Robert Frost - Home Burial

Robert Frost – ‘Home Burial’

            I enjoyed reading the poem ‘Home Burial’ by Robert Frost as well.  I believe that this poem is one of his most clearly saddest poems.  The poem has at least two tragedies in it which are the death of a child at the beginning of the poem and the collapse of a marriage is predicted in the poem.  This poem is mainly about heartache and mourning, but most of all it seems to be about the failure and limits of communication.  The husband and wife in the poem are grieving in two very different ways.  The wife’s grief fills every part of her and doesn’t decrease with time.  The loss of a child would be unbearable for any mother so I can see grief setting in and controlling her life.  The way that she views the world in understandable, in the poem she says that most people make only claim of following a loved one to the grave, when in truth their minds are “making the best of their way back to life / And living people, and things they understand.”  She will not accept this kind of grief nor will she turn from the grave back to the world of living because if she does so then she would have accepted the death of her child.  She says that “the world’s evil.”  The husband in the poem has accepted the death and moved on.  He did grieve for the death of his child but the indications of his grief were very different from those of his wife.  He had to dig his own child’s grave which was very physical work not to mention the mental strain that would have on someone.  This action further links the father with a “way of the world” mentality.  The cycles that make up the farmer’s life and the organic view of life and death shows that this is how it is supposed to be.  The father didn’t leave the task of the burial for someone else to do, he physically dug into the earth and planted his child’s body in the soil.  The two of them had a breakdown of communication because they never talked with each other about the death and burial of their child.  There was a failure of empathy and communication on both sides.  We all grieve in different ways and being compassionate about that with others can help them to feel better and in expressing their feelings.  In writing this poem Frost knew firsthand about losing a child.    His firstborn son, Elliott, died of cholera at the age of three. Later, his infant daughter died. Two more of his children died fairly young, one by suicide.  This is a sad poem not only because of the death of a child but a marriage is torn apart because of the lack of communication with each other.    

Robert Frost - Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

Robert Frost – ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’

Another poem that I enjoyed by Robert Frost is the poem ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’.  This is a poem that I can visualize in my head.  Frost says that he wrote this poem in a single nighttime setting.  This poem describes the woods and it is very lovely but it attracts us with dark depths. This is a simple poem.  The speaker is stopping by some woods on a snowy evening and he taking in the lovely scene in near-silence.  The speaker is tempted to stay longer, but acknowledges the pull of obligations and the considerable distance yet to be traveled before he can rest for the night.  I believe that the last two lines of this poem have the strongest claim.  The first “And miles to go before I sleep” stays within the boundaries of literalness that is set forth by the rest of the poem.  The next line “And miles to go before I sleep” implies that the man has more to travel before he can stop and sleep.  When the poem says it last “miles to go” seems just like life; we have to keep going through life and the last “sleep” in the poem seems like he is speaking of death.  The woods in this poem are someone’s in particular and the owner of them live in the village.  The poem is not saying that the woods are terrible but that they are still unreasonable and that they are dark at night.  The woods are described as restful, seductive, lovely, dark, and deep.   The woods sit on the edge of civilization in one way or another.  “Society” would condemn for someone to stop here in the dark, in the snow.  At first the speaker credits society’s approach to the horse which is a bit odd for him to do.  Having the horse rebuke the speaker helps us to focus on some uniquely human features of the speaker’s dilemma.  One is the regard for beauty, the attraction to danger, the unknown, the dark mystery, and lastly may be related but noticeable is the possibility of a death wish.  Beauty by itself is an appropriate warning; an appropriate protection against the seduction is a refusal to give up on society regardless of the responsibilities it requires.  The last two lines should not imply a burden alone but perhaps that the ride home will be lovely.  The last two lines could also be referring to Frost’s career as a poet because at this time he had plenty of great poems left in him.  I see this poem as someone stopping to admire nature in life but knowing that they have to continue on because there are many more miles to travel until the end.  There are times that we stop and look at beautiful things but then we know that we must continue on because society will not let us stop forever.                       



