The Code Breaker

I saw…those who wanted nothing, achieved nothing, and lived with nothing in mind…and I thought life had to ultimately become, a pit of nothingness… a distortion of light…evil…so the sight of it left you licking scales… impurity from your sockets, gnawing at brick of un…happiness… to bleed…from your mind…then, this…it…they… happened…what? I am not exact... It could’ve been the death of my precious, loving father…not his donations…but a will to love it all for me…her…her…and her; my marriage to a husband so powerfully put together that he has no chose but…be…here…there…within…and no longer without ; the miscarriage of a baby I desperately…(BLANK)...there are no words, just feelings; emergency surgery to remove an organ…an organ…a vessel…and membrane…a member; or just the thought of God saying ‘I Love You’ as only he can… it happened in a real way and life was no longer just quilted pieces of nothingness…no…thing…ness..define it! I cannot…explain what has no words…grasp it..’s…formless body with my hands…it is too swift…I don’t know what am I to do with it... my life, this life…His Life…

Write about its success?...I think…I can…see success seeping inside warm honey success…the word of encouragement inside here…there…a general tale of wake…(in)…up…and reasons to see and believe in life…an exploration of…what can be…and…is…so good…

My mentor, one of the greatest women alive…celebrated a happy birthday…--Happy Birth...Day...too…you—but there was her cancer…her breast…my heart...days, I cried…she told, I cried…selfishly, I cried…she should’ve cried, I cried…If her, then…me…it could happen to me… a selfish me…but it could happen…I cried…we had been defeated…the gauntlet yet thrown… we (she, I , humanity) had been…had…had we…then, it…the unexplainable happened to remind…me, selfish me…she is alive…today…tomorrow…yesterday…we had broken the code…I pass it on…

Heaven/Hell

I have been reading portions of John Milton’s Paradise Lost, and battling boredom induced depression. I have been feeling ill, and my thoughts have become as complicated as my life as a teacher, a full-time graduate student, and a wife. I have begun to feel myself slipping into an unfamiliar consciousness. Breath by breath I have become someone I do not recognize. So, Milton and I began a journey to seek and find the image of me I am comfortable with calling me….

(Side note: It isn’t easy loving yourself and being unpleased with your circumstances at the same time)

Not too long after the journey began I read, “The mind is its own place, and in itself/Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven” (lines 254-255), and was stricken with a thought so simple I had no choice but to pause and ponder…A Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven? …Which am I doing?
Truthfully, I haven’t been able to come to a conclusion. Depending upon the time and the day, the answer is subject to change. And it is my involuntary submission to change, necessary or unnecessary, that shocks me. I am torn between being shocked that I am shocked by myself, and being shocked that I thought I couldn’t be shocked by myself. The world of thought and boredom…leads me to believe that the mind on Earth osculates back and forth from heaven and hell regardless of its actual location.

T.S. Eliot- The Waste Land IV. Death by Water

Death is a process of life; the end to a beginning for all. However, each death is not the same. Some suffer to transition from life to death. Others leave more quietly than they came. But the idea of suffering seems to be Eliot’s niche in poetry.

“A current under sea
Picked his bones in whispers. As he rose and fell” (1212, lines 315-317)

Water is a powerful force. We must have it to live, but with too much we are bound to die. Death by water is one the most painful deaths to experience, because of the process the body is put through. Your cells expand and burst from over saturation. Your lungs begin to fill quickly and air is pushed further away from your brain. The pressure begins to build as you reach to breathe nothing but water filled with oxygen you cannot use.

But Eliot’s death does not seem to be a literal expression of death, but a longing to die as age progresses. And a reminder of our fate.

“He passed the stages of his age and youth
Entering the whirlpool.
Gentile or Jew
O you who turn the wheel and look windward
Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.” (1212, lines 317-321)

They shall die, either at sea or somewhere. But their fate is sealed. Did they truly have a chance to live?

Gerard Manley Hopkins

I love Hopkins’ poem about waking in hell. The idea of a Heaven and Hell is spellbinding, and gives more attractive natures to the idea of being disowned by God and cast into hell. The darkness that covers him when he awakes is not just an external cover, but an indication of what he feels like on the inside.

