AEISjAE#v=onepage&q=american%20literature&f=false
➢ Gray, Richard. A Brief History of American Literature
https://books.google.co.in/books?id=GmIyLel3HjEC&printsec=frontcover&dq=american+li
terat ure&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwitjKyP-
LzpAhVWXSsKHRgIDK0Q6AEIOjAC#v=onepage&q=american%20literature&f=false
➢ www.britannica.com
➢ americanliterature.com
➢ www.history.com : Black History: Facts and People

TEDX TALKS

➢ The dangers of whitewashing black history | David Ikard | TEDxNashville

➢ https://www.ted.com/talks/david_ikard_the_dangers_of_whitewashing_black_history?lang
uage= en
➢ The Great Migration and the power of a single decision: Isabel Wilkerson. 2017
➢ https://www.ted.com/talks/isabel_wilkerson_the_great_migration_and_the_power_of_a_sin
gle_d ecision?referrer=playlist-10_great_talks_to_celebrate_bl

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 ➢ The Danger of a Single Story : Chimamanda Adichie
https://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_ngozi_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story?referrer=pl
aylist

-10_great_talks_to_celebrate_bl

Unit 1 Poetry
1.A Hillside Thaw

To think to know the country and now know

The hillside on the day the sun lets go
Ten million silver lizards out of snow!
As often as I've seen it done before
I can't pretend to tell the way it's done.
It looks as if some magic of the sun
Lifted the rug that bred them on the floor
And the light breaking on them made them run.
But if I though to stop the wet stampede,
And caught one silver lizard by the tail,
And put my foot on one without avail,
And threw myself wet-elbowed and wet-kneed
In front of twenty others' wriggling speed,-
In the confusion of them all aglitter,
And birds that joined in the excited fun
By doubling and redoubling song and twitter,
I have no doubt I'd end by holding none.

It takes the moon for this. The sun's a wizard

By all I tell; but so's the moon a witch.
From the high west she makes a gentle cast
And suddenly, without a jerk or twitch,
She has her speel on every single lizard.
I fancied when I looked at six o'clock
The swarm still ran and scuttled just as fast.
The moon was waiting for her chill effect.
I looked at nine: the swarm was turned to rock
In every lifelike posture of the swarm,
Transfixed on mountain slopes almost erect.
Across each other and side by side they lay.
The spell that so could hold them as they were
Was wrought through trees without a breath of storm

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To make a leaf, if there had been one, stir.
It was the moon's: She held them until day.
One lizard at the end of every ray.
Robert Lee Frost (March 26, 1874 – January 29, 1963) was an American poet. His work was initially published in
England before it was published in the United States. Known for his realistic depictions of rural life and his command
of American colloquial speech.Frost frequently wrote about settings from rural life in New England in the early 20th
century, using them to examine complex social and philosophical themes.
Frequently honored during his lifetime, Frost is the only poet to receive four Pulitzer Prizes for Poetry. He became
one of America's rare "public literary figures, almost an artistic institution". [3] He was awarded the Congressional Gold
Medal in 1960 for his poetic works. On July 22, 1961, Frost was named poet laureate of Vermont.

In the poem A Hillside Thaw by Robert Frost the theme is that nature is always changing, it's never constant.
Two examples from the poem that support my answer are "And caught one silver lizard by the tail,and put my
foot on one without avail," and "The moon was waiting for her chill effect. I looked at nine: the swarm was
turned to rock."
Frost is at his playful best in "A Hillside Thaw," a poem Jay Parini calls a "vivid snapshot of rural New
England life" (207). The poem, which Frost once referred to as "Silver Lizards," in a letter to Sidney Cox
develops an extended metaphor from an image that Frost and his friend Raymond Holden once observed
on his farm in Franconia, New Hampshire. Holden recalled, "We stood for awhile in the moonlight, watching
the glitter of the frozen rivulets which, in the warm sun of the afternoon before, had been runnels of thaw-
water, running down the sloping floor of the sugar orchard" (Cramer, 84).

The poem begins, "To think to know the country and not know / The hillside on the day the sun lets go,"
and this statement reveals the subject and attitude of the poem. The narrator chides those who think they
know the country but have not witnessed a hillside thaw, because to him that is the country. The poem is
filled with detailed imagery, beginning with the "ten million silver lizards out of the snow," the trails of
water that trickle down from thawing snow on a hilltop. As the water slithers down the hillside, it looks as
if silver lizards are coming out from under a rug. The narrator cannot imagine how "it's done," this illusion,
except by "some magic of the sun."

Frost expands the image, describing it as a "wet stampede" and imagining catching a "lizard by the tail" or
trying to stop one with his foot. He knows that even if he were to throw himself on the ground in "front of
twenty others' wriggling speed," he would still "end by holding none," since lizards made of water cannot
be grasped.

The closing stanza describes the sun as a wizard and the moon as a witch. The sun's wizardry has turned
melting snow into lizards before the speaker's eyes, and the moon's witchcraft manages to turn them into
"rock" when the sun sets and the temperature drops below freezing again.

This poem demonstrates how the human imagination works in the face of natural occurrences. Frost's
poetic description of the hillside thaw skillfully extends one of his most unusual metaphors.

"The Hillside Thaw" was first published in the April 6, 1921, issue of the New Republic and was later
collected in New Hampshire.

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 In the poem,the most important thing to note is the contrast between the sun and the moon,
the use of enjambment within the second stanza clearly highlights the calmness of the moon,
while the diction used within the first stanza: "birds that joined in the excited fun, by doubling
and redoubling song and twitter" highlights the excitement and life which is enjoyed under
the sun.
The poem heavily alludes to springtime and life, in direct contrast to the stillness of the moon.
The notion that the narrator explores in trying to catch the lizards highlights man's inability to
catch lizards, or control nature, rather implying the reliance which we, and nature have upon
the sun and the moon.
the narrator highlights this through his last sentence "the thought of my attempting such a
stray", "stray" illustrates the useless attempts which he, or man, makes to control nature,
directly contrasted with the moons ability.

2.Chicago
BY CARL S ANDBURG

Hog Butcher for the World,

Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,
Player with Railroads and the Nation's Freight Handler;
Stormy, husky, brawling,
City of the Big Shoulders:

They tell me you are wicked and I believe them, for I have seen your painted women under the gas
lamps luring the farm boys.
And they tell me you are crooked and I answer: Yes, it is true I have seen the gunman kill and go
free to kill again.
And they tell me you are brutal and my reply is: On the faces of women and children I have seen
the marks of wanton hunger.

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And having answered so I turn once more to those who sneer at this my city, and I give them back
the sneer and say to them:
Come and show me another city with lifted head singing so proud to be alive and coarse and
strong and cunning.
Flinging magnetic curses amid the toil of piling job on job, here is a tall bold slugger set vivid
against the little soft cities;
Fierce as a dog with tongue lapping for action, cunning as a savage pitted against the wilderness,
Bareheaded,
Shoveling,
Wrecking,
Planning,
Building, breaking, rebuilding,
Under the smoke, dust all over his mouth, laughing with white teeth,
Under the terrible burden of destiny laughing as a young man laughs,
Laughing even as an ignorant fighter laughs who has never lost a battle,
Bragging and laughing that under his wrist is the pulse, and under his ribs the heart of the people,
Laughing!
Laughing the stormy, husky, brawling laughter of Youth, half-naked, sweating, proud to be Hog
Butcher, Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat, Player with Railroads and Freight Handler to the
Nation.

Carl August Sandburg (January 6, 1878 – July 22, 1967) was an American poet, biographer, journalist, and editor. He won

three Pulitzer Prizes: two for his poetry and one for his biography of Abraham Lincoln. During his lifetime, Sandburg was widely

regarded as "a major figure in contemporary literature", especially for volumes of his collected verse, including Chicago

Poems (1916), Cornhuskers (1918), and Smoke and Steel (1920).[2] He enjoyed "unrivaled appeal as a poet in his day, perhaps

because the breadth of his experiences connected him with so many strands of American life". [3] When he died in 1967,

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President Lyndon B. Johnson observed that "Carl Sandburg was more than the voice of America, more than the poet of its

strength and genius. He was America.

When Sandburg wrote this poem about Chicago, it was 1914. Chicago was established as a city in 1833, so it was only about 70
years old. This is quite young compared to many of the other great cities of the world, such as London, Paris and Tokyo. This is
why Sandburg describes Chicago as a young man; it has been around for quite a while, but compared to most cities, it's quite
new.
By using this metaphorical comparison of Chicago, Sandburg can show how Chicago holds many of the same qualities as an
immature young man: both are vibrant and active, but both also have many flaws. However, Sandburg wants his reader to know
that despite those flaws, there is much to admire about how Chicago continues to grow.
Another theme that Sandburg focuses on is the theme of commerce. Chicago was a major city because it was the midwest hub
to the Western states. In the time before air travel, Chicago farmers and merchants moved their products both to the West and to
the East through the railroad and anyone going from East to West (or vice versa) almost surely would stop at Chicago along the
way.
Sandburg also celebrates the many types of workers that helped the city grow, from the hog butchers that feed the populace to
the people that build the city's skyscrapers and commercial buildings. Sandburg wants the reader to realize how important
Chicago is as an example of a vibrant modern economy.

The Chicago of 1900 was "stormy, husky, [and] brawling": a financial, agricultural, manufacturing, and
transportation hub for the nation.
The city of Chicago is itself a character in Carl Sandburg's volume Chicago Poems. The poem "Chicago"
describes the city in the following way: "Stormy, husky, brawling, / City of the Big Shoulders." Chicago is
personified, or made into a person who is strong and ready to fight.

“Chicago” is a celebration of America’s vitality. It is about boundless energy, about love of life,
about the zest and laughter that Sandburg found. Granted, the city has its dark side, but
Sandburg’s city laughs in the face of terrible destiny. This attitude is a prominent theme in
American literature, especially in the latter half of the twentieth century.

The destiny to which the poet refers is death. Many of Sandburg’s poems address this theme
directly, but in “Chicago” it is implied rather than directly stated. The terrible destiny is
inevitable; no matter how much life is packed into the sprawling city, its inhabitants will perish.
The spirit of the city will eventually soften and become like other cities. This impression of death
is reaffirmed in the metaphor of the ignorant fighter. Fighters do lose eventually, even if it has
not happened yet. Despite the certainty of destiny, however, the important thing is to live. The
affirmation of life lies in the attempts to live life fully, to work, and most of all, to laugh.

Unlike many of his contemporaries, notably T. S. Eliot, Sandburg was a poet of the people. He
was widely read in his own time, and his poetry reflects his preoccupation with the common
person. The people of his city may be underfed, criminal, or immoral, but they are real people.
He writes of workers and farmers. He writes of those people who strain and sweat and swear and
laugh and cry in order to celebrate the very existence of humanity. His concern for common

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people is more than intellectual; throughout his life, he kept in close contact with the laboring
classes and was motivated by his experiences with the Populist movement. It is no coincidence
that in addition to his many volumes of poetry Sandburg wrote a massive biography of Abraham
Lincoln. He viewed Lincoln much the same way that he viewed his city, Chicago—as a folkloric
figure of the people, standing for the average worker.

Sandburg contributed an important dimension to the poetry of his time. His use of blunt
language helped liberate poetry from the nineteenth century’s formal prettiness. His subject
matter appealed to working people rather than to strict intellectuals. The form was loose and
free, like the dreams of the people. This poem, perhaps his greatest, provides a glimpse of the
talent and power of one of America’s early twentieth century poets.

The poem begins when the speaker addresses the city of Chicago with five short lines. He calls
Chicago a series of names—it's a "Hog Butcher" and a "Tool Maker" and a "Stacker of Wheat" (and a
bunch of other things too). The Chicago that the speaker personifies is burly and tough.

Then, in longer lines, the speaker describes the life of the city. A mysterious "they" tells the speaker
that Chicago is "wicked," "crooked," and "brutal," and the speaker agrees with all of these judgments.
He has seen prostitutes, killers, and starving families. But the speaker responds to this "they" and
pronounces Chicago is "so proud to be alive and coarse and strong and cunning." It's a vibrant and
dynamic city, and the speaker finds beauty in it, despite its dark corners.
The speaker then describes Chicago again in a series of short lines. Chicago is constantly "building,
breaking, rebuilding." This is the life cycle of the city.

Then the speaker describes Chicago even further. The city almost becomes the very people who
inhabit it (freaky, right?). The city feels the pulse and the "the heart of the people."

In the last line of "Chicago," the speaker repeats the first few phrases of the poem. He once again
calls Chicago "Hog Butcher" and "Tool Maker," and he says that the city is proud to have these
names. Chicago, you rock, the poem says.

Figurative Language: "Chicago" Uses Severa l Type s Of Figurative La nguage. For Instance, Sandburg Draws
On The Device Known As Sim ile, Writing That The City Is "Fierce As A Dog" And "Cunning As A Savag e."
Likewise, The Poem Uses Metaphor, Calling The City A "Young Man" And "Youth." More Generally, The Poem
Draws On Personification, Characterizing The City Of Chicago As A Living Thing Rather Than An Inanimate
Place.

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Carl Sandburg was born in a smaller city in Illinois but later did move to Chicago, where he worked as a journalist. His work
reporting on issues of social justice and the working class within the city influenced the themes expressed in his poems, like
"Chicago."

The basic theme of Sandburg's "Chicago" is to celebrate the city. The poem develops several alternative names for Chicago that
note its connections to industry, such as "Hog Butcher of the World" and "Stacker of Wheat." The poem acknowledges that the
city can be rough around the edges but proudly defends Chicago. Ultimately, Sandburg's poem characterizes Chicago as the
"City of the Big Shoulders," a place of strength, power, progress, and potential.
In "Chicago," Sandburg personifies the city as a living thing with both youthful energy and a darker side. The intent of the poem is
to celebrate the city as a place of energy, industry, and progress without covering up the sense that it is also a place that can be
rough and even cruel.

“Chicago” as Carl Sandburg says has a few bad parts but despite its faults and errors he is still in love with
the city. He personifies the city, Chicago in the poet’s view is a young man who has all the responsibility on his
tender shoulders and who is willing to carry out the responsibility with proper care.
The poet is in love with the vitality of the workers in Chicago and in essence, Sandburg is deeply concerned
with the American dream of working related to ethics as a result of which pride, prosperity, and power would
automatically emerge. In this vivid, writhing and alive poem, the poet talks about as a matter of fact paints a
picture of a dark city, a grimy city of men. These are the men who work continuously for the betterment of the
city and also for upholding the pride of Chicago. These men are extremely proud of Chicago because they have
in a sense molded the city with their own hands. They are a part and parcel of the city. The blood that surges in
the men is synonymous to the city.

The poet actually argues with anyone who even speaks one bad word against the city, when no human being is
perfect, how we can expect a city to be perfect. Written from a non- shifting first persons narrative point of view,
the poem can be viewed as a piece written by an individual who is deeply in love with the city he grew up in.
Anyone who loves the place he or she grew up in understands the obvious reasons why an individual cannot
hear a word against it, you love your city as much as you love your nation, may be more than that. The poet
loves the city so much that he wants more industrialization of the city, he wants Chicago to turn more
progressive.

‘CHICAGO‘, which is no less treated, reveals his love for the city. He gives teeth for teeth to the
people who share biased criticism about his city. The poem itself is a typical example of middle-
class life that existed in Chicago. Most of the time, the city is seen darker because of things like
prostitution, hunger, and murders in urban areas. However, despite the darkness, the poet says
that Chicago is still a prosperous city.

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Summary of Chicago
‘CHICAGO’ expresses the poet’s admiration and pride in Chicago. The poet narrates what he
observed and heard in the city.

The speaker praises Chicago for its aesthetic nature and the flourishing industries. He portrays
Chicago as a big, vibrant, and developing place. The poem begins with the poet addressing the
city with different names which well suits its nature. The following lines are the arguments with
‘They’ those who criticize the negative aspects of the city. Though it looks like he agrees to
whatever they say, in the later lines, he comes back at them with his observation of the city,
highlighting all the positive sides of it. Despite Chicago being considered as a dangerous place to
live in, the citizens are proud to be a part of this city because of its vibrancy, which reflects who
they are.

Analysis of Chicago
Analysis of Chicago gives the reader an insight into how Sandburg celebrates America’s vivacity
despite all the wars and Chicago as the center of its growth. It talks about boundless energy,
about the love of life, about the zest and laughter that Sandburg found in the city. Like any other
city, it also has its dark side, yet the city laughs in the face of terrible destiny.

Lines 1-5

Hog Butcher for the World,

(…)City of the Big Shoulders:

The first five lines of the poem is an address to the city. He calls it with names which describe
various jobs and the industry it is popular for Hog Butcher, Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat, Player
with railroads, Nation’s freight handler. Further, the poem also personifies the city to a young man

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who is nonchalant, husky, brawling with big shoulders. The stanza gives the overall appeal of the
city to be a burly and somewhat hard nature man.

Lines 6-9

They tell me you are wicked and I believe them, for I have seen your painted women

(…)
have seen the marks of wanton hunger.
Lines 6 to 9 describe what people say about Chicago, and he sounds to be in agreement with
them. ‘They’ refers to people who criticized Chicago for its negative sides. Using ‘You’, ‘I’, and
‘they’ make this sound like a dramatic monologue. The people who the poet address as ‘they’ call
the city ‘wicked’ for the painted women (prostitutes) lure the innocent boys to go with them, and
the poet agrees, for he has seen it himself. Then they call it crooked, for in the city the roughs are
allowed to go freely with guns and to kill people, and the poet agrees too. They also call the city
as brutal, for it has made women and children starve for food, and the poet replies in agreement,
for he has seen it in the face of women and children.

LINES 10-13

And having answered so I turn once more to those who sneer at this my city, and I give
them back the sneer and say to them:

(…)
Fierce as a dog with tongue lapping for action, cunning as a savage pitted against the

wilderness,

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The lines 10-13, is a response given by the poet to the people who sneer at his city and talk only
about the negative side. He admits that his city has flaws in the previous lines, in these lines, he
responds to the haters that his city is more than what they know and no less than any other city.
He asks those people to show him a city that keeps its head high, the one who is energetic, strong,
and shrewd. The next line projects Chicago as a baseball player who consistently hits for power,
especially home runs and doubles amongst the less vibrant and less active cities. Further, he
compares Chicago to a ‘fierce dog’ whose tongue is ‘lapping for action’ always ready to attack and
like a ‘cunning savage’ he’s willing to fight his way through the wilderness.

Lines 14-18

Bareheaded,

(…)
Building, breaking, rebuilding,
In lines 14-18, the poet personifies the city to a man who is bareheaded and involved in
construction. It symbolizes that the city is thriving and growing every day. Shoveling, Wrecking
Planning, Building, Breaking, and rebuilding refers to how Chicago was toiling to expand its
horizons. ‘Bareheaded’ shows how the city had to work its way alone without any support.

Lines 19-22

Under the smoke, dust all over his mouth, laughing with white teeth,

(…)Bragging and laughing that under his wrist is the pulse, and under his ribs the heart
of the people,
Laughing!
The lines 19-22 further explain Chicago as a man in action. In spite of all the handworks, smoke,
and dust, it has learned to laugh. It doesn’t think much about the burden but laughs like a young
man who laughs without giving much importance to the burden the destiny has thrust upon him.

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The city laughs like an ignorant fighter who has never lost a battle, boosting his power. The
phrases ‘under his wrist is the pulse’ and ‘under his ribs, the heart of the people’ give a more
human approach to the city.

Line 23

Laughing the stormy, husky, brawling laughter of Youth, half-naked, sweating, proud to
be Hog Butcher, Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat, Player with Railroads and Freight
Handler to the Nation.
Altogether the line portrays Chicago as an optimistic young man who has learned to be happy in
all situations. ‘Stormy, husky, brawling laughter’ presents the city as a person with coarse nature.
The phrases’ Hog Butcher’, ‘Tool Maker’, ‘Stacker of Wheat’, ‘Player with Railroads’, and ‘Freight
Handler’ have refrained, to sum up, that the embraces its identity – true appearance and nature of
a working-class man.

Use of figurative language

TONE: The poem is defensive, confident, and patronizing in tone. The choices of words and the
way the poem sequenced, despite following no proper rhyme scheme or meter, depicts presents it
in the voice of a coarse working-class man.

