<p>What essay are you talking about?</p>
<p>Anyone else think writing about Will McLean from Lords of Discipline was a good fit for the 3rd essay?</p>
<p>Hey juba2jive, I did Catcher in the Rye for my open essay. What kind of stuff did you write about?</p>
<p>invisible man for third essay!!! </p>
<p>one of my classmates did Orr from catch 22...i thought that was a lot better...really unique im sure.</p>
<p>48 hour policy is over. We can talk about the Free Responses now.</p>
<p>The second essay was a tad annoying. I mean, come on. I was on the throes of laughter ... then I felt sorta sorry for the woman..</p>
<p>The poems I analyzed a lot of what I could get to (I did it last). White and dark in both, depiction of religion in both, as well as personalization and narrative voice. </p>
<p>White (innocence, regression): the lamb, the snow, the bodies. It could also be depicted as ghostly as the spirits had white bodies and Tom had white hair. Dark is obvious, the harsh world of sweeping the kids became forced into. Symbolized even death.</p>
<p>Religion in the first one seemed optimistic. The Angel was the liberator of the souls and the advice given to Tom gave a little hope to their situation. The second one, father and mother abandoned the child to go PRAY to God and especially the last line emphasized the negativity. </p>
<p>Personalization: even though both narrators seemed speaking directly to the readers in both, the first one was more personalized. You had the full name of Tom as well as the dead sweepers: (don't recall but he listed off names). In the second, the child is only known as "little black thing"</p>
<p>Yes, all of these contributed to the one main idea of getting the dreariness across to make their situation seem as inhumane as possible with the blame placed on certain things.</p>
<p>For the 2nd one my argument was something to do with outer appearances vs inner reality and basically based it off the "typical" description of the situation, especially one paragraph in the story deticated to depicting how ordinary they seemed and the turn at the end. I even tried to argue the time period (1946) which was after the war, a lot of conformity and regression after the trauma of the war but it really took effect in th 1950s where the idealistic views of perfection really took hold.</p>
<p>For the third, I used Wuthering Heights showing how Catherine Earnshaw betrayed her love Healthcliff and conformed by marrying Edgar Linton, heir to the large Linton estate Thushcross Grange. It was socially unacceptable to marry or love a gypsy such as Heathcliff.</p>
<p>mc- yucky...definitely harder than past years...especially the last poem</p>
<p>1st essay- yay...easy!
2nd essay- ummm...not that bad
3rd essay- AWESOME!!! Middlesex definitely worked for that one...if anyone's read it....awesome book and worked really well in the prompt</p>
<p>Yeah, I focused on the contrasting "dark/light" theme in the poem one, too, Meng...</p>
<p>ABCD, I wrote about how Holden was conflicted between his adult self (smoking, "cussing", drinking, trying to hire a hooker, etc.) and his childlike self (evidenced by how he treated his sister and acted very immature at times). He showed the struggle through his actions with outbursts, etc. but also through his thoughts, such as how he thought all adults were "phonies," showing he didn't want to grow up and become one of them, and his fantasy about being "the catcher in the rye," which I considered to be analogous to wanting to "save" kids from growing up.</p>
<p>Uh, what? Did we have different second essay passages? My second essay passage was titled "Birthday Party." And it was great -- easy to read, and filled with ideas to write about.</p>
<p>but where is Holden conforming, juba?</p>
<p>i don't think the author of the poem intended the angel to give the reader a sense that the kids had hope.
i think it was so that at the end when you consider their position you would see how pathetic their nonexistant hope is</p>
<p>I wrote about how their "hope" displayed the complacency of the children in the dangerous field of chimney sweeping, and the fact that many of them had wished for death, for their salvation can only have come through these means.</p>
<p>I didn't totally catch the light/dark theme. But when writing about diction, I made it clear about the "bright" key and the "black" child. Is it bad I didn't specify? And I felt in the first poem that the children had hope. I guess you can work around that, but I took the obvious route.</p>
<p>There was a lot of irony in the second poem of the first passage. It is a more scathing criticism of the politics of British society, esp. in concerns to the chimney sweepers.. they go to praise a God and King who command that their children be protected as the innocent ones, yet they are forced up chimneys to clean them out, endangering their lives.</p>
<p>
[quote]
In both of the first two verses Blake employs basic colour imagery to contrast the 'little black thing' with the white of the snow, which represents the purity of the childhood that the sweep has had taken away from him. The sweep's clothes are 'clothes of death' not just because the soot has turned them black, the colour of mourning, but also because the soot will soon kill the child. The greatest shock of the poem comes in the second verse, where the boy says it was 'Because I was happy' that his parents condemned him to this early death. Blake has deliberately given us a sentence which doesn't make sense in order to show us how totally wrong it is to violate the purity of the child. The rhythm of the last verse becomes quicker and lighter as the sweep describes how his parents 'praise God' that everything is fine, but slows right down as the biting last line exposes the hypocrisy at the heart of state religion. The law passed by Parliament in 1788 to protect child sweeps had failed to make any difference by the time Blake published Songs of Experience in 1794. The poet's anger at society's indifference blazes out as never before.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Did anyone actually mention Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience? My teacher went over Blake during our poetry unit, but I completely omitted that. The essay could have been a lot more powerful using the concepts of innocence vs. experience. The first poem displays innocence and naivety on the speaker's part because he truly believes that angels would come and save him and his companions from their suffering. In the second poem, however, after being experienced, the speaker now knows that all the childish visions and ideals of being saved will never come true, and therefore has a much more pessimistic view of heaven and life in general.</p>
<p>I think the naivete provides the backdrop for complete complacency... and complicity..</p>
<p>Awesome, juba2jive, I wrote about the same type of things. Good luck.</p>
<p>I wrote exactly about that, how the child in the second poem seemed a bit more mature, having experienced more than the child of the first. It was almost as if the 5 years in seperation of the poem also were 5 years in the growth of the child in the first poem.</p>
<p>I didn't write exactly about the two books (Innocence and Experience), but the themes I highlighted ended up being innocence and disillusionment without even realizing it. We did Blake so long ago that I didn't recognize the poems, but I'm glad that I at least got the themes somewhat accurate.</p>
<p>"In both of the first two verses Blake employs basic colour imagery to contrast the 'little black thing' with the white of the snow, which represents the purity of the childhood that the sweep has had taken away from him. The sweep's clothes are 'clothes of death' not just because the soot has turned them black, the colour of mourning, but also because the soot will soon kill the child. The greatest shock of the poem comes in the second verse, where the boy says it was 'Because I was happy' that his parents condemned him to this early death. Blake has deliberately given us a sentence which doesn't make sense in order to show us how totally wrong it is to violate the purity of the child. The rhythm of the last verse becomes quicker and lighter as the sweep describes how his parents 'praise God' that everything is fine, but slows right down as the biting last line exposes the hypocrisy at the heart of state religion. The law passed by Parliament in 1788 to protect child sweeps had failed to make any difference by the time Blake published Songs of Experience in 1794. The poet's anger at society's indifference blazes out as never before."</p>
<p>tklatan - that's pretty much exactly what I wrote! booyah!</p>