Fog

In the poem “Fog” by Carl Sandburg we can identify some literary elements and devices used to fulfill the author’s intent.

We can find literary devices such as enjambment which is the constant in the poem. There is no pause between the lines. Something you can notice about the poem and how it is written is its form. The poem starts “The fog comes” (line 1), making a relationship between the fog and the poem itself. There is a blank line, a break. The top stanza seems to have settled over the bottom stanza. The author uses the physicality of his poem to portray what he means. At the end of the poem we see this strategy again when Sandburg says “and then moves on” (6). He ends the poem there and then moves on, like the poem says. As a reader the effect this has is the same, you move on.

In this poem by Carl Sandburg titled “Fog” we see how the author uses several elements to reveal his intent. He searches through metaphor and form a way to show the reader that the fog he speaks about is the poem he has written.

Acrobat - Poet

In the poem by Lawrence Ferlinghetti titled “Constantly Risking Absurdity” we see how the author uses literary elements and devices to give away his tone and intent. The way the poem is written explains the title in a way, for its structure is “absurd”, the title being “Constantly Risking Absurdity”.

The form the poem is written is a literary device that the author uses to portray his message. A poet is “like an acrobat” (line 6) someone who is “Constantly risking absurdity/ and death/ whenever he performs” (1-3). The words used by the author in this poem are constantly describing the physical aspect the poem has. The “absurdity” of the composition of the poem, the using of “tricks” to enchant the reader, are various strategies he uses. The author also uses metaphor, comparing the poet to an acrobat, saying that he “climbs on rime2 to satisfy his audience, like if saying that a poet is putting much at stake when writing a poem to satisfy his audience.

This poem is like a circus act, it’s disorganized, and the poet in this case is the acrobat. The comparison used by the author in this poem works for us to understand the meaning of it.

Timed Writting

In Kevin Young’s poem “The Mission” we see a vivid memory of something that he once lived. The author uses imagery and metaphor to describe death and how it affected him in the past.

Young begins speaking of when he was younger, and lived “across the street from a home for funerals” (lines 2-3). The impact of having to live so near a place were dead people came. Young shows the differences of common neighborhoods with where he lived when he says, “children played tag out front, while the bodies snuck in the back” (18-20). We can see here some irony, for he speaks of “the bodies” as a secondary thing, while we learn that death is a primary thing, important in the lives of the people who lose a loved one. Here it’s portrayed as something “else” that happens while the kids play tag.

The author then begins to write about the funeral place, wondering things about it, remembering things about it. “I wondered who slept there” (38-39), again making reference to the dead who arrived every day, sleep meaning death. Young speaks of his experience with death, how his father died, “He kept everything but alive” (44-45). He then makes a statement that “sorrows not noun but verb” (46-48), he has felt sorrow therefore making it an action, a “verb”. The addition of this to the poem let us see that he did feel sorrow for his father’s death, but we learn later that it short, for “by doing right you do less of”(50-51).

“The Mission” by Kevin Young is a poem in which the author shows his view of death, and how it affects the ones who remain alive. He speaks of “sorrow” when death approaches him.

Time

I continued to read The Farming of Bones, and began to see how Danticat plays with us when she decides to tell the story in a non linear way. She works with the past and the present, and when she goes to the past it’s usually a moment of Amabelle with her family mother and father.

The narration is also interrupted by moments that Amabelle has with Sebastien. She talks about moments, small things she does or speaks with Sebastien, and then goes back to what is going on in that moment. Like in pages 66 and 67, were in one page Amabelle speaks of Kongo’s dead son, and then she talks of a quick anecdote with Sebastien. This strategy used by Danticat is confusing in a way for I lose track of time, or don’t know which the “real” time is. She moves from talking of a current action to a secular moment that till this moment has small or no effect on the novel. The same effect is produced when a flashback to her childhood happens. You lose the track of time, and the events describes in these moments haven’t taken effect on the novels central story, or at least what I think is the central story. Sooner or later they will all unite as one.

A Start

I began reading The Farming of Bones by Edwidge Danticat, a novel that I had never heard of. There wasn’t much I could infer about the novel for I honestly had absolutely no idea and the cover dint give any clues either.

Danticat introduces us to the main character Amabelle Desir, a Haitian women who’s parents died in the flood of the Massacre river that borders Haiti and Dominican Republic. Anyways Amabelle moves on and becomes the maid of a land owner called Don Ignacio. The story line is very similar to that one of a slave in a United States plantation years before. The characters described by Danticat are appearing slowly in the novel. Don Ignacio’s daughter, Valencia, grows next to Amabelle, and they have a strange owner/servant relationship for they grow up like friends, or at least so it seems.

Danticat shows the relationship of Amabelle with the family she serves as one that is pleasant but with certain distance. I don’t know why but I have a feeling that this will eventually change to one side, it will either become a better relationship or it will worsen. Predictions don’t hurt anyone, and I hope this prediction wont hurt the way the novel unravels to me.

White vs. Black/ Light vs. Dark

In Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad we can find a lot of imagery, especially when Conrad juxtaposes black and white in a constant basis. It’s as though there is a constant battle between that white and black things. The comparison with European and African, modern and rudimentary, good and bad is almost too obvious.

On everything that Conrad writes we can find this comparison, like when he speaks of Kurtz, “I saw on that ivory face the expression of sombre pride” (Conrad 130). You can say that the “ivory face” is good, in a manner of speaking, but the “sombre expression” makes it bad. Or at least this is the constant battle played in the novel between black and white.

We see this once again in Heart of Darkness when the jungle is portrayed as “dark” and all that created by man is “light”. “There was a lamp in there­­­ – light, don’t you know – and outside it was so beastly, beastly dark” (Conrad 131) In the boat there was light, for it represented all the western world, civilization as it is, and outside was all the unknown, the rudimentary and dangerous world of the Congo.

Conrad relates this idea of Light vs. Dark during the novel in a constant way. Pointing out that everything had a “light” side and also a counterpart “dark” side.

A Good Start

I began reading Joseph Conrad’s book, Heart of Darkness, today. I wasn’t expecting much since I hadn’t heard anything from this book, but by the cover I began making some ideas about it, a boat in a jungle. You can make out many things out of this picture, but what came into my mind was an adventure through the jungle, and the book started a little differently.

It all starts in London, the river Thames, were our narrator is in a boat with four more characters, and among them is Marlow. He will be the one who is going to start speaking about his adventures on a steamboat in the Congo. Joseph Conrad captures our attention easily when he juxtaposes Marlow’s experience with that of a Roman who just arrived to England when it was conquered by the Romans. He speaks of a dark place, and Conrad catches us even more when he writes, “yet to understand the effect of it on me you ought to know how I got out there” (pg 9). Marlow experienced something in the Congo that changed him, something very dark in many different ways.

Because this was my first reading of the novel I might say it did capture me. It has some mystery in it and I look forward to answering all the questions I have right now about Conrad’s book.