THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER-story - Edgar Allan Poe

Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849), the American poet and writer, was born in Boston,

Massachusetts, of a couple of travelling actors. He deserted him when he was two years old, and his mother passed away a year later. Through he was adopted by Joh Allan, a rich tobacco merchant of Richmond, he felt emotionally and financially insecure. His foster father constantly reminded him of his own charity that made Poe’s life comfortable. Consequently he broke away from Mr. Allen after the death of his foster- mother and Mr. Allan’s remarriage. Mean while he had received education in a school in long land. For a while he served in the army and worked as a journalist. He married his Cousin Virgina C Lem who died ten years later. Poverty never spared

Poe and he even attempted suicide once, through without success. In 1849 he was found dead on the streets of Rich Mond. His death remains a mystery. Poe is regarded by many not only as the first American Poet but also as the founder of modern detective stories. He wrote many Gothic short fictions. Gothic fictions is a type of fiction which lacks the exotic setting of the earlier romances, but develops a brooding atmosphere of gloom and terror, represents events that are uncanny or macabre or melodramatically violent and often deals with aberrant psychological states. The local was often a gloomy castle furnished with dungeons is the typical story focused on the sufferings imposed on an innocent heroine by a cruel and lustful villain and made bountiful use of ghosts, mysterious disappearances and othersensational and super natural occurrences. 

The principal aim of such novels was to wake chilling terror by exploiting mystery and a variety of horrors. Many of them are now read mainly as period pieces, but the best opened up to fiction. The realm of the irrational and of the perverse impulses and nightmarish terrors lie beneath the orderly surface of the civilized mind. The Gothic novel was inaugurated by Horace Walpole’s “The castle of Otranto: A Gothic story” (1764). ‘The fall of the House of Usher’ was published in the Sept.1839 issue of Burton’s gentleman’s magazine. It was slightly revised in 1840 for the collection Tales of the Grotesque and Arabeque. It contains with it the poem ‘ The Hacented palace’ which had earlier been published separately in April 1839 issue of the Baltimore Museum magazine. 

Summary

The legend opens with the unnamed narrator arriving at the house of his friend, Roderick Usher, having received a letter from him in a distant part of the country complaining of an illness and asking for his help. Although Poe wrote this short story before the invention of modern psychological science, Roderick's condition can be described according to its terminology. They include a form of sensory overload known as hyperesthesia (hypersensitivity to light, sounds, smells, and tastes), hypochondria (an excessive preoccupation or worry about having a serious

illness), and acute anxiety. It is revealed that Roderick's twin sister, Madeline, is also ill and falls into cataleptic, deathlike trances. The narrator is impressed with Roderick's paintings, and attempts to cheer him by reading with him and listening to his improvised musical compositions. on the guitar. Roderick sings "The Haunted Palace”, then tells the narrator that he believes the house he lives in to be alive, and that this sentience arises from the arrangement of the masonryand vegetation surrounding it.

Roderick later informs the narrator that his sister died and insists that she be entombed for two weeks in a vault (family tomb) in the house before being permanently buried. The narrator helps Roderick put the body in the tomb, and he notes that Madeline has rosy cheeks, as some do after death. They inter her, but over the next week both Roderick and the narrator find themselves becoming increasingly agitated for no apparent reason. A storm begins. Roderick comes to the narrator's bedroom, which is situated directly above the vault, and throws open his window to the storm. He notices that the tarn surrounding the house seems to glow in the dark, as it glowed in Roderick Usher's paintings, although there is no lightning. The narrator attempts to calm Roderick by reading aloud The Mad Tryst, a novel involving a knight named Ethelred who breaks into a hermit's dwelling in an attempt to escape an approaching storm, only to find a palace of gold guarded by a dragon. He also finds hanging on the wall a shield of shining brass on which is written a legend: that the one who slays the dragon wins the shield. With a stroke of his mace, Ethelred kills the dragon, who dies with a piercing shriek, and proceeds to take the shield, which falls to the floor with an unnerving clatter. As the narrator reads of the knight's forcible entry into the dwelling, cracking and ripping sounds are heard somewhere in the house. When the dragon is described as shrieking as it dies, a shriek is heard, again within the house. As he relates the shield falling from off the wall, a reverberation, metallic and hollow, can be heard. Roderick becomes increasingly hysterical, and ventually exclaims that these sounds are being made by his sister, who was in fact alive when she was entombed and that Roderick Usher knew that she was alive. The bedroom door is then blown open to reveal Madeline standing there. She falls on her brother, and both land on the floor as corpses. 

