“Bleecker Street, Summer” gives off a vibe of hope and excited anticipation of what love feels like. Walcott sets the scene of summer on Bleecker Street and what he would do if his loved one was here. His other work, “The Fist” talks about how love can make you feel as if it’s unreasonable and overly emotional, and the heart-aching feeling you get from it is never-ending. This theme is pretty re-occurrent throughout most love poems I have read in the past. Let’s take “The Lady with the Dog” by Chekhov as an example: the story incorporates longing and anticipation when Anna Sergeyevna and Dmitri Gurov parted ways in Yalta. The longing they have felt with each other made their love seem so unreasonable under their circumstances as they both are married with their own spouses. The setting in Yalta is comparable to that of “Bleecker Street, Summer” set by Walcott because of the euphoric feeling it gives off to readers.
Author: KELINA HUYNH
Yeats – “When You Are Old” is obviously a very romantic poem but it is also about aging. 10/24
The way I interpret the poem is through a male’s perspective on his love whom he grew old with. It seems to be a reminiscence of the past that they had and how he came to love her. Though many people loved her for her or for her looks, he loved her for her adventurous spirit and how impressionable she was. The last stanza, “And bending down beside the glowing bars, Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled”, almost feels as if he is sad how times have changed and now they are old and the fire that was once there is now diminishing. What I took away from this is that love can be ever so lasting, but time has made the relationship lose its spark.
Consider the role(s) of betrayal and infidelity in the story. 10/14
The story opens up to a happily married couple of Joe and Missie May. Hurston pulls up a plot twist for her audience to show how money can change people. The betrayal was on Missie May’s part when she slept with Mister Otis D. Slemmons of the ice cream shop for a cold coin. Even after knowing the fact that his wife had committed infidelity, he still stayed. Though he stayed, there was no longer any fun banters they had in the evenings, no running through his trousers for the fear of finding the gold coin. He doubted that the baby was his as well. But slowly and surely, they rekindled their marriage and had a baby boy. Hurston wanted to portray Missie May as the one committing the adultery instead of Joe to break this stereotype between gender roles.
Wharton: “The Muse’s Tragedy” – Consider Mary’s choices toward the end of the story. Why does she choose this life rather than another? 10/8
After an inferred proposal by Lewis Danyers, Mary rejected him out of pity and her own spite. She could have chosen to marry Lewis Danyers after having a great time in Venice with him, but because of the fact that she had loved Victor Rendel for quite some time during her marriage, she thought it would not have been fair for him to marry her. Victor Rendel never reciprocated her love for him and Mary did not want Lewis Danyers to marry a “disappointed woman,” in another words, someone who treated him as a rebound. So in the end, she chose what she thought was a good moral compass for her, but as she had realized, “it has shown me, for the first time, all that I have missed.”
Chekhov: What is the significance of the two lovers meeting at Yalta, a resort town? 10/1
Yalta is a resort city, part of Ukraine at the time of the passage (now under Russia), that has a reputation for where promiscuous affairs and forbidden rendezvous transpire. The city revolves around stories of budding romances amongst strangers who are willing to sin; though, to great extents to where it doesn’t sound as plausible. Of the two lovers, Dmitri Dmitritch Gurov did not believe in such tales about this city of Yalta. Even though he didn’t, he couldn’t help but “remembered these tales of easy conquests, of trips to the mountains, and the tempting thought of a swift, fleeting love affair, a romance with an unknown woman, whose name he did not know” when he looked at Anna Sergeyevna, whom he would soon form a sinful bond with. Because the setting of this story is revealed to be a place where affairs happen, readers can kind of foreshadow what might happen between these two strangers meeting in Yalta.
Blake
Consider Blake’s use of images and metaphor in his various poems and proverbs.
If I am deciphering this unerringly, Blake starts off his prose with God being the accuser of all things. “Truly, my Satan, thou art but a Dunce, And dost not know the Garment of the Man. ” Satan is anything but dull-witted and does not know of a priest, meaning he doesn’t know good deeds. “Every Harlot was a Virgin once, Nor canst thou ever change Kate into Nan.” Like every prostitute was once a virgin, you cannot change them back to purity. “Tho’ thou art Worship’d by the Names Divine Of Jesus and Jehovah, thou are still/The Son of Morn in weary Night’s decline, The lost Traveller’s Dream under the Hill.” Even though Satan is worshipped by other known supreme beings, at the end of the night he is still the “son of morn” which is an idiom for “Lucifer” as he is the son of the morning. Blake’s use of idioms and metaphors here depicts that of someone in a religious stance who acknowledges Satan as a being, but not of the other “Divine Names” as Jesus and Jehovah. Thus, towards the end of the prose, “The lost Traveller’s Dream under the Hill” signifies that Lucifer was the Traveller that had this idea to detach himself from God, but that idea placed him “under the hill” where he is casted away.