“ I am gall, I am heartburn. God’s most deep decree
Bitter would have me taste: my taste was me;
Bones built in me, flesh filled, blood brimmed the curse.” (778, lines 9-11)

Suggests that he did not simply awake into hell, he was born there. His flesh and bone were built to suit the hellish heat by God alone. However, he woke up to find that he was still much better off than those who must experience hell away from God and Jesus. Is he suggesting that Earth is a form of hell? A temporary torment with the option of “saving” out through a redeemer? And if so, why would God create Earth to be a slight form of hell?

I don’t think I will ever know the answer to the latter question, but I can question and answer my own beliefs of heaven and hell. And Hopkins has helped get the ball rolling.

Bernard Shaw-Pygmalion

What does it mean to be you pretending to be someone else? Is it important for people to like you, or perceive you as something you are not? These are questions I asked myself while reading Shaw’s Pygmalion.

This play is wonderful because its message is timeless. Why do we have to give up ourselves to allow others to define us? It is a universal question, a theme that crosses borders and seas. Why would someone want to change another in order to identify with something that is not real?
I believe that it is a part of human nature to try to shape our surroundings to fit our comfort level. But I think Shaw wants us to see the brutal ideals that come from trying to shape others in a way that is unnatural to their individuality. I believe the Pygmalion is his commentary about the ills of trying to mold everyone from the same clay.

John Keats-Sonnet: When I have fears

When love and fear combine you find yourself reading When I have fears by John Keats. It is a wonderful poem about the things that matter most in life. It made me think about the things that matter most in my life. It seems a lot of the poems I have been reading recently have helped in the process, because so many of them have dealt with death. But Keats’ When I have fears make me wonder what my fears truly are.
When I behold upon the night’s starred face,

"Huge cloudy symbols of high romance,
And think that I may never live to trace
Their shadows with the magic hand of chance;” (425, lines 5-8)

The idea of not reaching my goals or the possibilities that are head frighten me as they do Keats in the lines before. What would I miss? Who would miss me? Would I have accomplished all that I possibly could?

It seems that chance is very important to Keats and his of idea of living life to its fullest. The idea of not having chance seems to be more frightening that opportunity. For me, not having the opportunity to explore or to conquer is what frightens me. I want to be able to accomplish all that I set out to before I leave this Earth.

But why is accomplishing much important to me? That is the question I think Keats would like for me to answer. I would simply answer, “I could have not lived to accomplish nothing at all.”

Robert Browning, Porphyria's Lover

The love of Elizabeth Barrett Browning did not faze Robert Browning when he wrote Porphyria’s Lover.

I found this poem engaging from the beginning. Love, a universal theme in poetry, was being turned around from the neck to see what was behind it. What it found was its behind and Browning’s uncanny wit. This poem is grotesquely beautiful in every sense. The elements of psychosis, love, and murder all bundled into a magnificent package. One feels compelled to read this murderous tale without flinching or condemnation.

Somehow, we experience the connection between the narrator and Porphyria.
“she put my arm around about her waist,
And made her smooth white shoulder bare,” (662, lines 16-17)

The love triangle begins, and the scent of her lovely “displaced yellow hair” reaches out to me. I want to touch her and caress below her waist. And as she offers herself to narrator as a sacrifice, I want to offer her my life in place of hers, but the narrator frightens me.
How could he believe that when she offered herself to him forever that she meant for him to take her life? Did love or passion possess him so, that he wanted to keep her forever in death? I believe Browning is showing how love can overtake a sane man and make him irrational.

“in one long yellow string I wound
Three times her little throat around,
And strangled her. No pain felt she;
I am quite sure she felt no pain.” (663, lines 39-42)

But did she feel pain? I was shocked. I wanted to cry. I thought the love affair between Porphyria, her lover, and I could be immortalized in some manner other than her death. If she felt no pain, I felt it for her. I wept for her return.

