Group Project Blog

Group Project Blog

My individual study which I plan to contribute to the overall group project will be on the poet William B. Yeats or Emily Bronte. This is because even though both poets may be different from each other, I see both of them to have similar qualities in writing their poems. They show a lot of symbolism in their poems through the narration of fiction.

I plan to make a presentation analysis about the poetry works of my chosen author and how the poetry reflects in their life and how I also can relate to the poetry. I will add my own hand graphic drawing to also interpret my own understanding of the poems. I also intend to provide some pictures of the studied author.

Author to be studied: William Yeats or Emily Bronte

Study: Symbolic Fictional Poems

Analysis: Pictures, Drawings, Blog analysis

Details: How the poem quality relates to the nature of the author.

SHE WALKS IN BEAUTY

BY GEORGE BYRON

• He had a reputation of being extravagant, melancholic, courageous, flamboyant, and controversial.
• He enjoyed adventure, especially relating it to the sea.
• He believed his depression was inherited
• He was noted for the extreme loyalty he inspired in his friends.
• His traveling companions thought he was mentally ill.

1. Identify images, motifs, tone, and feeling, figurative language, allusions to other poets, texts, historical figures, cultural figures, and any unfamiliar words.

Unfamiliar words:

Clime

Serenely

Figurative language:

Personification- “of cloudless climes and starry skies”

Hyperbole - “she walks in beauty, like the night, of cloudless climes and starry skies”

Motif:

“And all that’s best of dark and bright”

(Repeated idea) - “One shade the more, one ray the less”

2. “So soft, so calm, yet eloquent”

Eloquent- denotation: vividly and movingly expressive.

Connotation: To be influential.

Serenely- denotation: unaffected by disturbance, calm and unruffled.

Connotation- address for certain members of royalty.

3. The speaker of the poem is George Byron. In this poem, he adopts a fictional persona of a woman.

4. The poet actually speaks about another character fictionally and then makes a description of the character to the audience.

5. The poem tells a descriptive story of a character in a time- lined stage form.

6. My perception of the poem is that, the poem seems to be talking about a certain lady character and describes some certain qualities that enhances her beauty both inside and out. The poem is also described in a way that the lady is moving both in space and in time. As in the first line which states that “She walks in beauty, like the night”, the word “walk” is a very important element to indicate the idea of advancing. At the same time, it expresses the beauty of the lady’s image in dual situations or conditions. The character of the lady is expressed in a dual way whereby in the third line; “and all that’s best of dark and bright” shows that the lady can show or express her beauties whether in an evil or good character. This shoes that she is a mixture of both images. Which also means that the lady uses her beauty attributes to get away with doing evil and at the same time adds a plus to her good side. This could be a typical example of a hypocrite.

Formal Blog

In our everyday life, people use things that are normally not regarded as important as objects of advice. In chapter seven, page 145 of Zadie Smith’s “White Teeth”, the old man named J.P. Hamilton was advising a couple of young people named Millat, Irie, Magid, who were sent to his place for a charity work in Honor of a Harvest festival. As Millat, Irie, Magid were with him, Mr. Hamilton used the opportunity to advise them about the importance of the human white teeth in the life of people when it comes to race, ethnicity and what not. Wisdom teeth are a metaphor for wisdom and something you inherit. This can be seen by the statement J.P. Hamilton made: “Because they are your father’s teeth, you see, wisdom teeth, are passed down by the father, I’m certain of it so you must be big enough for them.”(Smith, 145) this statement is very interesting to me because even though it may seem like to the young people that he is just talking about the wisdom teeth, I look a the whole phrase in a different way.

Because Millat, Magid and Irie were young people, they wouldn’t take what elderly folks say to them seriously. Because elderly people are more experienced in life, they talk in parables that the young people find it hard to decode in order to advise themselves. Analyzing the phrase, I take the word “wisdom teeth” as wisdom itself. So in my own understanding, Mr. Hamilton can also be saying that wisdom is always passed down from the father to the child. For instance, where I come from in Africa, wisdom is mostly associated with the father because he is the head of the family. And since he is the family head, God passes his vision through the Father, and then he shares the vision with the Mother and the rest of the family and therefore leads the family into the direction of that vision. Since the wisdom is mostly used to refer to the father, wisdom can be passed down from the father to the child, because the children are representation of the parents and as a matter of fact they would be also a representation of the wisdom of the father. But at the end of the statement he says that “so you must be big enough for them.” This statement in my own understanding means that when a person is young, they do not have life experiences unless they grow and become mature with the experiences that life brings in order to acquire wisdom. Even though the fathers wisdom can be passed to the younger ones, but the wisdom has to develop as they grow and mature by learning life experiences.

Another context that I can relate to this statement is inheritance. Where I am from in Africa, in a nuclear home, the son can inherit valuables from the father when he is of a matured age. Valuable properties of the father can be passed down to the son, but even if the father dies during the young age of the child, the child has to become of age or an adult before he can actually take over the valuables of the father. And also, in Africa it is not only the materialistic valuables that are inherited from the father but also the cultural values and ethics are also passed to the son or the rest of the children from the father. Because the father is simply the head of the household. And therefore as the children mature later in life, there should be a replica of the fathers’ cultural and ethic values in them that will make people identify them

And looking at the context of the story, I think Irie, Millat, and Magid should have listened to his advice. It is based for the fact that Mr. J.P. Hamilton is an elderly person and been through all walks and challenges in life and not forgetting the fact that he was also once a young person like them. After he made the statement about the wisdom teeth being passed down from the father, he also added to the fact that he actually knows it is a fact and therefore has experienced it. The statement he made saying “ I’m certain of it so you must be big enough for them” shows that he has lived and matured to know it is true and also tell them that a child must be matured enough to see what its father sees.

