James Joyce

The character Maria in James Joyce’s “Clay” from Dubliners is a hard-working and good hearted woman in the story despite not living in the best circumstances. She is described as one of those people who everyone was “so fond of.” Maria did not have any real family of her own and worked in a laundry not really making that much money. The closest she has to family are two boys whom she nursed and raised as her own when she was younger named Alphy and Joe. The two boys saw her as family and thought of her like their own mother. Joe would say, “Mamma is mamma but Maria is my proper mother.” The effect that Maria had on these boys was great. In fact, it can be seen throughout the story that she had a warm and loving effect on basically everyone that she encountered. She had grown very close to the boys and it was obvious that she was sad that they no longer talked.

“She could not help thinking what a pity it was Alphy and Joe were not speaking. They were always falling out now but when they were boys together they used to be the best of friends: but such was life.”

Maria is kind hearted and always thinking about others even though she did not have that much money. Before a party she is going to, she stops by a cake shop and gets penny cakes for all of the children and then goes to a special store to get plum cakes for all of the adults. The plum cakes are “two-and-four” which is probably pricey for her. On the way to party on the train, a nice older man makes conversation with her. It makes her feel good to have someone pay attention to her because none of the young men on the train even noticed her. This is a sign that Maria is getting older and no longer attracts people at first glance. When she arrives at the party, she realizes that she has left the plum cake on the train and it deeply frustrated by this.

“At the thought of the failure of her little surprise and of the two and fourpence she had thrown away for nothing she nearly cried outright.”

Maria becomes extremely upset by the loss of the cakes and loss of the money. This lets us know that Maria does not buy stuff like that very often and that money that she spent is hard to come by. Maria’s attachment to both Joey and Alphy can be seen again when she asks Joe about Alphy. It hurts her to see that they are not talking any more since she is like a mother to them.

“Maria thought she would put in a good word for Alphy. But Joe cried that God might strike him stone dead if ever he spoke word to his brother again.”

Maria quickly makes her peace with Joe and drops the subject. She does not want anyone to have a bad time at the party. At the end of the party, she plays a game with the children. She is blind folded and asked to pick an object. At first she feels a “soft wet substance” but that object is thrown out because Mrs. Donnelly thought it was inappropriate. From the title of the story, we can know that this substance was clay from the garden. The next object she felt was a prayer-book. The significance of the game was that the object that was picked would tell your future. Maria picking the clay first probably shows that she will soon be in the clay and death is not far away from her. Maria is getting old and her life described in this story seems to be complete and satisfactory. Maria touched everyone around her even though she did have many possessions or family. She still had a great effect on those around her. The final scene shows the effect she has had on Joe when he is left crying after she sings.

“He said that there was no time like the long ago and no music for him like poor old Balfe.”

I really admire Maria’s good heart and hard working manner. It shows in “Clay” that if you work hard and are good to other people, you do not have to have much in life to still have everything that you will ever need.

T.S. Eliot

“Journey of the Magi” by T.S. Eliot is interesting because it tells the story of the wisemen going to visit the new baby Jesus in a different light than most are used to hearing it. The story comes from the view of one of the wisemen and talks about many of the difficulties and doubts they face along the journey.

Along the way, their journey is “in the worst time of year” and in the “dead of winter.” The camels are “sore-footed” and “galled.” The journey that the wiseman is talking about doesn’t seem to be very pleasant at all. Next, the wiseman seems to be remembering the days before their journey.

“There were times we regretted
The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,
And the silken girls bringing sherbet.” (ln 8-10)

The journey seems so rough now and he can’t even really see what the real purpose of his journey is. He is tempted by his thoughts to turn back and continue with his life before. He then describes more difficulties that they face along the way causing him to question the reason for this journey. They face fires going out, lack of shelters, hostile cities, unfriendly people, and dirty and overpriced villages. None of it really seems worth it at the time. At the end of the night each night, voices would sing in their ears, “This was all folly.” This stanza portrays the negative tone of the wiseman and how difficult the journey must have been. Each night voices would tell them that all of it was a waste of time. Even through all of this discouragement, they still continued on because something in the back of their heads told them that it was right.

In the next stanza, they have arrived in Bethlehem presumably. They arrived in the “temperate valley, wet below the snow line, smelling of vegetation.” The arrival of warmer weather represents new life and a brighter future from then on. At the end of the stanza, he describes his arrival as “not as moment too soon” and the place as “satisfactory.” This seems to be in a sarcastic tone because the place he probably found the newborn Jesus was not satisfactory in his taste. Once he has finally arrived, he makes the point that he does not regret the journey at all. Once he has seen the birth of Jesus, he knows that it was all worth it. He makes an interesting statement on line 35.