Samuel Coleridge, Constancy to an Ideal Object

I found Coleridge’s work to be engaging as if I were a character is his poems, or his poems were written as letters to me. The most fascinating poem that Coleridge wrote is Constancy to an Ideal Object because it left me wondering what objects are most enjoyable in life.
The speaker in Constancy to an Ideal Object seems to be a lover away from his love, tormented and pleased by the dreams of what his life will be. He seems frustrated with his persistent thoughts on a consistent topic and pines,
Since all that beat about in Nature’s Range
Or veer or vanish; why shouldst thou remain
The only constant in a world of change
Oh yearning Thought! That liv’st but in the brain?” (349).


He treats thought, with a capital T (line 4), as if it is a spirit that is formed in the mind, and as it grows, possesses the body. I believe Coleridge uses this device as a way to sublimely allow the reader to “feel” what the narrator is feeling. But how can thought be so powerful that it can possess your mind? I believe this question calls the reader to recall a time when a thought consumed them so that nothing else in life could surpass it. How was the reader able to move pass that point in their life? How did they conquer the thought?

I believe this is what Coleridge is asking his reader to do. He wants us to think about being overtaken by thought, and how that thought changed or affected our lives. I have had many thoughts that seemed untamable, a point the narrator has come to. Coleridge wants the reader to become empathetic with the narrator.

But why is it important for the reader to empathize with the narrator? If the reader doesn’t sympathize with the narrator when he says, “…Yet still thou haunt’st me; and thought well I see/She is not thou, and only thou art she…” (349) we would only think he was crazy, and not realize that it is what we think that defines who we are. Though our thoughts are not always reality, they can define what our reality becomes.

Industrialism

With every change in life there is something lost or removed. In the case of Industrialism, the innocence of pastures and farms, family and country were swept away with the motions of the locomotive. In their place, social freedom and awareness, economic gain and power, technology came and dominated. After reading many writers from the Industrial Era, it is assumed that most had suspicion of the locomotives good for mankind and country. Though, the days of family and extended family may have been dwarfed, I can find no reasonable alternative to the locomotive coming into the lives of humans.

The locomotive was a powerful force in moving my things forward, women’s rights being one that began to move with great speed. After factory work became available the idea of the “factory girl,” the immoral promiscuous female, became a popular symbol for working women. Women who earned a living, helped to raise the economic standing of a nation were somehow the enemy, because they were “undermining the family structure” (487). Industrialization was widening the economic gap between the rich and the poor, and as in any time of ‘war’, women chipped in the close the gap so their families could eat. In essence women were told they weren’t needed. Their responsibility to industrialism and their country was to supply children for work, which the women could not feed. This made some women begin to look at the double-sided crazy talk of being a woman. It also made many people notice the effects factory work had on children.

Though working conditions were not ideal for women, children, or men; it was work. And many people needed the work to survive the times they were in. As, we do now. Those who do not work, do not eat; or eat very well.

Oscar Wilde, The Decay of Lying

The line between truth and untruth can be blurred in such a way one would question if there are any truths at all. Wilde’s play, the Decay of Lying, defined lying in a way to make one question if truth is even worth knowing. Does truth have to define the existence of man? Or is man free enough to define his own existence based on what he believes?

These questions tackled my own ideas of truth and untruth. Raised a Christian, I have always been taught to the “morbid and unhealthy faculty of truth-telling” (834), and have allowed it guide my thoughts and actions. Trained as a writer, I have always been taught truth is priority, but embellishment sells; even if that embellishment crosses the line into a lie. Admittedly, I have told some lies. Some I thought were pretty good, but according to Wilde, I might as well have told the truth. My lies didn’t stretch the boundaries even. They weren’t so random and fabricated that they crossed the line of so unbelievable that someone else had no choice but to believe it was true. That is the craft of the writer. And it is the reader’s responsibility to enjoy.

In the play, Vivian expresses that “art never expresses anything but itself. It has an independent life, just as Thought has, and develops purely on its own lines.” (845) I believe this statement embodies how Wilde felt about art itself. I think he wanted writers to be more creative and expanded their minds beyond what they could touch, taste, smell, and/or hear. He implies that it is the writer’s responsibility to produce something that many initially seem unreal, but as time continues, and people buy into, it becomes truth to all.

