Summary of the Poem When I Have Fears That I May Cease to Be Essay Example

Summary of the Poem When I Have Fears That I May Cease to Be Paper When I Have Fears That I May Cease to Be, Summary of the Poem The central metaphor in the first quatrain is the comparison between writing poetry and harvesting grain. The speaker compares the pen with an implement of harvest(â€Å"glean’d my teeming brain†) and books with the buildings(â€Å"garners†) where grain is stored. The metaphor expresses the first of the speaker’s three main concerns: that death will cut short his poetic career. Just as a person’s natural life spans youth, adulthood, and old age, so the growing of grain follows the natural progression of the seasons. For the poet to die young, however, precludes his chance of â€Å"harvesting† the fruits of his mind, which become â€Å"ripen’d† only as the poet ages. These fruits, which are poetic works, grant the poet fame, represented by the â€Å"high-piled books† in line 3. The fear of obscurity was one Keats carried to his death only three years after composing â€Å"When I Have Fears That I May Cease To Be†. Though he had no way of knowing his life would indeed be cut short before he achieved the kind of recognition he sought, he echoes this concern in the final line of the sonnet. Lines 5-8 We will write a custom essay sample on Summary of the Poem When I Have Fears That I May Cease to Be specifically for you for only $16.38 $13.9/page Order now We will write a custom essay sample on Summary of the Poem When I Have Fears That I May Cease to Be specifically for you FOR ONLY $16.38 $13.9/page Hire Writer We will write a custom essay sample on Summary of the Poem When I Have Fears That I May Cease to Be specifically for you FOR ONLY $16.38 $13.9/page Hire Writer Some readers believe that the second quatrain continues to discuss the fear that death will cut short the speaker’s poetic career. These readers infer that the â€Å"high romance† symbolized by the night clouds is a literary concept, a level of artistic expression the speaker will never â€Å"live to trace,† or to realize. But another reading is possible. The night sky as a symbol for the ultimate questions that haunt man dates back to ancient times. The Hebrew Psalmist, for instance, reflects on die stars in Psalm 8(in the King James Bible) and asks himself, â€Å"What is man? While Keats’s use of the word romance† might suggest a literary meaning, die reader must also acknowledge more philosophical implications. The clouds move across die moon and stars, making â€Å"shadows† that recall Plato’s analogy of me cave wall. These shadows, cryptic and insubstantial as they are, reveal die greater mystery of the heavens. By living, the poe t hopes he can divine the explanation for — die â€Å"Truth† of — the universe, and by extension me riddle of his own existence. Whether or not he lives to do so, however, remains at the discretion of â€Å"the magic hand of chance,† or fate. If he dies too soon, he knows, he will not be able to solve the mystery of the heavens, to â€Å"trace their shadows. † This fear that he will die in ignorance of the soul’s ultimate destiny is one mat goes far beyond the question of poetic fame in the first quatrain. It is also a concept mat remains unsettled by the final two lines of the poem — not dissolving, as do â€Å"love† and â€Å"fame,† to â€Å"nothingness. † Lines 9-12 The third quatrain speaks of another kind of â€Å"high romance,† that of â€Å"unreflecting love. In these lines, the speaker first addresses his beloved in typically romantic terms(â€Å"fair creature†), yet the quatrain’s main concern is not the beloved at all. Instead, it is the self. The speaker’s meditation on his beloved leads instantly to his twin fears of time and death. Because of life’s fleetingness, his love is only â€Å"of an hour. † Further, the consciousness of time — and of love’s transience — precludes what the speaker suggests is the best kind of love: love devoid of analytical scrutiny and therefore free of the fear of loss and death. This kind of love has a â€Å"faery power† (in mythology, fairies are immortal) precisely because it is â€Å"unreflecting. † Because the speaker’s nature is to be self-conscious, die opposite of â€Å"unreflecting,† he fears he will never experience this kind of love. Lines 13-14 In the end, the speaker’s recognition that he lacks the qualities of â€Å"unreflecting love† leads him to the state of alienation described in the final couplet. Because he is too self-conscious to love, he is forced to â€Å"stand alone. † Isolated, he continues to â€Å"think. † But thinking is, in this poem, equal to death. As he reflects on time’s inevitable course, two things the speaker holds most valuable in life — â€Å"love and fame† — are shown to be insubstantial given the