“This: were we led all that way for
Birth of Death? There was Birth, certainly
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought thy were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.” (ln 35-39)

This can be confusing because here Eliot feels Death as he sees Jesus being born, but most would think he should feel life. He probably feels death because with the birth of Jesus, he has thrown out all of his old beliefs and he is no longer the person he once was. The old him has died and he must leave all of that behind. He feels this inside of him. When the wisemen return home, the wiseman describes that he is no longer at ease.

“But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.” (ln 41-43)

He is no longer satisfied with his old life and would rather experience death than go back to his old life.

William Butler Yeats

Yeat’s “The Wild Swans at Coole” is a very nostalgic stroll down memory lane for a man who is coming to terms with his age. The poem opens up as a nice autumn evening stroll near a pond. The speaker tells us that it is a clear, dry night; the water is so calm that the mirror image of the sky reflects off of it. This description paints quite the picture for the reader’s mind. The speaker counts “nine-and-fifty” swans on the pond.

“The nineteenth autumn has come upon me
Since I first made my count;
I saw, before I had well finished,
All suddenly mount
And scatter wheeling in great broken rings
Upon their clamorous wings.”

After counting the swans, he thinks back nineteen years ago to when he first attempted to count them. He did not get a count back then, because they abruptly took off “upon their clamorous wings.” He is thinking to himself, “Wow, has it really been nineteen years?” and he begins to think about the swans.

“Unwearied still, lover by lover,
They paddle in the cold
Companionable streams or climb the air;
Their hearts have not grown old;”

He looks at these swans as if they too are aging with him, but when he looks closer, they haven’t changed. They are still the same swans that were here nineteen years ago when he first attempted to count them. He thinks to himself, “How can this be? I have grown so much older, but the swans, with their love for one another, stay forever young. The speaker then imagines what the future holds for him and his beloved swans. Will he see them the next year or will they leave to grace another lake and nest and produce more swans? He wonders if he will come back the following year “To find that they have flown away?” The poem leaves us on a question to ponder.

The poem reminds me a lot of a persons mid-life crisis. Here we have this guy, who can’t accept the fact that his relationship with these swans is nineteen years old and he stands in shock. He doesn’t know what lay ahead in his journey, and to many people that becomes a haunting thought.

Rupert Brooke

Rupert Brooke’s “The Soldier” embodies everything that it means to be a soldier of one’s country. The poem describes the last wishes of a soldier who is either going off to war or is in war. The soldier wants to be remembered as a loyal patriot of his country, he does not want anyone to mourn his death.

"If I should die, think only this of me:
That there’s some corner of a foreign field
That is forever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;"

He wants everyone to know that where ever he may die, he died as an Englishman, a loyal soldier to the motherland. He has such high regard for England that where ever he may die, not only will that spot be forever England, but the soil will be made richer because it was nourished with an Englishman.

I think this poem must have been a very emotional poem to have been read by English families of soldiers at war in World War I. The first war where so many families lost loved ones and so many families were without the men for so long. Brooke goes on to explain about the things that make this soldier who he is

"A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,
A body of England’s, breathing English air,
Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home."

This describes the pleasures that England has given the soldier, the fresh countryside full of flowers and streams and crisp air; but it also reminds the readers of the letter what the soldier’s cause for fighting is, he wants to preserve these great things for the next generation. He was able to take his England for granted, but now it is time to fight for what he has come to take for granted so that others may enjoy it as well.

The poem ends with a set of emotionally charged lines.

"Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given,
Her sights and sound; dreams happy as her day;
And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,
In hearts at peace, under an English heaven."

He is pouring out all the experiences that English has so kindly given him, and now rests at peace under an English heaven. This poem immortalizes what it is to be a true English soldier.

Gerard Manley Hopkins

Hopkin’s “Pied Beauty” is a colorful sonnet containing the beautiful imagery of God’s creation. The sonnet starts out by paying tribute to God for forming such things for us to enjoy.

“For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut falls; finches wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced---fold, fallow, and plough;”

He pays tribute for the sky “of coupled-colour” which I would think means white and blue. He pairs on the same line with the sky, the brinded cow, which is a cow with dark patches. This is similar to the sky with light patches of clouds. He mentions the colorful speckles of a trout. The “rose-moles all in stipple” I thought was a perfect way to describe the markings of a trout, very colorful and dotted all over. The “firecoal chesnut” also gives a great image of a bright orange chesnut falling through the air. When I read finches wings I had to look them up on google to see what he meant, and I must say, the golden finch has some of the prettiest wings I have seen on a bird, absolutely gorgeous. The image that was most clear for me though is the “Landscape plotted and pieced”, this was very easy to imagine because that is all I look at when I am in an airplane, I always choose the window seat and love to watch the terrain change from farm to farm. When you look down you see deep greens for a ripe harvest or a brown for freshly plowed it makes quite the quilt pattern.

