Read and Analyze Poem, Example: “My Heart Leaps Up”

Read and Analyze Poem.

Example: “My Heart Leaps Up”

My Heart Leaps Up

My heart leaps up when I behold
A rainbow in the sky
So was it when my life began
So is it now I am a man
So be it when I shall grow old,
Or let me die!
The Child is father of the Man
And I could wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety.

Poem Analysis

1.   Paraphrase

        The poem of “My heart leaps up when I behold”, written by William Wordsworth. The poem was written in 1802, but wasn’t published until 1807. Wordsworth’s poetry was greatly influenced by nature as he grew older, principally formed by his surroundings as he lived in England’s Lake District for many years. The speaker describes his connection to nature, expressing nature as a constant factor throughout the stages of life: child, man, and elderly. The true extent of the importance of nature is revealed that he would rather die than to live without nature.

        The poet says that his heart leaps up when he sees a rainbow in the sky. It was the beginning of his life, and now he’s well grown up. He knows that he will grow old and finally die, too. As the child (past) is father (future) of the man (present), the poet wishes his days to be bound to each period (past, present and future) by natural piety, that is, natural blessing of divinely power.

        The distinction of Wordsworth lies in the fact that to him Nature was not mere physical loneliness, but a revelation of God. He worshiped nature. He saw in all natural objects the indwelling spirit of Supreme Being. To him he varied forms and phenomena were nothing but manifestation of the divine.  He realized that to love nature is to Man who is part and parcel of the nature. Nature is the great teacher and healer. In the first two line of the poem, the poet feels his heart leaps up at the sight of a rainbow in the sky. The nature has produced a good effect on the poetic mind of Wordsworth. The poet has been turned to the skepticism of life because of the spectrum of the rainbow.

        In the third, fourth and fifth lines, he has found natural continuation of life – child, man and old man. In the fifth line, there is speculation (guess) of the break in the continuation. Death is inevitable to end the beautiful period of life.

The seventh line is basically the main theme of the poem. The widely accepted proverb, “The Child is the Father of Man” has to tell us a lot. It says that the present is the outcome of the past. So naturally the future will be the outcome of the past. The last two lines conclude the argument. The poet, therefore, concludes wishing that his days should be bound to each period of life by natural way with divinely pleasure.

2.   RHYME & RHYTM

Ø  It is blank verse poetry

Ø  Rhythm : Iambic tetrameter

Ø  Rhyme scheme:

My heart leaps up when I behold        a
    A rainbow in the sky                  b
So was it when my life began            c
    So is it now I am a man                       c
So be it when I shall grow old,            a
    Or let me die!                                b
The Child is father of the Man           c
And I could wish my days to be         d
Bound each to each by natural piety.   d

3.  Figurative Language

Ø  Personification

My Heart Leaps up

In reality, Heart cannot leaps but here it expresses a great joy upon the sight of the rainbow.

Ø  Extended metaphor

A rainbow in the sky:
So it was when my life began;
So it is not that I am a man;
So be it when I shall grow old,
Or let me die!” (|| 2-6)

To express that life is not worth living without a connection to nature

Ø  Paradox

The Child is father of the Man

The poet has expressed his opinion about the natural growth of a human being in which a child always develops into man. A man can never transform into child

4.    Symbols and Imagery

Ø  Symbols

−      Behold

Represents to see or observe something, not to hold it.

−      Rainbow

Represents to the excitement in life

−      Natural piety

Represent to the religion that is natural, or not forced. 

Ø  Imagery

−      Natural imagery

My heart leaps up when I behold
A rainbow in the sky

        The usage of this image is used to express the beauty that nature has to offer. The poet uses this image to express that he was born into a world of beauty and that in order to make life worth living, people must embrace nature and the beauty within it.

−      Age imagery

So was it when my life began
So is it now I am a man
So be it when I shall grow old, 

       This poem covers the range of human life, from childhood, to adulthood, to old age and death. It stresses the influence of childhood throughout life, not just until one "matures." The most important part of that childhood influence, it is the unbridled joy that a child finds in the natural world.

5.  Subject Matter

This poem covers the range of human life, from childhood, to adulthood, to old age and death.

6.  Theme

The theme of this poem is about the nature of life

7.  Reason

This poem is expressing nature as a constant factor throughout the stages of life : child, man, and elderly. The true extent of the importance of nature is revealed that he would rather die than to live without nature.