A great example of the fiction turning into fact is man going outer space. It was once an untruth that is was possible, but someone believed it was so, and now man has been to the moon and back. We are to continue in the direction and explore ideas and styles no one has done before.

Lord Alfred Tennyson, Tears, Idle Tears

We all grow old, unless we prematurely pass into death. Our deaths are not a variable in our life, but an ever present constant. We pass the time given as best we can, until that day arrives and we can no longer continue. During that process we think. We think of our present, our future, but above all, we think of our past.

Our past is our connection to the person we think we are, and the person we would like to be. It solidifies our connection to what is just and truth. Our past can cause us to yearn for what we once had, or search for what we do not. No poem I have read as expressed these notions s vividly as Tennyson’s Tears, Idle Tears. Tears…, is a poem that provokes the reader to think about the process of aging in a way that embraces life’s accomplishments and end with dignity and longing. However, to get to the point of embracing one’s end a recollection of one’s past is needed, and this poem provides the necessary steps to insure a happy transition.

“Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean,
Tears from the depth of some divine despair
Rise in the heart, and gather to the eyes…” (597, lines 1-3)

I have never thought tears to be an idle element. It moves from Earth to human and back to Earth in a definite motion. But I do not think Tennyson wants us to believe that tears are idle in the sense or never moving or not actively being engaged. I believe he would like us to wonder the meaning behind our tears, why are they meaningless, or idle. That is where the recollection of the past comes in.

The narrator continues to rant about “the days that are no more” (597, lines 5, 10, 15, 20) and the “friends from the underworld” (597, line 7). All of the memories ride on the tide of the tear that finds its way to the narrator’s duct. But the tears do not move? Why? Why does the narrator not allow the tears to fall? I believe Tennyson wants to the reader to question why tears are the expression of internal turmoil. Tears do not cause friends to return or to flee. They cannot heal wounds or mend broken hearts. They cannot protect against death.

So, why do we need tears? I believe Tennyson is telling the reader we need tears to strengthen our ability to cope with the reality of life. Our tears do not compromise or strength. They are the vessels upon which tears move through our bodies.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Sonnet 32

Every lover needs to be exposed to Elizabeth Barrett Browning during their courtship experience. I wish I had been exposed to her explicit love poems before I wed. Her words, so vivid and rich, express all the feelings and emotions I felt during the time my husband began to woo me. It is as though Ms. Barrett Browning knowingly expressed my deepest cares for me, because she knew I would be unable to do so as lovingly as she was able to. For this, I express as great connection to her work. Especially, her Sonnet 32, because it expressed how there is no stronger feeling then that of love.

“The first time that the sun rose on thine oath
To love me, I looked forward to the moon
To slacken all those bonds which seemed too soon…” (531; lines 1-3)

Here, Barrett Browning is experiencing the world through the lens of love for the first time. In this world, consumed by raw emotion, all that is dark is cast away by the light love produces. In love, as with light, sickness cannot live; despair cannot grow. There is only enough room for love, the love that the two share for one another. I think this is an important aspect to pay attention to. The love between her and Robert Browning helped her escape her sick room, both mentally and physically. The sun that shines in line 1 is a metaphor for the sun that she had not seen for years being tucked away in her room. She was now free.

Though she was gaining a new sense of freedom from all that had imprisioned her, she was still captivated by the idea of being so withdrawn from the world. Would she have enough to offer Robert after being confined to her lounge chair for so long? Or is she too “out of tune” (531, line 7) to be a match for his lovely love? Is the love they share strong enough and/or worth giving up all that she would lose to be with him? Most people in the initial stages of love have asked themselves question similar to these, and I believe all can relate to her worry and her excitement.

Most people have even questioned if they deserve the love they feel.

“And, looking on myself, I seemed not one
For such man’s love!—more like an out-of tune
Worn viol, a good singer would be wroth” (531-532, lines 6-8)

But why does she question the love? Why can’t she just except that they belong together? Does their age difference mean that much to her? I believe Mrs. Browning suggests that love is a powerful force, which blinds the human of its capability to reason, and if looked at through too much haze could cause the heart to break and to hate. She was protecting herself from herself and the ills of a bad decision. But such is love. Ms. Browning could not have known what was ahead for her and her romance. She couldn’t have imagined that her life would be an example for many modern American women in love to follow. She helped the likes of Mariah Carey and Demi Moore feel comfortable in marrying men much younger than they are. Her example of courtship is a remarkable testimony to the power to love and to overcome.