Themes:Progress, social-realism, and admiration are the major themes found in the poem. The
city is progressing in itself by building and rebuilding amidst all the criticism it received. It has its
own positive as well as negative sides. It is piling jobs after jobs and expanding its horizons by
building railroads. Altogether the poem creates an impression that the city is intense, aggressive,
joyful, tough, cunning, and fierce. The poet admires the vibrancy of the city, and he accepts the
city as it is.

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Personification: Sandburg personifies the city to a working-class man, an identity of
Chicago’s life at that time. Like a working-class man who does all kinds of job for a living, the city
provides with opportunity after opportunity – from butchering to supervising the cargos. It is like a
man who works bareheaded, not worrying about protecting his head, a young man who doesn’t
bother to reflect on the role of destiny, and an ignorant fighter who boasts his success he unruly
laughter.

Conclusion: As the title suggests, the poem Chicago is the epitome of life that prevailed
during the poet’s period. The city was thriving on its own despite all the hatred and criticism it
received. One of the phrases’ City of the Big Shoulders’ used in the poet has stayed with the city as
a nickname. Altogether the poem is the poet’s attempt to do justice to the city.

3.POETRY By Marianne Moore

I too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle.
Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers that there is in
it after all, a place for the genuine.
Hands that can grasp, eyes
that can dilate, hair that can rise
if it must, these things are important not because a

high-sounding interpretation can be put upon them but because they are
useful; when they become so derivative as to become unintelligible, the
same thing may be said for all of us—that we
do not admire what
we cannot understand. The bat,
holding on upside down or in quest of something to

eat, elephants pushing, a wild horse taking a roll, a tireless wolf under
a tree, the immovable critic twinkling his skin like a horse that feels a flea, the base—
ball fan, the statistician—case after case
could be cited did
one wish it; nor is it valid
to discriminate against “business documents and

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school-books”; all these phenomena are important. One must make a distinction
however: when dragged into prominence by half poets, the result is not poetry,
nor till the autocrats among us can be
“literalists of
the imagination”—above
insolence and triviality and can present

for inspection, imaginary gardens with real toads in them, shall we have
it. In the meantime, if you demand on the one hand, in defiance of their opinion—
the raw material of poetry in
all its rawness, and
that which is on the other hand,
genuine, then you are interested in poetry.

Marianne Craig Moore was an American modernist poet, critic, translator, and editor. Her poetry is noted for formal
innovation, precise diction, irony, and wit. Moore was highly regarded as a poet during her lifetime and
even became somewhat of a celebrity, famous for her tricorn hat and cape and featured in
magazines such as Life, the New York Times, and The New Yorker.

Theme: Throughout ‘Poetry’ Moore engages with themes of writing and self-
expression. ‘Poetry’ is a poem about poetry, something that is less rare than it might seem.
In this three-line version of the poem, Moore speaks very briefly on the one quality that
poetry has that makes it redeemable and worth returning to, its means of genuine
expression. The poem itself is an expression of the same genuine attitude that Moore finds
in other poetic works.

Structure and Form: ‘Poetry’ by Marianne Moore is a short, three-line poem that does not
make use of a single rhyme scheme or metrical pattern. This is a style of writing known
as free verse. But, despite how it sounds, it does not mean that the poem is completely
devoid of any structure at all.

When glancing at the poem, one of the first things that readers will notice is the unusual
use of line breaks. The lines vary greatly in length with the first only containing five
syllables, the second, nineteen, and the last line eleven. The poem reads like one long
sentence.

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Literary Devices: Moore makes use of several literary devices in ‘Poetry’. These include but
are not limited to alliteration, caesura, and end-punctuation. Usually, end-punctuation goes
unnoticed in a poem. But, when the text is this minimal it means that each choice the poet
made is all the more important. The use of a period at the end of the first line creates a
strong, declarative statement. The content of it requires some context, but it is quite a
powerful opening to this short poem.

Caesura is another punctuation oriented technique which can be seen most clearly in the
second and third lines. Here, Moore divides the lines up into short sections separated out
by commas. This creates a very choppy, halting rhythm and interrupts any flow that these
supposedly poetic lines would have. Moore made this choice very purposefully in order to
alter one’s expectations about what poetry is.

Despite the brevity of the poem, there are examples of alliteration in the text. For instance,
“perfect” and “place” in lines two and three as well as “dislike” and “discovers” in lines one
and two.

Summary:

STANZA 1
The speaker opens by admitting that she, "too, dislike[s] it." The "it" she's referring to is poetry, both the title of the
poem and its subject. Other things, the speaker says, are more important than "all this fiddle," or nonsense. Yet even
those who hate poetry have to admit that when it is "genuine," it can provoke a physical reaction in the reader.

STANZA 2
The speaker states that good poetry—the kind that makes someone's hair stand on end—is "useful." Useful poems
aren't an imitation of another's work, and they don't lend themselves to "high-sounding interpretations." After all, the
speaker points out, it's hard to admire something one doesn't understand. The stanza ends with the image of a bat
hanging upside down or searching "in quest of something to."

STANZA 3
The third stanza opens with "eat," finishing the thought from the previous stanza (enjambment). The same sentence
continues with images of animals engaged in very natural acts: a wild horse rolling, an elephant "pushing," a wolf

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"under a tree." The same sentence then lists a few people—the "immovable critic," who is compared to a horse
bothered by fleas, a sports fan, and a statistician. These are just a few examples of "case after case" that could be
cited. All are equally valid and interesting, the speaker argues, as are the "business documents" introduced in the
sentence that continues in the next stanza.

STANZA 4
The previous stanza's sentence wraps up by including textbooks and claiming that "all these phenomena are
important." Any subject, the speaker argues, can make a good poem as long as the poem is written by a real poet,
not a "half poet." The speaker also states that good poetry will not exist until the "autocrats" (the supposed
authorities who determine what makes "good" poetry), become "literalists of the imagination." Those autocrats must
stop being trivial and rude and be able to "present"—the last word in the stanza. Once again the thought is
incomplete and continued in the next stanza.

STANZA 5
What the autocrats need to be able to present for others to examine is "imaginary gardens with real toads in them."
Only then "shall we have / it": real poetry. Until then, those who demand "the raw material" of genuine poetry can
count themselves among those who really are "interested in poetry."

SPEAKER AND MEANING

As is often the case with first-person poems, literary critics and readers generally assume that the speaker of
"Poetry" is author Marianne Moore herself. In real life Moore certainly wasn't shy about expressing her opinions
about popular poetry. The virtues she extols in "Poetry" could easily describe any of her published works. Like the
speaker of the poem, she believed that poetry should be firmly rooted in things that are real.

Moore's terse language and stanza-long sentences can obscure the poem's meaning during an initial reading. But
behind the complexity of language is a simple message: poetry is terrible—except when it's not. In "Poetry" she
argues that most poems are too overworked, too hard to understand, and too disconnected from reality. Their
purpose is not to enlighten or provoke thought but to show off the author's verbal prowess and appease the
"autocrats." Good poetry—and, Moore would argue, REAL poetry—is "raw" and "genuine," firmly rooted in real,
everyday "phenomena," such as the bat or business documents. That isn't to say there isn't any place for creative
language in poetry; there is. But it should be used to examine that which is real. To borrow Moore's example from
Stanza 5, descriptions of an imaginary garden help the reader understand the flesh-and-blood toad.
Moore places the burden of bringing such poetry to light not on her fellow poets but on the reader. According to the
speaker of the poem, the "autocrats"—a faceless, nameless collection of so-called experts who determine what is
"good" and what is "bad"—are too entrenched in "insolence and triviality" to even realize that a change needs to be
made. It is the reader who must demand better poetry and hold poets to a higher standard.

POETIC FORM
"Poetry" is a syllabic poem. It does not have a set meter that is a pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables or a
rhyme scheme. Rather, it is written to meet certain syllable counts on each line. Moore is generally classified as a
syllabic poet—a preference she acknowledged in a 1919 letter to fellow modernist poet Ezra Pound—but later in life
she resisted that classification. "I never 'plan' a stanza," she said when asked about the syllabic nature of her poems.

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 In the same interview, however, she conceded that when she found an arrangement of syllables she liked in one
stanza, she patterned the others in a nearly identical way. Such is the case in "Poetry."

"Poetry" is broken into five stanzas of six lines each. The first line of Stanza 1, which in many online versions is
actually shown as two lines because of space constraints, has 19 syllables followed by 22 in line 2. The first and
second lines of Stanza 2 follow suit with 19 syllables in line 7 and 22 syllables in line 8. The last three stanzas repeat
this pattern of two long introductory lines per stanza. The third, fourth, and fifth lines in each stanza have 11, 5, and 8
syllables, respectively. The final lines are each 13 syllables, and the general line structure of each stanza is long,
long, short, short, short, long.

Syllabic poetry doesn't have a particular or prescribed rhythm. There aren't any stressed beats, as in metered poetry.
Pauses are dictated by punctuation instead of line and stanza breaks. Because of this structure "Poetry" sounds
more like persuasive speech than a poem when it is read aloud, and Moore's poetic form is evident only on paper.
There, readers can see how Moore uses enjambment to split ideas and phrases between lines and stanzas. For
example, lines 4 and 5 read: "Hands that can grasp, eyes / that can dilate, hair that can rise." Separating "eyes" in
line 5 from the action they take (dilating) surprises readers and perhaps even makes them feel off-kilter. Before the
brain can comprehend the comma that separates "Hands that can grasp" from "eyes," readers are given a brief and
creepy visual impression of hands clutching eyeballs.

Something similar happens between Stanzas 2 and 3. The speaker is talking about the bat at the end of Stanza 2: it
is "in quest of something to." Readers don't find out what exactly the quest is until the beginning of Stanza 3, which
starts, "eat, elephants pushing." Because of the line and stanza breaks, instead of imagining bats eating, readers
may envision bats looking for someone who will eat a herd of impatient elephants. Moore's use of enjambment
disrupts any preconceived ideas or images readers may have and forces them to take a closer look at the words and
their arrangement on the page.

4.SKUNK HOUR By Robert Lowell

For Elizabeth Bishop)Dedication Lowell’s poem is modeled on Elizabeth Bishop’s poem
“The Armadillo,” which Bishop had dedicated to Lowell.
Nautilus Island’s hermit
heiress still lives through winter in her Spartan cottage;
her sheep still graze above the sea.
Her son’s a bishop. Her farmer
is first selectman in our village;
she’s in her dotage.

Thirsting for

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the hierarchic privacy
of Queen Victoria’s century,
she buys up all
the eyesores facing her shore,
and lets them fall.

The season’s ill—

we’ve lost our summer millionaire,
who seemed to leap from an L. L. Bean
catalogue. His nine-knot yawl
was auctioned off to lobstermen.
A red fox stain covers Blue Hill.

And now our fairy

decorator brightens his shop for fall;
his fishnet’s filled with orange cork,
orange, his cobbler’s bench and awl;
there is no money in his work,
he’d rather marry.

One dark night,

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my Tudor Ford climbed the hill’s skull;
I watched for love-cars . Lights turned down,
they lay together, hull to hull,
where the graveyard shelves on the town. . . .
My mind’s not right.

A car radio bleats,

“Love, O careless Love. . . .” I hear
my ill-spirit sob in each blood cell,
as if my hand were at its throat. . . .
I myself am hell;
nobody’s here—

only skunks, that search

in the moonlight for a bite to eat.
They march on their soles up Main Street:
white stripes, moonstruck eyes’ red fire
under the chalk-dry and spar spire
of the Trinitarian Church.

I stand on top

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of our back steps and breathe the rich air—
a mother skunk with her column of kittens swills the garbage pail
She jabs her wedge-head in a cup
of sour cream, drops her ostrich tail,
and will not scare.
SKUNK HOUR BY ROBERT LOWELL: SUMMARY AND CRITICAL
ANALYSIS

About the poet: Robert Trail Spence Lowell IV was an American poet. American poet noted for his
complex, autobiographical poetry. He was born into a Boston Brahmin family that could trace its origins back to the
Mayflower. His family, past and present, were important subjects in his poetry. Robert Lowell served as
a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 1962 until his death

Skunk Hour is a confessional poem. In it, the poet reveals his personal secret confesses that he is living
meaninglessly and suffering from the loss of faith, courage and even desire for life. The poem is dedicated to his
friend and junior poetess Elizabeth Bishop, who also wrote poetry about the necessity of simple powers of the mind
and spirit to live a meaningful and happy life.

Robert Lowell (1917-1977)

The title of the poem means “disgusting period”: the word ‘skunk’ denotes to a small and badly smelling rat like
animal, but as an adjective (before the noun ‘hour’) it means ‘extremely hateful’; the word ‘hour’ must mean ‘period’,
‘time’ or ‘phase’. The title points to the disgusting phase of life that the poet was living when he had lost the courage,
desire and purpose of living life. The first part of the poem is pessimistic: stanzas 1 to 6 express frustrations, doubt
and failures. But the poem ends with a deep realization about why his life was becoming meaningless and painful: he

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sees a dirty small animal enjoying life, having the physical, mental and spiritual strength to live on. He realizes by
looking at the simple skunk that he was not having the fertile mind, spirit and body to bring up the energies to live
actively.

The poem can be divided into four main parts or stages of development of images. The first part presents an old
woman in a lonely island trying to maintain her old ways by buying cultural antiques. But she fails. The second part
begins with “the season is ill”, an expression of frustration. The speaker mentions how a “summer millionaire” has
gone bankrupt and auctioned his yacht. Another businessman fails to attract customers by decorating his shop, and
so he’d rather marry”. Besides, there is also a hint of violence: A red fox stain covers ‘Blue Hill’. The third part of the
poem shows how the persona wanders in intense agony and spiritual crisis. He climbs a hill and finds the degraded
modern condition. His spirit cries. His mind is not right. He echoes the sayings of Saint John, King Lear and Satan,
all of which express emotional crisis. In the last two stanzas, we find the speaker looking at a skunk and its kittens
fearlessly coming to a city street and eating garbage. The skunks’ passion or strong desire for life, their fertility and
naturalness and their originality makes the speaker feel that he doesn’t have these powers and qualities of living a
meaningful life. He learns a lesson, and a new life begins for him. This is the therapy for an ill soul, of modern man.
He must be physically, mentally, psychologically and spiritually fertile, or creative. He must have the determination
and spirit to live. He must fight and struggle against degradation and artificiality.

Each part is in two stanzas. The process seems to represent a journey back to health through art, imagination or
creative experience. What couldn’t be healed by anything is revealed to the sufferer in a simple incident. The
revelation or epiphany at the end is unbelievable. Modern life’s corrupting influences have led men to express
frustration and despair: “I myself am hell”. Solitude, trivialization, psychic problem, drug, and moral corruption are the
causes. Only the resolution (decision) to use the individual’s own potential will help, as in this poem.

The skunk serves as a symbol of fertility (creativity), the persistence of life, independence, naturalness and the like.
Only the realization and use of these potentials for revitalization of the inner energy will rescue modern man from his
suicidal frustration. The poem is creating a general symbol of the modern human condition. The language is simple,
but suggestive, too. The poem is essentially obscure like the thought and express of a mental patient. But the
observation of the shifting context helps us generalize about the development and meaning.

The theme of the poem is the loss and gain of spiritual powers by the poet, or his speaker, representing the modern
American or modern man. The speaker was almost giving up life and extinguishing his powers due to self-disgust.
His mind was getting more and more disordered. He was losing hope and faith. When he saw the others, he only
generalized that all of them were railing to maintain their old values, and failing to live. But when he himself reached

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 the climax of frustration and depression, he one day, fortunately, learn the right lesson by looking at a skunk that is
still living with full zeal an active and meaningful life, in its original and natural way. Thus, we see that the theme of
the poem is the quest of the speaker, his journey through failure to success. The speaker has moved from
depression to the spiritual rebirth of his natural energies, from a decadent world to individual revitalization. That
process is also suggested by the pattern of the poem that moves from a dying old human mother who is failing to
maintain her values to a young animal mother which is able to live so fully and actively.

5.RUNAGATE RUNAGATE
BY R OBE RT H AY DE N

I.Runs falls rises stumbles on from darkness into darkness

and the darkness thicketed with shapes of terror
and the hunters pursuing and the hounds pursuing
and the night cold and the night long and the river
to cross and the jack-muh-lanterns beckoning beckoning
and blackness ahead and when shall I reach that somewhere
morning and keep on going and never turn back and keep on going
Runagate
Runagate
Runagate
Many thousands rise and go
many thousands crossing over
O mythic North
O star-shaped yonder Bible city

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Some go weeping and some rejoicing
some in coffins and some in carriages
some in silks and some in shackles

Rise and go or fare you well

No more auction block for me

no more driver’s lash for me

If you see my Pompey, 30 yrs of age,

new breeches, plain stockings, negro shoes;
if you see my Anna, likely young mulatto
branded E on the right cheek, R on the left,
catch them if you can and notify subscriber.
Catch them if you can, but it won’t be easy.
They’ll dart underground when you try to catch them,
plunge into quicksand, whirlpools, mazes,
turn into scorpions when you try to catch them.

And before I’ll be a slave

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I’ll be buried in my grave

North star and bonanza gold

I’m bound for the freedom, freedom-bound
and oh Susyanna don’t you cry for me

Runagate

Runagate
II.
Rises from their anguish and their power,

Harriet Tubman,

woman of earth, whipscarred,

a summoning, a shining

Mean to be free

And this was the way of it, brethren brethren,

way we journeyed from Can’t to Can.

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 Moon so bright and no place to hide,
the cry up and the patterollers riding,
hound dogs belling in bladed air.
And fear starts a-murbling, Never make it,
we’ll never make it. HUSH THAT NOW,
and she’s turned upon us, levelled pistol
glinting in the moonlight:
Dead folks can’t jaybird-talk, she says;
you keep on going now or die, she says.

Wanted Harriet Tubman alias The General

alias Moses Stealer of Slaves

In league with Garrison Alcott Emerson

Garrett Douglas Thoreau John Brown

Armed and known to be Dangerous

Wanted Reward Dead or Alive

Tell me, Ezekiel, oh tell me do you see

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 mailed Jehovah coming to deliver me?

Hoot-owl calling in the ghosted air,

five times calling to the hants in the air.
Shadow of a face in the scary leaves,
shadow of a voice in the talking leaves:

Come ride-a my train

Oh That Train, Ghost-Story Train

Through Swamp And Savanna Movering Movering,
Over Trestles Of Dew, Through Caves Of The Wish,
Midnight Special On A Sabre Track Movering Movering,
First Stop Mercy And The Last Hallelujah.

Come ride-a my train

Mean mean mean to be free.

Hayden tended to shy away from the martyrology practiced by some militant African
American writers who presented highly varnished depictions of the heroes of black
history. In “Runagate Runagate,” however, he did paint a glowing portrait of Harriet
Tubman, an African American abolitionist who smuggled slaves from the South to the
free North before the Civil War.

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All ethnic and racial groups have enshrined ideal members who have accomplished great
things. It became the special province of radical black writers of the 1960’s to supply
such champions for their race, heroes who, these writers correctly claimed, had been
neglected by the dominant culture. These militant writers often dismissed Hayden for the
lack of revolutionary flourishes in his verse, and they also looked in vain through his
works for idealized depictions of African American historical figures. When Hayden did
present such figures, as in his allusions to Cinque in “Middle Passage,” the portrait was
neither touched up—the atrocities practiced by Cinque’s followers are not glossed over—
nor direct (Cinque, for example, is described only through the words of his opponent).
Without compromising his commitment to indirection or objectivity, in “Runagate
Runagate,” Hayden does give a larger-than-life, though not overly flattering, picture of a
valiant woman.

Again Hayden plaits together a number of voices, often hostile ones, to give a rounded
picture of both Tubman and her surrounding circumstances. There are snippets from
advertisements for runaway slaves along with quotations from spirituals and wanted
posters.

The poem falls into two sections. The first, which does not mention Tubman, is
concerned with sketching the milieu in which slave hunters and fleeing slaves coexisted.
The description is focused by the stream of consciousness of a harried but determined
escaped slave who is swimming rivers and crashing through thickets to escape pursuing
hounds. In this part of the poem, the lines taken from spirituals appear as tonics to
strengthen the escapee’s resolve.