The narrator then flees the house, and, as he does so, notices a flash of light causing

him to look back upon the House of Usher, in time to watch it break in two, the fragments sinking

into the tarn.

“MOTHER TO SON” Langston Hughes

James Mercer Langston Hughes (February 1, 1902 – May 22, 1967) was an American poet,social activist, novelist, playwright, and columnist. He was one of the earliest innovators of thethen-new literary art form jazz poetry. Hughes is best known for his work during the Harlem Renaissance. He famously wrote about the period that "the negro was in vogue" which was later paraphrased as "when Harlem was in vogue". Langston Hughes was first recognized as an important literary figure during the 1920s, a period known as the "Harlem Renaissance" because of the number of emerging black writers. Du Bose Heyward wrote in the New York Herald Tribune in 1926: "Langston Hughes, although only twenty-four years old, is already conspicuous in the group of Negro intellectuals who are dignifying Harlem with a genuine art life. . . . It is, however, as an individual poet, not as a member of a new and interesting literary group, or as a spokesman for a race that Langston Hughes must stand or fall. . . . Always intensely subjective, passionate, keenly sensitive to beauty and possessed of an unfaltering musical sense, Langston Hughes has given us a 'first book' that marks the opening of a career well worth watching." “Mother to Son” by Langston Hughes is a short twenty line poem that packs significant meaning in the short verse. Hughes uses an older female speaker to give advice to a son who is part of the younger generation. In the poem, Hughes uses the device of an extended metaphor to describe the life of the mother. The extended metaphor compares the mother’s life to a staircase. The line “Life for me ain’t been no crystal stair” begins and ends the poem. With this line, Hughes quickly establishes that the speaker in the poem has not had an easy life. The concept of a crystal staircase gives the reader the impression of complete opulence. 

The reader can indulge in inferring that it would be someone with supreme wealth and someone who did not have to work as hard as the speaker did. By using the imagery of a crystal staircase as the opposite of her staircase, the reader immediately knows before learning any of the details of her staircase that she has not had an easy life. Hughes then goes on to illustrate the staircase of life that the speaker has lived. The speaker’s staircase has splinters and tacks. Both of these would be symbolic of the mother having suffered many hurts. A splinter or a tack will not cause life threatening injury, but they certainly will cause pain. If the splinters and tacks are on every step along the way, it is symbolic that her life has always had pain. 

Another descriptive detail of the mother’s staircase is that of boards being torn up. If a person walks on a staircase in which boards are missing, it gives the symbolic value that the mother’s life was filled with more dangerous situations than just tacks and splinters. It is symbolic that the mother has had gaping holes in her life that she had to somehow step over to arrive at the present place in her life that she is now. Not every step along the way was safe one, but despite this she perseveres. The speaker addresses the son by saying that he should not sit down or fall down just

because his staircase is hard to climb. In the mother’s eyes, the son should never give up. Instead he should see her as an example because it was not easy for her, but she never gave up. With the extended metaphor of a staircase as a symbol of the steps one takes in life, one can infer that as long as a person is living, there will be more steps to climb. It is like a precursor to the concept of the popular modern song lyric “stairway to heaven”. The mother is symbolically climbing the stairway to heaven and the path to heaven is not always an easy journey. The mother wants the

son to know that heaven is worth by taking life one step at a time, even if the stairs are full of tacks and splinters.

