Relationship of King Lear to Nature and Comparison with Myself

King Lear does not have a pleasant relationship with nature. Early on in the play when he becomes angry at his daughter Cordelia for expressing no love for him, he swears “by the sacred radiance of sun, the mysteries of Hecate and the night; By all the operation of the orbs From whom we do exist and cease to be” (1.1.117-119). Later on, when Lear rages about the supposed ingratitude of his daughter that causes her to expel some of his 100 knight followers, he says, “Hear, Nature, hear! Suspend thy purpose if thou didst intend to make this creature fruitful” (1.4.277-279). In both of these cases, King Lear invokes Nature as the agent of his deadly purposes. His view of Nature in this way shows his and his culture’s pantheism, but it also indicates that he views his own position highly. He calls on Nature not with an attitude of submission to the “gods” but with an order to bring in the troops. Lear’s relationship with Nature when he is out in the brutal storm is more puzzling. He summons Nature to show its worst saying, “blow, winds, and crack you cheeks! Rage! Blow!” (3.2.1) that it might destroy “ungrateful man!” (3.2.9). He then indicates that he is mad at Nature that she would join his “pernicious daughters” (3.2.22) against his “poor, infirm, weak, and despised” (3.2.20) self. In all of his discourse with Nature, he is almost always expressing anger, calling down curses, or swearing. I am very different from King Lear. Not only do I recognize that nature should be lowercase because it is inanimate, but I also view it much more positively because it is God’s creation. Even though nature was destroyed by the Fall, causing destruction, natural disasters, etc., it still has many facets of its former beauty and will some day be redeemed. Nature is something to enjoy and at which to marvel, giving glory to God who made it.

"Gathering Leaves" by Robert Frost

In the poem “Gathering Leaves,” Robert Frost emphasizes the futility and emptiness of the task. He starts off the poem by remarking how useless spades and spoons are for picking up leaves. He then remarks how light are the leaves, even in vast quantities and he continues this idea in the second to last stanza. In the second stanza, the description that he “[makes] a great noise…like rabbit and deer running away” suggests that he does not particularly want to rake the leaves and that the leaves seem to try to run away from him. Also the word choice indicates that all of the “great noise” has no purpose. In the third stanza, the narrator tries to embrace the leaves probably to carry them to the shed, but the leaves “[flow] into his face” as if they are mocking him. The parallelism of “load” and “again” in the fourth stanza is correlated well with the repeated process of carrying leaves to the shed. At the end of the stanza, Frost asks himself whether he has achieved anything to which the answer is presumably “nothing” even without the lines following. Frost wryly calms himself by rather unconvincingly saying that “a crop is a crop” no matter how useless. Although the final rhetorical question can be taken just as wearily as the rest of the poem because the leaves seem to just keep cascading down, the positive connotation of “harvest” raises the tone slightly. Additionally, if it were not leaves, an endless harvest such as this would be a great blessing. The futility of this poem recalls one of King Lear’s problems. Since he has given away most of his possessions and power, the King becomes extremely frustrated and distraught that he can no longer control who waits on him and where he finds shelter. Just like Frost, he comes to fret that he has harvested a useless crop, which, in his case, is his thankless daughters.

King Lear Act I Comparison of Cordelia, Goneril, and Regan

            Goneril and Regan are passionate in their pouring out of praises to their father as exemplified by such phrases as Goneril’s expression that her love is “a love that makes breath poor, and speech unable” (1.1.2). Regan has a similar passion, but she speaks about how her love his similar to that of her sister’s except that she is “alone felicitate” (1.1.79) in love for her father. In contrast, Cordelia favors reason. She picks out the troubling inconsistency that her sisters’ claim to love their father completely and only despite their marriages. Kent rightly analyzes that Cordelia should not be punished for her honesty. Especially in the light of what Cordelia pointed out, what the other daughters said was really just a lot of flowery language. While her sisters are speaking, Cordelia worries what to say as she squirms under the dilemma between light and heat. Cordelia has a desire for independence or at least a pragmatic attitude toward her father’s banishment. Normally, a woman would not say that she could not love someone in front of an audience even after he has already rejected his desire for her. She also tells her sisters subtly that, in the end, her honesty is better by saying “time shall unfold what plighted cunning hides, who covers faults, at last with shame derides” (1.1.309-310). Despite her criticism, her last words to her sisters before leaving are “Well may you prosper!” (1.1.311). She tries to tell the truth in love although she tends to fail on the second part, while her sisters tend to fail in the first part. Regan advises Cordelia to try to please France and that she has been unwisely disobedient, so the words of wisdom are not Cordelia’s alone. Just as Regan follows and nearly copies Goneril’s expression of love, Goneril leads her sister throughout their discussions throughout the first act. Goneril has a personality that favors leadership. Goneril and Regan are motivated by a desire to be approved and to fit in while Cordelia wants to be right.

