The Mother Essay Example for Free

The Mother Essay â€Å"The Mother: Remember the children you got that you did not get† Gwendolyn Brooks’ poem â€Å"The Mother† is ambiguous and totally unexpected. The narrator starts by speaking about abortion in a very accusatory tone. In the first part of the poem the narrator uses second person language and accuses mothers of getting abortions and talks about how all the mothers will be missing out on seeing their children grow. She is talking to readers about abortions in general. She talks to mothers and patronizes them, â€Å"Abortions will never let you forget. You remember the children you got that you did not get.† (1-2), she starts the poem with a paradox. The narrator sounds like an antiabortion and will speak for having a child; but as the poem came to an ending it seemed like she is trying to justify her own actions. As the poem goes on the speaker suddenly changes her language and starts to talk about herself in a first person language. She explains how she cannot forget how many children she has killed. From the second part of the poem she starts to talk about her children, which meant that she had not one but multiple abortions and now is haunted by it. She starts to talk about her pain and loss about not having a child, â€Å"I have heard in the voices of the wind the voices of my dim killed children. I have contracted. I have eased. My dim dears at the breasts they could never suck. I have said, Sweets, if I sinned, if I seized your luck† (11-15). In these lines the speaker starts to blame herself; and then the tone becomes angry and helpless, â€Å"If I stole your births and your names, Your straight baby tears and your games, Your stilted or lovely loves, your tumults, your marriages, aches, and your deaths† (17-20). In these last few lines she again is listing out the things she will miss about her children and reminds the readers that she is full aware of the things and is regretful, but she still does the abortion. Along with the title of the poem there is another irony here, she says she stole their deaths by not letting them grow, she is saying she did not naturally let them die and had killed them herself before they were born. Our class had an intense conversation about the lines â€Å"If I poisoned the beginnings of your breaths, Believe that even in my deliberateness I was not deliberate .† (21-22), someone had suggested about how there is another paradox here. The tone has once again changed and she again tries to justify herself and her actions. She tries to explain that even though she had gone through with the procedure and succeeded in getting the abortion, it was not what she had  intended. Later on the narrator starts to sound very hypocritical, â€Å"Though why should I whine, Whines that the crime was other than mine? Since anyhow you are dead.† (23-25). Here the speaker is stressing over her own words, one moment her tone is sad and regretful and the next she is saying that there is no point as the child is already dead. The mother started the poem by accusing others of getting rid of their unborn, then she directly starts to talk to her dead children and now she is reasoning with herself about getting an abortion. She talks about a crime but does not call herself a criminal; somehow she tried to sound like the victim. She questioned if it was another’s fault. She tries hard not to take the blame on herself; in that particular line she is possibly implying that there may have been another person in th e scene that had made her do this, but none were mentioned, which indicates she is just looking for a way to share the blame with someone else, so that shame is not heavy on her. Once the mother’s intensions were established the tension between the mother and her unborn children and abortion was pretty luminous. She claims to have multiple abortions and explains her grief about giving up her children, yet she never apologized. She cannot get over the ghosts of all the children and is haunted by what could have happened, yet she is not apologetic, she never once mentioned that maybe she should have changed her mind and kept one child. Before she ends the poem she says, â€Å"Is faulty: oh, what shall I say, how is the truth to be said? You were born, you had body, you died. It is just that you never giggled or planned or cried.† (29-31). In those lines she tries to speak the truth and tries to accept that each child had a body and lived but it died. She even says it is faulty, but still does not blame herself for the abortions. She ends the poem by saying, â€Å"Believe me, I loved you all. Believe me, I knew you, though faintly, and I loved, I loved you All.† (32-34). It seems as though she tries to sound like a loving mother and tries to tell her unborn children that she loved them and vaguely knew them. Works Cited Brooks, Gwendolyn. The Mother. Poets.org. Academy of American Poets, n.d. Web. 15 Feb. 2014.

When Pigs Heads Talk :: essays research papers

  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã¢â‚¬Å"What are you doing out here all alone? Aren’t you afraid of me?† asks a pig’s head on a stick, covered in flies. But it’s more that, it’s an entity, which is hidden within the depths of the book, concealed for the reader to discover. The book Lord of the Flies by William Golding contains symbolism all throughout the text, each symbol to be interpreted in its own way.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  The main symbol in Lord of the Flies is quite obviously, the Lord of the Flies, which as aforementioned, is a pig’s head on a stick, covered in flies. The symbol represents the evil within the boys that reside on the island. Each one corrupt in his own, fearing what resides within them. Jack with his â€Å"macho† attitude, while he is a leader, has actually took part in killing someone, but then again, so has every boy there. This evil could also be interpreted as a loss of innocence, in which the boys spiral from helpless little tykes to voracious savages, living only to kill.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Another symbol, is just the flies residing upon the sow’s head. They seem to represent people that cling to evil, as though it would their only chance of survival. An example of that would be a cannibal, whose own desires have led him to feast upon flesh, and then, even when he knows that what he has done is wrong, he continues to do it until his disgusting gorging has ended with his capture and punishment. Oddly enough, the flies are feeding on rotting flesh as well.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Simon, the boy murdered by his peers, can be viewed as a Christ figure. While some may say it is Ralph, Simon seems more like a savior. He comes down from the mountain, bearing news of the boys salvation from the beast that torments him and he is persecuted by them, each one taking part in the frenzy of his death. He also seems to be knowledgeable about things the boys can’t comprehend. He is always off in his own little world, pondering something that most boys wouldn’t even consider thinking about.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Yet another symbol in Lord of the Flies would the conch, which Ralph clings to so dearly. All of the boys see that as the upholding of order, until Jack claims it not so. With the shattering of the conch, Ralph seems to plummet into a slight depression, wherein he has nothing to remind of the upright and strict ways of his home. Without it he is nearly lost in a sea of his thoughts, buses as an example.