Blog 3:

In chapter seven of Zadie Smith's White Teeth novel titled "Molars", it talks about of the significance of teeth to humans in my point of view. Mr. J.P. hamilton, an old man whom Magid, Millat and Irie were assigned for charity work in honor of the Harvest Festival, was a senile person and advice the young ones on the importance of dental hygiene. There is a statement that Mr. Hamilton made that actually caught my attention to the text. In this chapter, he made a statement saying that "One sometimes forgets the significance of one's teeth. We're not like the lower animals-teeth replaced regularly and all that-we are of the mammals, you see." (Smith, 144). This statement stands out to me because he was trying to point out to the children how important the teeth is in human communication. The teeth is a vital tool in human communication because it is one of the main non verbal communication tools to help begin effective communication between people from all backgrounds. There are so many different races, ethinicities, cultures, and backgrounds of humans around the world. Among all these different race and ethnicities, every group of people have their own ways of understanding each other with their own languages. For example, Chinese people understand their own people when they are communicating in their own language. But when a Chinese person meets an African person, communication will be difficult to begin because they do not spak the same language. But when either one of them smiles first, it will send a positive message to the other that they are pleased to meet them, and therefore, the other person will also return a positive response with a smile. this means that smiling, in which the teeth is responsible for, even builds positive bridges between people of different races even though they might not speak the same language. So this context to me, is why Mr. Hamilton was serious to Millat, Magid and Irie about the care of ones teeth. I also believe that, the brighter your smile, the more positive message you send to people.

Blog 2

In the Root canals of Hortense Bowden, Alsana and Clara had the idea in their that a little education of English can be dangerous. Clara also went on to say that the English people are the kind of people who would teach and steal from people at the same time. I basically think the reason why they thought about English people that way is that, they remember their grandparents going through the same at the hands of the English people. for example, Clara's grandmother was impregnated by Captain Carlie Durham when he was renting a room for her mother. At the same time, he was educating her. so in this context, the English people can educate the colored women and at the same time use them sexually.

White Teeth Chapter

In between chapters 12 to chapter 15 of White Teeth novel by Zadie Smith, which starts with "The Ripping Teeth", talks about two couples in the characters of Marcus and Joyce Chalfen. these married couple began their relationship when they met in the university. they married and had very intelligent sons. Two youngsters named Millat and Irie were sent in to spend some time in the household of the Chalfens as a form of their own punishment. But contrary to the punishment, they were warmly welcomed by the Chalfens into their household. openly talked to them about race and sexual issues. Joyce was fascinated in Millat and even thought he was beautiful and that she sees him as a charity case. She also opens to both youngsters about how the reason of their problems are the fact that they dont have a good father figure in their lives. but as time went on, on of their sons named Josh, becomes annoyed by Millat because of certain behaviors he showed towards Joyce.The more she shows generosity and kindness to Millat, the more he uses her generosity to continue to show deviant behaviors like smokng, swearing, drinking and destroying. The weird issue to me was that, the more he shows those behaviors, the more Joyce gets more connected to him. And on the other hand, Irie's improvement makes Joyce lose interest in her as she also begins to get closer to Joyces' Husband, Marcus. This picture drawn here makes it very strange because how can Joyce get attached more to Millat, who is not learning anything good for himself but still maintaining a deviant character and lose interest in Irie, who was ready to improve herself and evening learning fron Marcus about the study of genetics of mouse embryos. Meanwhile, Alsana and Clara were getting disturbed about Millat and Irie spending a lot of time at the Chalfens' house and they got worried that the children being adopted into the English language and becoming a part of it. To me, even tho the relationship between the Chalfen couples and Irie and Millat were somehow disturbing Clara and Alsana, there was improvement at the end of the day. Irie and Millat improved very well on their grades and therefore it led to both families having a barbecue together. But again Alsana refused to thank Joyce at the barbecue but Clara went on to thank her. i personally liked what clara did at that point and that was also definitely unappreciative of Alsana to not show some appreciation. I like the Chalfen couple because they took their precious time that they could use to do something else to improve the academic skills of someone elses children and make them better. But the statement that Joyce made about the children being intelligent in their genes but not raised well was a true point but i personally think she could have said it in a nicer way to Clara.

blog 1: Literature Relationship

Literature has indeed made a lot of change about my mindset about the English language. Ever since i started studying literature, it has opened my mind and enabled me to be more grammatically skillful in my English writing. It has exposed me to know more elements of writing like the use of idiomatic expressions and other figures of speech. Most literature books that i have read are mostly made of fiction but at the same time provide interesting aspects of life that we as human beings can mostly relate to. one example of literaure stories is Romeo and Juliet by William Shakepeare. the Romeo and Juliet story is about two different young people from two diferent families which enemies of each other. But the love between Romeo and Juliet brought the two different families together even though the story ended on a sad note. Even though it is a fictional story, we can still see a lot of these situations happening in our lives or in the lives of others. Another literature story known as Taming of the Shrew, which was also written by William Shakespeare, was a comedy type of story which depicted a very young beautiful and arrogant, stubborn woman named Katherine, who was viewed by the society as an uncontrollable woman and therefore everyone thought no man can humble her character. but along came a man named Petruchio, who took the bold step to marry Katherineand gradually changed the disrespectful woman into a presentable and humble wife. This is also another aspect that is seen in people's lives everyday. Some people reviewed the Taming of the Shrew as "battle of the sexes" under one roof as Petruchio went through the struggles of training and shaping Katherine into the woman that he wanted her to be. At the first stage of the marriage she was rebelling. But as time went on, he found his own strategies and patiently transformed the lady into a calm and respectful wife.