8.  Enjambment.

        In poetry, when one line ends without a pause and continues into the next line for its meaning. This is also called a run-on line. The transition between the first two lines of Wordsworth’s poem "My Heart Leaps Up" demonstrates enjambment

My heart leaps up when I behold

A rainbow in the sky

Reading Novel.

Reading Novel.

A.    The Definition of Novel   

A novel is a fictional piece of prose usually written in a narrative style. Novels tell stories, which are typically defined as a series of events described in a sequence. The novel has been a part of human culture for over a thousand years, although its origins are somewhat debated. Regardless of how it began, the novel has risen to prominence and remained one of the most popular and treasured examples of human culture and writing. (by Jessica Ellis, http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-a-novel.htm)

As a prose, novel can be defined as a fiction of a certain extent as over 50,000 words. (by Abel Chevalley,

http://www.nvcc.edu/home/ataormina/novels/history/define.htm)

Novel is also fictitious tale or narrative, professing to be conformed to real life; esp., one intended to exhibit the operation of the passions, and particularly of love.

(http://www.brainyquote.com/words/no/novel194905.html)

Maeve Maddox said that the novel, a long fictional narrative that can be from 60,000-100,000 words. For some authors 100,000 words are not enough. (http://www.dailywritingtips.com/a-novel-is-fiction/)

At last, novel is also a form of prose that has a range of 2,000-10,000 words. Unlike shortstory that deals with major events, it deals with the elaborate sense of a literary work containing both major and minor events that could be found in any literary work. (http://www.enotes.com/virgins-make/q-and-a/what-difference-between-short-story-novel-thank-3675)

B.     KINDS OF NOVEL

1.      Allegory

The surface story, while a good read in itself, is but a means to an end of a deeper meaning. This is common in religious stories because earthly concerns are a distorted reflection of heavenly concerns. Much concerns the trials of journeying.

Example: Pilgrim's Progress (1678) by John Bunyan.

2.      Characters

These are the actors who form, who must do something or something else, and relate to the others. It is through characters that a novel moves on. Characters may be given different levels of credibility, perhaps the lowest in comic novels and the most in in depth psychological moves.

3.      Comic novels

These are about people caught in situations which draw out their own absurdities. The situation may be absurd or the people themselves. Comic novels can be cruel, and also have an overall pessimistic view of life. The world is exposed as bizarre and irrationality is emphasized. People are self-obsessed, or follow drives that seem beyond rational control. The worlds portrayed lack depth.

Example: Vanity Fair (1848) by William Makepeace Thackeray.

4.      Education

A character engages with a series of predicaments and learns something about him or herself. The character may start as challenging the system, and may come to conform, or the passage is the other way around. The character may start young, and through growing up progress is followed. Life can be presented as very complex through which the growing and self-educating process takes place.

5.      Epistolary

These are in the form of letters or emails to and from people. If this is all it is, it can be a rather restrictive format, and to get the full sense of place the letters or emails would have to be long, contrived and somewhat unconvincing. There is psychological potential. Older times when middle class people wrote letters to each other in good English might make better novels, although letters took a while to arrive. Another alternative to this is novel in the form of diaries.

Example: Pamela (1740) and Clarissa (1748) by Samuel Richardson.

6.      Feminist

Boundaries are challenged in the ordered male world. The categorizing of male and female as binary opposites is undermined, particularly the subordinate female. Alternatively women's consciousness is highlighted within the male dominated world, often a subculture within it, or men too challenge the given power structures that invade everything from decision making to relationships.

Example: A Room of One's Own (1931) by Virginia Woolf

7.      Gothic

This utopian related form of novel is often set in the past and perhaps in some far away land of the trees, like Transylvania! The place of dilemma is not the location but in the mind, however. The point about the fantastical world is not to seek perfection but to show the fallacy of seeking perfection (e.g. everlasting life) or the evil involved in seeking it immorally. These often use Christian iconography to actually support the general Christian viewpoint from the viewpoint of the other side.

8.      Ironic

It is the difference between how things seem and how they really exist. Often this is the expression of views to those intended or otherwise existing, and through expressing them creates the real meaning or situation desired. It is usually done through creating absurd or unbelievable narration. However, irony can be located in the difference between characters' perspectives (situational) showing that one view is far from the truth or indeed between their limited perspective and the reader's greater awareness looking down upon everything (dramatic). Satire is part of irony, as is the comic novel.

Example: Gulliver's Travels (1726) by Jonathan Swift.

