Comparing Poems Essay (edited)

Love is an eternal , loving feeling that is had for another person. However, there is a debate between the honest validity of that emotion. In John Donne’s “A Valediction” his feelings for the girl that he loves are as strong as cupid’s arrows. They are connected through their souls instead of just by looks, or amounts of money. On the other hand, Judith Minty’s “Conjoined” has a much more negative stand point on love. She doesn’t believe that any person would honestly want to be connected to another person, so completely, for the entirety of said person’s life. While both author's use similar figurative language( like onomatopoeia, personification, etc.) to establish the meanings of their poems, they offer very contrasting views of love.
Donne commits to his other-worldly theme with words like “whisper,” “souls to go,” and “breath.” These words have a calm and peaceful feeling about them. The speaker does not fear death, but instead sees it as a kind of peaceful release. We are comforted by the fact that they left quietly. The souls of two lovers are also onomatopoeias and personified. They are quiet, soft, and linger between the lines. They describe that when a great man dies his soul stays behind. Even though his body is gone his soul stays on earth, the love he feels for this other person keeps his soul alive to live on passed his death. This gives the man spiritual form that seems to radiate positive, loving energy.
The use of repetition and hyperbole in “A Valediction” reflects the love of a man who is very much so on earth, in body and mind. “Sigh-tempests” is repetitive and reflects that belief that a common man’s love is superficial. There is no real contact between the two lovers, no deeper meaning to their love. Their relationship is routine and therefore boring. The couple gets used to one another, to the point where they just want to escape each other. There is no more spark or spontaneity to keep the fire that is his or her love burning. A common man’s love is just a routine of superficial sweets. He is unable to actually live in love and engage in new experiences everyday. The hyperbole “tear-floods” explains that the tears flow like floods. A soul of a lover is imperfect and his love is painful. It insinuates that a relationship with a man of the earth is destined for unhappiness.
Donne makes apparent comparisons within the lines of his poem. For example, “Moving of the earth brings harms and fears” and the contrasting “But trepidation of the spheres.” The earth is concrete. A relationship on earth is unstable and disconcerting. The earth is organic and concrete, so the love on the earth is all man-made. Men on the earth are fallible. They make mistakes, harm others, and have inhibiting emotions and fears. Donne compares that with “trepidation of the spheres” which alludes to something spiritual. The spheres are not of this earth, it’s all abstract and intangible. When souls do not come together no one can be blamed. A human is not at fault, it is rather the fact that the universe did not allow the two souls to be aligned. Repetition is used again in stanza 7 with the words, “they,” “two,” and “foot.” It reads,”If they be two, they are two so. As stiff twin compasses are two; thy soul, the fixt foot, makes no show to move, but doth, if th’other do.” It emphasizes that fact that a relationship is between two people happens to the fullest extent when they unifying as one. The stanza is also a metaphor and illustrates that both partners have work together like two feet. If one foot goes the other has to follow, and this cannot be done if the two are not in agreement. The concept of walking cannot be successful if one foot moves and the other doesn’t. The whole cannot continue on without it’s other parts. She is the other foot; she completes him.
Minty’s “Conjoined” has a significantly different view on marriage than Donne’s “A Valediction.” Minty uses words like “monsters,” “accident,” and “freaks” that have negative connotations to mirror the negative feeling she has towards marriage. She believes that marriage is unnatural and horrific. Marriage is unfortunate like a freak and destructive like a monster. These three words also create an illusion of a mad-scientist project gone wrong. A scientist invented this concept but during creation, something went wrong and this accident created a monster. Also, Minty uses a simile to compare marriage to Siamese twins. Like Siamese twins, marriage is an indefinite connection to someone. You have to live and work with someone forever and there is no escape. You will always have someone behind you, impairing you, inhibiting you from living a life on your own will. She says, “Do you feel the skin that binds us together as we move, heavy in this house?” Marriage is the skin the binds the two together. But it is a burden and weighs them down. With this skin connecting them, there is no individuality. They ultimately become one person doomed to live as one for the rest of their life. An onion is also used as a symbol. Minty states that the “onion in my cupboard, a monster…each half-round, then flat and deformed where it pressed and grew against the other.” The individual onion was normal, but then grew against the other and became deformed. The individual onion was transformed into this bulbous, hideous onion. The onion reflects the idea that growing against another person in marriage will deform a person.
The two very different authors use a lot of figurative language to establish two completely different points of view. Donne feels that his love is special, greater than a common man’s love because it is a spiritual connection of love, while Minty disagrees with the concept of marriage and gets tired of being with the same person all the time, even though he or she does love that person in some way. Figurative language unfolds the differing attitudes and juxtaposes an optimistic outlook with a negative one.