Robert Frost - The Road Not Taken

Robert Frost - ‘The Road Not Taken’

I would have to say that my favorite poem by Robert Frost is ‘The Road Not Taken’.  I think that this is one of the best-known and most often misread poems on the planet.  This poem is something that we face every day in this walk of life.  Paths in the woods and forks in the roads are ancient and innate metaphors for the lifeline, its predicaments and choices.  The forks symbolize the connection of free will and fate.  We are free to choose, but we don’t really know in advance what we are choosing between.  Our path is decided by a growth of choice and chance; it is impossible to separate the two.  This poem is not giving any advice.  In this poem there is no less-traveled road and it is never even a choice in the poem. The poem does have an original strain of remorse.  I think that this poem is more concerned with the choosing the right road and not regretting or second guessing yourself.  Once we choose a path in life it is then inescapable.  I often say “If I could go back in time, I would have not done this or that.”  We have all said this at some point in our life but once you make a choice and act on it, there is no turning back.  We all know that we will second-guess ourselves somewhere down the line.  In this poem the speaker knows that he will second-guess himself later on in life or he may even wonder what the Other path was like.  The nature of the decision is such that there is no Right Path; there is just the chosen path and the other path.  What are breathed for ages and ages later are not so much the wrong choices as the moments of the choices themselves.  I believe the theme of this story is to “seize the day.”             

Robert Frost - Introduction & Biography

                Robert Frost was born in San Francisco, California in 1874.  His father was William Frost, a journalist and a dedicated Democrat, died when Robert was around eleven years old.  His mother was Scottish, formally known as Isabelle Moody, and she was a schoolteacher to help support her family.  The Frost’s lived in Lawrence, Massachusetts with William Prescott Frost, Frost’s paternal grandfather, who provided his grandson with a good schooling.  Robert graduated from high school in 1892 and then he attended Dartmouth College for a few months.  He held a number of jobs over the next ten years.  Some jobs that he held was working in a textile mill and teaching Latin at his mother’s school in Methuen, Massachusetts.  The New York Independent published his poem ‘My Butterfly’ in 1894 and Frost had five poems printed privately.  He worked as a teacher and continued to write and publish his poems in magazines.  In 1895, Frost married Elinor White, a former schoolmate, and they had six children. Frost studied at Harvard from 1897 to 1899 but he left without receiving a degree.  He later moved to Derry, New Hampshire where he worked as a cobbler, farmer, and a teacher at Pinkerton Academy.  He also worked at the state normal school in Plymouth.  The Atlantic Monthly returned his poems that he sent with a note saying: “We regret that The Atlantic has no place for your vigorous verse.”  Frost and his family moved to England in 1912 after selling his farm.  While in England he published his first collection of poems, ‘A Boy’s Will’, at the age of 39.  Then in 1914 he published ‘North Boston’ and it gained universal standing.  Some of Frost’s best-known poems are ‘Mending Wall,’ ‘The Death of the Hired Man,’ ‘Home Burial,’ ‘A Servant to Servants,’ ‘After Apple-Picking,’ and ‘The Wood Pile.’  The poems that are written with blank verse or looser free verse of dialogue were obtained from his own life, recurrent losses, everyday tasks, and his loneliness.  Most of Frost’s poems show deep gratitude of the natural world and sensibility about the human desires.  Some images that Frost uses in his poems – woods, stars, houses, brooks, - are usually taken from everyday life.  He uses a down-to-earth tactic to his subjects and most readers find it easy to follow the poet into deeper truths, without being weighed down with literalism.  Frost often uses the rhythms and vocabulary of ordinary speech or even the looser free verse of dialogue.  In 1938 Frost’s wife died and he lost four of his children.  Two of his daughters suffered mental breakdowns.  His son Carol, a frustrated poet and farmer, committed suicide.  Frost died on January 29, 1963 and he was considered an unofficial poet winner of the United States.  Most of his poem illustrated the fields and farms of his surroundings, noticing the details of rural life, which hide complete meaning.  Most of his works were usually praised but the lack of significance concerning social and political problems of the 1930s aggravated some more socially orientated critics.  Lawrence Thompson presented Frost as a pessimist, uneducated, brutal, and angry man.  Jay Parini viewed Frost with sympathy.  He said that Frost was an outsider who liked company, a poet of seclusion who wanted a mass audience, and a rebel who sought to fit in.  Frost was a family man to the core but he often felt isolated from his wife and children and withdrew into daydreams.  Frost preferred to stay at home even though he traveled more than any poet of his generation to give lectures and readings.  Frost was terrified of public speaking up until he died.