The second section is less generic, pinpointing Tubman as the leader who is ferrying
fugitives to the North. The voice now comes from an escapee under Tubman’s direction.
The slave’s voice is counterpointed by the words on a wanted poster that describe
Tubman: “Alias Moses, Stealer of Slaves.” Ironically, by calling her “Moses,” the masters
adopt the slaves’ way of reading the Bible, according to which the slaves see themselves
as Israelites under unjust Egyptian bondage.

In the end, though, Tubman is not so much idealized as merged with the forces of
nature. Hayden describes how the shadows of fugitives blend with the dark trees and
how their voices mix with the bird calls they imitate. These comparisons act not so much
to lift Tubman high as to suggest that the impulse to freedom is as inexhaustible as
nature’s impulse to grow.

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 6.MIRROR By Sylvia Plath
I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.
Whatever I see I swallow immediately
Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike.
I am not cruel, only truthful‚
The eye of a little god, four-cornered.
Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall.
It is pink, with speckles. I have looked at it so long
I think it is part of my heart. But it flickers.
Faces and darkness separate us over and over.

Now I am a lake. A woman bends over me,

Searching my reaches for what she really is.
Then she turns to those liars, the candles or the moon.
I see her back, and reflect it faithfully.
She rewards me with tears and an agitation of hands.
I am important to her. She comes and goes.
Each morning it is her face that replaces the darkness.
In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman
Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.

• About the Poet: Sylvia Plath Was An American Poet, Novelist, Essayist, And Short -Story

Writer. She Is Credited With Advancing The Genre Of Confessional Poetry And Is Best Known
For Two Of Her Published Collections Mirror”

• SUMMARY
o The poem is told from the perspective of a mirror, who starts by describing itself physically as
silver-colored and precise. The mirror insists it has no predetermined notions or assumptions
about anything, and instead simply takes in whatever stands in front of it right away, exactly the
way it is, unclouded by any feelings. The mirror isn't mean or harsh, but simply honest. It's like
a small god's eye, only with four corners. For the most part, the mirror focuses on the pink,
speckled wall that stands across from it. The mirror has been staring at this wall for so long that
it thinks the wall is in fact an essential part of itself. At the same time, that wall goes in and out
of focus as people and darkness pass in front of it—and into the mirror's line of sight—again
and again.

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The mirror becomes the reflective surface of a lake over which a woman leans, looking intently
into the water's depths for some hint of who she is inside. Not finding it, she directs her
attention to the candle she holds or the moon—sources of light that she thinks must be lying to
her by not showing her who she really is. The mirror watches the woman's back as she walks
away, and reflects it accurately. The woman thanks the mirror by crying and wringing her hands
in distress. The mirror knows that it matters a lot to this woman, who comes back to look into it
time and again. Every day starts with the woman's face taking the place of the darkness that
the mirror reflected all night. The young girl she once was will never look back at her again,
having been metaphorically drowned in the mirror. Instead, as the days go by she sees only the
old woman she has become approaching her like an awful fish.

TIME, AGING, AND MORTALITY

The poem describes a woman seeing herself growing older and older in a mirror each day—or,
more accurately, it describes a personified mirror looking on as the women’s youth fades. The
woman clearly resents getting older and losing her beauty and youth—two important social
currencies for women living in a male-dominated society, especially in Plath’s day. The poem
thus illustrates the anguish of aging, as the woman confronts her mortality in the mirror each
morning.

The first stanza illustrates the objectivity of the mirror, which is only capable of reflecting what it
sees. The mirror describes itself as “the eye of a little god.” Like a god, the mirror sees things
exactly as they are. The mirror has no intentions of its own; it has no desire to make the woman
feel bad about herself. It doesn’t exist to flatter or insult, but only to reflect appearances
truthfully.

The woman, on the other hand, experiences the mirror’s objectivity as a pointed reminder of
her own mortality. As time passes, she ages and becomes further removed from her youth
while getting ever closer to death. The mirror is “important” to the woman, perhaps because

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 women in particular are so often expected to conform to rigid standards of beauty and youth.
Unfortunately, then, the very parts of the woman that patriarchal society deems most valuable
are also the parts of her that have a time stamp; they are quickly fading.

Even more upsetting is the question of who she is when these parts of herself fade away. On
the inside, the woman is the same person she’s always been, yet as she gazes into her
reflection each morning, she sees “an old woman / Ris[ing] toward her, day after day, like a
terrible fish.” This description suggests that the woman's reflection is disconcerting, as if the
aging process has made her unrecognizable; her changing face feels shocking and unreal. And
yet, the mirror insists that it is indeed real. This disconnect between how she feels inside and
the harsh reality of the mirror highlights the horror and difficulty of confronting aging and—
because aging inevitably leads to death—the idea of mortality.

7.HARLEM BY LA NG STO N H UG H ES

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore—
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over—
like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags

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like a heavy load.

OR DOES IT EXPLODE?

James Mercer Langston Hughes was an American poet, social activist, novelist, playwright, and columnist

from Joplin, Missouri. One of the earliest innovators of the literary art form called jazz poetry, Hughes is best

known as a leader of the Harlem Renaissance.

• HARLEM” SUMMARY
o The speaker asks what happens to a vision or hope of a community, when this vision or hope is
continuously put off or delayed.

The speaker asks: will that dream wither away and shrivel up like fruit left out in the sun? Or will
it putrefy like a painful, infected wound and then leak out pus? Will it smell disgusting, like meat
that's gone bad? Or will it become like a gooey candy that gets all crusty and crystallized?

The speaker proposes a fifth possibility: that the unfulfilled dream will simply weigh the
dreamers down as they have to continue to bear it.

Finally, the speaker offers a last alternative: maybe the dream will burst outward with energy
and potency, demanding to be recognized and accounted for.

• “HARLEM” THEMES
o

THE COST OF SOCIAL INJUSTICE

Hughes wrote "Harlem" in 1951, more than a decade before the Civil Rights Act of 1964. He
was also writing in the aftermath of the 1935 and 1943 Harlem riots, both of which were
triggered by segregation, pervasive unemployment, and police brutality in the black community.

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Hughes's poem responds to this context. The title, “Harlem,” places the poem in this historically
black and immigrant neighborhood in New York City, while the "dream" could be any dream
that those in Harlem have had: a dream for a better life, for opportunity, for equality—most
broadly, for access to the American Dream itself.

But, as the poem tells readers, this dream has been continuously put off (specifically, by the
policies that made black Americans second class citizens). The poem makes it clear, however,
that a “dream deferred” by injustice doesn’t simply disappear. Instead, that dream must be
accounted for sooner or later. Inevitably, the poem suggests, there will be a vast societal
reckoning as the dreamers claim what is rightfully their own.

At first, though, the speaker addresses the idea that deferring a dream may lessen the dream
itself, making it feel ever more unreachable as it fades away. The poem suggests that the
deferred dream could “dry up” or “fester like a sore”; it might “stink like rotten meat … Or crust
and sugar over / like a syrupy sweet." Each of these images suggests something spoiling,
losing potency, or outright decaying—which is perhaps exactly the outcome a racist society,
hoping to maintain the status quo, might want; such a society wants to see this dream of racial
equality lose its bite and scab over.

Each comparison also makes palpable what it might feel like to have a dream that can’t be
realized because of injustice. These images all imply the cost faced by black people forced to
bear this injustice like a painful, infected "sore." Later, the speaker wonders if that dream "just
sags / like a heavy load." In other words, maybe this dream of equality just forever weighs on
communities like Harlem, dragging them down rather than lifting them up.

But then the speaker proposes an entirely different outcome for this dream, asking, “ OR DOES
IT EXPLODE? ” This image of explosion brings to mind the Harlem riots of 1935 and 1943. It
could also refer to the explosion of the dream itself, in the sense that the American Dream
could be “exploded,” or shown to be hollow or false. Most importantly, the final question shifts

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from images of the dream withering away, festering, and sagging—all experiences that would
impact those most targeted by injustice—to an image of the dream “explod[ing]” outward. All of
society, this final question implies, will have to reckon with the dream, as, in its energy, vitality,
and righteousness, it claims its due.

Where this theme appears in the poem:

• Lines 1-11

THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE COMMUNITY

“Harlem” can be read in two ways at once: the deferred dream in the poem can be interpreted
as a collective, social dream—the dream of an entire group of people—and it may also be
interpreted as an individual dream. In fact, the poem suggests that individual and collective
dreams are intricately connected. Ultimately, the poem implies that individual dreams cannot be
realized without the realization of the larger, collective dream of equality.

Perhaps most obviously, the poem can be read as being about the deferral of a collective
dream. The title, “Harlem,” frames the poem as being about the experience of an entire
community—that of Harlem. The dream, then, implicitly, is the dream of this neighborhood and
group of people. In the poem, the dream is also described with the singular “it,” suggesting that
the dream is the SAME throughout the poem and that there is one, primary dream continuously
at stake. Given the title, this suggests that throughout the poem, the dream described is the
dream of Harlem as a whole.

At the same time, however, the poem can be read as about the deferral
of INDIVIDUAL dreams—that is, the hopes and desires of single people within this community.
The poem compares the deferred dream to things that an individual would experience. A “raisin
in the sun” is a tiny thing that a single person might observe; similarly, “a sore” is something an

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individual would endure. An individual might encounter the “stink of rotten meat” or have to bear
“a heavy load.” These comparisons suggest that the dream in the poem could be an individual
dream, or many individual dreams, and the deferral of these dreams is experienced on a
personal, immediate scale.

The use of “A dream” instead of “THE dream” further suggests that the dream could be
interpreted in different ways, including on the individual level. The word “the” is often used with
proper nouns, or to convey something that is singular, public, or widely known. Conversely, “a”
suggests that the dream is one of many dreams, not the only one. This supports the idea that
the dream could be an individual dream, or one of MANY individual dreams.

The historical context of the poem also supports these two readings. “Harlem” was written in
1951, during the era of Jim Crow segregation and the early period of the Civil Rights
Movement. It was also written in the aftermath of World War II, when black Americans fought in
the United States military—to defeat Nazism and to defend American visions of equality and
liberty— but were forced to do so within segregated ranks. The sense of a collective dream of
equality, and the deferral of this dream, was intensely present.

The persistence of systemic racism also meant that many individual dreams of black Americans
could not be realized. For example, a black family might dream of buying a home, but racist
policies like discriminatory lending practices and redlining made this virtually impossible.

Within this context, many individual dreams could LITERALLY not be realized without the
realization of a larger, COLLECTIVE dream of equality and Civil Rights. By making both
individual and collective experience present within in the poem, “Harlem” reflects and
comments on this reality, suggesting that the deferral of the collective dream of equality is felt
and carried on a palpable, human scale.

Where this theme appears in the poem:

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 • Lines 1-11

O LINE 1

What happens to a dream deferred?

The title and first line of “Harlem” establish the poem’s context and its central question. The title
places the poem in a particular location, a historically black American neighborhood in New
York City. In the early 20th century, millions of black Americans migrated from the rural south to
urban areas in the midwest, west and north of the country, including Harlem. In the 1910s and
1920s, during and immediately after the Great Migration, the neighborhood became the seat of
the Harlem Renaissance, an outpouring of black literature, art, and music that sought to explore
and express the experiences of black people in America.

The poem’s title also evokes the racial injustice that inhabitants of Harlem have endured. At the
time the poem was written, in 1951, black people had fought for the U.S. military in World War
II, yet still faced state-sanctioned racism, segregation, police brutality, pervasive
unemployment, and white supremacist violence at home. These conditions led to the Harlem
Riots of 1935 and 1943, as well as to the Civil Rights Movement, which was, in the early 1950s,
beginning to take stronger shape.

The title works, then, to establish the geographical, political, and cultural context within which
the poem’s questions are explored, and its first line understood. This opening line, “What
happens to a dream deferred?” is the only line that is completely left-aligned; the rest of the
poem is indented. In this way, the formatting connects the poem’s first question to the title,
almost as though it is an extension of the title.

The “dream” of the poem’s first question, read within this context, acquires inevitable
connotations; from the outset, it is clear that the poem is not just about a personal, individual
dream, but about a larger dream of social justice held by those in Harlem who have, for so long,
endured inequality.

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At the level of language, the opening question is concise and direct, inviting the reader to
immediately engage with and try to answer it. In a sense, the question involves and implicates
the reader in the problem of what will happen to the dream. This sense of involvement, which is
sustained by the questions throughout the poem, connects readers to the dream and to what is
at stake, suggesting that the dream is important, not just for the people of Harlem, but for
everyone.

The opening line also juxtaposes the conversational quality of “What happens” with the
compression and musical qualities of the phrase “dream deferred.” In this second phrase,
the alliteration of the /d/ sounds and the consonance of the long /e/ sounds (in “dream” and
the first syllable of “deferred”) tie the words together, suggesting that the dream is, by default,
“deferred” or continuously put off.

Yet this phrase is also, in certain ways, disjunctive. Readers might expect the phrase to read “a
dream THAT IS deferred,” but in the poem the connecting words (“that” and “is”) are omitted.
The shorter /e/ sound in the second syllable of “deferred,” meanwhile, shifts the phrase out of
its apparent musical unity.

Finally, “deferred” is not a word usually associated with dreams. “To defer” literally means “to
postpone” or “to put off.” “Deferment” is a word that has been connected with the military draft,
including during World War II: someone eligible for a draft deferment would not be drafted or
deployed right away.

The word, as it appears here, sounds strangely technical and bureaucratic, contrasting sharply
with the visionary, humane idea of a “dream.” This disjunction at the level of sound and
meaning introduces tension and irresolution at the poem’s outset.

THE DREAM

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 While “Harlem” uses a series of similes to describe what might happen to a dream that is
continuously put off, the poem’s primary symbol is the dream itself.

“What happens to a dream deferred?” the speaker asks. The speaker doesn’t go on to define
what the dream is or whose dream it is; instead, the poem leaves this implicit and, in some
ways, open-ended. The title suggests that the dream is one held by those who live in Harlem,
and also perhaps those who live in communities similar to Harlem. Given the historical
circumstances of the poem, this means that the dream could be one held by black people and
other people of color who have been continuously held down and back by a racist society.

Still, even with this degree of specific interpretation, the dream remains symbolic. It stands, in
the poem, for one dream of equality, but also for the many individual dreams held by people
who are oppressed. As a symbol, it embodies all of these people’s hopes and expectations and
sense of possibility. In a way, then, the symbol allows many different readers to “read
themselves” into the poem, as readers identify with the dream and with the frustration of its
deferral.

• “HARLEM” POETIC DEVICES & FIGURATIVE LANGUAGE

O ANAPHORA

Anaphora works in several ways “Harlem.” First, it provides a recognizable pattern and
structure to the speaker’s questions, beginning in stanza 2. “Does it dry up / like a raisin in the
sun?” the speaker asks. “Or fester like a sore—And then run?” These opening lines of the
stanza establish a pattern that will repeat, with some variation: “Does it stink like rotten meat?”
the speaker asks next. “Or crust and sugar over— / like a syrupy sweet?”

Note the words and phrases that repeat anaphorically:

Does it …

like …

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 Or …

Does it …

Or …

like …
The only line in this stanza that does not begin anaphorically is the one exactly at its center,
line 5: “And then run?” The stanza, then, creates a highly patterned form for itself. The
repeating beginnings of the questions and lines give them energy and momentum, and also
make them, in a sense, predictable, creating a kind of deceptive calm.

Importantly, then, “Harlem” also disrupts this predictability by how it changes its own anaphora.
Note, for example, how in the second half of the stanza, the order of anaphoric phrases
changes, from “like… Or… ” to “Or… like.” Stanza three also shifts away from this pattern,
though echoes it with the “like” in line 10 (“like a heavy load”). These subtle changes introduce
an increasing sense of instability in the poem.

The last line both changes and combines the anaphora that has been introduced up to this
point. “OR DOES IT EXPLODE?” the speaker asks, bringing together the “or” and the “does it” in
the second stanza into a single line and a single anaphoric phrase. Here, the tension that has
built in the poem up to this point between pattern and variation comes into full awareness, as
the poem transforms its own pattern. Like the explosion the poem describes, this
transformation may seem sudden or startling, yet the poem has actually been building toward
this point all along.

8.PERHAPS THE WORLD ENDS HERE By Joy Harjo

The world begins at a kitchen table. No matter what, we must eat to live.

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The gifts of earth are brought and prepared, set on the table. So it has been since creation,
and it will go on.

We chase chickens or dogs away from it. Babies teethe at the corners. They scrape their
knees under it.

It is here that children are given instructions on what it means to be human. We make men
at it, we make women.

At this table we gossip, recall enemies and the ghosts of lovers.

Our dreams drink coffee with us as they put their arms around our children. They laugh
with us at our poor falling-down selves and as we put ourselves back together once again
at the table.

This table has been a house in the rain, an umbrella in the sun.

Wars have begun and ended at this table. It is a place to hide in the shadow of terror. A
place to celebrate the terrible victory.

We have given birth on this table, and have prepared our parents for burial here.

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At this table we sing with joy, with sorrow. We pray of suffering and remorse. We give
thanks.

Perhaps the world will end at the kitchen table, while we are laughing and crying, eating of
the last sweet bite.
Joy Harjo was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1951 as the first of four children. A member of the Muscogee (Creek)
Nation, her father was from the famous Creek family, and her mother was of Cherokee, Irish, and French
descent. Harjo grew up among many artists and musicians. Her mother was a songwriter, and her grandmother
played saxophone. From Harjo’s youth, these artistic women inspired her to explore her own creativity. While
she didn’t start writing poems until she was a bit older, Harjo painted as a teenager to express herself, attending
the Institute of the American Indian Arts in Santa Fe. During this time, she danced, acted, and wrote songs
regularly. Harjo earned a Bachelor of Arts from the University of New Mexico and a Master of Fine Arts from
the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

OVERVIEW

“Perhaps the World Ends Here” is by Joy Harjo, a member of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation, and the
2019 US Poet Laureate—the first Native American poet to hold the office. Published in Harjo’s 1994
collection, THE WOMAN WHO FELL FROM THE SKY , the poem explores themes of unity, the concept of
gathering, and the apocalypse. Written as an extended metaphor in which Harjo’s speaker compares
the ubiquitous kitchen table to the world and the cycles of life, “Perhaps the World Ends Here” is a
stark argument—during times of global war, climate change, and overall fragmentation—for
recognizing the similarities of all humanity rather than its differences. As a Native, Harjo
understands the importance of community, supporting family and friends, and caring for the earth’s
environment. These thematic tones run deeply throughout this poem and many other works by
Harjo.

Speaking volumes in just 11 stanzas, “Perhaps the World Ends Here” is a testament to Harjo’s poetic
ability and to her softly forceful voice. Harjo’s work has been described as “[drawing] from the river
of Native tradition, but […] also [swimming] freely in the currents of Anglo-American verse” (“Joy
Harjo.” THE POETRY FOUNDATION), and this poem does just that. It reflects the Creek values and
traditions while speaking to a wider audience.

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Joy Harjo’s poem “Perhaps the World Ends Here” implants an impression of the world as a kitchen table:
“The world begins at a kitchen table. No matter what, we must eat to live.” (1). As I interpreted the poem, I
perceived it as a brief analysis of life. Harjo elaborates life as one protracted feast, and our life ends when we
eat the concluding bite of our meal: “Perhaps the world will end at the kitchen table, while we are laughing
and crying, eating of the last sweet bite.” (11). What is the point of life? This question wandered about in my
head demanding an answer as I read the poem. Is life as simple as a short meal at a kitchen table? After
reading “Perhaps the World Ends Here,” I am made aware of the answer to this very question. We
design…show more content…
Therefore, I chose to further analyze Harjo’s work through a psychological approach. According to research,
Harjo was the first Native American to be awarded the Wallace Stevens award from the Academy of
American Poets. It is an award that recognizes outstanding and proven mastery in the art of poetry. At an
interview, Harjo said, “As a Native person, you go through tests. There have been times I've almost given up
and have had every door slammed in my face, especially with poetry. I feel like I'm carrying this award for
all of us.” Regarding the interview, this demonstrates to readers the mentality of Harjo. She experienced
assorted types of adversity due to her social status of being a Native American. However, it is indisputable
that it was her mindset that inspired her to withstand hard times and fulfill her goals as a poet. Viewing
“Perhaps the World Ends Here” from a psychological perspective gave me insight in to why Harjo would
deliver a poem with such an inspiring moral. Harjo’s life defines the word “effort” and “Perhaps the World
Ends Here” is a summarization of her life.

