For a Lady I Know pg. 354

For a Lady I Know is a quatrain with an abab rhyme scheme. Countee Cullen uses diction and satire to make a social commentary about racism and those who think they are “above” others.

Cullen uses satire to prove that the woman he is talking about is not all she thinks she is. In the first line it says “she even thinks” meaning that she’s ignorant enough to believe that up in heaven, everyone is not created equally, even though heaven is a place where classes and races don’t exist. The poem is making a point of saying wow, her class really must be “intelligent” if they believe that the poor black people will still be cleaning up after them in heaven, while they’re sleeping late and snoring. In using diction, Cullen backs the social commentary up even more. Cullen uses heaven, cherubs, and celestial because they all pertain to heaven or heavenly creatures. Cullen calls the poor blacks cherubs because they are the ones who should go to heaven, not those who only rely on their social class to get what they want. The word “even” is an important word because it is showing that the woman is wrong about what she thinks she knows about heaven and who goes there. The word “poor” is important because Cullen is making a social commentary, and on one side is the high-class snorer who sleeps until noon, and on the other are the poor blacks, who have to get up at seven and clean up the snorer’s mess. The social commentary is that racism and class-rank don’t have an effect in heaven because it opposes the ideals heaven is made up of.

I really liked this poem because of its strength in such few lines. Cullen makes a point of pointing out the opposites, of the poor black who are basically saintly, and those who expect to be waited on, even in heaven. I interpreted the poem as a portrayal of an ignorant woman who relies on her class-rank instead of who she is to get her in heaven. What makes the poem satirical to me, is the fact that the poor blacks are portrayed as cherubs (heavenly creatures) while the woman of high-class is portrayed as lazy and I can imagine her lying in a bed with an eye mask on, because she wouldn’t dare wake up before noon. I got all these images just from four little lines. I really liked this poem because I am an anti-racist and it just proves that people can be so ignorant and narrow-minded that they don’t see things or themselves clearly.

Good Times pg. 349

Lucille Clifton makes a statement about poverty and the effects it can have on a child, and their view on the situation in impoverished homes. Clifton uses diction/language and syntax to make her statement.
Clifton uses diction/language to make a statement because the language used is that of one who is either younger and their language is one reflective of the environment he/she lives in or just uneducated because of the environment/situation at home. On the third line Clifton says “the lights is back on” instead of the lights are back on, which reflects on the home environment. Throughout the poem it mentions all the good things, such as the bread that mama has made, the rent is paid, there is no insurance man harassing them, there’s electricity, and there’s drunken singing and dancing. At this point, everybody is happy because it’s a good time. The important words are paid rent, no insurance man, the lights, bread, singing, dancing, and good times. In the second stanza, towards the end it says “these is good times” and “grampaw” yet again emphasizing the lack of proper language. The whole poem emphasizes the good times, which means there were bad times, when there was no singing and dancing, and no electricity. Everybody was probably upset and mad at the time, and there were bad times, and they have a negative effect on a child, just as the environment does. The last statement is really important because it says that the children must remember the good times, because there are going to be bad times, and the good times are what will get you through the worst of times.
Clifton uses syntax, but it is no t as detailed as the diction/language aspect of the poem, but equally important. The whole poem is one, huge run-on sentence with no punctuation at all. The sentence keeps going by a series of ands. This proves the negative aspects of the environment yet again. The child speaking is either young or uneducated because the proper language is not used. This proves yet again, that environment and poverty affect children and everything about them.
I really liked this poem because it is about those who are less fortunate, and those who are raised in poverty, and how they deal with it. I can picture this child speaking, and I see the environment he/she was raised in and how they learned what they did. This touched me on a personal level because it creates a story in my mind of one who grows up to be something from nothing just by remembering those “good times” and wanting all the time to be a “good time”.

We

In Zamyatin’s We, there is a lot going on, and there is a lot that is different and confusing for us because the style of Zamyatin’s writing. The symbol I found most prominent was the glass walls. The city is made up of glass walls, the cutting edges are at every corner. They not only allowed almost no privacy, but they were also perfect because they were straight, square, nothing hanging off them. In this society where everything is in perfect squares and everything is proportional the walls seem to be just an extension of that perfection. Another thing about the walls is the fact that you can look down and see other people, such as the morning D-503 woke up and looked down to see everybody else doing EXACTLY the same things as him. I can’t imagine how creepy that would be to be looking through my glass wall and seeing almost a mirror effect. There is another aspect of the walls, and that is the blinds. The blinds allow the privacy needed for the pink ticket hour. The blinds allow him to have his own thoughts, in his dark room.

My favorite passage was, “You are perfect, you are the equal of the machine, the path to 100 percent happiness is free. Hurry, then, all of you, young and old, hurry to undergo the Great Operation. Hurry to the auditoriums where the Great Operation is performed. Long live the Great Operation! Long live OneState! Long live the Benefactor!” because it’s such a cheerful message from the Benefactor, but it has to do with something that is not cheerful at all. They are advertising the operation that removes imagination, which is hard to IMAGINE living without. That means that nothing new can be created, nothing maybe a little irrational, because that would involve an imagination. I don’t like the fact that the state has so much control over its people, because these messages, these advertisements probably persuaded many people to go get the operation done.

