"Punishment" by Seamus Heaney

In punishment by Seamus Heaney, the author uses diction, and enjambment to underline the feeling of a distant and disconnected intimacy between the speaker and and victim in the poem. The poem itself is about the young women that is found in a peat bog compressed under branches and stones who is naked and was killed for being an adulteress. This alludes to not only the historical finding of a girl in a peat bog that had been there 2,000 years, but also a reference to an adulteress being tied to lampost and being tarred and feather. The two situations were ocmbined into Heaneys punishment.
When reading a peom, you can determine alot about the poem from its structure. The most obvius example of literary structue is enjambment, which is the breaking of clauses between lines of verses(stanzas in this case). This shows the distance between the two, the speaker and the victim, as the broken thoughts between stanzas shows a disregard for intimacy and closeness, and is written in a form of broken thoughts. These breaking of thoughts show the distancing between the two as the speaker is reluctant to break convention and what is a set stencil of the peom for his lover/the adulteress.
Diction is used to not only create intimacy, but also show a distancing between the speaker and the vctim. Intimacy is creatd between the two the the uses of sexual an dintimate word such a nipples, beauty, adulteress(passion), and finally intimacy in the last few lines. This shows that there was some connection between the two and they were close. He also speaks of her in a possesive voice as if she is his. This further highlights the closensess between the two. Diction however also creates a distancing between the two as he almost objectively describes how she was found. He seems to be using a catalouging technique as if he were writing and article about her, thus, as journalists write, he reports the information devoid of emotion.
Seamus Heaney's Punishment has both and intimate and as distanced feel to it. This is created through the diction of the poem and the enjambment of the stanzas. The reasoning for this could but multitudinous. The speaker could have been ashamed for being invloved with an adulteress, and not want to tarnish his name. He could have had his heart broken by the victim and although he hated her for it, he still had a feeling of longing and forlorn for her. All we can deduce is there is an internal struggle on the part of the speaker that is harnessed in the thoughts and feelings captured in the poem.

Death be not Proud

In death be not proud we see excellent uses of cataloging and diction to show the mocking of death, and to belittle his power and reasons to fear him. The speaker in this poem, who may be john Donne and who may not be John Donne, we can never really tell, uses diction to bring top light reasons to not fear death, and to show death as less of a powerful being, and more of a weak servant. then later we see uses of cataloging to reinforce this theme of mockery towards death as told by the speaker.
Diction is used to mock death in many instances. First of all we see the uses of rest and sleep as the pictures and instruments of death. this is because when we see dead people, they look peaceful and almost as if they are sleeping. This takes the fear out of death as sleep is a happy and wonderful thing that i personally look forward to, and if sleep is an instrument of death, how can we fear it? Then later down towards the end of the peom, we see that we have but one short sleep and then we wake enternally. this means that we die only briefly and are then born into heaven and all its glory, or something along those lines, as John Donne was christian. this takes even more fear and stigma away from death as he take us to heaven, and how can anything that takes us to such a fabled, beautiful place be scary or bad?
Catalouging is used to destroy the power that death lords over us. This is done in the middle of the peom with the line "thou art slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men". this line clearly says that death is a slave, and because he is a slave to the action of kings and desperate men, key word desperate, and forces such as fate and chance, how can he have any real power. Death makes nothing happen, he only reactes to what has been done, thus he is merely the bus boy of life. The next instance of catalouging is seen in the very next line where death is said to dwell with poison, war and sickness. As he is among poison war and sickness, he is not among good company, and has a horrible existence, thus he has no power, and in fact is pitied by the reader.
I personally really like death be not proud as it was pretty straight forward and although it was still a peom, i wasnt totally lost in the language, which in most of Donne's poems holds me back from the understanding them. I personally theorize that the speaker could actually mocking death, or he could be trying to belittle death for his own sake as he actually fears death and is reassuring himself and trying to improve his own confidence.

The Good Morrow

John Donne's The Good Morrow uses wonderful diction, word choice, to highlight the he was just drifting through life until he met his true love. We see this play out in all three stanzas, and overall it creates the tone of being lost and walking with a blindfold until love open his eyes to the world. This word choice leads to the eventual poetic voice which he uses to show his desire for love, and how his life really inst a life until he has met his love.
The Good Morrow narrates Donne's feelings towards love, and of love for his significant other. I personally think that it does so in a very round about way that befuddles the reader, but that is just my personal opinion. Diction plays a very large part in The Good Morrow, and it creates the overall meaning of the poem like pieces of a puzzle. In the first stanza we see hsi diction showing the meaninglessness of his life until he found love with " i wonder, by my troth, what thou and i did, till we loved?" he is wondering what his life consisted of and what meaning his life had before he found his love, showing that life without love is not life at all. Another instance in the first stanza of diction reinforcing the theme of this poem is near the bottom when he says that any beauty he saw prior to his love was just a dream of her, his lover.
The second stanza further underlines the theme of being lost when with out love with all the references to discoveries and maps. He discovered what life was like when he discovered love. the sentence "let maps to others, world on worlds have shown..." this says that he discovered a true life, a new world, with the help of a map, and that without that map he had nos sense of direction.
Finally, in the third stanza, the references to the hemispheres further brings to light how he was not complete and his life had no meaning without love. He was one hemisphere and his lover, his partner, was the other hemisphere, creating a complete, new world.
The Good Morrow speaks to Donne's romantic side, and also his philosophical nature. This unravels to the reader through the diction of the poem, which illuminates that in life we are ever moving, ever discovering, but we only begin to understand and respect the gift of life when we are given the gift of love. Donne has received love, and as such he has seen the difference between a life with and without love.