fact of death, and they dissolve into â€Å"nothingness. † Thus the speaker stands on â€Å"die shore/ of the wide world,† at die edge of what we perceive in life but also close to what might exist beyond. In this state, there is only a hint of solace. While love and fame prove illusory, me â€Å"high romance† of the universe discussed in the second quatrain does not â€Å"sink† into â€Å"nothingness. It is this mystery, represented by the â€Å"huge cloudy symbols† of Line 6, that the speaker comes closest to in die poem, his fear of death leading to the ultimate question of his own existence. Overview Written in 1818, this poem expresses concerns that run through his poetry and his lettersfame, love, and time. Keats was conscious of needing time to write his po etry; when twenty-one, he wrote, Oh, for ten years that I may overwhelm Myself in poesy. By age twenty-fouronly three years later, he had essentially stopped writing because of ill health. There were times he felt confident that his poetry would survive him, I think I shall be among the English Poets after my death. Nevertheless, the inscription he wrote for his headstone was, Here lies one whose name was writ in water. Definitions and Allusions Line 2. glean: in this poem, Keats is using the meaning of collecting patiently or picking out laboriously. teeming: plentiful, overflowing, or produced in large quantities. Line 3. charactery: printing or handwriting. Line 4. garners: granaries or storehouses for grain. Line 6. igh romance: high = of an elevated or exalted character or quality; romance = medieval narrative of chivalry, also an idealistic fiction which tends not to be realistic. Analysis This poem falls into two major thought groups: Keats expresses his fear of dying young in the first thought unit, lines 1-12. He fears that he will not fulfill himself as a writer (lines 1-8) and that he will lose his beloved (lines 9-12). Keats resolves his fears by assertin g the unimportance of love and fame in the concluding two and a half lines of this sonnet. The first quatrain (four lines) emphasizes both how fertile his imagination is and how much he has to express; hence the imagery of the harvest, e. g. , gleand, garners, full ripend grain. Subtly reinforcing this idea is the alliteration of the key words gleand, garners, and grain, as well as the repetition of r sounds in charactery, rich, garners,ripend, and grain. . A harvest is, obviously, fulfillment in time, the culmination which yields a valued product, as reflected in the grain being full ripend. Abundance is also apparent in the adjectives high-piled and rich. The harvest metaphor contains a paradox (paradox is a characteristic of Keatss poetry and thought): Keats is both the field of grain (his imagination is like the grain to be harvested) and he is the harvester (writer of poetry). In the next quatrain (lines 5-8), he sees the world as full of material he could transform into poetry (his is the magic hand); the material is the beauty of nature (nights starrd face) and th e larger meanings he perceives beneath the appearance of nature or physical phenomena (Huge cloudy symbols) . In the third quatrain (lines 9-12), he turns to love. As the fair creature of an hour, his beloved is short-lived just as, by implication, love is. The quatrain itself parallels the idea of little time, in being only three and a half lines, rather than the usual four lines of a Shakespearean sonnet; the effect of this compression or shortening is of a slight speeding-up of time. Is love as important as, less important than, or more important than poetry for Keats in this poem? Does the fact that he devotes fewer lines to love than to poetry suggest anything about their relative importance to him? The poets concern with time (not enough time to fulfill his poetic gift and love) is supported by the repetition of when at the beginning of each quatrain and by the shortening of the third quatrain. Keats attributes two qualities to love: (1) it has the ability to transform the world for the lovers (faery power), but of course fairies are not real, and their enchantments are an illusion and (2) love involves us with emotion rather than thought (I feel and unreflecting love). Reflecting upon his feelings, which the act of writing this sonnet has involved, Keats achieves some distancing from his own feelings and ordinary life; this distancing enables him to reach a resolution. He thinks about the human solitariness (I stand alone) and human insignificance (the implicit contrast betwen his lone self and the wide world). The shore is a point of contact, the threshold between two worlds or conditions, land and sea; so Keats is crossing a threshold, from his desire for fame and love to accepting their unimportance and ceasing to fear and yearn.

