In 1952 the owners of a little bog near Windeby, in the vicinity of Schleswig, Germany, discovered the corpse of a 2,000-year-old girl, aged 14 at her death, as they cut up the peat for sale. Birch branches and a large stone covered the girl when alive, weighing her down so that she drowned in the bog. Photographed, analyzed, her well-known remains now rest in the Archäologisches Landesmuseum in Schleswig, vivid testimony that the bog peoples of northern Europe enforced their moral code with capital punishment. Danish archaeologist Peter Vilhelm Glob in 1965 published Mosefolket, a book about these iron-age bog folk; and in it he placed some photographs of the body of the teenager by then named the Windeby girl

Seamus Heaney's "Punishment" famously compares the Windeby girl with Catholic girls in Northern Ireland, her "betraying sisters" (38), who consorted with British soldiers.

In the 1970’s, Heaney--born in 1939 to a pious, Catholic, moderately Nationalist rural family--felt himself uncomfortably caught between physical-force Republicanism, about which he was generally skeptical, and the discriminatory rule of entrenched Protestant political power, one of whose Paisleyite newspapers referred to Heaney as “the well-known papist propagandist.”

At about the same time as the tar-and-feather incident, at which it is possible Heaney might actually have been a bystander, he and his own young family decided to move out of Belfast, south to the less fractious Irish Republic.

The presence and fear of conflict and violence are a part of Irish history. Whether it is from ancient times or from around the time of 'The Irish Troubles', it is an ever present part of Ireland and consequently makes it in to Heaney's poetry.

In “Punishment” Heaney establishes a metaphorical connection between two extravagantly violent events: on the one hand, the execution of a young adulteress, whose body has been preserved for two millennia in a North European bog; and, on the other, in an analogous tribal ritual, the savage chastisement in 1972 of certain Belfast Catholic girls who, because they had dated British soldiers, were shorn, tarred-and-feathered, and chained in the city center by the IRA.

This paradoxical poem, it will occur to many, helps explain Ireland and its centuries-long "trouble," where Christians, in killing each other, simultaneously feel revulsion and sorrow, and vindictive triumph.

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Just to Say

Just to Say

I have taken

your bike light

it was on

your bike

although

you probably

accidentally forgot

it there

Forgive me

I don't need it

I'm just a

kleptomaniac

Dreams

When a dream is left alone, nothing comes of it. Langston Hughes presents this to us in his poem "Harlem".

The poem consists mostly of rhetorical questions in no particular order. However, the organization of the poem is important. The stanzas are divided into a question, a group of rhetorical questions consisting of similes, a statement, and then another rhetorical question that's a metaphor.

The transition between the first and second stanza is the most important transition of the poem. The first line introduces the subject of the poem and what all the rest of the lines refer to: "a dream deferred". After this the poem explains, through rhetorical questions or statements, what happens to dreams that are deferred.

The second stanza and the third stanza consists of similes.

"Does it dry up

like a raisin in the sun?" shows how dreams, when left alone and forgotten, become useless. Just like a raisin left in the sun becomes trash, so do dreams.

"Or fester like a sore-

And then run?" relates dreams to sores. You have to be responsible and constantly care for your dream or it'l just take longer to accomplish.

"Does it stink like rotten meat?" is a simile explaining how dreams affect those around you. The lingering smell of rotten meat not only harms the person responsible for letting the meat rot but also those around the meat.

"Or crust and sugar over-

like a syrupy sweet?" is like the first simile. If you don't care for sweets, they get hard and become useless.

The fifth simile however, is a drastic change from the other four. Not only is it not presented in the form of a rhetorical question, but also it shows a dream that you're still holding on to.

"Maybe it just sags

like a heavy load."

It shows that a dream might just be a burden to carry.

These similes give negative imagery to help explain what happens to "a dream deferred", showing that only bad can happen when you leave a dream alone. Yet it still gives hope that this dream can be accomplished. But the last line, a metaphor, "Or does it explode?", shows exactly what happens to "a dream deferred": it goes away.

Imagery

"The apparition of these faces in the crowd;"

The word "apparition" in Ezra Pound's In a Station of the Metro has many different connotations. It can be interpreted as an appearance, an expression, or a presence. Taken from dictionary.com, an apparition is defined as "a supernatural appearance of a person or thing, esp. a ghost; a specter or phantom; wraith". In my opinion, the word "apparition" in In a Station of the Metro describes the image created by the hundreds of people at a metro station. Their bodies and emotionless faces blend into one ghostly figure. Also, with most people either moving towards the exit, moving towards the metro, or waiting idly, uniformity is added to the scene.

The pictures I selected show what I believe to be the image intended by Pound. However, I believe associating a photo with Pound's poem removes depth from the poem. The line "The apparition of these faces in the crowd;" has many interpretations and attaching a photo to the line limits the reader's imagination.

Death

Death is a concept we are all familiar with, whether it be the death of an emotion, the death of a dream, or the death of a loved one. We start young and experience death as we grow older, knowing our own death is inevitable.

Shakespeare, in "Sonnet 73", explains the death of youth. The first quatrain shows the changing of seasons, how the cheerfulness of summer dies and how the leaves die and fall to the ground. The second quatrain shows the death of the day when it turns into night. "Death's second self", being sleep, is prominent in the first two quatrains. Birds no longer sing and animals sleep when the cold winter comes along or the day passes. The third quatrain shows the death of a fire. While all three explain something inevitably ending, we know that the seasons will change again and the day will return. The fire, however, is permanently gone. The couplet shows the ending of youth, another change that is permanent. Being young, you know that inevitably you will grow older and more and more independent. The death of youth is inevitable.

"Do Not Go Gentle Into that Good Night", by Dylan Thomas, explains the death of his father and how he feels about it. He knows that his father is dying of old age and is criticizing him for his lack of accomplishments throughout his life. He is especially distraught by his father's acceptance of death. The two repeated lines "Do not go gentle into that good night" and "Rage, rage against the dying of the light" emphasize how Thomas does not want his father to willingly die. He mentions how wise men, good men, wild men, and grave men try to make the most out of their life before their inevitable death. By saying that his father is accepting death, he shows that he doesn't think his father is wise, good, wild, nor grave. The death of Thomas' father is inevitable and although he doesn't want his father to give into death.