Hughes also illustrates the sense of identity in the speaker with the use of vernacular

language. Hughes writes using the language that the mother would actually speak with. Some examples of the vernacular language include: ain’t, finds it’s kinder hard, and dropping the final “g” in words such as goin’ or turnin’. The use of vernacular language gives the sense that this is a less educated woman. The less grammatical language gives the sense that the speaker wants something better for the son, but she knows he will still have to work for it. On the road of life, many trials arise that one must overcome to make his or her life feel complete. In Langston Hughes’s poem, “Mother to Son,” these trials are a subject of concern for one mother. Hughes’ “ability to project himself” is seen in his use of dialect, metaphors, and tone. Although the dialect by itself does not seem to be an important quality, however, “when it is presented with all dramatic skill”, it is important. In “Mother to Son”, Hughes uses dialect to show that the mother is not as well educated as many people. When she says phrases such as “For I’se still goin’, honey,” it is understood that she means that she is still going, even though it is not clearly said. The dialect may also show what area she may live in. When she talks about “boards torn up” it shows that she was from the poor part of the town. It does not seem relevant that she has torn up boards, but these are not found in a wealthy person’s mansion. Although the grammar of this dialect is wrong, it makes the woman seem more like a real person and less like someone who is fictional. Another quality that is prevalent in this poem is its metaphors. She says that her life has not been fancy or easy, but she is getting by. While climbing her stairs she is “reaching’ landing’s, / and turning’ corners, / and sometimes going’ in the dark”.

 Although these are “homely” things someone may face on a staircase, they actually mean things that she has encountered in her life. She says that she reaches landings, which means that she has come up on place where she could rest. When she says she turns corners, it is when her life changes and she has to turn away from her original path. Her final comparison is when she goes in the dark, which

are times in her life when she does not know what she can do to help herself. The metaphors in this poem show a conflict in the mother’s life and make the poem seem complete. The third quality that Langston Hughes uses in his poem is the tone of the speaker. When she explains to him not to “set you down on the steps / ‘Cause your find it’s kinder hard. /don’t you fall down now,” the tone in her words in compassionate. The mother is simply trying to tell her son that she knows what he is going through because she has been in rough times herself. Those rough times

were troublesome but she had the strength to go on and get past them. All she wants for her son is for him to keep climbing, and never give up. Winslow believes that “enduring exuberance” shows her youthful spirit towards life. She wants this all because “(she is) still goin’, honey, / (she is) still climbin ‘, /and life for (her) ain’t been no crystal stair”. This poem, “Mother to Son” by Langston Hughes teaches a valuable life lesson about never giving up. Even when life is getting more difficult and one thinks they cannot go on, they need to keep climbing.

EDGE -Sylvia Plath ,American poet, novelist, and short story writer

Sylvia Plath was an American poet, novelist, and short story writer. Known primarily for her poetry, Plath also wrote a semi-autobiographical novel, The Bell Jar, under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas. The book's protagonist, Esther Greenwood, is a bright,

ambitious student at Smith College who begins to experience a mental breakdown while interning for a fashion magazine in New York. The plot parallels Plath's experience interning at Mademoiselle magazine and subsequent mental breakdown and suicide attempt. Along with Anne Sexton, Plath is credited with advancing the genre of confessional poetry initiated by Robert Lowell and W.D. Snodgrass. Despite her remarkable artistic, academic, and social success at Smith, Plath suffered from severe depression and underwent a period of psychiatric hospitalization. She graduated from Smith with highest honours in 1955 and went on to Newnham College, Cambridge, in England, on a Fulbright fellowship. Here she met and

married the English poet Ted Hughes in 1956. For the following two years she was an instructor in English at Smith College. In 1960, shortly after Plath and Hughes returned to England from America, her first collection of poems appeared as The Colossus. She also gave birth to a daughter, Frieda Rebecca Hughes’ and Plath’s son, Nicholas Farrar, was born in 1962.