"Robert Frost Biography." Famous Poets and Poems - Read and Enjoy Poetry. Web. 22 Feb. 2011. <http://famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets/robert_frost/biography>.                                       

Edith Wharton - The Other Two

                Edith Wharton was brought up in a prosperous and fortunate family.  She lived in a time when the ritzy crowd dreaded the extreme social changes that occurred due to the post-civil war domination and immigration.  Edith Wharton became the first woman to win a Pulitzer Prize for literature, for her novel The Age of Innocence (1921).  Even though she was wealthy and female, she was one of the few American citizens who traveled to the front lines in France during World War I.  Wharton wrote a series of articles about her experience in France and in 1916 she was named a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor.  She stayed in France until her death in 1937.  She returned to the United States on one occasion to get an honorary doctorate from Yale.  In spite of the time that she spent away from the United States, Edith is admired for her novels that completely apprehended and moderately criticized the upper class in America.  An expression that was devised about Edith Wharton’s family was “Keeping up with the Joneses.”  She was born as Edith Newbold Jones and her privileged lifestyle led to many of her best works.  She had several significant ancestors, including Ebenezer Stevens who partook in the Boston Tea Party.  Wharton was divorced from her husband in 1913.  She didn’t see the divorce as immoral but as a “diploma of virtue.”  Edith was working on a novel, The Buccaneers, at the time of her death.  The unfinished novel was published in 1938.  In 1993, author Marion Mainwaring completed a version of the novel and it was published.   

            The story, The Other Two, was Edith’s way of reflecting on the social changes that the American society was experiencing.  This was a great story and it made sense.  The main character in the story is a high society man.  He is the prime example for the values that most men during this time held as a standard.  His position as a Wall Street Investor and as a man who has the earnings to have servants, gives us a clear parallel between himself and high society.  What he deems is a doorway into the psychology of high society as a whole.  This is obvious throughout the story as the main character is always concerned with what the society pages have to say about his wife.  The main character in this story is Mr. Waythorn and he is having trouble reconciling with his wife’s past marriages.  The reflection of a difficulty with the  issue of divorce is having within the society is also attributed to Wharton herself.  The author has been divorced and this story can reflect on her thoughts about the issue.  Mr. Waythorn is upset that his wife has had two divorces in the past.  A significant point in this story is the ease in which divorce is granted as well as Mr. Waythorn’s tense reunion with his wife’s two ex-husbands.  Edith was a person who did not divorce her husband easily due to her “devotions to family ties and the sanctities of tradition.”  In this short story there is an examination into how divorce can threaten society as it did with Mr. Waythorn.  At the end of the story there is a moment of understanding when the complex situation is acknowledged and everyone accepts the roles that they are given within the divorce.                                         

Stephen Crane - The Open Boat

            The story ‘The Open Boat’ by Stephen Crane was a wonderful story to read.  Through reading this short story I found some symbols within in it.  The first symbol that I found was “The Boat”.  The boat was what the men had to cling to in order to survive the seas.  I think that the boat symbolizes human life bobbing along among the universe’s uncertainties.  The boat was probably no larger than a bathtub but it seems even smaller than that against the massiveness of the ocean.  Throughout the story the boat is worthless and always in danger of overturning.  Just as humans are minor and delicate in the context of the world around us.  The boat is often described as being “open” which I interpret that to mean that the boat is unprotected and open to suffering the unexpected turns of fate that are inevitable in life.  The men on the boat realize that from being on the open boat it becomes the reality of their lives.  They have very little control over where they can go and what they can do.  Crane infers, through the use of the boat, that life is not something we can control, but rather life is what we must hang onto as we make our way in the world.

            Another symbol that I picked up on in this story was ‘the cigars.’  The four wet and dry cigars serve as a complicated symbol of hope for spiritual salvation and as the ultimate loss of that salvation.  Crane makes it clear that there are two explanations of the men’s trouble when the correspondent finds the cigars in his pockets.  The four men are physically and spiritually saturated by the heavy, crushing forces of nature which makes them broken and useless just like the four drenched cigars.  There is something inside the men that remains untouched by the cold, drenching despair that the sea imparts just like the four dry cigars are hidden deep inside the correspondent’s pocket.  As the correspondent digs through his pocket, the men are apt to see themselves optimistically – as the four dry cigars – because their teamwork and hard work has seemingly put them on track to defeat nature.  By the end of the story, the men’s assurance is not complete, and they feel distress, not success.  The wet cigars are more appropriately demonstrating the tragedy of the men’s spirits.

