Feeling numb

My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
my sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,
or emptied some dull opiate to the drains

This quote is close to Isabella’s story. About how her heart ached when her brothers killed Lorenzo in the forest. She turned pale and looked sickly growing thin and weak with each passing day that Lorenzo never showed. Finally she had a dream about him where he showed her his grave; the dream gave her great detail on where to look. She took her maid and went to look for the certain spot he was buried.  Eventually after looking for a long time they found his grave site and she dug, her maid feeling her sorrow helped her dig. After a little bit they uncovered his body and she wept as she found her lover in the ground. Instead of leaving all of him there so took his head with her and kept it in a pot with basil that flourished. Isabella was deceived by her brothers who tricked her into thinking that Lorenzo had left her. When she found him she was heart-broken. He had never meant to leave her, but how could he say no to the two brothers of hers when they asked him on a hunt.

She felt her pain for days to come. When someone goes missing we look constantly for them, never giving up. Her heart was heavy and the world seemed to pass by as if she was surrounded by a glass block and she could not feel the outside world. Until she found Lorenzo nothing mattered. It was like she lived under a rain cloud, it was always raining on her and when the sun peaked out and she had the dream about him she felt compelled to go and see if it was true, hoping the dream was true while at the same time hoping that is was not true. She just wanted to see him safe and alive. Instead she found him buried in the earth with no hopes of ever coming back to her again. No more listening to him or making him things. No more coming home and calling out to her loved one. She was no longer able to keep him with her.

When you lose someone like Isabella did, you feel a numbness that you cannot know how long will last. Sometimes the feeling might last a week, a day, or years. Numbness causes you to feel as if living in a fish bowl. You know things are happening around you and you feel them happening, you just don’t feel like you are a part of it. Something significant may happen, but you will never know if you are numb. Describing the feeling as numb is the best way to describe that feeling of losing something or someone.  

 Not knowing the unknown is a scary thing. To want to know everything is simply human nature. You want to know if your child one their baseball game tonight, you want to know that your spouse will make it through the night, you want to know that your love will last a life time. Not knowing is simply one thing that one must get used to. Isabella didn’t know what happened to her lover, she wanted to know how Lorenzo was, if he was doing okay, if he was not. She wanted to spend her time with him, and worried something fierce when her brothers came back when he left.

Spending our life with someone forever is a big commitment, and she felt that she and Lorenzo could do just that. She knew that they could spend together forever and never be bored or lose sight of their love.  There might have been ups and downs, but that would have made their love stronger for each other. They would have overcome these things and it would have made them better people. They would understand how it is to be with someone all the time, to share secrets and dreams and tell stories and not be laughed at. They knew they could trust each other wholly. To have no secrets between two people and you can trust them wholly and know that you will always be there for them is what they have.

The ultimate quest

It was cold out. But that did not matter to you.

You happened across a mission.  You went looking for love.

Love is only spoken about in whispers, or when you see two people pass by whispering sweet things and holding hands.

You wonder how people find love, but more importantly you wonder how they kept it.

Your parents were never able to keep love; they loved no one but themselves and money.  But money never made them happy, nothing did.

Still your search continues when you walk down a street seeing a jogger go by you with an expressionless face.

You cross the street and see an old couple sitting on a park bench enjoying the afternoon sunlight and watching the children play in the park. They have smiles on their faces, ones of honest joy.

Too many times have you seen fake smiles and heard fake laughs. Too often have you seen a day go by when no one around you is honest about how they are handling things. Sadly no one ever turns to the person who can make them see the joy in life. The one they agreed to be with until death and after.

You know that no one takes that oath seriously anymore, yet you keep looking for the one seemingly impossibly quest. You think you have love, then one night it just slips out your door without a note or a good-bye. You wait to see if love will come back to your door, but you wait in vain. Love has left and you have to pick up the pieces and move on.

Yet wait you see a person on the next block pick up a bag of groceries that an elderly dropped and your spirits lift in the hope that maybe you can connect with this person, but alas it is not meant to be so as that person slips on by without notice to the world.

To this day you look for love, one of the most elusive feelings out there. When suddenly someone knocks at your door, you are almost anxious to open the door. What will you let in when you open that door? The unknown scares you but you take a chance and open the door.

Coleridge Symbolism and Meanings

This was a great blog. It was very well organized with great stories that caught the reader with a hook. There was no clutter to the page; it was very neat and concise. I could find my way around easily with little to no trouble. The title fit their choice of author perfectly and the dark appearance made it look great, like you could curl up by a fire and just read. I didn’t see any errors and the stories fit well on the page. It helped me understand Coleridge better and his themes. I learned that he has many little symbols that mean huge things. If you weren’t looking you could easily pass symbols off as just a weird occurrence. He uses different and obscure ways of having symbols in his text, he almost hides them from us, as if it were a thing to search for and be found by the right people. 