Plath took her own life on the morning of February 11, 1963. Leaving out bread and milk,she completely sealed the rooms between herself and her sleeping children with "wet towels and cloths." Plath then placed her head in the oven while the gas was turned on.

Analysis

Plath's poetry was considered as the first and best examples of "confrontational" and

"confessional" poetry of her era. Such poetry takes real life events for the poem's metaphor. Poets often used this tool to "confront" real and imagined characters. Plath’s most famous poem, "Daddy" is a confrontational poem that directly "confronts" Plath's anger, sadness, and love for her father as he died as a result from taking proper care of his treatable medical condition. When you apply Plath's confrontational style to the Edge, it suggests that the poetess had considered taking the lives of her children along with her own. The ending of the poem refers to the children being "folded" back into the flower as "petals" and says "we have come so far, it is over." With these lines, Plath alludes to the idea that life is a journey and death is the reward at the end of the journey, not just for herself; but for her children as well. No one will ever know what Plath's true intentions were, but at the time of her death, she took considerable care to prevent her children being exposed to the fumes by stuffing towels below the doors and leaving milk at her children's bedsides. Despite her tragic death, Plath left behind a legacy of love for her children in her poetry. Sylvia Plath wrote the poem "Edge" six days prior to committing suicide on 11th day of February1963 (Alexander 2). The poem is alleged to be the author's last work. The form bears an exciting feature. It has ten stanzas, with each having only two lines, seized in an enjambment. The second line of every stanza is at all times half of the building and denotation of the first line of the subsequent stanza. Therefore, the break of verse is also an edge linking the stanzas, which forms an additional equivalence between form and substance of the poem. The sentences are only concluded once they traverse the edge amid the two stanzas, and character in this piece of literature only appears to discover calm and "achievement" when crossing an edge. In the most common interpretations, this edge is referred to as the one occurring between living and dying. This poem does not pursue a specific rhyme

scheme. It has various remarkable inner rhymes or assonant constructions such as child-coiled, sweet-bleed, toga-over, flows-scrolls, and rose-close. 

These terms do not essentially rhyme in the stern sense but they put in to the tranquil tone of this piece of literature and make stronger the plentiful images given. Two common literary devices, that is metaphor and metonymy will be examined, and afterward discover how they have been used in the 'Edge'. “Edge” is a short poem in free verse; its twenty lines are divided into ten couplet stanzas. The title suggests a border, perhaps between life and death. One of the last two poems written by Sylvia Plath before her suicide, “Edge” is a meditation on the death of a woman. Written in the third person, the poem may give the impression of offering a detached judgment of the dead woman. This point of view usually suggests a less subjective perspective than the first person. The apparently objective imagery of the poem, however, disguises a high degree of subjectivity on the part of the poet. “Edge” begins with an implied thesis: A woman is “perfected” by death. It is not difficult to see at least three ways in which the woman has been “perfected.” To “perfect” means to complete, to master, or to make flawless. While literally true that the woman has completed her

life, “perfected” also suggests that the woman has mastered womanhood and has been made flawless through her death. These notions of completion, mastery, and achieved excellence are linked to death in the brief second line, “Her dead,” which provides an approximate rhyme with the first line. The second stanza notes “the smile of accomplishment” that adorns the dead body, suggesting that the woman is pleased by the perfection she has achieved. The poet then hints that

the woman has achieved death through suicide. 