SUMMARY
Harjo uses the image of a ‘table’ within PERHAPS THE WORLD ENDS HERE as a symbol of
all the events a human could encounter. Beginning with the simple fact that one must eat
to life, then expanding out through childhood, into adulthood, covering love and loss, even
touching upon war, Harjo suggests that everything happens at a table. It encompasses the
human spirit beautifully, the communal idea that lies with a ‘Table’ referencing our desire
to be among good company. As quickly as life ends, it is over, with perhaps our last
moment being at our kitchen table, savouring the ‘last sweet bite’.

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 Perhaps the World Ends Here ANALYSIS
STANZA ONE

The world begins at a kitchen table. No matter what, we must eat to live.
Joy Harjo begins PERHAPS THE WORLD ENDS HERE by focusing on the ‘kitchen table’. By
using a caesura after ‘table’, Harjo emphasises the noun, furthering the importance of the
object. Indeed, the ‘kitchen table’ becomes Harjo’s central metaphor, and therefore is
placed at a focal moment in this first line.

The very image of a ‘kitchen’ bares connotations of nurturing and food. These ideas follow
later in the poem, with Harjo stating that at the most base and literal level, ‘tables’
represent the place where one eats. Indeed, ‘we must eat to live’, and therefore it is the
base for all other things.

The blunt nature of the rest of this stanza, caesura splitting the line into two halves, depicts
the reality of life. Indeed, ‘no matter what’, it is a fact that ‘we must eat to live’. There is no
poetic intent behind these words, just a simple truth that then becomes the core of the rest
of the poem. Everything can be avoided, but at some point we must come into contact
with food and the ‘kitchen table’, therefore it acts as a fantastic metaphor.

STANZAS TWO AND THREE

The gifts of earth are brought and prepared, set on the table. So it has been since
creation, and it will go on.
(…) They scrape their knees under it.

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The semantics of naturing are extended into the second stanza, with the image of ’gifts of
earth’ being used to describe food brought to the kitchen table. The act of eating becomes
inherently connected to the land and nature, ‘gifts’ suggesting the importance of nature.

The focus on ‘chickens or dogs’ furthers this sense that nature is present at the kitchen
table. Although ‘chase[d]’ away, they continue to have a role in the poem, nature being
ever-present in Harjo’s narrative.

It is at this point within PERHAPS THE WORLD ENDS HERE that Harjo introduces the
image of ‘babies’. Although not seemingly too important, this moment in the poem
provides an important contrast to later stanzas, therefore developing an image of a
complete human life passing before our eyes.

STANZAS FOUR, FIVE & SIX

It is here that children are given instructions on what it means to be human. We
make men at it, we make women.
(…)
Our dreams drink coffee with us as they put their arms around our children. They
laugh with us at our poor falling-down selves and as we put ourselves back
together once again at the table.
Harjo suggests that ‘what it means to be human’ is something on which ‘children are given
instruction’. This relates to the passing on of morals, ideas, and views from parent to child.
Children are the future, and the morals they are taught to keep close define not only their
lives, but the lives of those they interact with. It is across the table, slowly permeating
through their childhoods, where they learn what it means to ‘be human’, how it feels to
care for others.

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Harjo reflects on memories of the past, all these things flowing in to what it means to be
human and exist within a community. The poet focuses on the act of ‘recall[ing] enemies
and the ghosts of lovers’, recounting the past a way of educating and sharing life
experience with others. The metaphor of the ‘kitchen table’ supplies a narrative of warm,
family-orientated community, with this extension into stories of the past further showing
the durability of the image.

The nostalgia for the past Harjo instigates at this stage in the poem extends to the idea of
‘dreams’. They, too, are happy and supportive, being framed through the naturing image of
‘coffee’ and then personified as having ‘their arms around our children’. The central idea of
the poem remains focused on nurturing, happy, positive images of the community. The
personification of dreams is no different here, with Harjo adding to the
thankful atmosphere of the poem.

STANZAS SEVEN – ELEVEN

This table has been a house in the rain, an umbrella in the sun.
(…)
Perhaps the world will end at the kitchen table, while we are laughing and crying,
eating of the last sweet bite.
The ‘table’ metaphor, representing life and all things within it, go through stages of ‘rain’
and stages of ‘sun’. The use of these weather conditions acts as pathetic fallacy for the
emotions of the people living, reflecting happiness and sadness. Despite the exact
emotion, the image of the ‘table’ is always there, strongly offering a representation of
support.

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The beginning of life, ‘birth on this table’, and the end, ‘our parents for burial’ all stem from
the central image of the ‘table’. Birth, childhood, adulthood, and death all compound into
one image of the shared experiences that happen around a table.

The focus on the personal pronoun ‘We’ further classifies the sense of community Harjo is
depicting, all these people she has come into contact with and known throughout her life
being combined through her use of the pronoun.

The title of the poem takes its name from words in the final stanza of PERHAPS THE
WORLD ENDS HERE. Although the ‘world will end’, Harjo argues that at least humanity will
have had moments of connection within their communities, around ‘tables’ that act as
representations of these life events. Friends, family, and loved ones all ‘laughing and crying’
as life continues around the ‘kitchen table’, moments that define a life happening at these
seemingly unimportant objects. Eventually, the ‘sweet bite’ of life will come to its end – but
we can be thankful for all the moments of connection we have had until that moment.

UNIT 2 PROSE:
1.THE FIGURE A POEM MAKES By Robert Frost– TEXT
The Figure a Poem Makes (1939) Abstraction is an old story with the philosophers, but it has been like a new toy in

the hands of the artists of our day. Why can’t we have any one quality of poetry we choose by itself? We can have in

thought. Then it will go hard if we can’t in practice. Our lives for it. Granted no one but a humanist much cares how

sound a poem is if it is only a sound. The sound is the gold in the ore. Then we will have the sound out alone and

dispense with the inessential. We do till we make the discovery that the object in writing poetry is to make all

poems sound as different as possible from each other, and the resources for that of vowels, consonants,

punctuation, syntax, words, sentences, metre are not enough. We need the help of context– meaning-subject matter.

That is the greatest help towards variety. All that can be done with words is soon told. So also with metres—

particularly in our language where there are virtually but two, strict iambic and loose iambic. The ancients with

many were still poor if they depended on metres for all tune. It is painful to watch our sprung-rhythmists straining

at the point of omitting one short from a foot for relief from monotony. The possibilities for tune from the dramatic

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tones of meaning struck across the rigidity of a limited metre are endless. And we are back in poetry as merely one

more art of having something to say, sound or unsound. Probably better if sound, because deeper and from wider

experience. Then there is this wildness whereof it is spoken. Granted again that it has an equal claim with sound to

being a poem’s better half. If it is a wild tune, it is a Poem. Our problem then is, as modern abstractionists, to have

the wildness pure; to be wild with nothing to be wild about. We bring up as aberrationists, giving way to undirected

associations and kicking ourselves from one chance suggestion to another in all directions as of a hot afternoon in

the life of a grasshopper. Theme alone can steady us down. just as the first mystery was how a poem could have a

tune in such a straightness as metre, so the second mystery is how a poem can have wildness and at the same time a

subject that shall be fulfilled. It should be of the pleasure of a poem itself to tell how it can. The figure a poem makes.

It begins in delight and ends in wisdom. The figure is the same as for love. No one can really hold that the ecstasy

should be static and stand still in one place. It begins in delight, it inclines to the impulse, it assumes direction with

the first line laid down, it runs a course of lucky events, and ends in a clarification of life-not necessarily a great

clarification, such as sects and cults are founded on, but in a momentary stay against confusion. It has denouement.

It has an outcome that though unforeseen was predestined from the first image of the original mood-and indeed

from the very mood. It is but a trick poem and no poem at all if the best of it was thought of first and saved for the

last. It finds its own name as it goes and discovers the best waiting for it in some final phrase at once wise and sad-

the happy-sad blend of the drinking song. No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise for the writer,

no surprise for the reader. For me the initial delight is in the surprise of remembering something I didn’t know I

knew. I am in a place, in a situation, as if I had materialized from cloud or risen out of the ground. There is a glad

recognition of the long lost and the rest follows. Step by step the wonder of unexpected supply 2 keeps growing.

The impressions most useful to my purpose seem always those I was unaware of and so made no note of at the time

when taken, and the conclusion is come to that like giants we are always hurling experience ahead of us to pave the

future with against the day when we may Want to strike a line of purpose across it for somewhere. The line will

have the more charm for not being mechanically straight. We enjoy the straight crookedness of a good walking

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stick. Modern instruments of precision are being used to make things crooked as if by eye and hand in the old days.

I tell how there may be a better wildness of logic than of inconsequence. But the logic is backward, in retrospect,

after the act. It must be more felt than seen ahead like prophecy. It must be a revelation, or a series of revelations, as

much for the poet as for the reader. For it to be that there must have been the greatest freedom of the material to

move about in it and to establish relations in it regardless of time and space, previous relation, and everything but

affinity. We prate of freedom. We call our schools free because we are not free to stay away from them till we are

sixteen years of age. I have given up my democratic prejudices and now willingly set the lower classes free to be

completely taken care of by the upper classes. Political freedom is nothing to me. I bestow it right and left. All I

would keep for myself is the freedom of my material-the condition of body and mind now and then to summons

aptly from the vast chaos of all I have lived through. Scholars and artists thrown together are often annoyed at the

puzzle of where they differ. Both work from knowledge; but I suspect they differ most importantly in the way their

knowledge is come by. Scholars get theirs with conscientious thoroughness along projected lines of logic; poets

theirs cavalierly and as it happens in and out of books. They stick to nothing deliberately, but let what will stick to

them like burrs where they walk in the fields. No acquirement is on assignment, or even selfassignment. Knowledge

of the second kind is much more available in the wild free ways of wit and art. A schoolboy may be defined as one

who can tell you what he knows in the order in which he learned it. The artist must value himself as he snatches a

thing from some previous order in time and space into a new order with not so much as a ligature clinging to it of

the old place where it was organic. More than once I should have lost my soul to radicalism if it had been the

originality it was mistaken for by its young converts. Originality and initiative are what I ask for my country. For

myself the originality need be no more than the freshness of a poem run in the way I have described: from delight to

wisdom. The figure is the same as for love. Like a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride on its own melting.

A poem may be worked over once it is in being, but may not be worried into being. Its most precious quality will

remain its having run itself and carried away the poet with it. Read it a hundred times: it will forever keep its

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freshness as a metal keeps its fragrance. It can never lose its sense of a meaning that once unfolded by surprise as it

went.

• SUMMARY
• Robert Frost’s essay “The Figure a Poem Makes” talks about his own perception of
how poem should be and how people should view poem. He mentions that all poems
should be distinct from one another and should have wisdom that the readers can
benefit from, not only to entertain them. The poem should also evoke its readers to
discover something they previously do not know, but they actually know from the
start. Frost also noted the relationship of the writer’s emotions while writing the poem
and the reader’s emotion while reading the poem. At the end of his essay, Frost
asserted that poems are eternal—that they will forever bear their wisdom and truth.
• ANALYSIS
• The author’s main argument in this essay is that each poem should be unique
enough to be distinguished from one another, and that they should not only be made
in order to entertain the readers but to give them wisdom—that poems should “begin
in delight and end in wisdom” (Frost, par. 4). The author also argued that sounds are
not just the only basis that makes a poem “sound”—that is, according to the rules of
logic. However, Frost also made clear the distinction of the logic of scholars and
artists—with the artist’s (such as poets) logic is backward (par. 6), thus utterly
suggesting that scholars and other masters of philosophy have totally different views
of life, much less than art and poetry as he noted that “Scholars and artists thrown
together are often annoyed at the puzzle of where they differ” (par. 7). He also
added that “scholars get theirs with conscientious thoroughness along projected
lines of logic; poets theirs [knowledge] cavalierly and as it happens in and out of

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 books,” which suggests that poetry cannot be measured by logic or evaluated
through the means of scholars (ibid.). Perhaps, the author is suggesting that poems
are best evaluated through emotion. This assertion can be seen with the author’s
words when he stated “no tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise for
the writer, no surprise for the reader” (par. 5). This line also suggests the link
between the poet’s feelings when he writes the poem and the feelings that the
readers get when they read the poem—this is one of the greatest achievement that a
poet can have, to be able to convey his feelings through his writings.
Robert Frost himself is a famous poet and knows the power of poetry is not only to the point but also to the readers.

By comparing the poetic pleasure with the pleasure in love the writer thinks that pleasure in poetry is similar like in

love. He believed that poetry from the beginning to the ending makes a figure which is related to human life.

According to Frost poetry begins in the light and ends in wisdom. He believes that poetry gives not only pleasure but

also knowledge. A feeling in poetry is equally important for both poet and reader but the only poet guided by

emotional can arose the similar emotions in the reader. He thinks that poetry takes the journey from the very

beginning and when it ends it always ends meaningfully. Good poems always reflect the emotions and feeling from

the beginning. He considers if the poet does not express his feelings in the beginning he tries to do it at last.

Robert Frost believes that poetic knowledge is highly exciting. He says that he feels much excited when he knows

something which he knew but does not know now. In other words when something is suddenly found out that we had

already known and forgotten now it is very experiencing in poetry. While reading poetry the writer feels somewhere

as if he has been materialized from the clouds and rising from the ground. It is the excitement that we experience

when we are reading the imaginary world of poetry. According to the writer, pleasure is more important in poetry than

truth. Poetry pleasure does not give happiness and delight so the poet nor the reader has tears. Frost says that the

scholar of the logician and the artist of the poem are different from each other in the sense that poets are guided by

emotions from the heart but logician are guided by rationality from the mind. Even though his belief is related to

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poetry, poetry origins from the heart. It is different from T.S Eliot who says that poetry should be reacted by

balancing both heart and mind. Finally, the writer believes that poetic pleasure is possible what we exercise it for

hundred times. Whether he does it or not while reading his poem the writer says that poetic pleasure comes slowly

like a piece if ice melting in front of heart stone.

There may be a better wildness of logic than of inconsequence. But the logic is backward in retrospect after the act.

It must be more felt than seen ahead like prophecy. It must be a revelation or a series of revelations as much for the

poet as for the reader. For it to be that there must have been the greatest freedom of the material to move about in it

and to establish relation in it regardless of time and space, previous relation and everything but affinity. We prate of

freedom. We called our schools free because we are not free to stay away from them. No tears in the writer no tears

in the reader. No surprise for the writer no surprise for the reader. The initial delight is in the surprise of remembering

something I did not know. Scholar and artist thrown together are often annoyed at the puzzle of where they defer.

Both works for the knowledge but they defer most importantly in the way their knowledge is come by. Knowledge of

the self-assignment is much more available in the wild freeways of wit and art. Radicalism, originality, and initiative

are important for delight wisdom. The originality needs to be no more than the freshness of a poem run. It will forever

keep its freshness as a metal keep its fragrance. It can never lose it a sense of a meaning that once unfolded by

surprise as it went.

Granted no one but a humanist much care how sound a poem is if it only a sound. The sound is the gold in the ore.

Then we will have the sound out alone and dispense with the initial. We do till we make the discovery that the object

in writing poetry is to make all poem sound as different as possible from each other and the resources for that of

vowels, consonants, punctuation, syntax, words, sentences, meter are not enough. We need the help of context that

is meaning of subject matter. That is the greatest help towards variety. All that can be done with words is soon told.

So is also with meters particularly in our language where there are virtually but to strict iambic and loose iambic. The

ancient with many were still poor if they dependent on meters for all time. It is painful to watch our sprung rhythmic

straining at the point of omitting one short from the foot for a relief from monotony. The possibility for a tune from the

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dramatic tone of meaning struck across the rigidity of a limited meter is endless. And we are back in poetry as merely

one more art of having something to say, sound or unsound. Probably it is better if sound because it is deeper and

from wider experience.

There are only three things after all that a poem most reach that is the eye, the ear and what we may call the heart of

the mind. It is the most important of all to reach the heart of the reader. And the serious way to reach the heart is

through the ear. The visual images thrown up by a poem are important but it is more important still to chose and

arranges words in a sequence so as virtually to control the intonation and pauses of the reader’s voice. By the

arrangement and choice of words on the part of the poet, the effect of humor, pathos anger, and in fact all effects

can be indicated or obtained. The figure is the same as for love. No one can really hold that which should to be static

and stand still in one place the poem begins in delight and hence ends in wisdom. It is but a trick poem and no poem

at all if the best of it was thought of first and saved for the last.

2.THE MAN OF LETTERS IN THE MODERN WORLD - TEXT

To the question, What should the man of letters be in our time, we should have to find the answer in what we need

him to do. He must do first what he has always done: he must recreate for his age the image of man, and he must

propagate standards by which other men may test that image, and distinguish the false from the true. But at our

own critical moment, when all languages are being debased by the techniques of mass-control, the man of letters

might do well to conceive his responsibility more narrowly. He has an immediate responsibility, to other men no

less than to himself, for the vitality of language. He must distinguish the difference between mere communication—

of which I shall later have more to say—and the rediscovery of the human condition in the living arts. He must

discriminate and defend the difference between mass communication, for the control of men, and the knowledge of

man which literature offers us for human participation. The invention of standards by which this difference may be

known, and a sufficient minority of persons instructed, is a moral obligation of the literary man. But the actuality of

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the difference does not originate in the critical intelligence as such; it is exemplified in the specific forms of the

literary arts, whose final purpose, the extrinsic end for which they exist, is not the control of other persons, but self-

knowledge. By these arts, one means the arts without which men can live, but without which they cannot live well,

or live as men. To keep alive the knowledge of ourselves with which the literary arts continue to enlighten the more

ignorant portion of mankind (among whom one includes oneself), to separate them from other indispensable

modes of knowledge, and to define their limits, is the intellectual and thus the social function of the writer. Here the

man of letters is the critic. The edifying generality of these observations is not meant to screen the difficulties that

they will presently encounter in their particular applications. A marked difference between communication and

communion I shall be at some pains to try to discern in the remarks that follow. I shall try to explore the assertion;

Men in a dehumanized society may communicate, but they cannot live in full communion. To explore this I must

first pursue a digression. What happens in one mind may happen as influence or coincidence in another; when the

same idea spreads to two or more minds of considerable power, it may eventually explode, through chain reaction,

in a whole society; it may dominate a period or an entire epoch. When Rene Descartes isolated thought from man’s

total being he isolated him from nature, including his own nature; and he divided man against himself. (The

demonology which attributes to a few persons the calamities of mankind is perhaps a necessary convention of

economy in discourse.) It was not the first time that man had been at war with himself: there was that first famous

occasion of immemorial antiquity: it is man's permanent war of internal nerves. Descartes was only the new

strategist of our own phase of the war. Men after the seventeenth century would have been at war with themselves

if Descartes had never lived. He chose the new field and forged the new weapons. The battle is now between the

dehumanized society of secularism, which imitates Descartes’ mechanized nature, and the eternal society of the

communion of the human spirit. The war is real enough; but again one is conscious of an almost mythical

exaggeration in one’s description of the combatants. I shall not condescend to Descartes by trying to be fair to him.

