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Marcel Proust Swann’s Way

Reading Response

The way the narrator talks about his mother is on an entirely different level than the way he talks about anyone else. This caught my attention because he refers to his father as father, and his mother as Mama (145).  His mother is very important to him, mainly, because the he depends greatly on her to tuck him in at night.  “Why I went to sleep in the end even though Mama didn’t come to say goodnight to me,” (145). The narrator asks this question to himself, which shows that normally  he wouldn’t be able to sleep without her goodnight ritual. He mentions this need for his mother to come kiss him goodnight several times through out the reading. Another example, ” My sole consolation, when I went upstairs for the night, was that Mama would come kiss me once I was in bed …,” (150). It is quite normal for a child to love their mother the way the narrator does, but the way he writes about her seems like he is fantasizing about her. It is not clear whether or not he knew that his father found their goodnight ritual to be absurd, as a child, because he doesn’t care about what his father thinks. All he wants to do is satisfy his desires.

The narrator starts to seem obsessed with his mother towards the middle of the reading when he talks about preparing to kiss his mother by deciding where he is going to kiss before hand (160). This sounds like a predator preparing to attack their prey, but his plan failed because he was forced to go to his room without being able to follow through with his kiss. At this point he could not sleep, so he even tried to ask the cook to hand a letter to his mother for her to come, but that did not happen. He ended up having to lie about the contents in order for it to be delivered (162). This did not work either, but he does not give up, and now he is willing to upset his mother just to kiss her goodnight (163). He threw himself at his mother when he heard her coming up the stairs, and he told her to come say goodnight, but his father heard it and thought his life was over (166). Surprisingly, his father told his mother to sleep with him. At last  he got what he wanted, but now that he is no longer deprived of his mother, he is able to move on. Even though he was supposed to be happy that he got what he wanted, he wasn’t. He wants what he could not have, but when it was given to him he no longer wants it.

Would his desires changed if he was never deprived of it from the beginning?

 

Frost at Midnight by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Reading Response

In “Frost at Midnight,” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the poet uses the imagery of nature throughout the poem to compare the different parts of nature that is visible in the country side, to the city. For example, “This populous village! Sea, and hill, and wood,” would be the ocean, mountains, and trees that you would see in the country side (line 11), but in the city the only parts of nature you would see are the sky, and stars. Coleridge seems to be in love with nature, and because of his love for nature he wants his child to grow up in a place that offers more than just the sky and stars (line 54-58). As a child, Coleridge had an horrible experience growing up in the city. He did nothing but dream, and when he is in school, he would try to look for someone that he knows because he had nothing better to do (line 39-41). He does not want his child to go through the kind of childhood he had to go through. The experiences that his child will go through allows him to live the life that he dreamt  of., through his child. This  seems selfish in a way, but he wants to spare his child from the boredom that life in a city would bring.

Coleridge has grown to hate the city, and started to love the countryside, but would this change if he did not grow up in the city. His love towards nature makes him seem like he hates the city, which leads to the whole idea of urbanization, and how he is probably against it. In the poem he does not mention much about his childhood, but he does talk about the beauty of nature that could only be experienced outside of the city. His experiences in the city must have been a lot worst than what he has mentioned because you don’t make the decision of moving out the city just because of the boring childhood he had.

I could see how Coleridge fell in love with the environment of the countryside because it is an magnificent sight, but the city has its own kind of beauty as well. I am not convinced that being bored made him want to move out of the city.