The Meaning of Life in To the Lighthouse Essays

The Meaning of Life in To the Lighthouse Essays The Meaning of Life in To the Lighthouse Paper The Meaning of Life in To the Lighthouse Paper Essay Topic: Light in August Virginia Woolf was never reticent about her atheism, stating that certainly, emphatically, there is no God. This does not mean, however, that she did not feel the need for something that would give a purpose to life, and in To the Lighthouse, each of the characters appears to be searching for this. The apparently trivial details, to which she pays such attention, carry the weight of a struggle to draw form out of chaos, to grant shape and meaning to human experience. Each of the characters clings to one philosophy or another, be it art, scholarship or family duties, although they all lack the self-knowledge that previous literature had presented as the crucial form of wisdom. The self in this novel is elusive, complex and volatile, but it is with this that the characters must discover the meaning in life. An unmarried woman has missed the best of life, argues Mrs. Ramsay, who has faith in marriage above all things. Marriage, she believes, is not merely a contract, it is an affirmation of order and stability. There is a clear demarcation of masculine and feminine domains in the novel. The feminine domain is the home, where Mrs. Ramsay fulfils her purpose as a woman by being a good wife and mother (She would be happy if always to have a baby in her arms). She also has the whole of the other sex under her protection, not only due to admiration of them, but also because she pitied men always as if they lacked something women never, as if they had something. There is, she believes, profound value in the traditional womans role. Within this role, the process of establishing relationships between people is of paramount importance. In fact, drawing people together, overcoming their personal differences, has become her reason for being. She struggles against the complexity of life, described as her old antagonist, in order to act as a consoling presence for her family and friends. In XVII (The Window), she contemplates the meaning of her existence. All she has, she thinks, is only this an infinitely long table of plates and knives. But she seems here to be standing separate from her life, for when she gives herself a shake, the old familiar pulse begins to beat again, suggesting a return to life. That pulse is hospitality without it she looked old and worn, but when she regains it, it was as if the ship had turned and the sun had struck its sails again. Mrs. Ramsay had given. Giving, giving, giving, she had died and had left all this, complains Lily. Helping the less fortunate was something that Mrs. Ramsays lived for. Her compassionate nature made her alert to the plight of the poor and the suffering, and she desired to help in some practical way to alleviate their distress. In I, 1, she knits a stocking for the lighthouse-keepers son, who is unwell, and visits the home of a sick woman in the nearby town. She is active in promoting certain improvements in social welfare, which should ameliorate the lot of the underprivileged. She gives her whole self for the happiness of others. Indeed, happiness, when applied to other people, is meaning is itself. She contemplates the lives of her children: knowing what was before them love and ambition and being wretched alone in dreary places she often had the feeling, Why must they grow up and lose it all? And then she said to herself, brandishing her sword at life, Nonsense. They will be pe rfectly happy. Mr. Ramsay is also concerned with social issues, caring so much about fishermen and their wages that he lost sleep, and believing that the lot of the average person should be of paramount concern in social policy. He evidently finds great value in poetry (though he considers art a superficial embellishment, unnecessary in a truly civilised society). These are not central to his understanding of purpose, however. He has a linearity of thinking best suited to logical argument and extraordinary concepts, and sees mental achievement in terms of an alphabet, where meaning comes from climbing up, letter by letter, and reaching Z is the ultimate goal. This brings its insecurities: In that flash of darkness he heard people saying he was a failure that R was beyond him. Although he appears to be driven by a fiery unworldliness, suggesting a deep purpose to his life, at one point Lily sees him as a petty, selfish, vain, egotistical tyrant. Indeed, he is obsessed with the nature of greatness, fearing that his own work will not be valued by posterity. There is a sense that if he is not remembered after his death (through his books), his life will have been meaningless. Art is Lily Briscoes means to emulate Mrs. Ramsay in making coherent form from lifes chaos without adopting her faith in marriage, which she perceives as a shortcoming. Importantly for her, as a woman, the creative affirmation of painting allows her to move out of the domestic confines which constrained Mrs. Ramsay. So what would seem to Mrs. Ramsay to be misfortune, she considers as luck: She had only escaped by the skin of her teeth though, she thought. She had been looking at the table-cloth, and it had flashed upon her that she would move the tree to the middle, and never need marry anybody, and she felt an enormous exultation. It is a meaningful break from the cycle of tradition. Virginia Woolfs own decision to become a writer enabled her to experience the world beyond those limits within which her mother led her life. In the novel, it is Lily who has the final joy, the final fulfilment of purpose: With a sudden intensity, as if she saw it clear for a second, she drew a line the re, in the centre. It was done; it was finished. Yes, she thought, laying down her brush in extreme fatigue, I have had my vision. Augustus Carmichael (rubicund, drowsy, entirely contented), has broken from a