For the battle is being fought, it has always been fought by men few of whom have heard of Descartes or any other

philosopher. Consider the politician, who as a man may be as good as his quiet neighbor. If he acts upon the

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assumption (which he has never heard of) that society is a machine to be run efficiently by immoral—or, to him,

amoral—methods, he is only The Man of Letters in the Modern World 13 exhibiting a defeat of the spirit that he is

scarcely conscious of having suffered. Now consider his fellow-citizen, the knowing person, the trained man of

letters, the cunning poet in the tradition of Poe and Mallarme. If this person (who perhaps resembles ourselves) is

aware of more, he is able to do less, than the politician, who does not know what he is doing. The man of letters sees

that modern societies are machines, even if he thinks that they ought not to be: he is convinced that in its

intractable Manicheeism, society cannot be redeemed. The shadowy political philosophy of modern literature, from

Proust to Faulkner, is, in its moral origins, Jansenist; we are disciples of Pascal, the merits of whose Redeemer were

privately available but could not affect the operation of the power-state. While the politician, in his cynical

innocence, uses society, the man of letters disdainfully, or perhaps even absent-mindedly, withdraws from it: a

withdrawal that few persons any longer observe, since withdrawal has become the social convention of the literary

man, in which society, in so far as it is aware of him, expects him to conduct himself. It is not improper, I think, at

this point, to confess that I have drawn in outline the melancholy portrait of the man who stands before you. Before

I condemn him I wish to examine another perspective, an alternative to the double retreat from the moral center, of

the man of action and the man of letters, that we have completed in our time. The alternative has had at least the

virtue of recommending the full participation of the man of letters in the action of society. The phrase, "the action of

society,” is abstract enough to disarm us into supposing that perhaps here and there in the past, if not uniformly,

men of letters were hourly participating in it: the supposition is not too deceptive a paralogism, provided we think

of society as the City of Augustine and Dante, where it was possible for men to find in the temporal city the

imperfect analogue to the City of God. (The Heavenly City was still visible, to Americans, in the political economy of

Thomas Jefferson.) What we, as literary men, have been asked to support, and what we have rejected, is the r 14

THE MAN OF LETTERS IN THE MODERN WORLD action of society as secularism, or the society that substitutes

means for ends. Although the idolatry of the means has been egregious enough in the West, we have not been

willing to prefer the more advanced worship that prevails in Europe eastward of Berlin, and in Asia. If we can

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scarcely imagine a society like the Russian, deliberately committing itself to secularism, it is no doubt because we

cannot easily believe that men will prefer barbarism to civilization. They come to prefer the senility (which

resembles the adolescence) and the irresponsibility of the barbarous condition of man without quite foreseeing

what else they will get out of it. Samuel Johnson said of chronic drunkenness: “He who makes a beast of himself gets

rid of the pain of being a man.” There is perhaps no anodyne for the pains of civilization but savagery. What men

may get out of this may be seen in the western world today, in an intolerable psychic crisis expressing itself as a

political crisis. The internal crisis, whether it precede or follow the political, is inevitable in a society that multiplies

means without ends. Man is a creature that in the long run has got to believe in order to know, and to know in order

to do. For doing without knowing is machine behavior, illiberal and servile routine, the secularism with which

man’s specific destiny has no connection. I take it that we have sufficient evidence, generation after generation, that

man will never be completely or permanently enslaved. He will rebel, as he is rebelling now. in a shocking variety of

“existential” disorders, all over the world. If his human nature as such cannot participate in the action of society, he

will not capitulate to it, if that action is inhuman: he will turn in upon himself, with the common gesture which

throughout history has vindicated the rhetoric of liberty: “Give me liberty or give me death.” Man may destroy

himself but he will not at last tolerate anything less than his full human condition. Pascal said that the “sight of cats

or rats is enough to unhinge the reason”— a morbid prediction of our contemporary existential philosophy, a

modernized Dark Night of Sense. The impact of mere sensation, even of “cats and rats" (which enjoy the innocence

of their perfection in the order of nature) —a simple sense- The Man of Letters in the Modern World 15 perception

from a world no longer related to human beings —will nourish a paranoid philosophy of despair. Blake s “hapless

soldier’s sigh,” Poe’s “tell-tale heart,” Rimbaud’s nature careening in a “drunken boat,” Eliot’s woman “pulling her

long black hair,” are qualities of the life of Baudelaire s four millante Cite, the secularism of the swarm, of which we

are the present citizens. Is the man of letters alone doomed to inhabit that city? No, we are all in it—the butcher, the

baker, the candlestickmaker, and the banker and the statesman. The special awareness of the man of letters, the

source at once of his Gnostic arrogance and of his Augustinian humility, he brings to bear upon all men alike: his

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hell has not been “for those other people”: he has reported his own. His report upon his own spiritual condition, in

the last hundred years, has misled the banker and the statesman into the illusion that they have no hell because, as

secularists, they have lacked the language to report it. What you are not able to name therefore does not exist—a

barbarous disability, to which I have already alluded. There would be no hell for modern man if our men of letters

were not calling attention to it. But it is the business of the man of letters to call attention to whatever he is able to

see: it is his function to create what has not been hitherto known and, as critic, to discern its modes. I repeat that it

is his duty to render the image of man as he is in his time, which, without the man of letters, would not otherwise be

known. What modern literature has taught us is not merely that the man of letters has not participated fully in the

action of society; it has taught us that nobody else has either. It is a fearful lesson. The roll call of the noble and

sinister characters, our ancestors and our brothers, who exemplify the lesson, must end in a shudder; Julien Sorel,

Emma Bovary, Captain Ahab, Hepzibah Pyncheon, Roderick Usher, Lambert Strether, Baron de Charlus, Stephen

Dedalus, Joe Christmas—all these and more, to say nothing of the precise probing of their, and our, sensibility,

which is modern poetry since Baudelaire. Have men of letters perversely invented these horrors? They are rather

the inevitable creations of a secularized society, the society of means without ends, in which nobody participating

with the full substance of his humanity. It is the society in which everybody acts his part (even he is most active) in

the plotless drama of withdrawal. I trust that nobody supposes that I see the vast populations of Europe and

America scurrying, each man to his tree, penthouse, or cave, and refusing to communicate with other men.

Humanity was never more gregarious, and never before heard so much of its own voice. Is not then the problem of

communication for the man of letters very nearly solved? He may sit in a sound-proof room, in shirtsleeves, and talk

at a metal object resembling a hornet’s nest, throwing his voice, and perhaps also his face, at 587,000,000 people,

more or less, whom he has never seen, and whom it may not occur to him that in order to love, he must have a

medium even less palpable than air. What I am about to say of communication will take it for granted that men

cannot communicate by means of sound over either wire or air. They have got to communicate through love.

Communication that is not also communion is incomplete. We use communication; we participate in communion.

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“All the certainty of our knowledge,’* says Coleridge, “depends [on this]; and this becomes intelligible to no man by

the ministry of mere words from without. The medium, by which spirits understand each other, is not the

surrounding air; but the freedom which they possess in common.” (The italics are Coleridge’s.) Neither the artist

nor the statesman will communicate fully again until the rule of love, added to the rule of law, has liberated him. I

am not suggesting that we all have an obligation of personal love towards one another. I regret that 1 must be

explicit about this matter. No man, under any political dispensation known to us, has been able to avoid hating

other men by deciding that it would be a “good thing” to love them; he loves his neighbor, as well as the man he has

never seen, only through the love of God. “He that saith that he is in the light, and hateth his brother, is in darkness

even until now.” I confess that to the otiose car of the tradition of Poe and Mallarme the simple-minded Evangelist

may seem to offer The Man of Letters in the Modern World 17 something less than a solution to the problem of

communication. I lay it down as a fact, that it is the only solution. “We must love one another or die,” Mr. Auden

wrote more than ten years ago. I cannot believe that Mr. Auden was telling us that a secularized society cannot

exist; it obviously exists. He was telling us that a society which has once been religious cannot, without risk of

spiritual death, preceded by the usual agonies, secularize itself. A society of means without ends, in the age of

technology, so multiplies the means, in the lack of anything better to do, that it may have to scrap the machines as it

makes them; until our descendants will have to dig themselves out of one rubbish heap after another and stand

upon it, in order to make more rubbish to make more standing-room. The surface of nature will then be literally as

well as morally concealed from the eyes of men. Will congresses of men of letters, who expect from their

conversations a little less than mutual admiration, and who achieve at best toleration of one another’s personalities,

mitigate the difficulties of communication? This may be doubted, though one feels that it is better to gather together

in any other name than that of Satan, than not to gather at all. Yet one must assume that men of letters will not love

one another personally any better than they have in the past. If there has been little communion among them, does

the past teach them to expect, under perfect conditions (whatever these may be), to communicate their works to

any large portion of mankind? We suffer, though we know better, from an ignorance which lets us entertain the

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illusion that in the past great works of literature were immediately consumed by entire populations. It has never

been so; yet dazzled by this false belief, the modern man of letters is bemused by an unreal dilemma. Shall he

persist in his rejection of the existential “cats and rats” of Pascal, the political disorder of the West that “unhinges

the reason”; or shall he exploit the new media of mass “communication”—cheap print, radio, and television? For

what purpose shall he exploit them? The dilemma, like evil, is real to the extent that it exists as privative of good: it

has an impressive “existential” actuality: men of letters on both sides of the Atlantic consider the possible

adjustments of literature to a mass audience. The first question that we ought to ask ourselves is: What do we

propose to communicate to whom? I do not know whether there exists in Europe anything like the steady demand

upon American writers to "communicate” quickly with the audience that Coleridge knew even in his time as the

"multitudinous Public, shaped into personal unity by the magic of abstraction.” The American is still able to think

that he sees in Europe—in France, but also in England—a closer union, in the remains of a unified culture, between

a sufficiently large public and the man of letters. That Alexis St.-Leger Leger, formerly Permanent Secretary of the

French Foreign Office, could inhabit the same body with St. -John Perse, a great living French poet, points to the

recent actuality of that closer union; while at the same time, the two names for the two natures of the one person

suggest the completion of the Cartesian disaster, the fissure in the human spirit of our age; the inner division

creating the outer, and the eventual loss of communion. Another way of looking at the question. What do we

propose to communicate to whom? would eliminate the dilemma, withdrawal or communication. It disappears if

we understand that literature has never communicated, that it cannot communicate: from this point of view we see

the work of literature as a participation in communion. Participation leads naturally to the idea of the common

experience. Perhaps it is not too grandiose a conception to suggest that works of literature, from the short lyric to

the long epic, are the recurrent discovery of the human communion as experience, in a definite place and at a

definite time. Our unexamined theory of literature as communication could not have appeared in an age in which

communion was still possible for any appreciable majority of persons. The word communication presupposes the

victory of the secularized society of means without ends. The poet, on the one hand, shouts to the public, on the

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other (some distance away), not the rediscovery of the common experience, but a certain pitch of sound to which

the well-conditioned adrenals of humanity obligingly respond. The response is not the specifically human mode of

behavior; it is the specifically animal mode, what is left of man after Occam’s razor has cut away his humanity. It is a

tragedy of contemporary society that so much of democratic social theory reaches us in the language of “drive,”

“stimulus,” and “response.” This is not the language of freemen, it is the language of slaves. The language of freemen

substitutes for these words, respectively, end, choice, and discrimination. Here are two sets of analogies, the one

sub-rational and servile, the other rational and free. (The analogies in which man conceives his nature at different

historical moments are of greater significance than his political rhetoric.) When the poet is exhorted to

communicate, he is being asked to speak within the orbit of an analogy that assumes that genuine communion is

impossible: does not the metaphor hovering in the rear of the word “communication” isolate the poet before he can

speak? The poet at a microphone desires to sway, affect, or otherwise influence a crowd (not a community) which is

then addressed as if it were permanently over there —not here, where the poet himself would be a member of it; he

is not a member, but a mere part. He stimulates his audience—which a few minutes later will be stimulated by a

news-commentator, who reports the results of a “poll,” as the Roman pontifex under Tiberius reported the color of

the entrails of birds—the poet thus elicits a response, in the context of the preconditioned “drives” ready to be

released in the audience. Something may be said to have been transmitted, or communicated; nothing has been

shared, in a new and illuminating intensity of awareness. One may well ask what these observations have to do with

the man of letters in the modern world? They have nearly everything to do with him, since, unless I am wholly

mistaken, his concern is with what has not been previously known about our presentation of an unchanging source

of knowledge, It’s the intelligence of the man of letters: he must not be committed to the illiberal specializations

that the nineteenth century has proliferated into the modern world: specializations in which means are divorced

from ends, action from sensibility, matter from mind, society from the individual, religion from moral agency, love

from lust, poetry from thought, communion from experience, and mankind in the community from men in the

crowd. There is literally no end to this list of dissociations because there is no end yet in sight to the fragmenting of

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the western mind. The modern man of letters may, as a man, be as thoroughly the victim of it as his conditioned

neighbor. 1 hope it is understood that 1 am not imputing to the man of letters a personal superiority; if he is luckier

than his neighbors, his responsibility, and his capacity for the shattering properties of experience, arc greater: he is

placed at the precarious center of a certain liberal tradition, from which he is as strongly tempted as the next man

to escape. This tradition has only incidental connections with political liberalism and it has none with the power-

state; it means quite simply the freedom of the mind to discriminate the false from the true, the experienced

knowledge from its verbal imitations. His critical responsibility is thus what it has always been—the recreation and

the application of literary standards, which in order to be effectively literary, must be more than literary. His task is

to preserve the integrity, the purity, and the reality of language wherever and for whatever purpose it may be used.

He must approach his task through the letter—the letter of the poem, the letter of the politician’s speech, the letter

of the law; for the use of the letter is in the long run our one indispensable test of the actuality of our experience.

The letter then is the point to which the man of letters directs his first power, the power of discrimination. He will

ask: Is there in this language genuine knowledge of our human community—or of our lack of it—that we have not

had before? If there is, he will know that it is liberal language, the language of freemen, in which a choice has been

made towards a probable end for man. If it is not language of this order, if it is the language of mere communication,

of mechanical analogies in which the two natures of man are isolated and dehumanized, then he will know that it is

the language of men who are, or who are waiting to be, slaves. If the man of letters does not daily renew his

dedication to this task, I do not know who else may be expected to undertake it. It is a task that cannot be

performed today in a society that has not remained, in certain senses of the word that we sufficiently understand,

democratic. We enjoy the privileges of democracy on the same terms as we enjoy other privileges: on the condition

that we give something back. What the man of letters returns in exchange for his freedom is the difficult model of

freedom for his brothers, Julien Sorel, Lambert Strether, and Joe Christmas, who are thus enjoined to be likewise

free, and to sustain the freedom of the man of letters himself. What he gives back to society often enough carries

with it something that a democratic society likes as little as any other: the courage to condemn the abuses of

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democracy, more particularly to discriminate the usurpations of democracy that are perpetrated in the name of

democracy. That he is permitted, even impelled by the democratic condition itself, to publish his discriminations of

the staggering abuses of language, and thus of choices and ends, that vitiate the cultures of western nations, is in

itself a consideration for the second thought of our friends in Europe. Might they not in the end ill prefer the upper

millstone of Russia to the nether of the United States? Our formidable economic and military power—which like all

secular power the man of letters must carry as his Cross; our bad manners in Europe; our ignorance of the plain fact

that we can no more dispense with Europe than almighty Rome could have lived without a reduced Greece; our

delusion that we are prepared to “educate” Europe in “democracy” by exporting dollars, gadgets, and sociology—to

say nothing of the boorish jargon of the State Department—all this, and this is by no means all, may well tempt (in

the words of Reinhold Niebuhr) “our European friends to a virtual Manicheeism and to consign the world of

organization to the outer darkness of barbarism.” But it should be pointed out, I think, to these same European

brothers, that the darkness of this barbarism still shows forth at least one light which even the black slaves of the

Old South were permitted to keep burning, but which the white slaves of Russia are not: I mean the inalienable right

to talk back: of which I cite the present discourse as an imperfect example. The man of letters has, then, in our time

a small but critical service to render to man: a service that will be in the future more effective than it is now, when

the cult of the literary man shall have ceased to be an idolatry. Men of letters and their followers, like the parvenu

gods and their votaries of decaying Rome, compete in the dissemination of distraction and novelty. But the true

province of the man of letters is nothing less (as it is nothing more) than culture itself. The state is the mere

operation of society, but culture is the way society lives, the material medium through which men receive the one

lost truth which must be perpetually recovered: the truth of what Jacques Maritain calls the “supra temporal

destiny” of man. It is the duty of the man of letters to supervise the culture of language, to which the rest of culture

is subordinate, and to warn us when our language is ceasing to forward the ends proper to man. The end of social

man is communion in time through love, which is beyond time.

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In the modern world the role of the man of letters is to recreate the image of man.He should also propagate

standards that would help others to test that image.But the problem for the man of letters is that all languages are

debased by the modern techniques of mass control.However he is responsible for improving the vitality of

language.He must attempt to rediscover the human conditions in the living arts.

A man of letters must keep up his standards.The aim of the literary arts is not the control of other persions but self-

knowledge.Without arts a man cannot live welln or live as ‘man’. Literary arts are meant to enlighten the ignorant.

So the man of letters must differentiaten between the knowledge obtainedand its social function.

Men in a dehumanized society may communicate but they cannot live in full communion.Thoughts emanate from

writers,spread,EXPLODE,AND DOMINATE A WHOLE EPOCH.Rene Descartes,iosolated thought from nature and

divided man against himself. What Descartyes said was already there and would have happened so even if he had

not said so.

Descartes mechanized human nature.Secularism has dehumanized society.As a result there is no communion of

human spirit.Tate blames the immoral or a moral politician for dehumanized mechanization.

A man of letters must see to it that the modern society is niot just a machine.He might have read more but he might

not have the cunningness of a politician.While the politician is cynically innocent,the man of letters is disdainfully

innocent.He even withdraws from the society.Tate feels that the man of letters must play a mere positive role in the

society.

Modern political philosiophy has made modern literature shadowy.It is the duty of the modern man of letters to

improve the moral tone of the society.Augustine and Dante saw the city of God even in the material city.This is not

possible for the modern man of letters. The society shocks him with ‘existentialiST ‘ disorders.

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Society substitutes ‘means’ FOR THE ENDS.The idolatry of the means has become egregious. However,a more

advanced worship is going on in Europe, eastward of Berlin,and in Asia Russian system ofsecularism borders on

barbarism.What one sees is the West today is a psychic crisis expressing itself as a political crisis.This internal crisis

affects the writer and he serves the existential disorders.He has to recreate a society in which everyone must be

allowed to participate.

Tate feels that the word ‘communion’ does not mean being in touch with others.It means ‘Love’ THAT UNITES

PEOPLE. An enlightened person who says that he hates his brother is,in fact,in darkness.In a secularized country a

writer is not able to have communion with the audience.He is no betterthan a machine.

The society if full of communication but it is not backed up with communion. It is a society of means without

ends.’Literature’ must participate in promoting ‘communion’ From Lyricto epic every communion experienced in a

definite place and a definite time

The contemporary society is full of democratic urge ‘Drive’ ,’stimulus’ and ‘response’ ARE THE WORDS USED BY

THE MODERN TECHNOLOGISTS.Tate considers this the language of the slaves. He wants to replace the words with

discrimination.

In a secular world,thoughthe poetb is able to communicate to the point of sharing,the news-commentator does not

allow the experience to be shared.Nothing can be shared tough everything is transmitted.This atmosphere must be

cleansed completely by the man of letters.

Tate assigns three types of roles to the writer-end,choice and discrimination.The particular responsibility of a

writer is discrimination through choic. This will bring him to the appointed conclusion.He must not be committed

to ‘illiberal specializations’.In the modern society he has to becritical and recreate the literary standards. His choice

of the letters and the words is much important.He should keep up purity,integrity and reality of language.

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Tate says that the ‘letter’ THE WRITER USES WILL give him power.It gives him the power of discrimination.The

language the writer uses must have a link with the human community.Only then it will become the language of a

freeman. If a writer fails in this,his writings will be mere communications and mechanical analogies.

A man of letters should have a sense of dedication.But it is fdifficult,because the society ids not democratic. He has

to give something in return for his freedom.He must have the courage to condemn the abuse of democracy.He must

be able to discriminatethe usurpations of democracythat are perpetrated in the name of democracy.He must be

allowed to publish his discriminations on the abuse of demiocracy including the boorisjargon of the State

Department the dollarsand the gadgets.

Man of letters are like the upstart Gods of ancient Rome spreading distraction and novelty. But his true province is

‘culture’ itself. He should disseminate ‘culture’ which is the fulcrum on which even the state revolves. It is the duty

of the man of letters to supervise the culture of language.The social man represents communion through love.It is

beyond time.

3.I HAVE A DREAM – Martin Luther King Jr.

