Canadian Literature, when traced from when the first settlers arrived in Canada until today, has changed not only in its literary form but also in its aspirations. As one might expect from an immigrant community, the first literary forms were epistolary in nature, describing conditions an...

HomecomingNarrative voice plays an important role in conveying the idea of 'journey' in 'Homecoming' by poet Bruce Dawe. In this free-verse war poem, the idea of 'journey' extends itself to cover both the physical and emotional aspects of the subject matter of the poem. Repetition and word choice ...

A folk epic is a long narrative poem, which has distinct elements written by an unknown author. Those elements include telling of a complete story, the inclusion of magic versus reality and heroes that seem super-human, yet are mortal. There are seven in all and they all can be found in the Old Eng...

A folk epic is a long narrative poem, which has distinct elements written by an unknown author. Those elements include telling of a complete story, the inclusion of magic versus reality and heroes that seem super-human, yet are mortal. There are seven in all and they all can be found in the Old Eng...

THE FORMS OF POETRYPeter Abbs and John Richardson; 1990, Cambridge, CUPI was introduced to this book via its companion volume, The Forms of Narrative, which I was recommended by a teacher at my Phase One teaching practise school; I could just as easily have used this book for this exercise but I cho...

Robert Frost's "Home Burial" is a narrative poem that speaks of life's tragedies. Robert Frost's writing style is very straight-forward and direct. In "Home Burial" the setting appears to be the background of a tragedy that centers around the death of a child. It is important for the reader to recog...

Gilgamesh (A Critique) Gilgamesh is known as the first great heroic narrative of world literature. Scholars have found that the origins of Gilgamesh were written on tablets throughout the Middle East and in cuneiform. The history of the text is far from being fully understood, but it is believed...

Compare and Contrast Eavan Boland's use of narrative voice with the work of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Eavan's Boland's poetry, like Elizabeth Barrett Browning's 'Aurora Leigh', deals directly with the tensions between traditional definitions of woman and man, and the apparent dichotom...

Digging, by Seamus Heaney In this poem, Heaney seems to use his father's and his grandfather's digging into the the homeland ground as a comparison to his writing and development of his poetry. Heaney's father and grandfather use their shovels to work with the land, while Heaney ...

"The Ballad of Birmingham", written by Dudley Randall, is a poem that commemorates the bombing of a black church in Alabama in 1963, at the height of the civil rights movement. The poem is written in a traditional narrative style form of a ballad, though the subject matter is far from traditional. ...

Allegory 1. The representation of abstract ideas or principles by characters, figures, or events in narrative, dramatic, or pictorial form. 2. A story, picture, or play employing such representation. John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress and Herman Melville's Moby Dick are allegories....

Sophocles\'s Oedipus Rex fits Aristotle\'s conception of tragedy to a great extent. Aristotle defines a disaster as a play expressed through poetry that ends unhappily for a nobleman whose fate incites fear and pity in the audience. Oedipus Rex meets all of these requirements fully. In Poetics, Aris...

After evaluating my perception of The Last Night that She Lived, by Emily Dickinson. The message in this poem is we take life for granted and we don¡¯t appreciate it until we are threatened with losing it. Emily used what seems to me as free verse with no apparent rhyme but alliteration at time...

Gary Soto's "Mexican's Begin Jogging," explores an array of emotions twisting from desire to anxiety as the narrative unfolds into an inspiring tale of courage and freedom. It delves into the constant struggle to strive for something better in one man's race towards a new...

"Snake" is one of Lawrence's most famous poems. Although the poem seems to be about an encounter with a snake, the true theme of the poem is the conflict between emotional behavior and learned behavior. This conflict is displayed through setting and symbolism.The poem begins with a very narrative ...

My Last Duchess, by Robert Browning, is an example of a dramatic monologue. A dramatic monologue is a kind of narrative poem in which one character speaks to one or more listeners whose replies are not given in the poem. The Duke is speaking to an envoy about his first wife who is apparently dead. F...

The Metamorphosing World of Literary Criticism The critical view of any literary work is always subject to the societal vices of the time. Judgement of a piece of writing changes over time because new view points, set to different fields of experience, fixed by completely different historica...

Creation of Mood in "The Bull Moose"In his narrative poem, "The Bull Moose", the poet, Alden Nowlan, presents us with his portrait of a bull moose whose final journey takes him from his familiar mountain environment to the entrapment of a "pole-fenced pasture". It is within this setting that the mo...

'Not Waving But Drowning' by Stevie Smith explores the idea of isolation by being misunderstood by the people around you. The poet deepens the reader's appreciation of the theme by employing imagery, contrast and an ambiguous tone. In the first verse both physical and emotional ...

The Depths of Hurt in "Home Burial""Home Burial" is a long narrative poem told in Robert Frost's conversational, very free blank verse. This means that the general structure of the lines is unrhymed iambic pentameter -- the same meter that much of Shakespeare's work is written in -- which classicall...

Longfellow and his Poetry These are many great poets. Longfellow is one of the few poets that put together novel type works. He created some of the best poetry ever written. Longfellow's narrative poems, such as Evangeline, The song of Hiawatha, and The Courtship of Miles Standish, ...

War Poetry Comparison In this essay, I have decided to analyse two poems by the war poet Wilfred Owen, taken from his writings on the First World War and a poem by Jessie Pope. Both of Wilfred Owen's poems ('Dulce et Decorum Est' and 'Anthem for Doomed Youth') portray Owen's bitter feelings to...

GEOFFREY CHAUCER AND HIS EFFECT ON THE ENGLISH LANGUAGEGeoffrey Chaucer has been called the Father of the English language. He did for the English narrative what Shakespeare later did for drama. He was the first writer to use lines of poetry that had an appeal to those interested in nature and boo...

ROAD NOT TAKENEnglish 113B26 September 1999Choices are never easy- men face multitudes of them in their lifetime. Some decisions to these choices are clear while others are sometimes more difficult to effectuate. The poem "The Road Not Taken" by Robert Frost is a first person narrative tale of a mon...

G. Identify and discuss what, in your opinion, are the distinctive qualities of Patrick Kavanagh's poetry. In your answer you should support the points you make by reference to the poems by Kavanagh on your course. Kavanagh's poetry has a number of distinctive qualities, many of which I...