Their page had pictures and videos, which was a nice change, rather than just reading all text. The pictures and movies gave your eyes something new to look at and made you want to read more.

There was one particular article in there called White Night. It really made me think and look at everything, and see what was happening like a picture. It went as smoothly as a moving picture. It followed a certain flow, it was almost like rafting down a river, you are never sure what you will find at the bottom, but when you get there it was well worth the ride.

For someone who is just beginning to understand the concept of romanticism I would definitely recommend this blog, it has accurate information and just helps you with the things you might not have seen while reading. Like how Coleridge has the albatross hanging from the mariners neck. Some might have passed that by, either not wanting to understand or not realizing that the bird is a symbol.  Others who might be starting the romanticism era understand what is happening, but are missing the little things. The symbols that are hidden and kept secret for someone to find.

Blogging Community Assignment "Significance of the Albatross"

While I was scanning through other blogs, I came across a particular blog that caught my eye. The poem, Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Samuel Coleridge illustrates the challenges on the ship that the mariner comes across. This mariner is attending a weeding that takes place on a ship. Before the ceremony has even begun, the sky fills with gloomy clouds creating a vicious storm. The ship strolls along the ocean and ends up being surrounded by little lands of ice. After reaching this location, the sailors come across an Albatross flying about their boat. As soon as this bird came, pieces of ice became to break off and the ship slowly moved on its way. The mariner takes his bow and arrow and shoots it towards the Albatross. Bad luck had turned towards the ship and the sailors on board were furious. The sailors hung the dead Albatross around the mariner’s neck. A while after, they passengers died with wide open eyes, all looking at the mariner. He had began to pray about his sin and things slowly turned better. The ship was on its way back to it’s journey but the mariner had awful feelings about what he had done.

Angela Ly created a blog called “Significance of the Albatross” which describes her perspective of what the Albatross represents. The bird played a big role into the story although it was not exactly clear what it symbolized. Reading this poem the first time was confusing to understand. Angela explains that she believes that the Albatross teachers the readers from what’s right from wrong. She quotes, “When you do well for others, good things will happen to you.” While the bird is alive, everything seams to being going okay. After the mariner kills the bird, things change for the worst.

I liked how the blog expresses how much of an impact the bird makes in the story. Without the Albatross, the poem wouldn’t have a purpose. Romanticism ties into this story by the imagination and emotion Blake puts in. He thinks of the good and bad of human beings and what are the consequences that could happen to them.

The head

Why would Isabella take Lorenzo’s head? Why not simply take a lock of his hair. I would have taken the hair, because what if one day she decides to move on, what does she do with the head then? If the man, that her brothers wanted her to marry, accidently opens the place holding his head and finds the decapitated head that would frighten anyone. How else is a person supposed to react to finding his head, even though she thoroughly cleaned the head of grime. Having the head is almost like having a skeleton in your closet, it will come back to haunt you. Even though she seems to find sentiment in keeping the cranium most would find it odd and peculiar. Although given the time, back then you would do anything to keep a loved one close. Parents would keep their daughters locked away so that they could not fall in love with a man that they don’t want her to. They need their daughters to marry a wealthy man so that they could gain from the profits and expand their own wealth. Isabella often with Lorenzo and they made it seem like Lorenzo and Isabella could not be together, yet they were openly so. The brothers should have openly told her rather than going behind her back and lying constantly. She had it in her heart and mind that her lover would be coming back to her, when he never did she worried and had dreams about him. Which makes me wonder how she even had the dream in the first place, was it a random occurrence? How did Lorenzo first appear in her dream, even with the area surrounding him and it was detailed too. How often do we have dreams that are true and show a real picture? She never got over her love for him, and she kept him with her, even if it was a strange way to keep a loved one by you.

Letting go

I came across a story the other day that talked about a man who made the woman he wanted to marry a 1,000 paper cranes. He worked at a small business firm and his future didn’t look very good. He went to meet up with his girl friend, and when he got to their meeting place she told him she was flying to Paris to live there and would not come back. He was heart-broken but he let her go. When he over-came her leaving him he worked on his business day and night, and with all of his work he managed to set up his own company. His motto was “You never fail until you stop trying.” He wanted to go somewhere with his life and make something of himself.

Then on a rainy drive home he noticed a couple under an umbrella and realized they were his ex-girl friend’s parents. He followed the couple wanting them to see what kind of car he was driving and show them the money and life he had. He followed them right into a cemetery without realizing that he had and he got out of his car following them.