            A theme that I picked up on in this short story was nature’s indifference to man.    Even with the narrator’s abundance of animistic (animal-like), humanistic (manlike), and deistic (godlike) characterizations of nature, Crane makes it very clear that nature is ultimately uncaring to the troubles of man.  Nature has no consciousness that we can understand.  The reality of nature’s lack of concern for them becomes increasingly clear as the stranded men progress through the story.  The narrator emphasizes this development by changing the way he describes the sea.  At the beginning of the story the sea snarls, hisses, and bucks like a bronco but later it merely “paces to and fro.”  In reality, the sea does not change at all; it is only the men’s observation of the sea that changes.  The action of the gulls, clouds, and tides clarifies that nature does not behave any differently in light of the men’s struggle to survive.  Crane reinforces the idea that nature is unresponsive to man by showing that it is as randomly helpful as it is hurtful.  The men experience an unforeseen good turn in the form of a favorable wind or calm night for every evil impulse that they undergo.  The fact that the men almost seem to get assistance from nature destroys the notion of nature as an entirely unpleasant force.  I can see this through the correspondent’s final rescue.  The correspondent must grip the fact that the very thing that has put him in harm’s way has saved him when he is plowed to the shore and saved by a freak wave.  The same wave that saved the correspondent may have also been responsible for killing the much stronger oiler.  This turn in events demonstrates that nature is as much a harsh punisher as it is a benefactor and that nature does not act out of any motivation that can be understood in human terms.                        

SparkNotes Editors. “SparkNote on The Open Boat.” SparkNotes.com. SparkNotes LLC. 2007. Web. 13 Feb. 2011.

Stephen Crane - Biography and Poetry

            Stephen Crane was born in Newark, New Jersey and lived from 1871 to 1900.  He was the 14^th child of a Methodist minister.  His mother published fiction and was very active in the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union.  At the age of 8, Crane started to write stories and at the age of 16 he was writing articles for the New York Tribune.  His mother and father did some writing and two of his brothers became newspapermen.  Crane never cared much for schooling but he did attended  Lafayette College and Syracuse University only for one semester.  His mother died in 1890 and his father had died when Crane was 9 years old.  After the death of his parents he moved to New York.  In New York he was a free-lance writer and a journalist for the Bachellor-Johnson newspaper syndicate.  He supported himself by his writing and he lived among the poor in the Bowery slums to research his very first novel, Maggie.  Crane’s devotion to precision of details led him once to dress up as a tramp and spend the night in a flophouse.  This generated the sketch ‘Experiment in Misery’ in 1894.  His work motivated other writers, such as Hutchins Hapgood (1869-1944), to research the Lower East Side.     

            Crane’s war novel ‘The Red Badge of Courage” portrayed the American Civil War from the point of view of a common soldier.  It has been called the first modern war novel.  The text was so believable that England readers thought that the book was written by a veteran soldier.  He rejected this belief by saying that he got his viewpoints from the football field.  His collection of poems, ‘The Black Rider’, appeared in 1895 and they had much in common with Emily Dickinson’s simple, stripped style.  Crane’s rising reputation brought him better reporting assignments.  He pursued experiences as a war journalist in combat areas.  He journeyed to Greece, Cuba, Texas, and Mexico, writing mostly on war events.  His short story, ‘The Open Boat,’ is based on a true experience.  In 1896, his ship, a coal-burning boat heavy with ammunition and knives, sank on the journey to Cuba.  Crane spent several days floating in an open boat with a small party of other passengers before being rescued.  This experience compromised his health permanently. His colleagues noted him as being an "original" in his field of work.  He was well known as a poet, journalist, social critic and realist.  He wrote 95 poems in his life time. In the last few years of his life, he began writing franticly because he was in debt and suffering from tuberculosis. He later died while he was in Germany. 

"Stephen Crane Biography." Famous Poets and Poems - Read and Enjoy Poetry. ReadPrint. Web. 13 Feb. 2011. <http://famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets/stephen_crane/biography>.