I am happy to join with you today in what will go down in history as the greatest demonstration for
freedom in the history of our nation.

Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed
the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of
Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice. It came as a joyous daybreak to
end the long night of their captivity.

But one hundred years later, the Negro still is not free. One hundred years later, the life of the Negro is
still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination. One hundred years
later, the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. One
hundred years later, the Negro is still languished in the corners of American society and finds himself an
exile in his own land. And so we've come here today to dramatize a shameful condition.

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In a sense we've come to our nation's capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote
the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a
promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men, yes, black
men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the "unalienable Rights" of "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of
Happiness." It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note, insofar as her citizens
of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a
bad check, a check which has come back marked "insufficient funds."

But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are
insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. And so, we've come to cash this check, a
check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice.

We have also come to this hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce urgency of Now. This is no time to
engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism. Now is the time to make
real the promises of democracy. Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to
the sunlit path of racial justice. Now is the time to lift our nation from the quicksands of racial injustice to
the solid rock of brotherhood. Now is the time to make justice a reality for all of God's children.

It would be fatal for the nation to overlook the urgency of the moment. This sweltering summer of the
Negro's legitimate discontent will not pass until there is an invigorating autumn of freedom and equality.
Nineteen sixty-three is not an end, but a beginning. And those who hope that the Negro needed to blow off
steam and will now be content will have a rude awakening if the nation returns to business as usual. And
there will be neither rest nor tranquility in America until the Negro is granted his citizenship rights. The
whirlwinds of revolt will continue to shake the foundations of our nation until the bright day of justice
emerges.

But there is something that I must say to my people, who stand on the warm threshold which leads into
the palace of justice: In the process of gaining our rightful place, we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds.
Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred. We
must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline. We must not allow our
creative protest to degenerate into physical violence. Again and again, we must rise to the majestic
heights of meeting physical force with soul force.

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The marvelous new militancy which has engulfed the Negro community must not lead us to a distrust of all
white people, for many of our white brothers, as evidenced by their presence here today, have come to
realize that their destiny is tied up with our destiny. And they have come to realize that their freedom is
inextricably bound to our freedom.

We cannot walk alone.

And as we walk, we must make the pledge that we shall always march ahead.

We cannot turn back.

There are those who are asking the devotees of civil rights, "When will you be satisfied?" We can never be
satisfied as long as the Negro is the victim of the unspeakable horrors of police brutality. We can never be
satisfied as long as our bodies, heavy with the fatigue of travel, cannot gain lodging in the motels of the
highways and the hotels of the cities. **We cannot be satisfied as long as the negro's basic mobility is
from a smaller ghetto to a larger one. We can never be satisfied as long as our children are stripped of
their self-hood and robbed of their dignity by signs stating: "For Whites Only."** We cannot be satisfied as
long as a Negro in Mississippi cannot vote and a Negro in New York believes he has nothing for which to
vote. No, no, we are not satisfied, and we will not be satisfied until "justice rolls down like waters, and
righteousness like a mighty stream."1

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I am not unmindful that some of you have come here out of great trials and tribulations. Some of you have
come fresh from narrow jail cells. And some of you have come from areas where your quest -- quest for
freedom left you battered by the storms of persecution and staggered by the winds of police brutality. You
have been the veterans of creative suffering. Continue to work with the faith that unearned suffering is
redemptive. Go back to Mississippi, go back to Alabama, go back to South Carolina, go back to Georgia, go
back to Louisiana, go back to the slums and ghettos of our northern cities, knowing that somehow this
situation can and will be changed.

Let us not wallow in the valley of despair, I say to you today, my friends.

And so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream
deeply rooted in the American dream.

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold
these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal."

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I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former
slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.

I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice,
sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the
color of their skin but by the content of their character.

I have a DREAM today!

I have a dream that one day, DOwn in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips
dripping with the words of "interposition" and "nullification" -- one day right there in Alabama little black
boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.

I have a DREAM today!

I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, and every hill and mountain shall be made low,
the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight; "and the glory of the
Lord shall be revealed and all flesh shall see it together."2

This is our hope, and this is the faith that I go back to the South with.

With this faith, we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith, we
will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With
this faith, we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to
stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day.

And this will be the day -- this will be the day when all of God's children will be able to sing with new
meaning:

My country 'tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing. Land where my fathers died, land of the
Pilgrim's pride, From every mountainside, let freedom ring!

And if America is to be a great nation, this must become true.

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And so let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire.

Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York.

Let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania.

Let freedom ring from the snow-capped Rockies of Colorado.

Let freedom ring from the curvaceous slopes of California.

But not only that:

Let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia.

Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee.

Let freedom ring from every hill and molehill of Mississippi.

From every mountainside, let freedom ring.

And when this happens, and when we allow freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every
hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when ALL of God's children,
black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing
in the words of the old Negro spiritual:

Free at last! Free at last!

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In his “I Have a Dream” speech, minister and civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr. outlines the
long history of racial injustice in America and encourages his audience to hold their country
accountable to its own founding promises of freedom, justice, and equality.

King begins his speech by reminding his audience—the 250,000+ attendees at the March on
Washington in August of 1963—that it has been over a century since the Emancipation Proclamation
was signed into law, ending slavery in America. But even though Black Americans are technically free
from slavery, they are not free in any larger sense—the “chains of discrimination” and the “manacles
of segregation” continue to define the Black experience in America. It is time, King argues, for Black
Americans to “cash [the] check” they were promised a century ago and demand “the riches of freedom
and the security of justice.” There is no more time to waste in pursuit of a gradual solution to racism,
King says—it is the “sweltering summer of the Negro’s legitimate discontent,” and the country has
reached its boiling point.

Even though King calls for the “whirlwinds of revolt” to spin into action, he urges those on the front
lines of the civil rights movement not to let “bitterness and hatred” define their actions. They cannot to
let their movement for justice “degenerate into physical violence.” King reminds his listeners to remain
in the “majestic heights” of nonviolent resistance and also to not see their white allies as enemies. In
order to bring true justice about, King says, Americans of all races will need to unite and remain true to
the values of nonviolent solidarity.

King acknowledges the long and difficult struggles that many of his listeners have already faced—he
knows that those involved in the movement for civil rights have been beaten, insulted, and
incarcerated. Still, he urges them to return home from the march to wherever they may live, be it in the
sweltering South or in the “ghettos of the northern cities,” confident in the value and promise of their
fight.

Then King invokes the dream he has for America: a dream that one day the country will “live out the
true meaning of its creed” and make it a reality that “all men are created equal.” He dreams that his

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children will one day live in a society where they will be judged not “by the color of their skin but by the
content of their character” and that, in the future, Black children and white children will join hands as
sisters and brothers.

King urges his listeners to take their faith in meaningful change back to their hometowns—they must
continue to struggle together, face incarceration together, and “stand up for freedom together” in order
to truly make America a great nation. He calls for freedom to ring out across the country, from the
highest mountains of Colorado, to Stone Mountain of Georgia, to “every hill and molehill of
Mississippi.” When America collectively allows freedom to ring across its hills and valleys, he says,
only then will “black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Catholics and Protestants” be able to
sing truthfully and honestly the words of the old Negro spiritual: “Free at last, free at last; thank God
Almighty, we are free at last.”

4. The Black Writer and the Southern Experience- Alice

Walker
Alice Walker won the Pulitzer Prize and the American Book Award for her novel The Color
Purple. Her other bestselling novels include By the Light of My Father's Smile, Possessing
the Secret of Joy, and The Temple of My Familiar. She is also the author of two
collections of short stories, three collections of essays, five volumes of poetry, and
several children's books. Her books have been translated into more than two dozen
languages. Born in Eaton, Georgia, Walker now lives in Northern California.
As a woman, writer, mother, and feminist, Walker explores the theories and practices of
feminism, incorporating what she calls the “womanist” tradition of African american
women. Recognized as one of the leading voices among black American
women writers, Alice Walker has produced an acclaimed and varied body
of work, including poetry, novels, short stories, essays, and criticism. Her
writings portray the struggle of black people throughout history, and are
praised for their insightful and riveting portraits of black life, in particular
the experiences of black women in a sexist and racist society. Her most
famous work, the award-winning and best-selling novel The Color Purple,
chronicles the life of a poor and abused southern black woman who

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eventually triumphs over oppression through affirming female
relationships. Walker has described herself as a “womanist”—her term for
a black feminist—which she defines in the introduction to her book of
essays, In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose, as one
who “appreciates and prefers women’s culture, women’s emotional
flexibility… women’s strength” and is “committed to [the] survival and
wholeness of entire people, male and female.”

A theme throughout Walker’s work is the preservation of black culture,

and her women characters forge important links to maintain continuity in
both personal relationships and communities. According to Barbara T.
Christian in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Walker is concerned
with “heritage,” which to Walker “is not so much the grand sweep of
history or artifacts created as it is the relations of people to each other,
young to old, parent to child, man to woman.” Walker admired the struggle
of black women throughout history to maintain an essential spirituality and
creativity in their lives, and their achievements serve as an inspiration to
others. In Our Mother’s Gardens, Walker wrote: “We must fearlessly pull
out of ourselves and look at and identify with our lives the living creativity
some of our great-grandmothers were not allowed to know. I
stress some of them because it is well known that the majority of our
great-grandmothers knew, even without ‘knowing’ it, the reality of their
spirituality, even if they didn’t recognize it beyond what happened in the
singing at church—and they never had any intention of giving it up.”

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 Walker frankly depicted the “twin afflictions” of racism and sexism.

Walker’s women characters display strength, endurance, and

resourcefulness in confronting—and overcoming—oppression in their

lives, yet Walker is frank in depicting the often devastating circumstances

of the “twin afflictions” of racism and sexism. “Black women are called, in

the folklore that so aptly identifies one’s status in society, ‘the mule of the

world,’ because we have been handed the burdens that everyone else—

everyone else—refused to carry,” Walker stated in Our Mothers’ Gardens.

The Black Writer & The Southern ExperienceThis essay, “The Black Writer & The Southern

Experience,”written by Alice Walkerdiscusses the trials and struggles that not only her, but her family has

had to endure. Walker alsodiscusses how her upbringing and her experiences early in life have shaped her

into the personthat she is today. She starts off her essay by explaining a story her mother always told her

whenshe was a child. The story talks about her mother’s experience trying to get flour for her family.Her

aunt had sent her mother some clothes, so her mother changed into these fairly nice clothesbefore she

went to town to get flour for the family. When she got to the distribution center, thewhite woman behind

the counter “looked her up and down with marked anger and envy.” The white woman said to her

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“anybody dressed up as good as you don’t need to come here begging for food.” The mother left, did not

get her flour, but did feel a great deal of shame and embarrassment.

Unit 3 Drama
The Glass Menagerie – Tennessee Williams
• The Theme of Illusion vs Reality in The Glass Menagerie
• Tom, Laura, and Amanda all survive because their illusions protect them from the painful facts
of their lives. However, illusions can prove to be self-destructive as well as helpful.
• Amanda Wingfield, who is one of the main characters of the play doesn’t live, but exists. Socially,
Amanda’s husband abandoned her, leaving her with the financial and emotional burden to take
care of the family. Amanda longs for financial and social success, but this element makes her adopt
an illusionary life. Secondly, Amanda declines to accept the exit of her husband from the family;
thus, acquiring a domineering and hysterical attitude, especially towards the children.
• For instance, Amanda says, “Gone, gone, gone. All vestige of gracious living! Gone completely! I
wasn’t prepared for what the future brought me” (Williams 694-696). This shows that Amanda has
declined to let her past go and accept reality. So, this is an example of illusion. Unfortunately,
Amanda can’t face the realities of life.
• When analyzing the play, it becomes evident that in real life “Williamses were never as hard up as
the fictional Wingfields and so, without denying the effect of the general socio-economic
environment as an intensifying element, I tend to see Amanda’s insecurity as characteristic of the
alcoholic’s family”
• While speaking about the second character – Laura, I have to point out that the girl lives in an
illusionary world. According to Williams, Laura has “Little articles of [glass], they’re ornaments
mostly! Most of them are little animals made out of glass, the tiniest small animals in the world.
• Mother calls them a glass menagerie!” (547). Therefore, Laura distances herself from the real
world. According to Joven, Laura is “like a piece of her own glass collection, too exquisitely fragile”
(57). Consequently, as the summary shows, Laura is using both her physical and mental disability
to detach herself from realism.
• The third character is Tom. He struggles to balance his family’s responsibility as the breadwinner,
thus, trying to escape from reality. According to Williams, Tom says, “There is a trick that would
come in handy for me—get me out of this two-by-four situation!” (680).

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• Although Tom is narrating a movie to Laura, his mind is struggling to devise ways in which he can
run away from home and offload the responsibility burden that always awaits him. Furthermore,
he visits bars and theatres to stay away from home. However, Tom’s actions are unreal because he
is the only male figure in the family.
• However, abandoning his family means running away from the real aspects of life thus, he is living
in a fantasy. The movie is only an illusionary step that, in reality, it is hard to accomplish. For
instance, he says, “I am more faithful than I intended to be!” (Williams 682). As The glass
Menagerie conclusion evidences, this statement shows that Tom finds it unreal to abandon his
sister and mother, therefore, his dream of pursuing adventure away from home is only illusionary.
• Similarly, according to critics, Tom’s “nature is not remorseless and to escape from the trust he has
to act without pity” (Broom 20). However, he finally deserts his family when he loses his job.
Therefore, Tom lives with an illusion that if he stays alone, then he may have a comfortable life.
• Conclusion: Reality vs. Illusion Theme
• In brief, Williams’ play focuses on the lives of three family members, who lack social skills. Thus,
they become caught between realism and fantasy.
• Although Amanda’s husband left her with family responsibilities, she is reluctant to accept her
situation. She lives in the American dream, whereby everybody should have a comfortable life. In
addition, she reflects on her early life, whereby her family was wealthy.
• Surprisingly, she confers her son with financial responsibility a step, which motivates him to
dream of how to abandon his family. Finally, due to her physical disability, Laura detaches herself
from other people and become engrossed with her glass menagerie. Therefore, all three characters
have to come out of their cocoons to face the real world. Thus, in the conflict of illusion vs. reality
in The Glass Menagerie, reality wins.
• explains that in creating the play from his memory that he is giving “truth in the pleasant disguise
of illusion,” and the stage directions of the play are designed to create a nostalgic, sentimental, non-
realistic atmosphere to create the unreal yet heightened effects of a dream. The lighting in each
scene adds emphasis and shadows: for example, the electric light that goes out, the candelabra,
moonlight, the paper lantern that hides the broken lightbulb, Tom’s lit cigarette, all draw attention
to the artistic, emotional, and artificial nature of the play. The stage illusions in the gentleman
caller scene—the switch from electricity to candlelight, the music on the Victrola—further this
sense of an unreal, dreamlike realm. Though the scene begins as comedy, the lighting and music
tenderly develop it into romance, which then shatters into tragedy as the glass unicorn breaks and
the dream shifts suddenly back to reality.
• The characters in the play are also full of dreams, though these dreams operate in different ways.
Tom dreams about escape from his present life. He writes poetry in the warehouse, discusses
joining the merchant marines, and escapes into action-adventure movies. He comments to Jim, at
one point, that all of the people at the movies are there to escape into illusion and avoid real
life. Amanda's dreams are desperate attempts to escape the sadness of her present, and as such
they become self-delusions, blinding her to reality and to the desires of her children. She insists
that Tom will fulfill her vision of him as the successful businessman. And when the dream

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 of Laura in business school falls apart, rather than see reality Amanda constructs a new fantasy life
for her daughter in the realm of gentleman callers and marriage prospects.
• For Laura, dreams do not take the form of ambitions, but instead offer her a refuge from the pain of
reality. Unlike Amanda, Laura does not delude herself by pretending that her physical disabilities
do not exist. Instead, she retreats from the world by surrounding herself with perfect, immortal
objects, like her glass menagerie and the “Jewel Box” she visits instead of going to business school
classes. Tom suggests that Jim might have once had high hopes for himself but has since slipped
into mediocrity, which might show Tom projecting onto Jim and not necessarily how Jim sees
himself. Unlike the Wingfields, Jim neither lives in a dream world of the past nor in a secret future
dream-life, but in the present. And yet Jim is himself hoping for a career in radio and television—an
industry that might be described as being in the business of creating dreams or believable
illusions—and in this way the play suggests that the Wingfield's are not alone in their
susceptibility to dreams.
•
• Symbolism of Illusion in GM
• Williams wastes no time in pointing out the illusions that are important in the play. The stage
directions tell us that transparent walls create the illusion of an apartment building, while music
and coloured lights suggest a dance hall across the alley. The fire escape that leads into and out
of the Wingfields’ apartment only seems to provide an escape from what Williams calls the
“slow and implacable fires of human desperation.” Several times Tom comments directly to us
that America in the 1930’s believed that the world’s trouble were not important enough to
worry about. The young people though that change and adventure were possible in their lives
only through “hot swing music and liquor, dance halls, bars, and movies, and sex.” But, in truth,
the world in the 1930’s was not “waiting for the sunrise”, according to the popular song; it was
waiting for the “bombardments” of the Second World War.
• Significance of the unicorn in The Glass Menagerie. How does the unicorn
relate to the play’s major themes?
• In The Glass Menagerie, Laura Wingfield’s unicorn represents a pure, unique soul that is
damaged by contact with the world. Likewise, Laura herself radiates delicacy and purity, which
she isn’t able to retain fully after her dinner with the gentleman caller. In subtler ways, the play’s
three main characters lose some of their youthful hope and idealism to the constricting realities
of adult life. The unicorn thus introduces Williams’s theme of lost innocence, and it emphasizes
his interest in the sacrifices his characters make as they grow older.
• Williams emphasizes the uniqueness and purity of Laura’s unicorn—qualities that are
diminished when the outside world intrudes on the Wingfield dining room. Williams reminds us
that the unicorn is glass, transparent, and completely unclouded. The unicorn’s horn sets it
apart from the other animals in the glass menagerie, because such a creature does not really
exist in the world. Laura gives it special attention, emphasizing its distinction among its
neighbors. When Jim, a representative of the outside world, visits for dinner, he remarks on the
big, ungainly shadow he casts across the living room, begins a clumsy dance with Laura,

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 knocks over the unicorn, and breaks its horn. Jim is the opposite of the unicorn—glass objects,
after all, don’t cast shadows—and his presence reduces the unicorn to a damaged, ordinary
object. A unicorn without a horn is nothing more than a mundane horse. By contact with the
world, the unicorn has lost some of its distinctiveness and purity.
•
• Like the unicorn, Laura initially radiates uniqueness and innocence. Her high-school
nickname, “Blue Roses,” suggests not only delicacy but also otherworldliness: Blue roses,
like unicorns, do not exist in the real world. Laura stays home all day to tend to her glass
figures, but in reality her hobby provides her with an excuse to avoid real-world adult
commitments, such as typing school and dating, that her mother tries to force on her. Like
the unicorn, Laura loses some of her purity through contact with Jim. Having thought she
could indulge a childhood fantasy and fall in love with Jim, she learns that he is already
engaged and has merely been flirting with her. Laura now has an understanding of the way
the world works: People do not always say what they mean, and men have a startling
capacity to hurt her. Laura offers the unicorn to Jim as a “souvenir,” suggesting that the
unicorn and its wounds symbolize the pain she has experienced over dinner. Contact with
Jim has stripped her of some of her childlike innocence, leaving her slightly more ordinary
and damaged, like her unicorn.
• The other three characters in The Glass Menagerie are not as fragile and childlike as Laura;
however, each of them has also lost a precious, youthful hope in the draining struggle to
survive adulthood. Jim recalls high-school dreams of glory in basketball and music, yet the
economic realities of 1930s Missouri have reduced him to a factory worker who spouts
clichés about the “inferiority complex,” the importance of public speaking, and
monogamous bliss with a “girl” he finds “just fine.” Amanda longs to return to youthful days
of courting and chivalry, and the peals of her girlish laughter that echo throughout the
climactic scene make audible her struggle to return to the past. The husband who deserted
her has crushed her dream of having a simple, romantic life. Tom yearns to write poetry
and escape, but his helpless, needy family has forced him to take a factory job. (Williams
brutally reminds us that, when he finally does decide to begin an artistic career, Tom must
abandon his family and stop paying the light bills. As a result, the electric company shuts
off the Wingfields’ lights in the climactic scene.) In each case, exposure to the devastating
economic and interpersonal realities of adult life reduces, saddens, and damages the
characters in The Glass Menagerie.
• The Glass Menagerie is a memory play, and its action is drawn from the memories of the
narrator, Tom Wingfield. Tom is a character in the play, which is set in St. Louis in 1937. He is
an aspiring poet who toils in a shoe warehouse to support his mother, Amanda, and sister,
Laura. Mr. Wingfield, Tom and Laura’s father, ran off years ago and, except for one
postcard, has not been heard from since.
• Amanda, originally from a genteel Southern family, regales her children frequently with
tales of her idyllic youth and the scores of suitors who once pursued her. She is
disappointed that Laura, who wears a brace on her leg and is painfully shy, does not attract
any gentlemen callers. She enrolls Laura in a business college, hoping that she will make
her own and the family’s fortune through a business career. Weeks later, however, Amanda