Jim Neilson's Article

From what I could tell from the article is that Neilson is trying to argue that O'Brien's novel is "incapable of opposing the ongoing reconstruction of the war as an American tragedy." I remember discussing in class or maybe hearing it somewhere else that The Things They Carried is supposed to be a different representation of the Vietnam war, and do the opposite of Neilson's accusation of what the novel is incapable of. As far as I could tell, Neilson's argument was primarily focused on the way O'Brien wrote his novel and why he wrote it the way he did. One of the quotes used by Neilson was from Peter S. Prescott, "Messy wars, like the one we fought in Vietnam, lend themselves more readily to fragmented narratives." I think the gist of the argument centers around this prospect and the whole debate about truth and lies that we have discussed so often in class. That latter prospect became clear to me with this prospect that Neilson stated: "It is within this framework -- the belief that the war escapes understanding and representation and even makes us liars -- that O'Brien attempts to tell a true war story."

The most useful insight I found was actually his use of the novel. Yes, the argument was very eyeopening on a different view of the novel, but I really liked how he used the novel for evidence; connecting different quotes from separate parts in the novel and using them appropriately. You can really tell that he thought out his structure and made sure is point got across.

One criticism Neilson makes is evident in this comment, “the board of directors of Dow Chemical are more blameworthy than people who switched channels at the mention of politics. O'Brien cannot make such seemingly obvious distinctions because, according to the logic of postmodernism, to do so is to endorse a naive and dangerous positivism. And so he is left with an assortment of equally plausible (and equally false) explanations.” I think the point Neilson makes is true. O’ Brien could have done a better job on taking his stance, but instead he takes his stance in a vague manner; perhaps because the war itself and the other issues of the surrounding time were vague.

TTTC: Blog 1

One of the more noticeable things I have seen so far, the one that I personally would like to touch on in detail, is that they seem to be doing all of this for nothing. Yes, they have missions that they are given from high command that they must carry out, but there does not seem to be any real reason behind what they are doing. Or, perhaps there is according to high command, but i guess it seems more like the soldiers themselves do not know why they are doing what they are doing. To quote, the narrator justifies this by saying, "Their principles were in their feet. Their calculations were biological. They had no sense of strategy or mission. They searched the villages without knowing what to look for, not caring... They carried their own lives. The pressures were enormous." It seems within the stories, they do not really care about what they are doing. They just do what they are told to do, what they have to, to stay alive.

Another quote I would like to touch on is one that I believe that we touched up on in class, but I was playing Sudoku, so I was consciously in and out of the conversation, sorry Mr. D. The quote is: "The pictures get jumbled; you tend to miss a lot. And then afterward, when you go to tell about it, there is always that surreal seemingness, which makes the story seem untrue, but which in fact represents the hard and exact truth as it seemed." To me this one quote represents many of the stories. When telling the stories the narrator gives more of a tell of feelings, whether than the exact event; partly, I believe, because when emotionally straining events happen, like constantly while participating in a war, there is more of a recollection of feelings then the actually events. This represents the stories, because in a straight forward manner they may be lies, but within them they hold absolute truth of what happened during the actual events.

I predict there may be many more events that force us to ponder between the presence of a truth and a lie, or between presence and absence in regards to familiar actions

Postmodernism For This Beginner

I hope I am not alone when I say that I never fully caught on to the meaning of postmodernism, or what a postmodernist's ideals really are. I know we only skimmed the surface of the what postmodernism really is in class, but I did not always understand even the beginners' information. I found another person who felt the same way I do about postmodernism, and the book Postmodernism for Beginners on a postmodernism blog that I read. This blogger stated, "I am by no means going to pretend to understand Postmodernism. Nor will I pretend to understand the tenets of most of the individuals associated with Postmodern thought. But this book seems like a good summary. I respect the fact that it unashamedly attempts to plainly state ideas that generally scurry behind grammatical obfuscation." I agree with what this blogger stated. The book we read did try to explain postmodernism in simpler terms than many other books can describe. The Compact Oxford English Dictionary refers to postmodernism as "a style and concept in the arts characterized by distrust of theories and ideologies and by the drawing of attention to conventions." This is mostly how I understand postmodernism, especially the distrust of theories and ideologies part. What I think the central part of postmodernism is is the theory of narratives and the truth of lies. The part that appeals to me the most is the idea that religions are only narratives that people choose to believe in in order to have some meaning or direction in life. I don't completely understand what we learned about postmodernism, but from what I have been able to comprehend, the central part to me would be the idea of narratives and meta-narratives since they are rooted everywhere, in every culture throughout history. I hope I'm right >.