He was stunned when he saw the picture of his old girl friend on her tombstone. Next to the picture were the paper cranes he had made her. Walking over to the parents he asked why this had happened. They told him she never left for France, instead cancer had taken her away and she had believed that he would make it big in life. She did not want her illness to be an obstacle and she left him. She wanted the paper cranes by her so that when the day comes again that she is back in his life he can take back some of the cranes. He wept and knew that worst way to miss someone is to be sitting right beside them but knowing you can’t have them and will never see them again.  

This story reminded me of how Isabella and Lorenzo loved each other and how they stayed in their hearts even after death. They may be gone in a physical way, but the ones they loved never truly leave.

Response to "John Keats" By Paul Elmer More

                        

(Pictured above: Left-Isabella's brothers killing Lorenzo  Right: Romeo & Juliet dead)

Paul Elmer More, an American critic, wrote an article titled "John Keats." Although the article is plainly entitled, More's ideas and opinions come alive as he reflects on Keats's collection of writings. More distinguishes himself as a "traditional conservative," who does not support aesthetic works of literature. He finds the idea of putting beauty and death together sickening in poems comparable to the ones written by Keats. Pieces of Keats's collection favors the beautiful aspects of life mixed with thoughts of death. After examining Keats's work, More expresses his disgust and hatred towards Romanticism. More dislikes Keats's techniques because of the simple vocabulary and use of borrowed materials from other poets. In the article More wrote, "To find in the Glossary a careful tabulation of the sources from which Keats drew his extraordinary vocabulary" (More 1). With sarcasm, More trashes Keats's use of terms by saying he extracted his words from a mere glossary with cautious calculations of use. Obviously, More is far from a fan of Keats and his work. More finds nothing promising about the methods used in Keats's wording of literature. Keats needs to expand the lexicon used in all of his poems for a wider variety of people to enjoy. Not everyone likes Keats’s limited use of words, especially More. More loathes Keats’s work with a burning passion, because Keats borrows materials from other poets. Although Keats borrowing materials bothers More minimally, More argues that Keats uses other poets’ work in an unoriginal manner. The quote, “To see how constantly he borrowed from Shakespeare and Milton and the writers that lie between, and how deliberately he sought to echo ‘that large utterance of the early gods,’” (More 1) further proves Keats’s plagiarism. In many of Keats’s poems, he stole the ideas of other famous poets and skillfully strung the themes together in his own version. He may have added a few new words here and there, but the presence of the real poet behind the ideas is still there. Keats may have thought he could fool people with new versions of world renowned poems, but he failed in his many attempts. More compares what Keats did to Wordsworth, who also borrowed from other poets. Wordsworth introduced the same ideas and themes in a new way, while Keats tried to cleverly disguise his borrowed materials. More proves Keats as an unoriginal poet with this quote, “But if occasionally these unlicensed expressions add to the magic of his style, more often they are merely annoying blemishes” (More 2). Further providing evidence of Keats ripping off the work of other poets, More bashes about how Keats adds his own take to poems, but finds the new additions frustrating and pointless. Keats should leave previous poems alone and come up with his own ideas. Overall, More discovers Keats’s work as repulsive and demeaning to literature.

I think More’s perspective on Keats’s works identifies all of the flaws with great accuracy. More talks about how Keats unoriginality effected the quality of his work. I agree, Keats’s poem, “Isabella,” seems awfully similar to other poems and plays that existed before it. The poem reminds me of the play Romeo & Juliet , by William Shakespeare, because related themes exist between the two. Romeo & Juliet contains themes of money, power, love, and death, while “Isabella” also contains the same themes only with a different plot. Money and power is a huge theme in both works of literature, without those two major themes, love and death would have a different route. In Romeo & Juliet, the two families hated each other because of power and money, they battled to be number one. If the families did not battle it out, then Romeo and Juliet could have loved each other without secrecy. When people found out about their love, death lingered to take their lives. The families regretted the hate they had for each other and mourned the two lovers’ deaths. A similar plot exists in “Isabella,” Isabella’s brothers thrived for power and money. All the brothers wanted was to marry off their sister to a wealthy man, this way the brothers will enable themselves to attain a powerful position in society. When the brother’s found out about Isabella’s ties with Lorenzo, they made it a necessary task to extinguish him. After killing Lorenzo, Isabella went crazy, dug up his body, and then continued her madness by planting his head in a pot of basil. Comparing both writings together exposes a sinisterly similar idea. In my opinion, Keats may have added a few twists here and there, but underneath all of his work reveals the true writings of Shakespeare. A true writer does not plagiarize others’ ideas, his inspirations create its own story.