Thursday, March 19, 2020
My Papas Waltz essays
My Papa's Waltz essays Confessional in spirit, viewing madness as a transforming force, Theodore Roethke's poetry explores the depths of the self, attempting to achieve wholeness through destruction. His verse is finely-crafted, full of stunning images and chant-like rhythms, which echo the poetry of T. S. Eliot and William Butler Yeats. From his Modernist masters, along with others such as Gerald Manley Hopkins, Roethke learned to find objects in nature which crystallized his poetic emotions. He drew upon his early childhood in Michigan, where his father owned one of the largest and most beautiful greenhouses in the state thus his work is rich in natural imagery of the garden. The luxuriant plant life of his father's greenhouses symbolized for Roethke both abundant life and death often the wet soil and the curling garden slugs became associated with decay and loss of self, while flowers could spark a mystical sense of oneness in the poet. At the center of Roethke's universe as well as his garden was h is father, a rough and stern man of Prussian descent who often grew irate at his son's delicate nature. The death of the father engendered enormous guilt in his teenage son, and the shadow of the father loomed over Roethke as he experienced nervous breakdowns, perhaps courting madness in attempts to exorcise his inner demons. The aloof and cold father, whose love was never expressed openly, created in the young poet feelings of inadequacy, as well as contradictory desires to reconcile with the father and to flee his burdening memory. Roethke's "My Papa's Waltz" captures in dramatic fashion his relationship to his father. In the poem, whiskey has loosened Otto Roethke's stern demeanor, demolishing his habitual aloofness and moral severity. Thus the poem describes an exhilarating, as well as frightening, moment of union with the father, who has become a drunken whirlwind in the kitchen. Roethke's poetic style captures the movement of the dance, as ...
Tuesday, March 3, 2020
The Phonogram WH
The Phonogram WH The Phonogram WH The Phonogram WH By Maeve Maddox A reader commenting on Wile vs While wrote: Modern speakers and writers have a problem with W words such as while and wile (another example: whale, wale, and wail) because there is no longer a distinction made between the way wh and w are pronounced. Not all American speakers distinguish between the sounds of whine and wine, but many still do. There are advantages to teaching the distinction, even in regions where the difference has been lost in the local dialect. Wh represents the sound one makes when blowing out a candle: [wh]. The number of English words that begin with wh is not large, and even speakers who distinguish between the initial sounds of Wales and whales do not pronounce wh as [wh] in every word that begins with the wh spelling. For speakers of dialects that still distinguish between the pronunciation of which and witch, the following words begin with the aspirated sound [wh]: whack whale wharf what wheat wheel wheeze when where whet whether which whiff Whig while whim whimper whip whirl whisk whisker whisky whisper whit white whoop why In the following words, the spelling wh represents the sound [h]. who whom whole whose wholly whore What linguists call the ââ¬Å"wine-whine mergerâ⬠is no doubt destined to prevail in the United States. Nevertheless, teaching the aspirated sound of wh is an aid to spelling mastery. Want to improve your English in five minutes a day? Get a subscription and start receiving our writing tips and exercises daily! Keep learning! Browse the Spelling category, check our popular posts, or choose a related post below:12 Types of LanguageWhat is Dative Case?50 Plain-Language Substitutions for Wordy Phrases
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