"Stephen Crane - Poems and Biography by AmericanPoems.com." American Poems - YOUR Poetry Site. Gunnar Bengtsson. Web. 13 Feb. 2011. <http://www.americanpoems.com/poets/stephencrane/>.

Kate Chopin - The Awakening

            After reading the story “The Awakening” by Kate Chopin, I began to have a better understanding of how women were treated in the 1800s.  This was a very long story almost like a novel.  I found it to be hard reading on such thin pages with small writing.  Besides all that this was a very good novel and explained how women were treated back in those times.  There are several themes that can be taken from this story.  A theme that I noticed was seclusion as the consequence of independence.  Edna Pontellier, the central character in this story, believed that independence and seclusion were undividable (SparkNotes).  Women had very few opportunities for individual expression, not to mention independence because of the limitations of the law.  The women were required to perform their household duties and care for the health and happiness of their families.  Victorian women were prohibited from seeking the fulfillment of their own wants and needs.  Edna begins to have an ongoing awakening where she finally notices her own identity and recognizes her emotional and sexual desires (SparkNotes).  At first she thinks of her independence as no more than an emotion.  The first time that she swims, she discovers her own strength.  It is through her painting that she is reminded of the pleasure of individual creation.  When she begins to speak about her feeling of independence, her husband tells her of all the constraints that weigh on her active life.  When Edna finally makes the decision to end her previous lifestyle, she then understands that independent ideas cannot always turn into an instantaneously self-sufficient and socially acceptable life (SparkNotes).  Robert has desire for Edna but it is not strong enough to join the two lovers in a true union of minds.  Robert’s desire is strong enough to make him feel torn between his love and his sense of moral goodness, but it is not strong enough to make him decide in favor of his love.  Robert leaves her a note that makes it clear that she is in fact finally alone in her awakening.  When Robert refuses to infringe on the boundaries of societal convention, Edna then recognizes the immensity of her seclusion (SparkNotes).  She has now lost her husband but in all reality that was what she wanted to begin with.

            The caged birds in this story are reminders of Edna’s entrapment and the entrapment of Victorian women in general.  The parrot and mockingbird represent Edna and Madame Reisz.  The women’s movements are limited by society and they are unable to communicate with the world around them.  The novel’s “winged” women may only use their wings to protect and shield, but never to fly (SparkNotes).  Edna tries to escape from her husband, children, and society but her efforts only land her in another cage which is the pigeon house.  She views her new home as a sign of her independence.   The pigeon house symbolizes her helplessness to remove herself from her previous life as her move only takes her “two steps away(SparkNotes).”  Reisz coaches Edna that she must have strong wings in order to survive the struggles that she will face if she plans to act on her love for Robert.  Reisz warns: “The bird would soar above the level plain of tradition and prejudice must have strong wings. It is a sad spectacle to see the weaklings bruised, exhausted, fluttering back to earth (McMichael).”  Reviewers say that Edna’s suicide marks defeat, both individually and for women.  The novel’s final example of bird imagery is when it states, “A bird with a broken wing was beating the air above, reeling, fluttering, circling disabled down, down to the water (McMichael).”  The bird is not a symbol of Edna herself, but it is rather a symbol of Victorian womanhood in general (SparkNotes).  The fall represents the fall of convention that was achieved by Edna’s suicide.                                                     

SparkNotes Editors. “SparkNote on The Awakening.” SparkNotes.com. SparkNotes LLC. 2002. Web. 7 Feb. 2011

McMichael, George L. "The Awakening." Anthology of American Literature. 10th ed. Vol. 2. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson/Prentice Hall, 2011. 697-786. Print.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman - The Yellow Wallpaper

            I enjoyed reading the short story “The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman's.  In my English 113 class, I read this story and I had a hard time understanding it but after reading it for the second time I understand what it means a little better.  This short story was written in 1892 in California and it had several different categories within it.  The short story was considered at one point a gothic horror tale, a character study, and a socio-political allegory (Sparknotes).  The person telling this story is a mentally disturbed young woman who is probably named Jane.  This story is told in first-person narration, concentrating entirely on her own thoughts, feelings, and opinions (Sparknotes).  Throughout this short story we learn and see that the story if categorized through the narrator’s shifting of consciousness.  The narrator seems to go insane over the course of the story.  Her view of reality is often completely at odds with all of the other characters in the story.   