9.      Magic realism

Events usually are bizarre and even supernatural or mythical. Rationality is undermined for the purpose or examining what may be more real than the rational. The Western tradition is parodied as a counter to its cultural imperialism and therefore local third world ways of thinking are presented. There is alternatively a Western (once Eastern European) critique of authority and power, making events produced bizarre. Alternatively other methods challenge the ordered world though distorting the plot, or the narration is made strange, or the mind has a high place alongside geographical locations, or the novel discusses fiction itself 9or a combination of these).

Example: Midnight's Children (1981) by Salman Rushdie.

10.  Narrative structure

There needs to be a scene set for action to take place within. The action has to be coherent, so that one thing leads to another. The characters carry out the action, and they need introducing, and they need to interrelate. The narrative is that underlying structure which runs the story, arranging the elements, driving the reader through the book. Time is dealt with, usually compressed and unevenly, and the predicament gives the plot. The plot is the narrative manifested in the prediction thrown up and resolved. The narrative varies in intensity and level of dominance, usually becoming the most imposing towards the end as the story comes towards its closure.

11.  Narration

This can take place from different points of view. The most neutral, most hidden approach, is the third person, with the least necessary "intrusion" to describe and present the narrative. This narrator is like God, all knowing and all seeing, but only revealing so much as necessary so that the story's life-world has its freedom and independence.

12.  Naturalism

Influenced by Darwin, this is a form of realism which stresses environment, the family line (and advantages/ disadvantages) and something of a deterministic outcome.

13.  Picaresque

A set up and denial of the romance, particularly a journey in search of an ideal, and shows the characters to be foolish and in fact involved in no such thing other than acting their predicaments as they prove too powerful or complex to resolve.

Example: Don Quixote (1605-1615) by Cervantes; Tristram Shandy by Henry Fielding.

14.  Postmodern

A general category for  those novels which deny realism, which are post-structural in language, whose devices draw attention to the novel as a novel. These novels are reflexive. They can show both the creativity and repetitive nature of life. Time and space is distorted, and characters can inhabit more than one world. Somewhere rules are broken and ordinary narration is disturbed.

Example: The French Lieutenant's Woman (1969) by John Fowles.

15.  Psychological

Either ordinary grammatical introspection can be used or a stream of consciousness. The idea is to present at least part of the novel from the mind at a cost of easy to be followed narrative. This may be incorporated into a more conventional narrative structure or may overtake it.

Example: Jayne Eyre (1847) by Charlotte Brontë; Portrait of a Lady (1881) by Henry James.

16.  Readerly

The text is simple to read, and readers consume it without having to engage in the process of word production. It is usually realist. It would stand in binary opposition to "writerly" except that readerly texts can be subjected to writerly analysis - thus undermining the structuralist binary opposition and giving a post-structuralist analysis.

Example: Concept in Barthes, R. (1975), S/Z, London: Jonathan Cape.

17.  Realism

Realistic novels are like looking glasses through which the reader sees an ordinary world operate. This produces a story to get lost into, because the only interest is in the characters as they work through the plot.

18.  Reflexive

The fact that here is a novel is highlighted by devices both written and presented, and this self-conscious, self referential, approach allows complexity to be better presented. If coherence of the story is a problem, then a reflexive form of narration may be suitable, or a quality of writing which disturbs the reader who would prefer a good lost-in-the-book run-through of the plot, impossible in the reflexive novel.

Example: The French Lieutenant's Woman (1969) by John Fowles.

19.  Romance

This form of novel goes beyond ordinary experience and social predicaments into make-believe.

 Example: Portrait of a Lady (1881) by Henry James; Wuthering Heights (1847) by Emily Brontë.

20.  Satire

A form of comic novel which intends, by lampooning, to be in fact constructive in its criticism because it wants things to be better. It's like saying, "If only people or institutions were more sensible or efficient then society would be improved."

Example: Nightmare Abbey (1818) by Thomas Love Peacock.

21.  Science fiction

A popular novel form which involves some utopian elements. The object is to reflect back on how we are now, as well as to dream on the possible future where life has more potential. Another object is to create an environment for moral discussion.

(http://www.change.freeuk.com/learning/concepts/noveltype.html)

C.     Elements of Novel

1.      Plot: a flow of events in a story. The plot has five parts to it, and these are:

a.      Exposition rising action

b.      Climax

c.       Falling action

d.      Resolution

2.      Setting

It refers to the place and time in which you set your story. It must be realistic to live so the reader can easily imagine.

3.      Characterization

The characters in novel are realistic and have full human attributes.

4.      Theme

This is the major idea or the motif of writing.

5.      Conflict

The problems of the story.

(http://www.writing-lovers.com/elements_of_a_novel.html)