Sonnet

"What tongue can her perfections tell,
In whose each part all pens may dwell?
Her hair fine threads of finest gold,
In curled knots man’s thought to hold:
But that her forehead says, “In me
A whiter beauty you may see”;
Whiter indeed, more white than snow,
Which on cold winter’s face doth grow.
That doth present those even brows
Whose equal line their angles bows,
Like to the moon when after change
Her horned head abroad doth range;
And arches be to heavenly lids,
Whose wink each bold attempt forbids.
For the black stars those spheres contain,
The matchless pair, even praise doth stain."

Sir Philip Sidney

This sonnet is a Blazon. Another type of a Petrarchian sonnet. A Blazon is a sonnet that catalogs the features or traits of its subject, usually a woman, and describes them using hyperbole, metaphor, or simile. I chose this sonnet because I had never heard of the Blazon sonnet and this was the example from the PowerPoint. In Sir Philip Sidney's blazon he is praising a woman's beauty. By using the Blazon form he was able to catalog her body into different sections and then praise each body part separately.

Paul Laurence Dunbar

Harlem Renaissance- The First Half of the 20th Century, after World War 1.

"We wear the mask that grins and lies,
It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,—
This debt we pay to human guile;
With torn and bleeding hearts we smile,
And mouth with myriad subtleties.

Why should the world be over-wise,
In counting all our tears and sighs?
Nay, let them only see us, while
       We wear the mask.

We smile, but, O great Christ, our cries
To thee from tortured souls arise.
We sing, but oh the clay is vile
Beneath our feet, and long the mile;
But let the world dream otherwise,
       We wear the mask!"

This is a perfect poem displaying the emotions of the African-American race of that time.
It has a repetitive structure and it rhymes and kind of has a swing to it like a jazz or blues song.

This poem is about how African-Americans must mask their real emotions because they must conform to what the World thinks of African Americans. 

What a lovely song

"You belong with me" by Steven Curtis Chapman is a love song that employs metaphor mostly. The extended metaphor of comparing his woman and himself to Tarzan and Jane and plenty of other little metaphors for good measure. Each of these metaphors like the light and dark or the land and sea metaphors emphasize the extreme differences between the two of them, but also each choice depicts two things that are both neccesry and intertwined. The waves crash upon the beach, night turns to day, and the sun shines through the rain clouds. Despite their differences they are both part of a whole. Together they provide the balance so readily prevelant in our natural world. Chapmans's assertion is that he and his lady were ment to be together. They are the real life manifestation of all the people shipping (not human trafficking) that exists between Tarzan and Jane. They are the perfect blending of opposites. This use of metaphor through the allusion to Tarzan and Jane makes the assertion easy to accept. If he is night and she's day and all these other things are true it seems perfectly natural that the two of them are meant to be together.

Percy Jackson & The Olympians: Medusa (bad hair day every day)

One of my favorite book series of all time is Perseus Jackson & The Olympians. In the First Book, the main character, Percy Jackson fights Medusa and defeats her by using his phone as a mirror and cuts her head off. Which is exactly similar to the original greek myth, in which, the greek hero Perseus uses his shield as a mirror to decapitate Medusa and when she died a horse sprang from her body. But I started the story at the end, now let me tell the beginning. Medusa and her sisters, the Gorgons, were very beautiful but Medusa was the most beautiful. She caught the eye of the Sea God, Poseidon. Poseidon courted Medusa and they went to Athena's temple to do the "shake & bake." This angered Athena alot and she chased them out of the temple putting a curse on Medusa and turning her into the ugliest woman alive, a monster. Medusa's hair was turned into snakes and if she looked into your eyes you would turn into stone.

Being a part of the African American community HAIR is a very BIG thing. Hair allows a person to be unique. There is so much you can do with hair, and not every hairstyle is for every person. Black people to hair is like white people to pets. We spend so much time, money, and effort with our hair. And you CAIN'T touch it!

Super late Anne Sexton analysis

Anne Sexton wrote during the “confessional period” of poetry during the 1950’s. This style of poetry was very personal and, as you might surmise, confessional. If you’re familiar with Sylvia Plath’s style of writing, you know the kind. It focused on topics that were at that time controversial, such as depression, mental illness, suicide and thoughts of death, sexuality, and so on.

“Her Kind” is one of Sexton’s most famous poems, published in 1960:

I have gone out, a possessed witch,

haunting the black air, braver at night;

dreaming evil, I have done my hitch

over the plain houses, light by light:

lonely thing, twelve-fingered, out of mind.

A woman like that is not a woman, quite.

I have been her kind.

I have found the warm caves in the woods,

filled them with skillets, carvings, shelves,

closets, silks, innumerable goods;

fixed the suppers for the worms and the elves:

whining, rearranging the disaligned.

A woman like that is misunderstood.

I have been her kind.

I have ridden in your cart, driver,

waved my nude arms at villages going by,

learning the last bright routes, survivor

where your flames still bite my thigh

and my ribs crack where your wheels wind.

A woman like that is not ashamed to die.

I have been her kind.

As you can see, this poem embodies much of the sentiment common throughout confessional poetry: gloominess, the welcoming of death, so on. The diction is strong, vivid, and dark: “haunting,” “evil,” “ribs crack[ed],” “witch,” “black air,” “twelve-fingered,” and the like. Sexton suffered from depression herself, so as we can plainly observe, the poem reflects much of the darkness built up within her own heart. Her illness spurred extreme thoughts of violence that came not quite out of herself but out of the darkness inhabiting her mind. She describes herself as a haunting, “possessed witch,” “dreaming evil;” a “lonely thing” “out of mind.” Those suffering from depression and extremely low self-esteem often have these types of thoughts about themselves; they imagine themselves as horrific, lonesome monsters, taken over by something they are unable to control, as not entirely human anymore: “a woman like that is not a woman, quite.” During this time period, women were still expected to be delicate and innocent of mind, and as Sexton reflects, her illness permitted her to be neither of these things. Truly, she did not fit in with the fold, as she reminds us several times; she has made living in “warm caves in the woods,” separate from people, “misunderstood.” She doesn't fit in with what is expected of her as a woman, as we can gleam from the line “fixed the suppers for the worms and the elves;” she didn't perform this wifely duty for a man, but rather for the worms in the forest—she is isolated, an outcast not fit to conform to her expected station as the perfect, chipper wife. She seems disassociated with herself, as though she were a ghost watching her body go through motions, not entirely attached to it, using both the first and third person to describe her actions. In the final stanza she personifies a witch on her way to be burned alive. Her being different caused life to hunt her down like a witch, persecuting her and sentencing her to death. Sexton’s illness more than likely made her unable to function normally with others and follow accepted social conventions, so she felt that life was out to condemn and torture her. But she’s not ashamed of who she is; she is not “ashamed to die.” This death by fire most likely refers to her own imagined suicide, and indeed, Sexton would later go on to end her own life. She knows she was born different, and she’s not ashamed of that, nor is she ashamed of choosing to walk to the grave. With the repeated line “I have been her kind,” she identifies herself with an archetype of woman she believes is not limited only to herself. She is the kin of these ostracized women, these women who don’t quite fit in with what their roles prescribe them to be, these persecuted women who can’t seem to adjust properly to their places in life’s mold. This deep, dark confession embodies the essence of confessional literature: an expression of one’s hidden thoughts, of the darkness that inhabits the writer, rendering them unlike most others in society and unable to fit in as society would have them do.