Acte de Résistance

My personal act of resistance was not the most clever, but my personal version took some cajones. On black friday, when i was at my grandmothers house, which is in conservative territory, i spent about 2-3 hours at the local shopping mall, and by local i mean the largest one that was available, and protested people going shopping on black friday, in order to let people know that they don't have to be pulled into the shopping ploys and marketing scheme like cattle to a slaughterhouse, and that by supporting businesses that use near slave labor, and in some cases real slave labor, to get cheap products, they are only furthering our social debt to humanity. I of course thought about printing off pamphlets, but before printing off huge amounts, i sent out a control group, and the response was resounding, they were all thrown into the garbage and into the street. It was then that i decided that not to hand out any more pamphlets, as they would just add to our environmental crisis, as well as they were difficult to make and cut. I personally felt that i tried hard, and froze my ass off, but it wasn't all that successful. I think i may have jumped in too deep too quickly as i was resisting outside of a very conservative areas shopping center, and i wasn't prepared for what it would take. One thing that i would like to comment on was that i loved the rush i got from informing people of their choices and what is wrong with the status quo, and i would definitely protest again, and hopefully very soon, if anyone knows of any protests, let me know, for what cause, and when i will try to be there.

Plot

I realize how boring my titles are for my blogs, but that is very simple to explain, i am not very original, and i dont want to have to put in that much effort for a title that most people wont get any way, me included. Anyways, the plot development in this play is very smooth, we see the introduction, the rising action of the play, The climax, what a double ontondra for this play( i realize how poorly i spelled that, but i dont care, its the meaning behind the words, not their appearance), the falling action of the play, and the conclusion. It flows very similarly to a play spanning many acts, and the theatrical experience of the play is not deterred by the plot, but enhanced. My only criticism of this is that, like all greek plays, it is meant to span only 24 hours. This pisses me off the most, as it is unreal that lysistrata would have sent out a call to all the women in greece to convene, tell them, they agree, they take the akropolis, and the men hear of this, discuss, agree, and all is well in the end. Personally i beleive that this is total bull shit. its impossible for that to happen so quickly, and all to end well. This impossibility is only enhanced by the times that this play was written. I realize that this was proabably used to highlight the abusrdity of the notion of abstinence bringing peace, but then again, wasnt aristrophanes trying to prove a point. All of this play was very improbable, and while it didt bother me when i was reading it, discussing it made me realize how foolish this play was, and that it was ridiculous to think that all this could be done in one day.

Spectacle(pronounced Speck-tac-le)

In lysistrata, for my creative and required 12-18 minute presentation, i, partnered with joelle wood, was assigned spectacle. I at first thought that this would be the most interesting, and was anticipating working on this, but those feeling eventually subsided, as i learned that it was not going to be nearly as interesting as language. The most notable thing in spectacle is that constant use of the props to h show penises. this really disappointed me, as i was tired of talking about penises in realation to the play, as they lost their humor factor, they had been literally exhausted beyond belief. Of course, in spectacle penises play a very improtant role, a role of differenciation. The props of the penis is used to highlight the differences between the men and the women, of which there are many in this play, in fact this whole play and all of it's themes seem to be centered around the differences of women and men, and how there are manifested in brains vs. brawn, the underestimation of women, the war between the sexes, and make love not war, but i digress. this prop, as well as costume use, to show the differences between men and women are very easily distinguished as the play goes on, if only for the densisty of those fallice props and costumes. I will not go into how they distinguish them and to what extent, that you will have to wait until our presentation.

What does that mean?(it means a penis)

As lysistrata is a sexual play, there are many play on words that are apparent here. These come from the characters lines, actions, reactions, and finally from props, although this will be discussed later. First of all, most of the times that there is a play on words, and you cant really determine what it means, your probably safe in assuming that it means a penis, erect penis, vagina, innocence, or womanhood. These are your go to symbols and hidden meanings. Second, these symbols and meaning are so densly scattered throughout the play, that after some time, i personnally felt at least, that i needed a break from the almost childish nature of the writing. I felt that some of the humor was that of a 6 year old who wrote the plays along these lines... haha poo poo kaka pee pee, penis and vagina, hahahahahahahahaha. I also thought that most of these were funny in the beginning, atleast for about the first 30 of 40 pages, and what was especially funny was trying to discuss these in class without saying anything too vulgar, and thus by trying to expalin it more in depth to avoid embaressment, i ended up bluching beyond recognition. I felt as if this type of humor was forced, and thus lost some of its appeal, atleast to me. Thirdly these references are used to make some of the audience uncomfortable, atleast in our, by comparision, sheltered society. This play was a sexual one, and the fact that there are all these references is used to remind tha audience of this. Overall i though that the plays constant references to erect and flaccide fallices was eventually a little boring and irritatiing, but i appreciate the reasons for this.