I’m working on a humanities writing question and need a sample draft to help me study.
Pick one of the poems or stories from the Learning Resources and identify a key theme of the work. Using interpretative tools from the Learning Resources or Module introduction that refers to figurative language, carefully analyze and interpret your poem or story as an expression of this theme. Choose three specific quotes or lines from the piece of work and show how each exemplifies this theme through its use of literary language.
Make sure to use an interpretative tool that refers to figurative language for each (for example, metaphor, simile, hyperbole, imagery etc.) in your analysis. Underline or bold all of the interpretative tools in your post. “A BRIDE TO BE MARRIED”
1 Easily you move, easily your head,
2 And easily, as through leaves of an album, I’m led
3 Through the night’s delights and the day’s impressions,
4 Past tenement, river, upland, wood,
5 Though sombre the sixteen skies of Europe
6 And the Danube flood.
7 Looking and loving, our behaviours pass
8 Things of stone, of steel and of polished glass;
9 Lucky to Love the strategic railway,
10 The run-down farms where his looks are fed,
11 And in each policed unlucky city
12 Lucky his bed.
13 He from these lands of terrifying mottoes
14 Makes worlds as innocent as Beatrix Potter’s;
15 Through bankrupt countries where they mend the roads,
16 Along unending plains his will is,
17 Intent as a collector, to pursue
18 His greens and lilies.
19 Easy for him to find in your face
20 A pool of silence or a tower of grace,
21 To conjure a camera into a wishing-rose,
22 Simple to excite in the air from a glance
23 Horses, fountains, a side-drum, a trombone,
24 The cosmic dance.
25 Summoned by such a music from our time,
26 Such images to sight and audience come
27 As Vanity cannot dispel or bless,
28 Hunger and fear in their variations,
29 Grouped invalids watching movements of birds,
30 And single assassins,
31 Ten desperate million marching by,
32 Five feet, six feet, seven feet high,
33 Hitler and Mussolini in their wooing poses,
34 Churchill acknowledging the voters’ greeting,
35 Roosevelt at the microphone, van der Lubbe laughing,
36 And our first meeting.
37 But Love except at our proposal
38 Will do no trick at his disposal,
39 Without opinions of his own performs
40 The programme that we think of merit,
41 And through our private stuff must work
42 His public spirit.
43 Certain it became, while still incomplete,
44 There were prizes for which we would never compete:
45 A choice was killed by each childish illness,
46 The boiling tears amid the hot-house plants,
47 The rigid promise fractured in the garden,
48 And the long aunts.
49 While every day there bolted from the field
50 Desires to which we could not yield,
51 Fewer and clearer grew our plans,
52 Schemes for a life-time, sketches for a hatred,
53 And early among my interesting scrawls
54 Appeared your portrait.
55 You stand now before me, flesh and bone
56 That ghosts would like to make their own:
57 Beware them, look away, be deaf,
58 When rage would proffer her immediate pleasure
59 Or glory swap her fascinating rubbish
60 For your one treasure.
61 Be deaf, too, standing uncertain now,
62 A pine-tree shadow across your brow,
63 To what I hear and wish I did not,
64 The voice of Love saying lightly, brightly,
65 “Be Lubbe, be Hitler, but be my good,
66 Daily, nightly.”
67 Trees are shaken, mountains darken,
68 But the heart repeats, though we would not hearken:
69 “Yours the choice to whom the gods awarded
70 The language of learning, the language of love,
71 Crooked to move as a money-bug, as a cancer,
72 Or straight as a dove”.
November 1934
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