In his poem, “God Has Pity on Kindergarten Children,”Yehuda Amichai is vividly illustrates god’s treatment towards, kindergartners, school children, and adults. The scale goes from innocent to corrupt, god does not pity adults for the immorality they bring into the world and how they feed the innocent biased knowledge of their own beliefs. They teach them who to hate, the kindergartners being forced to believe it without reason. The Volta occurs after his dark illustration in the second stanza, giving an alternative scenario to living a life of love could make god have pity on you. His connection to the Israeli-Palestine Conflict is clear through this poem; he believes people are feeding the future generations lies about their “enemies,” creating conflict that will exist for no known reason. His belief is that love is the only way to overcome this problem; once you love each other and are able to put differences past each other, god will have pity and you will be spared from experiencing the undesirable life that he depicts.
Author: Meni Musheyev
More to Life than Love
In Edna St. Vincent Millay’s Sonnet XXX, she contemplates how necessary is love actually is in people’s lives. She begins her sonnet by stating that “Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain” (Millay lns 1-2), saying that love cannot provide the three basic human necessities of food, water, and shelter, emphasizing them through iambic pentameter. But this is an obvious statement that the emotion of love, cannot provide these physical things. The rest of the poem states similar obvious facts, like love cannot heal broken bones, in an attempt to show the facts about what love really is, thinking that men and women have been blinding in their quests to feel loved. There is more to life than loving one person and being with them for the rest of your life.
The Human Race
How does Joyce depict the differences between Gabriel and the other characters in the story? How are they similar and different?
A main difference between Gabriel and the other character in “The Dead,” by James Joyce is the nationalism toward Ireland. Gabriel is portrayed as being more free flowing in the sense that he doesn’t feel strongly about any one country in particular. He sees the human race, as opposed to races of people belonging to certain countries. This is evidenced in the conversation he has with Miss Ivors, saying that he cares far more about the books, and in turn knowledge, he receives from writing for the The Daily Express, than he does about what the The Daily Express’s political standing is. Gabriel is someone who does not want to be trapped by the fabricated boundaries created to separate people based on race and nationality, an idea far ahead of his time.
Out of the Shadows
The life of secrecy that Gurov lives is the life he realizes that he wants to be living fully. He comes to this realization in the middle of the story, when explaining the differences between the surface temperature and the atmospheric temperature. The difference between what people live out on the surface, and the lives they live in secrecy, is that they live more for their secret lives than their real ones. Gurov feels this way about the life he was living with Anna, that he felt more alive with her than in his mundane life in Moscow. This realization comes with a shift, where instead of being around her in secrecy, he embraces her more, evidenced by telling his friend about her and embracing her in the presence of others at the theater. This is an attempt to break the life he enjoys living so much out of secrecy.
The Light of his Life
Chekhov’s symbolism of the lights within “The Lady and the Dog” delivered a message about what Gurov’s love for Anna meant. An instance of this was when Anna was departing Yalta and Gurov watched the train depart the station, specifically watching how “its lights soon vanished from sight” leading to him being left “gazing into the dark distance” (Chekhov 5). Spending days with Anna, and then having to watch her, the light within Gurov’s life, depart led to Gurov’s sadness once he too left Yalta. Chekhov purposely makes Gurov return to the cold winter of Moscow, to further show that the light that left him represented his happiness that he shared with Anna at the resort. Although they concealed their relationship from others, being at the resort with her was the light that he had in his life, once gone his surroundings showed misery, such as the winter he had to live through.
The irony in this situation is that in the beginning of the story, Gurov refers to woman as “the lower race,” potentially referring to how dependant they are on men for everything. If true, then the role switches and Gurov’s yearning for Anna makes him feel as if he needs her, without her his surroundings are bleak and meaningless. This changes his perception of women being the lower race because he chooses to risk his life in order to be with her, hoping to find a solution where this would be possible.
Rebirth
Why do you think Shelley chose to write an ode to the wind? Does the wind represent some larger concept?
The way she speaks of the wind resembles how people pray to god. She praises the wind earlier in the poem, “Destroyer and preserver; hear, oh hear!” (Shelley 14), and proceeds to ask of it to hear her out. The rest of the poem sounds like she is describing the current state of nature followed by here asking of the wind to do a favor, “to quicken a new birth” (Shelley 64). She is asking for a new, more enlightened era to be brought upon the world, and for the old world to be destroyed. The wind and nature representing a force that is capable of great destruction, but great creation as well.