Realism and Modernism Authors - Essay Example

Realism and Modernism in Literature Literature is like salt that adds meaning to the human life by expressing the writer’s inner feelings and state of mind. These experiences are brought up as real-life encounters, meditations, or the author’s experience of the world. The experiences of the writer are brought out to the reader through an objectified voice behind the work of literature supported by various literary devices. This voice is that of the persona. The changing tone, mood, and experiences of the persona represent the writer’s state of mind. In essence, by analyzing a work of literature, one retrospectively looks into the mind of the writer, shares his feelings, and understands how the environment in which he lives affects his experiences. From the poems of Theodore Roethke and Elizabeth Bishop, it is clear that the two authors used different stylistic devices and effectively embraced literary freedoms to set the reader in situations of both confusion and enlightenment. Imagery that is sometimes either ambiguous or informative dominates the poems written by the two poets. My Papas Waltz is an intriguing but ambiguous poem that can read both, as a narration of a terrorized child’s the story and as the story of a child who enjoys having a playful romp with his dad just before bedtime. The two different points of view of the poem is a result of its ambiguity.in the first stanza, the poet expresses his closeness with the father while in the second stanza he uses a tone of remorse in describing his relationship with the daddy. Ambiguity essentially allows the reader to have an in-depth analysis of the poem to ensure that the standpoint he takes provides the most realistic perception. The meaning of the poem, My Papas Waltz depends on the reader’s interpretation of the relationship between the narrator and the father. In essence, the poem has both a superficial and deeper meaning thus providing the reader with a privilege of making a self-assessment of the reading. The surface meaning of My Papas Waltz is that of a father and son sharing a waltz (dance). The subsequent stanzas of the poem depict disorder and occasional missteps that express the unique dance of the father and his son (the narrator). The son who is also, the persona in this poem shows some level of apprehension for the dance. Probably, this apprehension is elicited by his realization that the father is unstable during the dance. However, the ambiguity of the poem may also be perceived as an undertone of the father’s abuse of his son. The confusion imbedded in My Papas Waltz ambiguity leads to differential symbolic meanings. The readers may also perceive the poem as an embodiment of a parental abuse of the child. This perception views the abuse as emanating from alcoholic consumption. Therefore, the poem is an expression of torment and mistreatment. It has a symbolic meaning that the narrator‘s awkward experience with the father lingers so much in his mind. This bad experience is supported in the second stanza of the poem as the pots and pans jingle in the kitchen. As things fall, the narrator shows his fright by clutching onto the drunk father in the fear that he too may stumble and fall like the utensils. The understanding of the poem relies on the readers own backgrounds hence the tenacity of the poem. The meter is another poetic device that Roethke effectively uses in My Papa’s waltz. The meter creates a stumbling effect on the poem that makes it sound like a clumsy waltz. For example, the stumble is created in the lines such as “Could make a small boy dizzy” and “Such waltzing was not easy.” Moreover, the poem has very short lines that reinforce its essence as the narration of a child. In fact, Roethke uses elementary rhymes, jingles, and playground taunts to assert the point that the poem is a child’s narration. The writer intentionally makes the reader to identify more with the child as opposed to the other adults in the poem. In the poem, I Knew a Woman, Roethke effectively uses imagery to portray the writer’s feelings about the woman in the poem. In the second and subsequent stanza of the poem, the narrator creates a succinct picture in the mind of the reader to behold the beauty and countenance of the woman. Just like in My Papas Waltz, I Knew a woman is a narration of an event that really clouded the persona’s mid but has ever since ceased to happen. He tells, “I knew” to mean that from the onset of the poem, the narrator is no longer enjoys the same position as before at the time of narrating the story. Forthrightly, the voice behind the poem intends to connect the reader with his past. Notably, he cannot link the reader with the past without creating imageries of the past to suffice his contemplations. He uses a statement such as “lovely in her bones” to imaginatively express that his love for the beautiful woman was both interior and exterior. The narrator of I Knew a Woman repeatedly uses the images of curvature, circularity, and straightness in describing the woman and making a metaphorical comparison between the woman and men. In the concluding stanza, Roethke uses dizzy and musical statements similar to the rhythmic schemes produced in My Papas Waltz. The statements