Thurs., 1/15

1.Simile- From "Digging," by Seamus Heaney: "Between my finger and my thumb / The squat pen rests; snug as a gun."
Heaney uses "like" or "as" (in this case, "as") to compare his the grip he has on his pen to that of a gun. I believe he does this to hint at the potency of the pen being weapon-like, similar to a gun.

2. Figure of Speech- From "Digging": "Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds / Bends low, comes up twenty years away."
Of course, his father does not literally become twenty years older; Heaney uses non-literal language to stress the toll farming takes on one's body.

3. Conventional symbols- From "Digging": "Bends low, comes up twenty years away / Stooping in rhythm through potato drills,"
The book has a footnote for "drills:" small furrows in which seeds are shown. Perhaps unknown to the audience, Heaney is Irish, where the potato is a symbol that represents the country's prosperity and well-being. Without the potato, Ireland went into a deep depression in 1845.

4.Metaphor- From "Digging": "Between my finger and my thumb/ The squat pen rests / I'll dig with it."
Heaney describes his pen by making it act as his father's shovel, showing that the pen is his tool.

Blog Assignment

I liked the poem "God's Grandeur" by Gerard Hopkins. It has a lot of feeling and emotion, and it shows where Hopkins was at emotionally at that time in his life. He uses a lot of end rhyme, such as "toil, foil, oil, rod, God, things, springs" and so forth. I feel that this rhyme keeps the reader going, and his repetetiveness wasn't too much when I read it. Well, maybe a little bit, but it still works. The tone of this poem is frustration, maybe even a touch of resentment in the first stanza. The second stanza's tone is a bit more of "looking forward" at what God is actually doing, setting in the west and rising as the Holy Ghost at sunrise. The speaker could be Hopkins, but I picture any man in that state would be able to write a poem like this. He is identifying with the common man, asking questions like "Why do men then now not reck his rod?", showing the same beliefs and questions that many others have.(It says at the bottom of the page that reck is to reckon, like heed his punishment.) He uses a lot of universal symbols, such as "wearing man's smudge", "shares man's smell", and "all is seared with trade". Even talking about the sunset and sunrise is universal. There is a metaphor, or maybe figure of speech, but I don't exactly know what he means. "It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil crushed." Oil can't literally be crushed, it can be pressed, but not crushed from greatness. So it is a figure of speech about how God's greatness, in man's eye, is being crushed, or pressed, like oil. All in all, an angsty poem from a thirty three year old Catholic.

Thursday Blog Assignment

In the poem "Digging" by Seamus Heaney it seems that the pen is both symbol and metaphor. The pen is symbolic of the tools used by the speaker's Irish forefathers. The writer uses his pen in the same way that his father used his spade to dig for the "good turf." Of the three types of symbols mentioned in the introduction I think the pen fits best in the conventional category. A pen itself is a contrivance and therefore would not be a universal symbol. A pen is not "drawn from the natural world that every culture experiences." For instance, if you presented a pen to an aboriginal culture they probably would not regard it as a tool of great importance. However, in western thought the pen is "mightier than the sword" and as the speaker of this poem asserts, as useful as the spade. For us the pen carries connotations of power and influence. The pen is not merely a literary symbol specific to this poem, because in Western culture the pen is understood to have a specific meaning as a source of useful creation. The pen is also a metaphor in that the speaker is comparing the usefulness of the pen to the usefulness of the spade. In the same way that an irish farmer would harvest peat and potatoes from the soil, a writer can harvest insight and influence from the blank page.

In the poem "Acquainted with the Night" by Robert Frost there is an interesting rhyme scheme. The four, three line stanzas carry a structured rhyme scheme. The stanzas can be broken down like this: ABA BCB CDC DAD and finally the rhyming couplet of AA. What's different about this scheme is how one rhyme is carried from the preceding stanza and then disappears in the following stanza. This scheme serves to tie the stanzas together in a rather seamless way. This scheme helps maintain a steady rhythm. I think this poem is impressive because of how Frost uses rhyme scheme to strengthen the poem, rather than distract from it's content.

Oh Yea

Holler

Welcome

Welcome! This is my Textual Analysis Blog! ...There's not much to see...YET!

Amber

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Blog Number One

Welcome to the blog. For those of you who don't know me, my name is Nick. I'm very important and my dorm smells of rich... mahogany.

Welcome--please read

Hey welcome to the textual analysis course blog. We will use this blog as a sort of grand central station of the course (along with the course BB site). I will make you all "authors" on this space, so you can post to it, post comments, etc.

You will all create your own blogs for the reading blog element of the course. Your own blogs will be where you "publish" posts on the readings. Sometimes I will specify what to write about, and other times this will be up to you. All of your blogs will be linked to this one. I may "republish" some of your posts to this space to highlight interesting ones.

Obviously this is not your private journal entry type of writing. It's "out there" at least to each other. You can elect to not make your blog available to anyone outside of myself and the class. This blog will be open to the public for reading and commenting, but only we will have authorial rights to create posts.

The blog reading posts must be on your blogs before the class the reading is assigned for. Commenting can happen a bit more leisurely, but keep in mind that too long a lag time may result in unread comments. Feel free to embed videos and post images that you think relate to the texts. I ask that you not post images, messages, and videos that are not related to the course content.

I look forward to our discourse.

Dr R