Books: English Finals – Flashcards

- Thesis: Cullen suggests that memories and moments that have a lasting impact on our lives are often ones that are unpleasant - Written during the age of the Harlem Reinassance, which often times reflected black culture - About a black child (age 8) walking to Baltimore then he sees a White child no bigger then him and the white child called him a "******"... that was the only thing he remembered during his entire trip

- Thesis: The bond between a child and his or her father is a fluctuating relationship Quotes: "The whiskey on your breath could make a small boy dizzy" "The hand that held my wrist was battered on one knuckle" "You beat time on my head/ With a palm caked hard by dirt/ Then waltzed me off to bed/ Still clinging to your shirt"

- Thesis: The author gives us a narrator that says loss is inevitable in order to convince herself it is not a disaster so she can cope with her loss. - You have to practice losing in-order to not feel bad after losing important stuff - Repetition of lost and loss - Quotes: "The art of losing isn't hard to master" "I lost my mother's watch. And look!" "Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture I love) I shan't have lied"

- Thesis: White and black soldiers have a dark history together because of their differences but their history can be forgiven because of their similarities. - The white people and black people although may have difference in the past, they are all human beings - Quotes: "They had supposed their formula was fixed" "Besides, it taxed Time and the temper to remember those Congenital inquiries that cause disfavor of the darkness" "A box for dark and a box for other, would often find the contents had been scrambled or even switched" "Neither the earth nor heaven ever trembled, And there was nothing starling in the weather"

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- Thesis: Exposes the army as baffling and bad. Olaf represents anti-conformist movements -

- Thesis: You need to stay open minded and sometimes you have to take the choice less taken - "Sorry I could not travel both and be one traveler, long I stood" - "And both that morning equally lay, in leaves no step had trodden black" - " I shall be telling this with a sigh Somewhere ages and ages hence"

- Thesis: Hilda Doolittle uses imagery to show that people tend to cause themselves to perish on the path to their goals. - There are lots of seed references and wind and poplar - Quote: "The light beats upon me. I am startled" "My thoughts tear me, I dread their fever. I am scattered in its whirl. I am scattered like the hot shriveled seeds" "O Poplar, you are great among the hill-stones, While I perish on the path among the crevices of the rocks"

- Thesis: Harjo argues that the anxiety of confronting fear should not stop people from confronting their own fears. - Gives imagery of a shadow and people walking - Gives references to horses trying to get - Gives references to religion backwards. - Quotes: "There is this edge call it an ocean of fear of the dark" "Under our ribs our hearts are bloody star" "Heartbeat and breathe back sharply" "And Goodluck sat sleeping next to me in the struck"

Thesis: You should appreciate your father Quotes: "Sundays too my father got up early and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold" "I'd wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking. When the rooms were warm, he'd call "Speaking indifferently to him, who had driven out the cold"

- Thesis: Komunyakaa suggests that hatred leads to a stronger longing for and higher value of love

- Thesis: Levertov presents the woman's inner struggle to show that human beings are complex and sometimes contradictory, and yet need these contradictions to create a complete person. - There are two characteristics of a woman: 1) One perfect clean women who doesn't have imagination 2) One crazy women who wears rags, feathers, and knows strange songs

- Thesis: People who are idealized are often times abused

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- Thesis: You must die with honor - You can't die without fighting back - Quote: "If we must die, let it not be like hogs" "If we must die, O let us nobly die/So that our precious blood may not be shed" "O kinsmen! we must meet the common foe!/Though far outnumbered let us show us brave/ And for their thousand blows deal one deathblow!"

- Thesis: Moore expresses the need for one to protect the weak and young of the world in order to preserve the balance of nature. - Talks of how the nautilus shell is very thin and the mother needs to safeguard her babies until they hatch. Quote: "Giving her perishable souvenir of hope, a dull white outside and smooth edged inner surface glossy as the sea, the watchful maker of it guards it day and night" "Buried eight-fold in her eight arms, for she is in a sense a devil fish, her glass ram's horn-cradled freight is hid but is not crushed; as Hercules, bitten by a crab loyal to the hydra" "Like the lines in the mane of a Parthenon horse, round which the arms had wound themselves as if they knew love is the only fortress strong enough to trust to"

- Through the speaker's narration of her thoughts, Rich expresses her message that humans cannot control events in the world. - Summary: The barometer (glass) has fallen, winds are overhead, the sky is gray, and the narrator slowly walks to the window to close it. Describes how weather is unpredictable and can not every be fully foresaw and can change instantly. The only thing you can do is defend yourself against the season - Quotes: "I leave the book upon a pillowed chair and walk from window to close window, watching Bough strain against the sky" "Weather abroad and weather in the heart alike come on regardless of prediction" "Between foreseeing and averting change lies all the mastery of elements" "And set a match to candles sheathed in glass/ Against the keyhole draught, the insistent whine/ Of weather through the unsealed aperture."