include…“martyr, Motion”…”my, freedom…for...” and “live…., learn.” However, in I Knew a woman, the rhythm is merely to create musicality while in My Papas Waltz, it asserts the stumbling in the waltz that the narrator’s father engages him in. One Art by Elizabeth Bishop is a narration of the persona’s feeling of an eventful past experience. The poem begins with trivial loss that engulfs the narrator’s memory. At first, the losses that befall her life seem lesser burdensome but as it continues to greater ones, the loss becomes a disaster. The narrator uses repetition to assert the enormity of the losses. She repeatedly states, “Losing is easy to master, although it does at this point look like disaster.” The art that the narrator presents in One Art has double meaning just like the ambiguous meaning of My Papas Waltz. On one hand, the narrator focuses on the art of losing as something that when one practices, he becomes perfect. Nonetheless, it also opposes the notion of practicing lose by contending that mastering loss can be disastrous. The art that the poem illustrates has double meanings in the sense that it superficially states that losing enough small things makes people be prepared to lose bigger things but the art is also of poetic nature. On the surface meaning, the narrator asserts that no matter how one is prepared for losses; the art of losing always seems like a disaster. On the other hand, the poem is a manifestation of the poet’s mechanism of coping with her loses. She seems to overcome the disastrous losses that befall her through writing them down. The parenthetical statement “write it” in One art suggests the poet’s notion on how to cope with disastrous loses. In the last stanza, the narrator uses understatement that suggests the opposite of what is the reality. She states that the art of losing is not too hard to master in reference to the suicide of the lover. In essence, One art by Elizabeth Bishop has the gist of both an encouragement and the poets way of coping with her loses through writing them down. This stance is similar to that of My Papas Waltz in which the inherent ambiguity gives two different meanings; that of a son’s abuse and a fairy tale of encounters between a son and his father. In the Waiting Room is a narration of child’s past experience but from an adult’s point of view. This makes it different from My papa’s Wiltz that narrates the experiences of a son from the perspectives of a child. It also differs from I Knew a Woman by Theodore Roethke that narrates an adult’s story from the perspectives of an adult. However, just like in other three poems, the sense of imagery is not lost in In the Waiting Room. The poem mirrors, the experiences of an adult as a child in which she is frightened and terrified at the realization that she is suddenly an adult. The poet locates her experiences at an ideal time and place when reality meets worries, yet she is obliged to embrace the various identities that come with growing up and attaining a sense of self-awareness. The speaker in in the waiting room is as nostalgic as the persona in I knew a woman. The imagery used by Bishop in the poem depicts the narrator’s desire to be an adult just like her aunt, the naked women she sees in the magazine and everyone else in the room. She contemplates being an adult while she is really a child at seven years old. However, the writer allegorically attaches the feelings of the narrator to the experiences of her aunt just as the case between the narrator in I knew a woman with his beautiful lover. However, in I knew a woman; the characters are attached by romantic love while in in the waiting room familial ties attach the narrator and the aunt. At the center of in the waiting room is the narrator’s imagination on whether she is an adult or not. In conclusion, the four poems by Bishop and Roethke share and differ in the use of reflections and imagery. Nonetheless, the trivial nature of the persona’s narrations in some of the poems give them double meaning that give the reader an opportunity to comprehend meaning. The imagery in all its forms is an indispensable part of poetry that casts that authors mind to the reader and links past experiences with the contemporary life. Works Cited Bishop, Elizabeth, and Robert Giroux. One Art: Letters. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014. Internet resource. Bishop, Elizabeth, Robert Giroux, and Lloyd Schwartz. Poems, Prose, and Letters. New York: Library of America, 2008. Print. Burns, Allan. Thematic Guide to American Poetry. Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press, 2002. Internet resource. Cleghorn, Angus J, Bethany Hicok, and Thomas J. Travisano. Elizabeth Bishop in the Twenty-First Century: Reading the New Editions. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2012. Print. Davis, Cortney. I Knew a Woman: The Experience of the Female Body. New York: Random House, 2001. Print. Ellis, Jonathan. Art and Memory in the Work of Elizabeth Bishop. Aldershot, Hants, England: Ashgate, 2006. Print. Roethke, Theodore, and W D. Snodgrass. My Papas Waltz. Emporia, Kan.?: Bluestem Press, College of Saint Benedict, 2001. Print. Shaw, Fiona. One Art: A Study of the Life and Writing of Elizabeth Bishop. , 1991. Print. Read More