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 discovers that Laura’s crippling shyness has led her to drop out of the class secretly and
spend her days wandering the city alone. Amanda then decides that Laura’s last hope must
lie in marriage and begins selling magazine subscriptions to earn the extra money she
believes will help to attract suitors for Laura. Meanwhile, Tom, who loathes his warehouse
job, finds escape in liquor, movies, and literature, much to his mother’s chagrin. During one
of the frequent arguments between mother and son, Tom accidentally breaks several of
the glass animal figurines that are Laura’s most prized possessions.
•
• Amanda and Tom discuss Laura’s prospects, and Amanda asks Tom to keep an eye out for
potential suitors at the warehouse. Tom selects Jim O’Connor, a casual friend, and invites
him to dinner. Amanda quizzes Tom about Jim and is delighted to learn that he is a driven
young man with his mind set on career advancement. She prepares an elaborate dinner
and insists that Laura wear a new dress. At the last minute, Laura learns the name of her
caller; as it turns out, she had a devastating crush on Jim in high school. When Jim arrives,
Laura answers the door, on Amanda’s orders, and then quickly disappears, leaving Tom
and Jim alone. Tom confides to Jim that he has used the money for his family’s electric bill
to join the merchant marine and plans to leave his job and family in search of adventure.
Laura refuses to eat dinner with the others, feigning illness. Amanda, wearing an
ostentatious dress from her glamorous youth, talks vivaciously with Jim throughout the
meal.
• As dinner is ending, the lights go out as a consequence of the unpaid electric bill. The
characters light candles, and Amanda encourages Jim to entertain Laura in the living room
while she and Tom clean up. Laura is at first paralyzed by Jim’s presence, but his warm and
open behavior soon draws her out of her shell. She confesses that she knew and liked him
in high school but was too shy to approach him. They continue talking, and Laura reminds
him of the nickname he had given her: “Blue Roses,” an accidental corruption of pleurosis,
an illness Laura had in high school. He reproaches her for her shyness and low self-esteem
but praises her uniqueness. Laura then ventures to show him her favorite glass animal, a
unicorn. Jim dances with her, but in the process, he accidentally knocks over the unicorn,
breaking off its horn. Laura is forgiving, noting that now the unicorn is a normal horse. Jim
then kisses her, but he quickly draws back and apologizes, explaining that he was carried
away by the moment and that he actually has a serious girlfriend. Resigned, Laura offers
him the broken unicorn as a souvenir.
• Amanda enters the living room, full of good cheer. Jim hastily explains that he must leave
because of an appointment with his fiancée. Amanda sees him off warmly but, after he is
gone, turns on Tom, who had not known that Jim was engaged. Amanda accuses Tom of
being an inattentive, selfish dreamer and then throws herself into comforting Laura. From
the fire escape outside of their apartment, Tom watches the two women and explains that,
not long after Jim’s visit, he gets fired from his job and leaves Amanda and Laura behind.
Years later, though he travels far, he finds that he is unable to leave behind guilty memories
of Laura.

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 Unit 4 SHORT STORY
1.A JOURNEY by EDITH WHARTON

Edith Wharton (/ˈhwɔːrtən/; born Edith Newbold Jones; January 24, 1862 – August 11, 1937) was
an American novelist, short story writer, and designer. Wharton drew upon her insider's knowledge of
the upper class New York "aristocracy" to realistically portray the lives and morals of the Gilded Age.
In 1921, she became the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize in Literature, for her novel The Age of
Innocence. She was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame in 1996.[1] Among her other well
known works are The House of Mirth and the novella Ethan Frome.

The eponymous journey in Edith Wharton's story is a trip by rail from Colorado to New
York. A woman and her husband are traveling together, and the man is seriously ill. The
couple had gone to Colorado for the man's health, for the doctors had told them that he
needed a winter in a dry climate in order to be cured. But the husband is still sick and
appears to be getting worse; he is unable to leave his sleeping berth and has to be given
medicine regularly. Six weeks in the Colorado air were supposed to have cured him, but
the woman knows that the reason the doctors said that they can return to New York is
that there is no hope for the man: his death is imminent.

The woman thinks back on the brief time she has been married. At first, she and her
husband felt connected, both spiritually and physically. Her life as a schoolteacher had
been dull and uninteresting, but marriage had at first enabled her to be fulfilled, as she
and her husband seemed to energize each other. They were happy together. With his
illness, this has changed. He has become irritable and reproachful. She is unprepared for
having to care for a sick person and she feels that her own life, her development as a
person, has been stifled and cut short. Though pity for her husband overwhelms her, she
also experiences a strong sense of resentment, despite her still loving him.

The stay in Colorado has exacerbated the woman's depression, and she longs to be back
in New York City with family and friends. In Colorado she has felt alienated and cut off
from life, and no one there cared about her. Now, the train journey of several days has
started out seemingly well, with her husband reviving slightly during the first day and
enjoying the passing scenery and the activity within the car. On the second day,

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however, his condition starts to worsen. One of the other passengers is a freckled child
who pays unwanted attention to the man, to the point where the woman has to tell the
child's mother that her husband is too ill to be disturbed this way. The trip drags on, with
only brief words exchanged between wife and husband. After the third day is over, she
assures him that they will be home in twenty-four hours, and she pictures to herself the
scene that awaits them in New York when they'll be greeted at the station. Hopefully,
she muses, no one will make superficial and insincere comments to him that he is
looking well, when in fact he is dying.

Shortly after putting her husband to bed, she thinks she hears him call her, but it is only
the sound of a man snoring somewhere in the car. She observes the regular movement
of the curtains of her husband's berth and, for the moment, reassures herself that
nothing has happened to him. The woman goes to sleep, then wakes up at dawn and
gets dressed. When she parts the curtains of her husband’s berth and goes in, she finds
that he is dead.

The woman is terrified that if her husband’s death is discovered, she will be forced off
the train with her husband's body at the next station. She recalls a train ride earlier in
her life when she saw this happen to a couple whose child had died on the train. The
bewildered and frightened expression of the couple, abandoned at a random station with
their child's body, was terrifying to see. Now her effort becomes one of concealing her
husband's death. She fastens the curtains of his berth with a pin. All through the car
people are waking up, dressing, and going to breakfast. The porter tells her that he has
her husband's glass of milk ready for him, and when he asks if he can make up the
man's berth, she puts him off, saying her husband must have his milk first. When the
milk is brought and the porter asks if he should give it to the man, she abruptly tells him
her husband is still asleep and that she will give him the milk.

When she unpins the curtain and goes into her husband's berth, she sees the ghastly
look of his open eyes and closes his eyelids. She is uncertain of what to do with the milk
and finally drinks it herself. When she returns to her seat and the porter again questions
her about making up the berth, she insists that her husband not be disturbed because of
the severity of his illness and that he has been told to lie down as much as possible.
People in the car begin expressing sympathy and giving advice, with one of them asking
if she can take a look at the sick man. This passenger observes that the woman doesn't

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seem used to dealing with sick people and asks questions about the man's medicine,
even suggesting that the man be given it more frequently than has been the case.
Another passenger, apparently a Christian Science clergyman, begins discoursing to her
on the theme of death as a mere delusion and offers a pamphlet for her to give her
husband to read. He claims that if one submits oneself to “the action of the divine
force . . . disease and dissolution will cease to exist for you.”

The woman becomes increasingly detached from the other passengers and her general
surroundings. Their voices become indistinct; the porter says something to her she
doesn't understand. She realizes that when they finally reach New York, she must
pretend that she didn't know her husband was dead. She will have to scream when his
body is discovered, she thinks, but wonders if she will be able to do so. Yet all the while,
her own thoughts become increasingly confused, and she thinks she sees her husband's
face directly before her, imagining she can feel his smooth, dead skin. She cries out
involuntarily, prompting the woman in the seat in front to turn around and stare. After
taking out some biscuits and eating them, she also finds a flask of her husband's brandy
in her bag, takes a sip, and falls asleep.

In sleep she dreams of herself lying dead next to her husband. The darkness of death
surrounds her, and she awakens in terror. They are approaching New York, and the
passengers are preparing to detrain. The train goes through the darkness of the Harlem
tunnel, and she hears the porter saying that they had better wake her husband up now.
The story closes as she stretches out her arms, then collapses, falling forward and
striking her head “against the dead man's berth.”

In A Journey by Edith Wharton we have the theme of change, acceptance, gender roles, loyalty,
independence, conflict and social opinion. Taken from her The New York Stories collection the story is
narrated in the third person by an unnamed narrator and after reading the story the reader realises
that Wharton may be exploring the theme of change.

The temporary nature of life is a likely theme in any story about the death of an individual. In “A
Journey,” the couple have only been married for a short time. They are probably young, but the man
has become seriously ill.

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 A Journey" Themes
• Transience: The illness and death of the woman’s husband illustrate the ephemeral nature of both life itself and
marital...

• Isolation: The woman’s sense of isolation, which began with her husband’s illness, continues throughout the train trip...

• Disease: As in many literary works produced before the twentieth century, the husband’s illness is never explicitly said.

2.The Snows of Kilimanjaro by Ernest Miller Hemingway

Ernest Miller Hemingway was an American novelist, short-story writer, and journalist. His
economical and understated style—which he termed the iceberg theory—had a strong
influence on 20th-century fiction, while his adventurous lifestyle and public image brought him
admiration from later generations.
• The Snows of Kilimanjaro, short story by Ernest Hemingway, first published in Esquire
magazine in 1936 and later collected in The Fifth Column and the First Forty-nine Stories
(1938). The stream-of-consciousness narrative relates the feelings of Harry, a novelist dying of
gangrene poisoning while on an African safari.
• Plot
• The story opens with a paragraph about Mount Kilimanjaro, the highest mountain in Africa,
whose western summit is called in Masai the "House of God." There, we are told, lies the
frozen carcass of a leopard near the summit. No one knows why it is there at such altitude.
• The reader is introduced to Harry, a writer dying of gangrene, and Helen, who is with him
on safari in Africa. They are stranded in the camp, because a bearing in their truck's engine
burnt out. Harry's situation makes him irritable, and he speaks about his impending death in a
matter-of-fact, sarcastic way that upsets Helen. He quarrels with her over minute things, from
whether he should drink a whiskey and soda, to whether she should read to him. Helen is
obviously concerned for his welfare, but Harry's frustration makes him talk unpleasantly
towards her.
• Harry then begins to ruminate on his life experiences, which have been many and varied, and
on the fact that he feels he has never reached his potential as a writer because he has chosen
to make his living by marrying wealthy women. In italicized portions of the text that are
scattered throughout the story, Hemingway narrates some of Harry's experiences in a stream-
of-consciousness style. Harry's first memories consist of traveling around Europe following a
battle: hiding a deserter in a cottage, hunting and skiing in the mountains, playing cards during
a blizzard, and hearing about a bombing run on a train full of Austrian officers.
• Harry then falls asleep and wakes in the evening to find Helen returning from a shooting
expedition. He meditates on how she really is thoughtful and good to him, and how she is not to
blame that his talent as a writer has been destroyed. Helen, he remembers, is a rich widow who
lost her husband and a child, was bored by a series of lovers, and eventually "acquired" Harry
because "she wanted some one that she respected with her"; she loves Harry "dearly as a
writer, as a man, as a companion and as a proud possession", while Harry makes it clear that

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 he does not love her. Harry then recalls how he developed gangrene two weeks earlier: they
had been trying to get a picture of some waterbuck, and Harry scratched his right knee on a
thorn. He had not applied iodine right away, and the wound got infected; because all other
antiseptics ran out, he used a weak carbolic solution that "paralyzed the minute blood vessels",
thus the leg developed gangrene.
• As Helen returns to drink cocktails with Harry, they make up over their quarrel. Harry's second
memory sequence then begins. He recalls how he once patronized prostitutes
in Constantinople "to kill his loneliness", pining for the very first woman he fell in love with, with
whom he quarreled in Paris and broke up. Harry had a fight with a British soldier over
an Armenian prostitute, and then left Constantinople for Anatolia, where, after running from a
group of Turkish soldiers, "he had seen the things that he could never think of and later still he
had seen much worse". Then Harry recalls that upon his return to Paris, his then-wife inquired
about a letter that was actually from Harry's first love—a reply to the letter he wrote to that
woman (mailed to New York, asking to write to his office in Paris) while being in
Constantinople.
• Helen and Harry eat dinner, and then Harry has another memory—this time of how his
grandfather's log house burned down. He then relates how he fished in the Black Forest, and
how he lived in a poor quarter of Paris and felt a kinship with his poor neighbors. Next, he
remembers a ranch and a boy he turned in to the sheriff after the boy protected Harry's horse
feed by shooting and killing a thief. Harry ponders: "That was one story he had saved to write.
He knew at least twenty good stories from out there and he had never written one. Why?".
Then he felt once again that he'd prefer to be in a different company rather than with Helen, as
"rich were dull". Next, his thoughts wander to beating the fear of death, and the limits of being
able to bear pain. He remembers an officer named Williamson who was hit by a bomb, and to
whom Harry subsequently fed all his morphine tablets. Harry considers how he does not have
to worry about pain in his current condition.
• As Harry lies on his cot remembering, he feels the overwhelming presence of death and
associates it with the hyena that has been spotted running around the edge of the campsite. He
is unable to speak. Helen, thinking that Harry has fallen asleep, has him moved into the tent for
the night. Harry dreams that it is morning, and that a man called Compton has come with a
plane to rescue him. He is lifted onto the plane (which has space only for him and the pilot) and
watches the landscape go by beneath him. Suddenly, he sees the snow-covered top of Mt.
Kilimanjaro, and knows that is where he is bound. Helen wakes up in the middle of the night to
a strange hyena cry, and finds Harry unresponsive on his cot.

3.THE WORLD’S GREATEST FISHERMAN PART 1

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SUMMARY & ANALYSIS

After Erdrich’s short story “The World’s Greatest Fisherman” won the 1982 Nelson
Algren fiction prize, it became the basis of her first novel, Love Medicine (1984; expanded
edition, 1993). Love Medicine began a tetralogy that includes The Beet
Queen (1986), Tracks (1988), and The Bingo Palace (1994)Summary

SUMMARY: THE WORLD’S GREATEST FISHERMEN, PARTS 1 AND 2

Part 1 follows June Kashpaw, a middle-aged Chippewa woman, on her way to the bus on a
Saturday morning before Easter in Williston, North Dakota in 1981. A mud engineer named Andy
motions her into the Rigger Bar where they share a beer. He peels a pink egg and compares it to
the color of June’s shirt, which June describes as her own shell. Andy convinces her to spend the
evening with him. They go to another bar, and then ride in his truck to a country road where they
awkwardly make love although he never undresses. When Andy passes out, June fumbles her
way out of the truck and starts walking home in a heavy snow.

Part 2 is told from the first-person point-of-view of Albertine Johnson, June’s niece, a week later. It
opens with a letter from Albertine’s mother saying that Aunt June is dead and buried. Albertine
then relates June’s history, including details about her uncle who raised her, her marriage to her
cousin, her son King, and her wayward ways. June had trouble keeping jobs but was always a
good, loving aunt. Albertine, a medical student in Fargo, lies down in the grass grieving for her
aunt. She goes home to visit and finds her mother, Zelda, and Aunt Aurelia talking about June as
they bake pies. Marie and Nector Kashpaw arrive with June’s son King, King’s wife Lynette, and
King and Lynette’s baby, King Junior. Nector is senile with age. He remembers dates but not
events. Marie, Aurelia, and Zelda recall a memory from their childhood in which the children
pretend to hang June and Marie punished them. Aurelia learns that King purchased his car with
money from June’s insurance. Some in the family won’t ride in it because it came from June.
Gordie and Eli show up. Some of the women get into Albertine’s car to go visit June’s gravestone,
Marie telling them not to touch the pies.

SUMMARY: THE WORLD’S GREATEST FISHERMEN, PARTS 3 AND 4

Lipsha Morrissey joins Albertine and some others. Lipsha and King are half-brothers who don’t get
along. Lipsha is June’s son, born during one of her splits with Gordie. The men talk about the
animals they’ve killed—deer, skunk, soldiers, fox—and Lipsha leaves, upset. They quarrel about
who is the best fisherman, as well as the words on King’s hat (“World’s Greatest Fisherman”).

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When Eli tells the best tale, he takes the hat, adjusts it, and wears it, angering Lynette who gave it
to her husband. King and Lynette leave while Gordie tells a joke, but soon they hear fighting
outside. King ravages his car, with Lynette inside, until Gordie wrestles him to the ground, King
sobbing about his mother’s death. Gordie and Eli leave in the car, Lynette tends to King Junior
back in the house, and Albertine joins Lipsha in the nearby field. While admiring the northern
lights, Albertine thinks of June.

In Part 4, Albertine and Lipsha drink more wine and Lipsha admits that he is afraid of King, who
once took a potshot at him. Albertine considers telling Lipsha that June was his mother but
decides not to because he resents his mother for abandoning him. They fall asleep and wake to
commotion in the kitchen. There, they find King trying to drown Lynette in the sink full of
dishwater. Albertine tries to fight King off, even biting his ear, but he throws her across the room.
Lipsha is not there. The pies are destroyed. When Albertine calls King’s attention to the pies, he is
distracted, and Lynette escapes. King then leaves the house, ashamed. Outside, Lynette begs
King to take her away in the car, insisting he only gets crazy when around his family. King and
Lynette make love in the car while Albertine puts the hat under the mattress where King Junior
sleeps soundly through it all. Albertine tries to salvage the pies, but admits that once they are
broken, you cannot “put them right.”

ANALYSIS: THE WORLD’S GREATEST FISHERMEN

“The World’s Greatest Fishermen” was originally published as two short stories and then became
the seed of the expanded narrative. In this story, Erdrich introduces many characters who will
appear throughout the novel and establishes some of the major themes and motifs, such as
issues between parents and children, alcoholism, memories of the past, warped family dynamics,
and domestic abuse.

Part 1 establishes June as an important character, even though she dies the night in which the
story opens. Her two sons, Lipsha and King, play large roles in Parts 2–4, and her influence is felt
by everyone in the family. The conflict between the two sons will be fully explored in the novel,
and both earlier and later than this incident will serve as the setting for the final act. In Part 1, June
and Andy, fueled by alcohol, go off and spend an evening together that mysteriously ends in
June’s disappearance and death. Eggs are often symbols of spring, fertility, rebirth, resurrection,
and eternal life. Dominated by this symbol, June’s story establishes some of the novel’s dominant
patterns: death, rebirth, homecoming, sexuality, alcoholism, and betrayal. When Lynette wails that
she’d drink a few beers if she had to live in this family, she sets a tone and a challenge for the
entire novel to come.

The scene at the family home begins in order and creation and ends in chaos and destruction.
The women are baking pies, symbols of nourishment, domesticity, and creativity, but they will be

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soon be destroyed by the men. The men gather jovially, but they fight and bleed by the end. The
only couple present pull into the yard in their new car with their baby, King Junior, but leave
without the baby after a violent fight that could have ended in murder. In this story, alcohol and
the traumatic past are the fuels for the family fires. Throughout the novel, readers will come to
understand the reasons for the outburst and destruction and see it play itself out in many other
ways.