The Bronte Sisters & The Governess

I love reading literature about women with fortitude and moxy, and the stories/letters written by the Bronte sisters did not lead me yearning. There bold convictions and straightforward letters were filled with such emotion and self sureness that was/is unexpected of Victorian women. I was so taken back by there vivid approach to telling their dislikes for being a governess, I wondered if the duality of their lives and “thoughts” were not, somewhat, dangerous on many levels.

In public, the typical governess appeared to a meek, attentive whipping girl for her subjects and mistress. She had no thought or existence outside of household commands. Her every move and thought was controlled by the needs of the house. Or were they? Was the governess so dutiful, that she lost her wit and being in order for employment? According to the Bronte sisters’ letters, a governess is a woman who does what she must to survive in public, and in private is the woman she wishes to be.

It comes as no surprise that governesses were verbally abused by their mistresses. Though, the governess’s job seemed imprisoning, she had a freedom not bestowed to the lady of the household, because she was not, in essence, a lady.

A lady would have never been able to speak to her master as the character Agnes Grey, from Anne Bronte’s Agnes Grey, did and live without being beaten. Only a woman fed up with unruly children, a mistress with too much time, and an unforgiving master would be bold enough to say, “Then, sir, you must call them [the children] yourself, if you please…” (563) after her master insisted she wrangle his unruly children in from the snow, and not care the consequence. The beauty in her statement, though polite, is that it is against all the rules given by Sarah Stickney Ellis, because, again those rules were for “ladies.” Governesses weren’t ladies, they were simply governesses and they, without knowing, were smudging away at the definitions that defined women in general. Could the blurred social ranking of the governess be one of the pillars for women’s liberation?

Now, let us take a moment to speculate what Agnes Grey would have said had she been a modern woman in the movie The Nanny Diaries. I believe her monologue would have been similar to this:

“Then, sir, you must call them [the children] yourself, if you please, for they won’t listen to me…for all I care, the brats can catch a hellish cold or suffer from pneumonia. Frankly, I quit!”

Frankly, I would quit too. And because of the hardship suffered by these strong, enterprising ladies I have the right to.

The Lady of Shalott- Alfred Tennyson

It seems after reading both the 1830 and the 1833 versions of the Lady of Shalott, we are introduced to conflicting versions of the same woman. The woman in the original version seems whimsical, unstable. The more determined, self-sufficient heroine is described in the 1833 version. As a modern woman, I can’t help but to identify with the lady in the 1833 version. In both versions she is described as, “…the fairy Lady of Shalott” (lines 35-36, 590 text; lines 26-27 e-text). In theatre, fairies are usually a representation of youth, ignorance, and emotional turbulence. Many were often seen as the cause or the raw element of trouble. It is not hard to wonder if Tennyson deliberately characterized the Lady of Shalott as a fairy to emphasize her “curse.” Though neither lady, in either version, knows her curse or who/what cursed her, the consequences of their curse seem to have implications for completely different implications for the role of women.

In the 1830 version it was not until the Lady of Shalott overheard “…two young lovers lately wed…” (line 70, 590) did she express any resentment of having only seen people or their shadows through her mirror. She had not been as touched by religion (the Abbott in line 55), death (the funeral in line 67), or nature (the moon in line 69) as she was by the love the two newly weds shared. Why is their love, or love itself, so frustrating? Had love inspired Tennyson so, that he knew it would be the only thing to stir curiosity in the Lady? Or is it love, particularly love for a man, Tennyson uses to showcase how women are bound to men? I believe the latter.
It would not be farfetched to say that Tennyson, like most writers or educated males, would have been well exposed to the Bible. It is in the Bible that the first woman, Eve, is cursed to desire her husband. Eve, being the lifeline and representation for all women, passes this curse to every woman child. The Lady of Shalott would not have been an exception to this rule. Tennyson eludes to this in lines 109-117