- Thesis: Anne Sexton conveys the theme that mothers respond to their daughters' growth into full maturity by giving empowerment and support - Has references to time (eleven and noon) - Has references to fruits and vegetables, such as lemons, mushrooms, berries, orchards, string beans, etc. - Has references to Romans - The mother reflects upon her childhood and how she never had a caring mother who taught her of womanhood - Talk of how the embryo goes strong and becomes its own - Says that Linda, the mother's daughter's body never lies and always tells the truth - Some Quotes: "My daughter is like a garden" "This odd home where your face sits in my hand, so full of distance,..." "I say hello, to such shakes and knockings and high jinks, such music, such sprouts, such dancing-mad-bears of music, such necessary sugar, such going-on!" "I'm here, that somebody else, an old tree in the background." "Darling, stand still at your door, sure of yourself"

- Thesis: Throughout the poem, "Chicago", Sandburg argues that people should complete responsibilities vigorously and with pride in order to retain their youthfulness. - Every person is needed to build a good working community, even the people who retain bad jobs - "They used to tell me" - Everyone is telling the narrator that Chicago is bad, but it is not Quotes: "Hog Butcher for the World, Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat..." "Come and show me another city with lifted head singing so proud to be alive and coarse and strong and cunning" "Fierce as a dog with tongue lapping for action, cunning as a savage pitted against the wilderness" "Bragging and laughing that under his wrist is the pulse, and under his ribs the heart of the people, Laughing!"

- Thesis: Gary Snyder connects the human world with the natural world, comparing rocks for a riprap to ones words and life choices, as well as life and life's challenges to waves - Basically says the choice you make needs a solid foundation, and after this solid foundation is made, you should try and make the decision indestructible - Makes a lot of rock reference - "Before you mind like rocks. Placed solid, by hands" - "Cobble of milky way, straying planets, these poems, people, lost ponies with/Dragging saddles

- Thesis: Although America is perceived as being the for success, the hardship faced is worse China. - Part 1: 1) Named their first daughters Jade... They were supposed to be grateful and never left home. To move freely was a luxury 2) They were supposed to learn how to stretch the family rice, to quiet the demons, the noisy stomachs - Part 2: 1) The girls were contained by the land lords 2) China jade link handcuffed to your wrist 3) You have left no footprints Quote: " But they traveled far in surviving, learning to stretch the family rice, to quiet the demons, the noisy stomachs" " But in another wilderness, the possibilities, the loneliness, can strangulate like jungle vines." "But only because there is an ocean in between, the unremitting space of your rebellion"

A Sort of Song: Thesis: The poet posses a power to see ideas Quotes: "Let a snake wait under his weed and the writing be of words, slow and quick, shalt to strike" "Through metaphors to reconcile the people and the stones." "Compose. Invent!" Spring and All: Thesis: A dead old place is replaced by spring and becomes beautiful. Everything comes in cycles even though the transformation the beautiful thing may not be pretty Quotes: "Beyond, the waste of board, muddy fields brown with dried weeds, standing and fallen patches on standing water the scattering of tall trees" "They enter the new world naked, cold, uncertain of all save that they enter. All about them the cold, familiar wind"

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Thesis for I, Too: Black people are just as beautiful as white people - Quote: "I am the darker borther/They send me to eat in the kitchen" "Besides, They'll see how beautiful I am/ And be Ashamed" Thesis for Democracy: Equality and freedom should be put to the highest equality -Quote: "I have as much right/As the other fellow has/ To stand/ On my two feet" "I tire so of hearing people say, Let things take their course, Tomorrow is another day, I do not need freedom when I'm dead." "Freedom is a strong seed planted"

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