The “Greek necessity” that one imagines flowing “in the scrolls of her toga” strongly suggests the ritual suicides demanded of disgraced individuals in the classical world. Although most readers are familiar with the self-inflicted death by hemlock of the Greek philosopher Socrates, ritual suicide (like the toga) is actually associated with imperial Rome. Nevertheless, Plath is able to allude to her own writing through the clever description of the folds of the toga as “scrolls.” The third and fourth stanzas explain the meaning of the woman’s bare feet. They have taken her the length of her life with all its obstacles, but now “it is over.” The sense of relief at journey’s end is apparent. A new and ominous element is introduced in the fifth stanza. Dead children, presumably the woman’s own children, are described as white serpents. Each is coiled before a small “pitcher of milk,” which is “now empty.” Apparently, the children have each drunk the milk and coiled, fetus like, at each pitcher; they are pale, or white, with death. One must consider the possibility that the children have been poisoned by their mother. The sixth through eighth stanzas confirm this suspicion. The woman has “folded/ them back into her body.” She is their mother, and she has taken her children with her into death. The first line of the poem, “The woman is perfected,” now takes on yet another meaning: She becomes whole or complete as all the life that went forth from her is returned to her in death. The poet defends the murder of the children as the mere closing of a flower at the

approach of night. The rose draws in its petals (as the mother draws in her children) when the chill of the evening (or, in the case of the woman, death) descends upon the garden. The sensual but ghastly image of the night as a many-throated flower that “bleeds” its odors transforms the

traditional literary meaning of flowers and gardens as emblems of love into omens of death. 

From the lush imagery of the garden at nightfall, the ninth stanza turns to the stark moon of the night sky. The poet imagines the moon’s view of the grisly tableau of the dead bodies of mother and children. Like a nun in a white cowl, the moon in “her hood of bone” surveys the scene without sadness. The final stanza of the poem explains the moon’s indifference: “She is used to this sort

of thing.” The dead woman has reenacted an ancient tragedy that the moon has witnessed overm and over again. Further, the poem concludes with the hint that the moon bears some responsibility for the deaths. The moon’s “blacks crackle and drag.” - effect of the moon on the earth (dragging the oceans back and forth across the planet in tides) and on the menses of women account for the final verb. “Crackle,” however, suggests something more like sunspots, casting interference and

static into the atmosphere and, perhaps, troubling individuals. Such a relationship between the moon and human behavior is acknowledged in folklore (the werewolf is transformed under the light of a full moon) and even in our vocabulary (“lunatic” derives from the same root as “lunar”).

The moon, it is implied, may have influenced the terrible events that “she” then observes impassively. Themes and Meanings Written only six days before the author’s suicide, “Edge” has sometimes been viewed as a formal suicide note. Such a hasty conclusion deprives the poem of its significance as a work of

art. As mentioned above, “Edge” was carefully constructed through a series of drafts. A close inspection of its form and imagery confirms an artistic intent, so one must look for the meaning of the poem not in Plath’s biography, but in the poem itself. The poem argues that the woman who is the subject of the poem is “perfected” in death, which alone offers release from her unhappiness. She smiles in death at the conclusion of an obviously painful journey through life. The description of her children suggests the malevolent role they have played in her life. She imagines them back within her as her body closes like a chilled rose. The woman seeks to return to the condition of the virgin, and it is to the virgin goddess, Artemis, that the poet turns for consolation. The solitary, pure white, perfect female offers no sympathy; the suicide has endured the ancient destiny of women. Only the woman who can hold herself aloof from love and its demands can escape a similar fate. It is difficult to imagine a bleaker view of human experience than that which Plath expresses in “Edge.” She suggests that one can find happiness only in absolute solitude, the solitude of death.

ANECDOTE OF THE JAR- Wallace Stevens

Wallace Stevens is one of America's most respected poets. He was a masterstylist, employing an extraordinary vocabulary and a rigorous precision in crafting his poems. But he was also a philosopher of aesthetics, vigorously exploring the notion of poetry as the supreme fusion of the creative imagination and objective reality. Because of the extreme technical and thematic complexity of his work, Stevens was sometimes considered a willfully difficult poet. But he was also acknowledged as an eminent abstractionist and a provocative thinker, and that reputation has continued since his death. In 1975, for instance, noted literary critic Harold Bloom called him "the best and most representative American poet of our time."