Hopkin’s then goes on to praise all the things that are beautiful that he left out, “counter, original, spare, strange” he names them all. If you notice the word grouping in the previous selection, his word grouping is very nice in the sonnet, when read aloud you will notice that the sharp sounding words are in a line and then you have smooth sounds grouped together, its as pleasing to the ears as it is to the mind.

When I read this sonnet I can just envision a beautiful day in the country, no city for miles, just immersing myself in the colors of nature. This poem just makes you want to go outside and enjoy a bright summer day in the countryside.

Thomas Hardy

“The Darkling Thrush” seems to be another gloomy work of art from Hardy, where the main character seems to have lost all hope in this world and then, like a light house, a beam of hope comes toward him through the dark.

“I leant upon a coppice gate
When Frost was spectre-gray,
And Winter’s dregs made desolate
The weakening eye of day.”

The beginning of this poem makes you feel tired and worn out to be honest. We open with the man in the poem leaning on a gate observing how bleak his surroundings have become and it seems as though he has given up and is just depressed at what he has been given. “When Frost was spectre-gray” makes the mood even more drab, he couldn’t just say gray it had to be a ghostly gray, a deathly gray. “The weakening eye of day” seems to be the sun making less and less of an impact on the earth the deeper into winter it gets. Studies show that depression is more common in the winter time due to lack of sunlight. So maybe as it is growing colder and dimmer, he is becoming more and more depressed.

“And all mankind that haunted nigh
Had sought their household fires.”

The plants are all dead or in hibernation, the bushes look like “strings of broken lyres” and all the sane people are inside getting warm by the fire, why does this guy sit outside and wallow in his own misery? The entire poem gives me a dull and sorrowful mood, until we get to line 17, oh line 17, you couldn’t have come at a better time.

“At once a voice arose among
The bleak twigs overhead
In a full-hearted evensong
Of Joy illimited;
An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,
In blast-beruffled plume,
Had chosen thus to fling his soul
Upon the growing gloom.”

The first line above takes the reader from a monotonous sad poem to shouting out and proclaiming “At once a voice arose”, finally something upbeat. We come to find that a thrush has began to sing and bring hope to such a dreary day. Like a wave of light to break the dark plane. The man is confused, he doesn’t understand what the cause for all of this happy song is, doesn’t the thrush see how horrible the weather is? Can he just let it be?

“So little cause for carolings
Of such ecstatic sound
…
Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew
And I was unaware.”

The man questions the thresh’s jubilant song. He looks at his surroundings again and then asks himself if maybe the thresh knows something that he doesn’t know that might be cause for jubilation. I think Hardy is trying to end the poem with some irony, here is this horrible day and then enters the thrush to sing a joyful song and brighten it all up. For this man, the thrush could be too late, or it could be just what he needed to turn his frown upside down.

John Stuart Mill

John Stuart Mill did not follow the norm of his time. Men were thought to be over their wives and own them in a sense. Mill had very different views from this and his views were even considered radical at this time.

“Mill advocated sexual equality, the right to divorce, universal suffrage, free speech, and proportional representation.”

All this sounds familiar to what we know today, but back then, many of these ideas were unheard of and people did not dare speak of them.

On March 6^th, 1851, after his marriage to Harriet Taylor, he wrote “Statement Repudiating the Rights of Husbands.” During that time, when a woman married, she entered into a state called coverture meaning that she was added into the legal personhood of her husband. She could not sign legal contracts or own her property. She was her husband’s property. Mill did not agree with this law. He wanted his wife to have the same privileges that he have and be his equal. He wanted more of a partnership and commitment with her rather than he basically own the rights to her.

“Statement Repudiating the Rights of Husbands” is a document which he wrote renouncing his rights as a husband under British law. He did not believe in them and therefore did not want them to have to apply to him. In this document, he states,

“the whole character of the marriage relation as constituted by law being such as both she and I entirely and conscientiously disapprove.”

In other words, both he and Harriet disapproved of the law giving the husband power so it was his duty to fix that and make his wife happy. The reason he gives for disapproving the law is that it gives one of the parties in the contract “legal power and control” over the other. The writing is simply a protest to the existing law of marriage because he feels people should know his feelings about it. In the last part of the document, he says that Harriet should have exactly the same rights that she had before she was even married at all.

“I declare it to be my will and intention, and the condition of the engagement between us, that she retains in all respects whatever the same absolute freedom of action, and freedom of disposal of herself and of all that does or may at any time belong to her, as if not such marriage had taken place.”

He wants her to act as if they had never gotten married. He does not want her to have to owe anything to him or feel like she is now owned by him. In his eyes, he loves her just how she is and he wants her to remain that way. The marriage did not gain him anymore rights, it just showed his love for her. I admire Mill for sticking up for what he believed in and not just going along with the rest of society. Sometimes that can be hard in life, but I have learned it is best to do what makes you happy and not just do what everyone thinks is the right thing to do.