different cycle. He is evidently indifferent to worldly success, and has surrendered all ambition in a manner unthinkable to Mr Ramsay. In doing so, he has found peace. Minta and Paul followed the advice of Mrs. Ramsay, but the marriage had turned out rather badly. What brought them some happiness was untraditional it was Pauls infidelity which made them excellent friends. The idea that meaning belongs in a traditional life is now shattered. Allusion in the novel to the Great War suggests that the dominance of conventionally masculine values has reached an impasse. The gaining of power is not the essence of life, only the cause of death. How aimless it was, how chaotic, how unreal it was, she (Lily) thought, looking at her empty coffee cup. Mrs. Ramsay dead; Andrew killed; Prue dead too repeat it as she might, it roused no feeling in her. In any case, time and nature obliterates any individual determinati ons in its sweep. Deaths are mentioned in parenthesis, as if they are of little consequence to the whole. Chaos and disintegration are the realities of life. For James, in The Window, visiting the lighthouse is a distant goal, the object of an adventure. The intensity of James hostile response to his father is a measure of the strength of his desire to reach the lighthouse. By The Lighthouse, this purpose has changed into fighting tyranny to the death, and it is Mr. Ramsay whose purpose is that of visiting the lighthouse. Both are fulfilled Mr. Ramsay ends his tyranny by praising James; they reach the lighthouse. Mr. Ramsay rose and stood in the bow of the boat, very straight and tall, for all the world, James thought, as if he were saying, There is no God. This confident declaration of independence appears to be the conclusion to his search for meaning. Lily, far away, perceives this: He has landed, she said aloud. It is finished. Mrs. Ramsay lives on after death in the way she is remembered. This is Mr. Ramsays idea of meaning in life the gaining of immortality. But of all the people in this book, it is the mystic and the visionary who have the surety. They, walking the beach on a fine night, stirring a puddle, looking at a stone, asking themselves What am I, What is this? had suddenly an answer vouchsafed them: (they could not say what it was) so that they were warm in the frost and had comfort in the desert. The ineffability suggests that each man must find the answer for himself. Perhaps Mr. Ramsay stumbled on that answer as he stepped from the boat, and Lily also, for she has had her vision.

Substandard Prenatal Care Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words

Substandard Prenatal Care - Essay Example Both Latin America and Mexico are developing nations that have a modern economy that is encompassed in a rural peasant population. Mexico and Latin America are influenced by the forces of economics, politics, and cultural traditions that contribute to a rate of pregnancy problems and infant mortality that significantly exceeds their neighbors in North America. The issue of prenatal care is an issue that has several relevant aspects. It is a woman's issue, and as such has suffered from gender bias that has pervaded the hemisphere due to the impact of religion and its view of women. As with other women's issues, such as breast cancer, funding for prenatal care is often diminished by the male dominated power structure. However, prenatal care is not merely a women's issue as it impacts males and female alike and is an integral part of a healthy family. In the 21st century, prenatal care has become an issue of basic human rights. It addresses the most fundamental units of society (the children) that are incapable of deciding or acting for themselves. Adequate prenatal care is a broad based program that not only delivers a healthy child at birth, but also addresses the needs of the pregnant woman, her nutrition, mental health, and delivery safety. It should include "Safe and clean delivery, early detection and management of sexually transmitted diseases, infections and complications during pregnancy and delivery and taking into account the physiological needs of the newborn baby" (World Health Organization 25). When these interventions are accessible, affordable, and offered to pregnant women, they can have a substantial effect on improving the health of the newborn child and mother. There has been some increased international focus on this issue as it has been recognized that "the vast majority of infant and maternal deaths and disabilities are preventable through high quality care, detection and efficient referral for complications, and access to the essential elements of obstetric care when needed" (Glei, Goldman, and Rodrigue z 3). While these initiatives are helpful, they are impeded by competing social, cultural, and economic factors. The forces that influence the delivery of adequate prenatal care have particularly impacted Latin America and Mexico, our neighbors to the South. Economics, culture, and politics have all taken a toll on this region in regards to health care. While the external influences of diet and the environment contribute to infant mortality, "maternal mortality is almost wholly attributable to a lack of-or poor quality- prenatal, delivery, and puerperal care" (Casas, Dachs, and Bambas 27). These services are difficult for many women to attain due to cultural traditions that have subjugated women and an economic system that has placed prenatal care out of the reach of the masses in this region. Inequalities based on wealth are one of the biggest obstacles that women in the lower economic classes face. In Mexico, less than 10 percent of all the babies born to the lower economic classes are born in a hospital, but this number rises to 90 percent for the upper economic municipalities (Casas, Dachs, and Bambas 31). Countries in Latin America have mediated this figure by mandating a goal of 80 percent of all deliveries be attended by a skilled professional,