THEME OF THE POEM

The poem is about a single subject –the relation between imagination and reality. His view is that it is the man who imposes some kind of order upon nature through his artistic creation (jar). In many of the poems he tries to resolve the conflict between reality and imagination as it appeared to him. Ultimately, he found that reality is indispensable to a poet  while composing verses, but his imagination has the right to play upon reality and even transform it when necessary. The idea is that art which is the product of imagination can impose order upon a chaotic state of affairs. But Steven’s modernist austerity nakedly reveals that his theme is power. In an American context the poem engages with Emerson's Transcendentalist emphasis on

the possessive power of the eye. 

The poem celebrates a moment of aesthetic triumph. The poet transfers his own

imaginative activity to an inhuman medium-jar. It serves as an extension of the poet’s own drive to order, but it achieves dominion over the chaotic wilderness precisely because it is inanimate. The jar in Tennessee represents a purely formal principle of order and this kind of order cannot satisfy the deepest needs of Stevens’ imagination. The jar is not placed in Tennessee, on the hills of Tennessee. The jar is round upon a rounded piece of ground, a hill. Hills are calmer and softer than the mountains. We can imagine that this jar is sitting perfectly on the crust of the hill. The

jar is looking down upon everything around it and it is affecting the world around it. There is a lot of wilderness around the place where the jar is placed. This place is slovenly unclean and unmaintained. As the jar is placed on the hill, we can imagine that the crust of that hill is bare and grey. The wilderness-the trees, vines, birds, shrunk and rabbits around the hill are being raised up to the hill. There is something man made in the wilderness now, tarnishing its purity. It could also be a statement about how men and manmade objects often overtake the wild and the natural. Being placed on the top of a hill the jar gives an apex of human purpose through nature. But the jar asserts authority even more through the implied design of its own rotundity. It is the design of a created object embodying a human, cultural purpose. "Anecdote of a Jar" is a metaphor about the magnetic power of mind and art to order a void (and the void). Stress is laid upon its non- naturalness to accentuate the crucial power of artistic and thus human purpose. Art (mind) governs its antithesis, nature—"It took dominion everywhere," even, indeed, especially, in a non- civilized, non-human place.

I HEAR AMERICA SINGING

Walt Whitman is a famous American poet. He was a prophet of democracy. Whitman is considered as the father of free verse. Walt Whitman is a typical American poet. He always breaks away from the tradition and creates a new trial.

 Summary :

The poem underscores Whitman’s basic attitude towards America ,which is part of his ideal human life. The American nation has based its faith on the creativeness of labour which is glorified in the poem. The catalogue of craftsmen covers not only the length and breadth of the American continent but also the large and varied field of American achievement. This poem expresses Whitman’s love of America-its vitality, variety and the massive achievement which is the outcome of the creative endeavor of its entire people. It also illustrates Whitman’s technique of using catalogues consisting of a list of people. The poet hears the varied carols of all the people who contribute to the life and culture of America. The mechanic, the carpenter, the mason, the boatman, the shoe maker and the wood cutter all join in the chorus of the nation. The singing of the mother, the wife and the girl at work expresses their joy and their feeling of fruition. They are highly individualistic men and women. 

Each person sings ‘what belongs to him or her and to none else.’ At night young men sing loud ‘melodious ‘ songs. All of the workers mentioned are that of the labour class, they do manual labour not desk work. Most likely they all ‘sing’ because the work they do causes some sort of sound. Whitman is emphasising that each man can have pride in what he does, even if he doesn’t make a lot of money .Each one is important to contribute to the strength of this country. He recognises the value of women’s work. Whitman shows the value of work in the American society.This poem elucidates that an individual had a particular role to play on the society in which he\she thrives. He encourages industry in America to be heard as something pleasant ,as a chorus of many songs. The poet decides to glorify and celebrate work as well as a perception of nationalism. Whitman is celebrating the greatness of America by celebrating the greatness of its individuals. The democratic nature of Whitman’s poetry is reflected by his subject matter .He celebrates mechanics, carpenter s, masons, mothers-the type of people usually not discussed in poems. For Whitman, it is the individual freedom that allows him to be great.