I didn’t enjoy this book. I liked the fact that I could understand some of it because I like math so much, but at other times, when D is speaking, I get confused, and I get angry because his thinking is so unlike my own. He has such different ways of looking at things, and I don’t understand it because although I am used to thinking mathematically because I do it all the time, I’ve never done it with the intensity he does it in. He is just weird in my opinion. If the book was written a different way, I might have liked it better, but it probably wouldn’t be the same because it wouldn’t give the characters as much depth as they had.

The Handmaid's Tale

As I went back and skimmed the Handmaid's Tale looking for quotes and things to use for my blog, I noticed how much Margaret Atwood uses flowers as symbols. Mainly she uses the flowers as symbols for women in general, and at times especially handmaids. At one point in the beginning of the book Atwood is describing the house, and she says, “above the front door, is a fanlight of colored glass: flowers, red and blue” (9). I took this to symbolize the two main women of the household; Serena Joy (blue), and Offred (red). As I thought about the colors and the women being flowers, I thought about the other women of the household: the Marthas. The Marthas wear green, so I took this to symbolize the stems of the flower, which do all the work, and make the energy for the rest of the plant. So the Marthas are the stems and Serena Joy and Offred are the flowers. In another part of the book, the flowers are described as chalices, and at first, we talked in class about how the chalice was just pertaining to Offred, but as I thought about it further, I realized that it’s both Offred and Serena Joy. They’re both empty chalices, but the difference is that Serena Joy isn’t disposable. At one point in the book it says that when the flowers get old and the petals wither, it’s time to dispose of them, and it’s the same with Offred, once she’s used and starts to get old, it’s time to get rid of her. That’s ironic because that’s just like the society we live in. We all turn old things in to get the new thing, the new toy, because “old” is out. Another use of flowers as symbols is when Atwood uses them to tell about the struggle for the women to be heard. Offred tells us, “There is something subversive about this garden of Serena’s, a sense of buried things bursting upwards, wordlessly, into the light, as if to point, to say: Whatever is silenced will clamor to be heard, though silently” (153). This means that the women are silenced, and they can’t speak up, but that doesn’t mean they won’t try to be heard in some way, to try to bring the truth into the light. The flowers are very important in this novel. These are just a few of the many examples I found.

My favorite passage is, “She was snipping off the seedpods with a pair of shears…the swelling genitalia of the flowers…the fruiting body…Saint Serena, on her knees, doing penance” (153). I really liked this passage because of the image I get. I don’t just see Serena Joy tending her garden, I see her bitterly chopping off the seedpods, and I see her almost chopping at the handmaid’s uterus, trying to cut that out, make them not be able to reproduce. This was such an interesting passage to me because of the symbolism and innuendoes that are hidden beneath the surface.

I liked this book the best out of all the dystopias we read because I understood the characters and the plot made me want to read it. This was a book I didn’t want to put down (except for some of the graphic parts), and I wanted to know more about the society. I was clamoring for more at the end, unlike in Anthem and We. In both of those I was bored. With Anthem I didn’t think there was a great plot, and with We I couldn’t relate to the characters at all. At first I was critical of Handmaid’s Tale, but it may now be one of my favorite books I’ve read in school.

Anthem

The passage that I really liked in Rand’s Anthem was, “But our hand which followed the track, as we crawled, clung to the iron as if it would not leave it, as if the skin of our hand were thirsty and begging of the metal some secret fluid beating in its coldness” (Rand 28). As they were climbing down, they clung to the iron not only out of fear of the unknown, but also because they wanted to learn. The words begging and thirsty are in there, meaning they wanted to find something so badly, they wanted something to be down there, they couldn’t bear it if there wasn’t. Down into the tunnel, they wanted something other than the life they’d known, they wanted there to be more. I really liked this passage because of the word choice, and what it added to the meaning of the work as a whole.

A very important symbol is the forest. Much like in Harry Potter it is somewhat of a “forbidden forest”. As far as “they” were concerned, no one had ever gone into the forest following the “unmentionable times”. It is similar to the tunnel where Equality 7-2521 found the light bulb, it is one of the places where they can go to escape the world they live in. The forest is new knowledge for them, it is a place that they haven’t explored before, and it’s in the forest, outside of the society they used to live in, where they become who they were truly meant to be. It is in the forest they break ties with “we”, it is just them, just “I”. They even get names. Equality 7-2521 becomes Prometheus, who is the Greek God of light, and Liberty 5-3000 becomes Gaea, the God of Earth. The forest allows them to escape the world they were suffocated by.

I liked this book enough, I didn’t exactly love it. My favorite was definitely Handmaid’s Tale. I liked this book because there was a love story, and there were also characters I can understand.