“She left the web, she left the loom,
She made three paces thro’ the room,
She saw the water-lily bloom,
She saw the helmet and the plume,
She look’d down to Camelot.
Out flew the web and floated wide;
The mirror cracked from side to side;
‘The curse is come upon me,” cried
The Lady of Shalott. (1830 version)

The modern woman in me wants to believe this is another ploy for man, Tennyson, to disenfranchise woman, The Lady of Shalott. My mind is even allowed to oblige this thought when it is Sir Lancelot, the Lady of Shalott’s desire, who gives the unknown damsel importance and meaning in death because, “…she has a lovely face...” (593, line 169) and it is his blessing for “…God in his mercy lend her grace…” (593, line 170). Is Tennyson suggesting that woman has no meaning until man gives it to her? It is hard to say…however, Tennyson would not have revised the poem in the manner he did in the 1833 version.

In the 1833 version, Tennyson empowered the Lady to speak for herself, even in death; an honor most women would not have been allowed in reality or fiction.
“The web was woven curiously,
The charm is broken utterly,
Draw near and fear not---this is I,
The Lady of Shalott.” (e-text)

The lady’s level of self-respect and self-awareness seem to leap off of the page. She has plotted her own destiny. Had Tennyson began to see women and their role as humans differently, or was he expressing a belief he couldn’t in 1830? I believe that the Lady of Shalott’s death had nothing to do with feminism or traditionalism.

Though the curse of love, stemming from Eve, has not been broken the right for women to speak for themselves is transitionally unleashed from 1830 to 1833. That is the beauty of these poems; the same outcomes with different implications on the liberty of women to be human. An idea a modern woman can feel confident in passing on. I’m not sure if this was Tennyson’s objective when producing the 1833 revision, but I feel confident that he was sending us all a message that: life and death has everything to do with free will.

Ozymandias-Percy Bysshe Shelley

Ozymandias is one of the better poems written by Shelley, because it is a vivid connection between the power and the weakness of people, and the might of nature.

By being introduced to the wreck and the ruined land first, Shelley gives the reader an opportunity to feel “despair” and hopelessness. The reader is not only able to read, but to see the “two vast trunkless legs of stone” (399, line2) and the “half sunk, shattered visage” lying in the sand. Those passages are a great use of imagery. Though one may have never travelled there, they understand the devastation. But why would the devastation and the “wreck” be an important aspect of the poem? I believe Shelley wants us to understand that our physical work is only a fleeting representation of power and success. We must find other means of showing and defining our greatness, if greatness is even important.

At the point we are formally introduced to Ozymandias, the “…King of Kings:” (399, line 10) we find that it is his likeness that is shattered upon the desert floor and his command for us to “look on” his works and “despair” seems like a plea for the reader to remember him. Ozymandias’ inscription even categorizes the reader as “ye, Mighty” (399, line 11). Ironically, the inscription would not have been meant to up lift the reader’s status to that of a royal, or even the king, but because the king’s statue lays in ruin the reference of “ye, Mighty” places the reader in the highest position.

But it seems that no position is as high as that of the sand, nature itself. It is the sand that was before the king and the statue. It is the sand that is present with the reader.

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away. (399, lines 12-14)

And as the passage suggests, it is the sand that will be after the reader. But why does Shelley give such importance to the sand, or to nature? It is my assumption that Shelley is suggesting that nature is the only true might in the world. Because of nature’s ability to change and remain, we are subject to its niceties and displeasures.

The reader is left to ponder the possibility of the world as they know it becoming an “antique land” (399, line 1) ruined and wrecked as that of Ozymandias.

So, we'll go no more a-roving- George Gordon, Lord Byron

From the start of this poem, I was captivated by every word, because I did not feel like an observer but a participant. The poem felt like a letter written to me. Gordon accomplishes this by beginning the poem as, “So, we’ll go no more a-roving/So late into the night…” (358). The initial “we” in line 1 compelled me to believe that Gordon was breaking a romantic routine that I lived to experience nightly. I think Gordon wanted to invoke this feeling purposely, because he wanted the reader of the poem to feel a personal connection to insure they read with a wide range of emotions, and pose questions that compel them to read further for the answers. If Gordon would have begun the poem with “you and I will” the personal attachment the reader could feel would be limited, because “you and I will,” though more specific than “we’ll,” seems very cold and detached.

