Friday 26 August 2016

The reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. along with two thousand people of African American origins have rallied in front of the Lincoln Monument in Washington, D.C on the 28th of August, in order to speak up on the injustices they have suffered along the years, and yet nothing has been done to stop the racial segregation that is common occurrence in this country. The march started earlier today and has made others join in, until it climaxed once the reverend King gave a speech worthy to go down in history as the most memorable advocations for one's rights and justice.

Dr. King's speech addressed many topics in relation to how much and for how long they've suffered of a divided society and a marginalised race such as the African American people.
When addressing the march, King had a dream of his children and grandchildren living in an America free of racism, segregation and disregard for black people in all of its states. But nowadays, in despite all of Martin Luther King Jr.'s efforts, such a thing still happens in America. Currently, the law system remains to be flawed for everyone, and Afroamerican people have it far worse than anyone else, as children, they go to school, totally oblivious to the world beyond their grasp, and yet, they continue to be defined by their ethnicity or simply by the color of their skin and not who they truly are as a person. After that, they proceed to a world filled with disdain for the qualities they were born with, eventually affecting who they are as a person, and how they're seen by entities like the law. After nearly 50 years of his famed speech, the Americans and the country in itself have yet to learn how to exclude and thoroughly exterminate this kind of irrational hate that's been birthed by such an idiotic reason. For example, many black people have been shot, either by civilians or policemen, and have ended up heavily injured or dead. Moreover, these shooters have come out not convicted of any criminal charges due to this. Not only this, but many other innocent black people have been found to be bias against, without any more of a reason than their ethnicity. Due to all of the reasons and examples is why justice has still not been achieved by the United States.

Wednesday 23 March 2016

Poetry Analysis (All Things will Die by Lord Alfred Tennyson)

In this analysis, I will break down Lord Alfred Tennyson's famous poem; All Things will Die. From the title, I can perceive that this poem will take on the role of being critical, reflexive and make use of a sorrowful tone, which would create a gloomy ambiance, as for the theme, I think that he'll be making an insight on how ephemeral life is. After reading, I made a few interjections over how I interpret what the author meant. For example: from the 1st to the 7th verse, the author wrote with a tone of happiness or joy along with a relatively swift rhythm, appreciating all living things and delving into their beauty, but from that point and onwards, the tone changes to a depressive or melancholic tone while slowing down the poem's rhythm, with its predominant theme being how all things will wither away and die. The first interjection that I made was on the 31st verse, which read:

"The red cheek paling"

What I understood from this line is that, as a cheek loses its color, the world will lose its hue, and thus, representing that the world's beauty is dying, at the same time, employing imagery to compare the dying of a person to the decaying of the whole world along with its beauty. As for the third and last paraphrasing that I did, located in the 37th to the 40th verse and it read as follows:

"The old earth
Had a birth,
As all men know,
Long ago."

In the past few verses, I think that the author meant to make a connection with Buddha's famed words: "Everything that has a beginning, has an ending.And made a reference as to how long it has been since the earth's existence has begun, that it's already nearing its end. An opinion of mine would be that, the message hidden throughout this poem is that, due to our human nature, we're not appreciating the gift that is our planet earth in its fullest, and in its stead, we keep on fighting whenever we get the chance to. "All things will die" is written mostly on a pessimistic or saddening tone that indulges the audience to reflect and truly weigh our own actions while contrasting their consequences, for example:

"The stream will cease to flow;
The wind will cease to blow;
The clouds will cease to fleet;
The hearts will cease to beat;"

Through the previous quote, the author meant to refer to the small things in life that we don't usually notice and take for granted, implying that if we keep living on with the same mindset, we'll eventually come to the same conclusion as it's pictured in this lyrical scenario. In this poem, I found 2 notable shifts in which the theme of the poem and in the author's tone transition notably; the first one located between verse 7 and 8, in which the author switches from a positive and grateful view in the world, to a pessimistic and melancholic one, also changing the theme along with it, which was: "the gift of life and beauty", which developed to "all things will die", which can be noticed in the following quote:

"Full merrily;
Yet all things must die."

The second shift occurs in-between the 36th and 37th verse, in which the author comes into a state of acceptance or understanding, in which the speaker realizes that death was fated to happen from a beginning and is coming to terms with the idea, this realization forces him/her to adjust his tone, from lugubrious to reflexive and almost impartial or unbiased, in which the speaker breaks free from all despair and desperation and starts contemplating death while at its doors, as can seen in the following quote:

"Ye merry souls, farewell.
The old earth
Had a birth,
As all men know,
Long ago."

As it can be seen on the last verses of the poem, the speaker forsakes his sorrow and begins to reminisce his life, this can also be seen as an allusion to the popular belief of seeing your life flash through one's eyes in a near death experience, ultimately remembering just how long the character has lived and coming to peace with the fact that death is near. As for the technical part of this poem, the meter changes along with the author's emotions, feelings and the theme that is being transmitted to the audience, for example:

"Clearly the blue river chimes in its flowing
Under my eye;
Warmly and broadly the south winds are blowing
Over the sky." 
(1, 2, 3, 4.)
-
"See! our friends are all forsaking
The wine and the merrymaking
We are call'd-we must go.
(18, 19, 20.)
-
"The old earth
Had a birth
As all men know,
Long ago." 
(37, 38, 39, 40.)

As it can be seen in the previous quotes from the poem, the structure depends on what the poem's theme and what the author is trying to convey to the audience. In the beginning of the poem, the author employs imagery, consonant rhymes and assonance to describe the beauty of the setting that the speaker is in complete awe at, using a trochaic heptameter along with a trochaic dimeter as follow-up, the rhyme scheme used here is ABAB. In the next excerpt, the author immerses the speaker and the audience into complete despair and chaos when all of the beauty present in the world is fading away right before the speaker's eyes. An allusion is made to connect wine and merrymaking with a lively or relatively joyous way of living, there's also an enjambment employed to emphasize that they were called, by what I can infer, Death itself. The meter used here consists of a trochaic quadrameter, trochaic trimeter along with a trochaic trimeter, the rhyme scheme used here is AAB. Towards the ending of the poem, the author alters the atmosphere by utilizing a reflexive tone, which uses consonant and vowel rhymes to fit in with the rest of the poem and thus, create fluidity; as for the devices, the author uses allusion along with symbolism and metaphor to compare implicitly the world's life and age to a human's, an antithesis or juxtaposition can also be observed on the close use of the words "old" and "birth", additionally, tacitly communicating that earth has grown old and will die. The metric structure of this extract are spondaic dimeter, iambic meter, iambic dimeter and trochaic meter used along with an AABB rhyme scheme.