4.LIVING SPACE by Isaac Asimov

Isaac Asimov was a Russian-born American writer and professor of biochemistry at Boston University. During his
lifetime, Asimov was considered one of the "Big Three" science fiction writers, along with Robert A. Heinlein and
Arthur C. Clarke. A prolific writer, he wrote or edited more than 500 books

It was first published in the May 1956 issue of Science Fiction and reprinted in the 1957 collection
Earth Is Room Enough. It concerns itself with a possible consequence of the existence
of parallel universes, specifically the ones where life on Earth never developed.

PLOT SUMMARY
Clarence Rimbro owns the entire planet Earth. This is no great accomplishment as, thousands of years in our future,
anyone can do it. There are an infinite number of possible Earths, each existing in its own parallel universe. If the
chance of life arising on any one of them is about 50%, then half the time a random choice of a parallel universe will
lead to a dead Earth. Since there are a trillion people living in this time, it would be almost impossible for them to live
on one Earth, so each family sets up its house and garden, protected by a force field and running on solar power, on
a dead Earth. Clarence enjoys total independence for his family, and an entire planet's worth of living space. As
there are still an infinite number of dead Earths, they can never be filled up, and nobody is worried about the
population becoming two trillion in fifty years or so.
Clarence finds he has a problem. There are noises and rumbling disturbing the silence of his domain. Naturally, he
does what people usually do, and complains to the authorities. At the Housing Bureau are two co-workers; Bill Ching,
who believes fervently in the parallel Earths as the solution, and Alec Mishnoff, who worries about something he only
hints at to others. Both agree to visit Clarence's Earth to check out the mysterious sounds. With a seismograph they
determine that the rumbles are due to some kind of surface activity, not deep earthquakes. To get a location,
someone will have to leave the force field and set up a second seismograph.
Mishnoff, with his own agenda, sets out in a protective suit into the carbon dioxide atmosphere. It does not take him
long to find the source of the sounds. When he does, he is accosted by a stranger who talks to him in a dead
language—German.
After a confusing conversation, Mishnoff realizes that the man is from a parallel Earth where Nazi
Germany conquered the entire planet. They are blasting and digging for a new settlement on the Rimbros' Earth.
Back on his own Earth, Mishnoff explains to Ching and his boss, Berg, that there must be an infinite number of
societies who are also using dead Earths for living space. By sheer chance, some will occupy Earths that Mishnoff's
society are using. There are probably many Earths with multiple occupants, but in most cases the settlements were
too far apart to affect one another—until now.

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After Ching leaves, Berg asks Mishnoff about his own theory, the one he refuses to share. Mishnoff, it turns out, is
concerned about the probability that life in some universe will arise somewhere other than Earth, and will find its way
to his Earth through the portal on one of the dead Earths. The odds are low, of course, but there are now hundreds
of billions of dead Earths occupied by a single house. Just then Ching rushes in with another customer complaint -
someone is worried about the red creatures with tentacles who are peering into his glasshouse.

THEMES
The story's name, "Living Space" is a direct translation of the German "Lebensraum", a key concept of Nazi ideology
used to justify conquest and expansion of the "Aryan Race" at the expense of "Inferior Races". In the context of the
story, there is a far more innocuous way, unlimited "Living Space" available with no need to fight or conquer
anybody, and is utilized not only by the people of Rimbro's timeline, but also by those of the Nazi-victorious timeline.
And though mass horrors must have been perpetrated in the aftermath of the Nazi victory, for the people of that
timeline - in whose calendar this year is thousands of years "After Hitler" - these are events of the distant past and
the ones encountered in the story seem quite civilized. Once finding that the Earth on which Rimbro lives is already
claimed, they accept this prior claim and go away (why fight when there is a literally infinite number of other worlds
just as good?).
Also for Rimbro's people, Hitler and Nazism are a piece of quite ancient history. ("Hitler was a sort of tribal chief in
ancient times. He led the German tribe in one of the wars of the twentieth century, just about the time the Atomic Age
started and true history began.") The horrors of Nazi Germany seem to be forgotten - except, perhaps, by
professional historians (which none of the characters are).

Unit 5 FICTION :To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

To Kill a Mockingbird is a 1961 novel by Harper Lee. Set in small-town Alabama, the novel is a
bildungsroman, or coming-of-age story, and chronicles the childhood of Scout and Jem Finch as
their father Atticus defends a Black man falsely accused of rape. Scout and Jem are mocked by
classmates for this.

Scout Finch lives with her brother, Jem, and their widowed father, Atticus, in the sleepy Alabama town of
Maycomb. Maycomb is suffering through the Great Depression, but Atticus is a prominent lawyer and the Finch
family is reasonably well off in comparison to the rest of society. One summer, Jem and Scout befriend a boy
named Dill, who has come to live in their neighborhood for the summer, and the trio acts out stories together.
Eventually, Dill becomes fascinated with the spooky house on their street called the Radley Place. The house is
owned by Mr. Nathan Radley, whose brother, Arthur (nicknamed Boo), has lived there for years without
venturing outside.
Scout goes to school for the first time that fall and detests it. She and Jem find gifts apparently left for them in a
knothole of a tree on the Radley property. Dill returns the following summer, and he, Scout, and Jem begin to
act out the story of Boo Radley. Atticus puts a stop to their antics, urging the children to try to see life from
another person’s perspective before making judgments. But, on Dill’s last night in Maycomb for the summer, the
three sneak onto the Radley property, where Nathan Radley shoots at them. Jem loses his pants in the ensuing
escape. When he returns for them, he finds them mended and hung over the fence.

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The next winter, Jem and Scout find more presents in the tree, presumably left by the mysterious Boo. Nathan
Radley eventually plugs the knothole with cement. Shortly thereafter, a fire breaks out in another neighbor’s
house, and during the fire someone slips a blanket on Scout’s shoulders as she watches the blaze. Convinced that
Boo did it, Jem tells Atticus about the mended pants and the presents.

To the consternation of Maycomb’s racist white community, Atticus agrees to defend a Black man named Tom
Robinson, who has been accused of raping a white woman. Because of Atticus’s decision, Jem and Scout are
subjected to abuse from other children, even when they celebrate Christmas at the family compound on Finch’s
Landing. Calpurnia, the Finches’ Black cook, takes them to the local Black church, where the warm and close-
knit community largely embraces the children.
Atticus’s sister, Alexandra, comes to live with the Finches the next summer. Dill, who is supposed to live with
his “new father” in another town, runs away and comes to Maycomb. Tom Robinson’s trial begins, and when the
accused man is placed in the local jail, a mob gathers to lynch him. Atticus faces the mob down the night before
the trial. Jem and Scout, who have sneaked out of the house, soon join him. Scout recognizes one of the men,
and her polite questioning about his son shames him into dispersing the mob.

At the trial itself, the children sit in the “colored balcony” with the town’s Black citizens. Atticus provides clear
evidence that the accusers, Mayella Ewell and her father, Bob, are lying: in fact, Mayella propositioned Tom
Robinson, was caught by her father, and then accused Tom of rape to cover her shame and guilt. Atticus
provides impressive evidence that the marks on Mayella’s face are from wounds that her father inflicted; upon
discovering her with Tom, he called her a whore and beat her. Yet, despite the significant evidence pointing to
Tom’s innocence, the all-white jury convicts him. The innocent Tom later tries to escape from prison and is shot
to death. In the aftermath of the trial, Jem’s faith in justice is badly shaken, and he lapses into despondency and
doubt.

Despite the verdict, Bob Ewell feels that Atticus and the judge have made a fool out of him, and he vows
revenge. He menaces Tom Robinson’s widow, tries to break into the judge’s house, and finally attacks Jem and
Scout as they walk home from a Halloween party. Boo Radley intervenes, however, saving the children and
stabbing Ewell fatally during the struggle. Boo carries the wounded Jem back to Atticus’s house, where the
sheriff, in order to protect Boo, insists that Ewell tripped over a tree root and fell on his own knife. After sitting
with Scout for a while, Boo disappears once more into the Radley house.

Later, Scout feels as though she can finally imagine what life is like for Boo. He has become a human being to
her at last. With this realization, Scout embraces her father’s advice to practice sympathy and understanding and
demonstrates that her experiences with hatred and prejudice will not sully her faith in human goodness.

Full Book Analys is

FULL BOOK ANALYSIS

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TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD tells the story of the young narrator’s passage from innocence to experience when her
father confronts the racist justice system of the rural, Depression-era South. In witnessing the trial of Tom
Robinson, a black man unfairly accused of rape, Scout, the narrator, gains insight into her town, her family, and
herself. Several incidents in the novel force Scout to confront her beliefs, most significantly when Tom is
convicted despite his clear innocence. Scout faces her own prejudices through her encounters with Boo Radley,
a mysterious shut-in whom Scout initially considers a frightening ghost-like creature. The novel’s resolution
comes when Boo rescues Scout and her brother and Scout realizes Boo is a fully human, noble being. At the
same time, Scout undergoes an inevitable disillusionment as she is exposed to the reality of human nature. The
entrenched racism of her town, the unfair conviction and murder of Tom Robinson, and the malice of Bob Ewell
all force Scout to acknowledge social inequality and the darker aspects of humanity. Throughout the book, her
father, Atticus, represents morality and justice, but as Scout becomes more sensitive to those around her, she
sees the effect of his struggle to stay purely good in a compromised world.

The book opens with a framing device that references Scout’s brother, Jem, breaking his arm when he was
thirteen. Scout says she will explain the events leading up to that injury, but is uncertain where to start, raising
the question of the past’s influence on the present. After tracing her family’s history and describing how her
father, Atticus, came to be the attorney for Maycomb, Alabama, she picks up her narrative almost three years
before the incident, when she is “almost six” and Jem is “nearly ten.” She presents Maycomb as a sleepy,
impoverished town still rooted in the rhythms and rituals of the past. Her loving characterization of the town
depicts it as an ideal place to be a child, where Scout and her brother play in the street all day long during the
summer. These opening scenes of safety and innocence are later contrasted with her more mature, nuanced
descriptions of the town’s darker aspects and the price of its attachment to the past.

In the following chapters, Scout recounts a series of amusing stories introducing us to the main characters in the
book and establishing the town’s social order. At the urging of their friend, Dill, Scout and Jem try to coax their
mysterious neighbor, Boo Radley, out of his house. Boo has lived as a prisoner in his own home after getting
into trouble as a teen; when he was in his thirties he stabbed his father in the leg with a pair of scissors. He has
become a figure of local gossip and speculation, and the children are terrified and fascinated by his seemingly
monstrous, ghostly nature. When Scout enters school, we meet Walter Cunningham, the son of a poor but proud
family of farmers. When Walter comes to lunch at Scout’s house, Scout is reprimanded for mocking his table
manners, one of her first lessons in empathy. Another child at school, Burris Ewell, introduces us to the Ewell
family, who will figure prominently later in the book. The Ewells are a mean, antisocial clan who rely on
government assistance and only send their children to school one day a year, to avoid the truant officer. Burris
threatens the teacher with violence, foreshadowing the violent attack by his father later in the book. Burris’s
father, Bob, represents the racism and violent past of the South, and is the book’s antagonist.

The inciting incident in TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD occurs in chapter nine, when Scout learns from other children
that her father is defending a black man, Tom Robinson, who has been charged with assaulting Mayella Ewell, a
white woman. When Scout and Jem’s neighbor, Mrs. Dubose, verbally harasses the children about their father’s
work, Jem retaliates by destroying her garden. As punishment, he is required to read to Mrs. Dubose, and Atticus

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reveals that she is a morphine addict determined to overcome her addiction before she dies. This episode further
develops the idea of gaining empathy for others by understanding their situations. It also introduces the concept
of bravery as adhering to a principle at great personal cost. Atticus’s admiration of Mrs. Dubose’s determination
to die “free” is later echoed in Scout’s admiration of his conviction to his values even at the potential price of his
personal safety. This conviction is displayed when he spends the night guarding Tom’s jail cell. The white
community in Maycomb is outraged and attempts to lynch Tom, but Scout saves Tom and Atticus by
interrupting the attempted lynching and inadvertently reminding the mob of their own children. Although she is
central to this event, she does not fully understand its ramifications. This combination of naïveté and attentive
witnessing characterizes Scout’s narration throughout the entire book.
The climax of the book occurs at the conclusion of Tom’s trial and the delivery of the jury’s verdict. At the trial,
Scout and Jem sneak in and sit with the black spectators, even though Atticus forbade them from attending. In
his defense, Atticus establishes that Tom was physically unable to attack Mayella, and suggests that in fact
Mayella approached Tom for sex and Mayella’s father, Bob, beat her when he saw them together. In questioning
Mayella about her family’s circumstances, Atticus paints a bleaker, more troubling portrait of Maycomb than
Scout’s earlier descriptions of the town, revealing the economic disparity between relatively comfortable
families like the Finches and the impoverished Ewells. Despite Atticus’s defense and the judge’s implied belief
in Tom’s innocence, the jury convicts Tom in a climactic reversal of our expectations that good will triumph
over evil. Scout is shocked by the verdict, and the contrast between her surprise and her father’s resignation
reveals how many illusions about the world Scout still has to lose. Later, Tom is shot to death while attempting
to escape prison. This event underscores how thoroughly the justice system has failed Tom and the black
community of Maycomb. Both Scout and Jem must reconcile their new understanding of the world with their
father’s idealism and high moral standards.

The falling action of the book takes place on Halloween, a few months after the trial. Despite Tom’s conviction
and death, Bob Ewell feels humiliated by the events of the trial, and seeks revenge on Tom’s widow as well as
the judge. Following the Halloween pageant, Bob attacks Scout and Jem, breaking Jem’s arm. Boo Radley
rescues them by killing Bob with his own knife. The re-emergence of Boo shows how community can be a
powerful protective force, softening the social criticism of the trial sequence. However, Boo’s reclusiveness and
Atticus’s decision to say Bob Ewell fell on his own knife also demonstrate that these two men still perceive
community as a risky, potentially destructive entity. Boo’s kindness somewhat restores Scout’s faith in
humanity, and her assertion that “nothin’s real scary except in books” suggests that she feels prepared to face the
world with her new, adult understanding of its complexities. The resolution of the novel suggests that humanity
will be all right as long as we remember to see each other as individuals and empathize with their perspectives.
While the ending implies that Scout has made a significant and beneficial transformation over the course of the
novel, Lee leaves the larger problem of the institutionalized racism and economic inequality of the South
unresolved.

PREVIOUS SECTIONFULL BOOK SUMMARYNEXT SECTION

Character Lis t
CHARACTER LIST

SCOUT FINCH

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The narrator and protagonist of the story. Jean Louise “Scout” Finch lives with her father, Atticus, her brother,
Jem, and their black cook, Calpurnia, in Maycomb. She is intelligent and, by the standards of her time and place,
a tomboy. Scout has a combative streak and a basic faith in the goodness of the people in her community. As the
novel progresses, this faith is tested by the hatred and prejudice that emerge during Tom Robinson’s trial. Scout
eventually develops a more grown-up perspective that enables her to appreciate human goodness without
ignoring human evil.

Read an in-depth analysis of Scout Finch.

ATTICUS FINCH
Scout and Jem’s father, a lawyer in Maycomb descended from an old local family. A widower with a dry sense
of humor, Atticus has instilled in his children his strong sense of morality and justice. He is one of the few
residents of Maycomb committed to racial equality. When he agrees to defend Tom Robinson, a black man
charged with raping a white woman, he exposes himself and his family to the anger of the white community.
With his strongly held convictions, wisdom, and empathy, Atticus functions as the novel’s moral backbone.

JEM FINCH
Scout’s brother and constant playmate at the beginning of the story. Jeremy Atticus “Jem” Finch is something of
a typical American boy, refusing to back down from dares and fantasizing about playing football. Four years
older than Scout, he gradually separates himself from her games, but he remains her close companion and
protector throughout the novel. Jem moves into adolescence during the story, and his ideals are shaken badly by
the evil and injustice that he perceives during the trial of Tom Robinson.

ARTHUR “BOO” RADLEY

A recluse who never sets foot outside his house, Boo dominates the imaginations of Jem, Scout, and Dill. He is a
powerful symbol of goodness swathed in an initial shroud of creepiness, leaving little presents for Scout and Jem
and emerging at an opportune moment to save the children. An intelligent child emotionally damaged by his
cruel father, Boo provides an example of the threat that evil poses to innocence and goodness. He is one of the
novel’s “mockingbirds,” a good person injured by the evil of mankind.

.
CALPURNIA
The Finches’ black cook. Calpurnia is a stern disciplinarian and the children’s bridge between the white world
and her own black community.

BOB EWELL
A drunken, mostly unemployed member of Maycomb’s poorest family. In his knowingly wrongful accusation
that Tom Robinson raped his daughter, Ewell represents the dark side of the South: ignorance, poverty, squalor,
and hate-filled racial prejudice.

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 CHARLES BAKER “DILL” HARRIS
Jem and Scout’s summer neighbor and friend. Dill is a diminutive, confident boy with an active imagination. He
becomes fascinated with Boo Radley and represents the perspective of childhood innocence throughout the
novel.

MISS MAUDIE ATKINSON

The Finches’ neighbor, a sharp-tongued widow, and an old friend of the family. Miss Maudie is almost the same
age as Atticus’s younger brother, Jack. She shares Atticus’s passion for justice and is the children’s best friend
among Maycomb’s adults.

AUNT ALEXANDRA
Atticus’s sister, a strong-willed woman with a fierce devotion to her family. Alexandra is the perfect Southern
lady, and her commitment to propriety and tradition often leads her to clash with Scout.

MAYELLA EWELL
Bob Ewell’s abused, lonely, unhappy daughter. Though one can pity Mayella because of her overbearing father,
one cannot pardon her for her shameful indictment of Tom Robinson.

TOM ROBINSON
The black field hand accused of rape. Tom is one of the novel’s “mockingbirds,” an important symbol of
innocence destroyed by evil.

LINK DEAS
Tom Robinson’s employer. In his willingness to look past race and praise the integrity of Tom’s character, Deas
epitomizes the opposite of prejudice.

MRS. HENRY LAFAYETTE DUBOSE

An elderly, ill-tempered, racist woman who lives near the Finches. Although Jem believes that Mrs. Dubose is a
thoroughly bad woman, Atticus admires her for the courage with which she battles her morphine addiction.

NATHAN RADLEY
Boo Radley’s older brother. Scout thinks that Nathan is similar to the deceased Mr. Radley, Boo and Nathan’s
father. Nathan cruelly cuts off an important element of Boo’s relationship with Jem and Scout when he plugs up
the knothole in which Boo leaves presents for the children.

HECK TATE
The sheriff of Maycomb and a major witness at Tom Robinson’s trial. Heck is a decent man who tries to protect
the innocent from danger.

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 MR. UNDERWOOD
The publisher of Maycomb’s newspaper. Mr. Underwood respects Atticus and proves to be his ally.

MR. DOLPHUS RAYMOND

A wealthy white man who lives with his black mistress and multiracial children. Raymond pretends to be a
drunk so that the citizens of Maycomb will have an explanation for his behavior. In reality, he is simply jaded by
the hypocrisy of white society and prefers living among blacks.

MR. WALTER CUNNINGHAM

A poor farmer and part of the mob that seeks to lynch Tom Robinson at the jail. Mr. Cunningham displays his
human goodness when Scout’s politeness compels him to disperse the men at the jail.

WALTER CUNNINGHAM
Son of Mr. Walter Cunningham and classmate of Scout. Walter cannot afford lunch one day at school and
accidentally gets Scout in trouble.

Fiction Suggested questions

1.Analyze the childhood world of Jem, Scout, and Dill and their relationship with Boo Radley in Part One.

2. How do Jem and Scout change during the course of the novel? How do they remain the same?

3. What is Atticus’s relationship to the rest of Maycomb? What is his role in the community?

4. Discuss the role of family in TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD , paying close attention to Aunt Alexandra.
5. Examine Miss Maudie’s relationship to the Finches and to the rest of Maycomb.

6. Discuss the author’s descriptions of Maycomb. What is the town’s role in the novel? 7. Analyze the author’s
treatment of Boo Radley. What is his role in the novel?

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