Gordon wouldn’t have wanted the narrator to seem cold in any way, because he too is a lover in the relationship. As the first stanza continues with, “though the heart be still as loving/And the moon be still as bright” (359), a sense of regret and displeasure with the decision to cease the nightly tryst is felt. I think this is the genius of the poem, because it makes the heartbroken sympathize with the heartbreaker; a tough job to accomplish in the world of love. Once I got to this part, all that came to mind was: Why stop our tryst now?

That question was the bait that hooked me into reading the next stanza. Why does “…love itself have to rest…” (359) if “…the heart be still as loving…” (359)? Though I felt Gordon was romantically disappointing me, I couldn’t find the courage to be angry. In some weird way I started to feel hopeful as I read,

“Though the night was made for loving,
And the day returns too soon,
Yet we’ll go no more a roving
By the light of the moon.” (359)

At this moment I felt he (the narrator) too was hurting. I wanted to naturally reach out to him, as a lover would, and embrace his pain away as if that would take away my hurt as well. And when Gordon’s uses “yet” in line 11, it suggested that the end of our night time pleasures could possibly be temporary, or they could become day time moments. My broken heart was mended with this sense of hopefulness.

I believe my emotional experience was the goal for the poem. In what other way would the reader/lover be engaged enough to continue to read such heartbreaking information? I believe Gordon wanted the readers to experience the pain of the separation while still being able to objectively see the narrator’s point of view in ending the nightly romance.

To me, that suggests that Gordon wanted the reader to remember that relationships have two perspectives that should be accounted for wholly.

William Blake's All Religions Are One

Blake’s description of ancient man/God as “Angel & Spirit & Demon” personifies the complexities of the battle many people of the revolutions, both American and French, fought as they faced their oppressors. The strength to find the humanity for those who were inhumane and neglectful was hard for many people to muster up during the days of the French Revolution. Blake, though an Englishman, felt the crunch of this oppression after he had been arrested and tried for several injustices. Although he was later acquitted of these injustices, his sentiment toward the French revolution and against the English status quo grew fervently.

One would believe that, because of Blake’s background, All Religions Are One would be filled with disdain of his country and men. To the contrary, one is left wondering if Blake truly embraces the often idealistic speak of man as the Poetic Genius, or if he uses it to pounce on the heads of those that do.

I believe the latter, because the “wilderness” Blake/narrator cries from does not seem like a place of torment lacking resources, but a realm of thought outside the reality that is quite heavenly. He doesn’t speak with the voice of a mere mortal or extraordinary prophet, but with the voice of God himself. Thus, making the line, “So all religions: & as all similiars have one source, the true Man is the source, he being the Poetic Genius,” seem like homage to himself or his inner God.

This moment is a window into Blake’s view of man and how man is to be treated: if we are all “similiars” from one origin, then we should have similar-if not equal-rights. But being that Blake had suffered such cruelties by the hand of his government is reason to believe that he reserved the hope for “similar rights” for all men as a realm for the “innocence” of the naiveté.

I believe All Religions Are One is Blake’s written understanding that it is humans' simplest nature, regardless of religious subscription, to believe that good, bright or dim, overshadows evil; and it is also human nature to make the choice between the two. It is the uncertainty of those choices and the human will that creates an imbalance in others to believe a friend to be a possible foe, and offer the idea of suppression in the midst of revolution. The description of uncertainty so pure is the reason All Religions Are One is a new love of mine.

My name is Chrishon Sims, and I am a M.A.T candidate at Mercer University in Atlanta. I am taking this course to fulfill a teaching certification requirement before I graduate next year, and I want to brush up on my literature knowledge.

I am very excited to participate in this online course, because I want to see how challenging it will be for me. Hopefully, this class will be exciting and intriguing. I hope to meet new people who like literature as much as I do.