            A symbol that I found in this story was the wallpaper.  The narrator perceives that the wallpaper is a text, like a book, that she must decipher.  She thinks that the wallpaper symbolizes something that affects her directly.  Throughout the story the wallpaper is mentioned.  At the beginning of the story it seemed simply nasty:  it was ripped, soiled, and an “unclean yellow.”  The wallpaper has an unrecognizable pattern that attracts the narrator as she attempts to figure out just how it is organized.  She stares at the wallpaper for hours and then she finally sees a ghostly sub-pattern behind the main pattern which is only visible in a certain light (SparkNotes).  The longer she looks at the sub-pattern, she begins to see a desperate woman who is constantly crawling and stooping, looking for an escape from behind the main pattern, which resembles the bars of a cage (SparkNotes).  I believe that the wallpaper represents the structure of a family, medicine, and tradition in which the narrator finds herself trapped.

            The author choosing to use first person was effective because it put the reader in the story actually seeing and feeling what the narrator saw and felt.  Being able to read a story from the one who is suffering makes the story seem more real and have more meaning to it.  By using the first person the author accomplishes the reader experiencing the same things that Jane was experiencing.  We actually got to be put in her shoes and know exactly what she was thinking and seeing.  By Jane telling the story we were able to know exactly how she felt about the situation that she was in.  All the stuff was happening to her and we were able to see it all from her view makes it more personal.  I believe that if the story was told in the third person then we would have never known what Jane was experiencing from her situation.  If the husband were telling the story then we would have only seen what he was able to see.  By Jane telling the story we knew her actions, emotions, and thoughts throughout the entire story.  If it were in the third person who would not have known what Jane endured from how her husband was treating her.  I believe that from Jane telling the story we really got to see and envision what she was going through and sympathize with her.

  The narrator’s relationship with her husband was what to be expected during the time that this short story was written.  Jane did not agree with what her husband was making her do but in the Victorian Age that was how the women of society were to be treated.  She respected her husband although she really did not agree with the things that he was making her do.  Women were not allowed to work but she thought that if she could work then that would help her with her mental state.  There is one statement in this story that stood out to me and it was:

         John is a physician, and -- perhaps (I would not say it to a living soul, of course, but this is dead paper and a great relief to my mind) perhaps that is one reason I do not get well faster. You see he does not believe I am sick! And what can one do?  If a physician of high standing, and one's own husband, assures friends and relatives that there is really nothing the matter with one but temporary nervous depression -- a slight hysterical tendency -- what is one to do?  My brother is also a physician, and also of high standing, and he says the same thing.   So I take phosphates or phospites -- whichever it is, and tonics, and journeys, and air, and exercise, and am absolutely forbidden to "work" until I am well again. Personally, I disagree with their ideas.  Personally, I believe that congenial work, with excitement and change, would do me good (Gilman). 

            From this statement I feel that she does not agree with her husband but she does not let him know that because she is to support and obey her husband.  Jane is not allowed to do much of anything but rest continuously and she disagrees with that completely.  She does things behind everyone’s back and hides it if they come in so they will not know that she is writing.  The author seems to suggest that women in this time period must submit themselves to their husbands and have no place in society.  Jane has done what her husband and physicians say because who is she to disagree with them.  In the Victorian age women had no rights at all.

SparkNotes Editors. “SparkNote on The Yellow Wallpaper.” SparkNotes.com. SparkNotes LLC. 2006. Web. 4 Feb. 2011.

Ambrose Bierce - An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge

     I was very interested in reading the story “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” by Ambrose Bierce.  Ambrose uses realism throughout this short story by speaking of nature and its beauty.  He sensibly lays out all of the details such as the setting which is in northern Alabama and the time is the Civil War.  Bierce specifically describes the complicated series of beams, planks, and ropes that were needed to hang Farquhar.  When I read this section in the story I could actually see this taking place in my mind.  Bierce verifies a recognizable world by his descriptions of the positioning of the soldiers, the way they hold their guns, the details of military ritual and conduct, and the exact terminology and language.  This story has authenticity and authority because Bierce drew from his own experiences of fighting for the North during the Civil War.  All of these details ground the readers into the story but it is not till the end of the story that Bierce reveals his structural innovations.  In the final section of the story a fantasy world replaces reality.  Although this fantasy world is falsely similar to the real world.  Bierce contributes in a realist tradition that helps to change popular thoughts of war by referring to the realistic details of an enemy’s execution.      