Junot Diaz’s Becoming a Writer: Dedication and Persistence Essay

The piece of work titled â€Å"Becoming a Writer†, written by Junot Diaz, is a short story showing the importance of dedication and persistence in order to become a good author. Diaz begins by explaining his difficulty in getting past the â€Å"75 page mark† in a novel he had been working on. He explains how no matter how hard he tried, it felt as if he was â€Å"chained to the sinking ship of those 75 pages and there was no key and no patching the hole in the hull†. Diaz explains how it is hard to continue his work after a long 5 years of writer’s block and begins to think that maybe he should move on to another profession. In pursuit of a new career, Diaz’s fiancà ©e suggests that he make a list of all the things he is talented at, however his list was relatively short and only had but three points. Diaz speaks about how he would just look at the list and hope for the hint of a spark to uplift his spirits†¦ but that spark never came. Shortly after, he sets aside his work and begins to disengage himself from the writing community; no longer did he attend book clubs, or even visit bookstores. In his downward spiral into normality, Diaz gives it one more go and decides to find just one good thing in the pages to get him back on track. He separated the 75 pages and â€Å"despite every part of him shrieking no no no, he jumped back down the rabbit hole again.† And three years later he could finally look at his pile of pages and say â€Å"done.† Diaz concludes his argument in saying that no one is perfect, and can just pick up a pencil and start writing a novel, but you have to work hard and never give up.

How Was Dilophosaurus Discovered

Of the dozen or so dinosaurs that every kid knows by heart, Dilophosaurus occupies the strangest position. This theropods popularity can be attributed almost entirely to its colorful cameo in the first Jurassic Park movie, but almost all the details presented in that blockbuster were completely made up--including Dilophosaurus petite size, prominent neck frill, and (most egregiously of all) its presumed ability to spit poison. One way to bring Dilophosaurus down to earth is to describe the fairly unremarkable details of its discovery. In 1942, a young paleontologist named Sam Welles went on a fossil-hunting expedition to the Navajo country, a sparsely populated portion of the southwest U.S. that includes much of Arizona. Welles, who later become a professor at the prestigious University of California Museum of Paleontology, offers his eyewitness account on a taped UCMP Dilophosaurus tour: [A colleague] asked me to look up the report of a skeleton found in the Kayenta Formation, which might possibly be dinosaurian. I tried to find this and failed...and got hold of Jesse Williams, a Navajo who had discovered these bones in 1940. There were three dinosaurs in a triangle about twenty feet apart, and one was almost worthless, having been completely eroded. The second was a good skeleton showing everything except the front part of the skull. The third gave us the front part of the skull and much of the front part of the skeleton. These we collected in a ten-day rush job, loaded them into the car, and brought them back to Berkeley. Introducing Dilophosaurus - By Way of Megalosaurus The above account is pretty straightforward, but the next installment of the Dilophosaurus saga is fairly twisty. It took over a dozen years for Welles bones to be cleaned and mounted, and it was only in 1954 that the type specimen was given the name Megalosaurus wetherelli. This must have been hugely anticlimactic to its discoverer, since Megalosaurus had been a wastebasket taxon for over a hundred years, comprising a huge number of poorly understood theropod species (many of which later turned out to deserve their own genus). Determined to give his dinosaur a more secure identity, Welles returned to Navajo territory in 1964. This time he unearthed a fossil bearing a characteristic double crest on its skull, which was all the evidence he needed to erect a new genus and species, Dilophosaurus wetherelli. (In real time, this happened fairly slowly; it was only in 1970, six years after this latter expedition, that Welles felt he had made a solid enough case for his two-crested lizard.) There is a second named species of Dilophosaurus, D. sinensis, to which a Chinese paleontologist assigned a theropod fossil discovered in Yunnan province in 1987. Some experts believe that this may actually be a specimen of Cryolophosaurus, the cold-crested lizard (and close relative of Dilophosaurus) that was discovered in Antarctica in the early 1990s. Before he died, Welles designated a third species of Dilophosaurus, D. breedorum, but never got around to publishing it. Dilophosaurus - The Facts and the Fantasy What, exactly, set Dilophosaurus apart from other theropod dinosaurs of early Jurassic North America (and possibly Asia)? Aside from the distinctive crest on its head, not much--this was your average, voracious, 1,000 to 2,000-pound meat eater, certainly no match for the likes of Allosaurus or Tyrannosaurus Rex. Its unclear why Jurassic Park author Michael Crichton even seized on Dilophosaurus in the first place, or why he chose to endow this dinosaur with its mythical features. (Not only did Dilophosaurus not spit poison, but, to date, paleontologists have yet to conclusively identify any genus of dinosaur that did!) The details we do know about Dilophosaurus probably wouldnt make for a very good movie. For example, one specimen of D. wetherelli has an abscess on its humerus (arm bone), most likely the result of a disease process, and another specimen has a weirdly foreshortened left humerus, which may have been a birth defect or a reaction to environmental conditions 190 million years ago. Limping, groaning, feverish theropods dont exactly make for big box office, which may partly excuse Michael Crichtons (and Steven Spielbergs) flights of fancy!