            I recognized a motif in this short story.  The motif that I recognized was the color gray.  The color gray appeared throughout the story, implying the vague color line that divides friends from foes as well as the clouded sense of reality.  The color gray signifies the Confederacy and thus is the cause to which Farquhar irrationally sacrifices himself.  The “gray clad” rider approaches Farquhar and his wife in the second section of the story.  Although the color gray is a misleading sign of the rider’s association since he is only pretending to be a Confederate soldier.  Here the color gray shows an alteration of the truth which is that the soldier is actually a Northern scout disguised in the enemy’s colors.  As Farquhar begins his daydreamt escape, he works under a gloomy gray sky.  Farquhar’s eyes are gray as well as the eyes of the guard who takes aim at him from the bridge.

            I enjoyed reading this short story because throughout the entire story I could visualize everything that I read.  It was as though I was in the story myself experiencing all those things.  I had never heard of this author but from reading this story I would love to read some of his other works.  I love nature and that is what this story is mainly about.  I think that the ending of the story is intended and more appropriate for a thriller, suspense, or mystery tale than for a literary work.  I guess that was why I enjoyed reading the story because reading works like that is what interests me the most.          

                                     

Henry James' - Daisy Miller: A Study

     I enjoyed reading the short story "Daisy Miller: A Study" by Henry James.  This story was very long but I liked reading it.  This short story was one of James’s earliest treatments of one of the themes for which he became best known for: the colonial or free American abroad (SparkNotes).  In the years after the Civil war Americans aboard was a subject very much of the moment.  The postwar boom, the so-called Gilded Age, had given rise to a new class of American businessman (SparksNotes).  The American businessman’s elegant families were ready to make “the grand tour” and reveal themselves to the art and cultural of the Old World.  During this time period, Americans were visiting Europe for the first time in record numbers.  The conflict between the two cultures was a unique and a well-known occurrence.  James had two different minds about the American character (SparkNotes).  One mind of his was by character, he was more sympathetic with the European way of life, with emphasis on culture, education, and the art of conversation.  He viewed his fellow citizens as rude, undereducated and ridiculously regional.  They were unaware of enormous and centuries-old worlds outside of their own and expanding regions.  James was also immersed by the emotional purity of the American national characters placing emphasis on sincerity rather than on deception. 

            The unlived life was James’ almost permanent subtext since the American abroad was his signature theme.  In many of James’s novels and stories the characters focus their mind on an abstraction which is an idea or ideal that they feel they could figure out or achieve only if they could devote their spirit or intellectual capacities to it with sufficient understanding or patience (SparkNotes).  The characters realize too late that whatever they sought to understand or achieve had passed them by and that they had wasted their whole life.  Just like Winterbourne in the story that never fully arrived at realization.  Daisy Miller was like a red herring that distracts Winterbourne from the business of living.  The core of the story would have to be that Winterbourne and the fear or lack of passion causes him to hide from life behind the ultimately mystery of Daisy’s innocence or not(SparksNotes). 

            I noticed two motifs in throughout this story which were gossip and innocence.  This story is about gossip that is understood as a piece of gossip throughout it entirety.  The narrator is not only involves in the events described but one who doesn’t really care much about them.  The narrator sees the whole episode with detached pleasure, as a pleasant way of distracting his listeners.  Throughout the entire story Winterbourne is preoccupied with the question of whether Daisy is innocent.  The word innocent appears repeatedly but always with a different shade of meaning.  In the days of James the word innocent had three meanings.  The first meaning could have meant “ignorant” or uninstructed.”  It also could have meant “naïve” as it does today.  A final meaning that innocent could have had is “not having done harm or wrong.”  This story had hidden meaning throughout it but it was an awesome story to read once you get into it.                    

                                          

SparkNotes Editors. “SparkNote on Daisy Miller: The Study.” SparkNotes.com.  SparkNotes LLC. 2004. Web. 1 Feb. 2011.