Explication of "Those WInter Sundays" by Robert Hayden

The poem “Those Winter Sundays” by Robert Hayden starts by describing the narrator’s father’s tough morning tasks on Sunday and presumably other days as well based on the beginning phrase “Sundays too.” The imagery of blueblack cold suggest a level of frigidity beyond the ordinary and a nuanced way of evicting a dislike for the cold.  The cold is being described in a similar way to a bruise, which helps with the negative connotation. Also, the poem refers to the father’s “crack hands that ached.” The end of that line ends with a dismal statement of the ingratitude toward the father’s sacrifice that, as is seen in the second stanza, enables the others to get up in a warm house. Hayden describes the cold as being heard “splintering” and “breaking.” This is a very unusual mode of imagery in which something tactile has been transmogrified to be auditory. It does help the reader imagine that the house is breaking free and brings to mind the idea that the house is full of ice (though it is not literally full of ice). In the last stanza, we see the relationship between the narrator and his father: that the child spoke “indifferently” and acted ungratefully while the father chased away the cold and polished his son’s shoes. Looking back, the child realizes how amazing is what his father used to do for him. The final statement sums up the unusual characterization of love presented throughout the poem. It presents love as having “austere and lonely offices.” Normally, love is attributed to warmth, joy, and comfort, but here it involves toil. Hayden shows with all of the imagery and discussion of cold that real love is not just shown by sensation but also by self-sacrificing work. The depth of this kind of love is also shown by the father’s continuation of his office despite his son’s cold attitude toward his service.

Ranking of Characters in Hamlet Based on Morality

The characters in Hamlet vary greatly in their moral character. At the bottom of the ladder, King Claudius wallows in his evil. He kills his brother treacherously and steals his wife. Thus he breaks four of the ten commandments in one fell swoop: murder, adultery, coveting, and stealing. He knows that for God to “Forgive [him his] foul murder? That cannot be, since [he] [is] still possessed of those effects for which [he] did the murder” (Shakespeare 3.3.56-58). He must turn himself in if he is truly repentant and he is unwilling to do that, so he removes the idea of repentance from his mind. Queen Gertrude comes next on this ladder of wickedness. Although it seems at first that she is a hapless victim of King Claudius and has had no part in his great crime, Hamlet’s tirade evokes a guilt that leads her to see “into [her] very soul,/ And there [she sees] such black and grained spots/ As will not leave their tinct” (Shakespeare 3.4.100-102). This suggests something more than marrying her husband’s brother, which, despite Hamlet’s rage, is not wrong. Hamlet comes next on this ladder because he conducts his revenge inappropriately. He wants to kill Claudius at the worst time possible without anyone knowing, just like his father was killed, so that Claudius will go to hell. This is the type of vengeance that can easily spiral out of control and leave a monarchy reeling in disorder. Because Hamlet struggles with indecision, he because reckless in his efforts to overcome his inaction and confuses motion with progress. He rashly kills Polonius in an inappropriate fit of rage. Laertes seeks vengeance in a slightly more honest way by confronting King Claudius with the common people at his back to find out what really happened. Unfortunately, he then conspires treacherously to kill Hamlet. Unlike Hamlet, he does not attempt to send anybody to hell at least. Ophelia and Polonius are a distant first and second compared to the rest of these. They conspire to kill nobody, but simply provide assistance and mourn over the unfortunate occurrences of which they must be a part. Each of them do have their faults, however, as Ophelia’s death is suspiciously suicidal and Polonius is somewhat of a hypocrite, but neither of these are within the same order of magnitude of wickedness as the other characters.

Explication of "Naming of Parts" by Henry Reed

The poem “Naming of Parts” by Henry Reed presents an interesting parallel between the parts of a gun and nature. Each paragraph begins with a rather mundane description of some general component of a gun and finishes with a more romantic piece of nature that is cleverly related by multi-dimensional wording. In the second stanza, the concept of a “sling swivel” traverses from a gun component to a sling for a broken arm (9). Just as the safety catch is not to be touched with a finger, blossoms do not allow tactile observing. The word breech in line 20 could denote the gun component, but it could also refer to a breach in enemy lines through which troops attack as indicated by the “early bees” “assaulting.” The poem is incredibly enigmatic, but there seems to be a general drift of the course of a battle throughout the poem. First, there is preparation through training and learning to use the gun in the first three stanzas, then it is “easy” to “[ease] the spring” or let the gun fire, and finally, the last line seems to be a gruesome double denotation between the naming of gun components parallel to earlier and the surveying of the battle field for who died. In the first paragraph, the Japonica in the “neighboring gardens” makes me think of blood still fresh from recent battles because it is a bright red flower. In the fourth stanza, the phrase “easing the spring” can refer to releasing a physical spring and to the beginning of the season of spring. The recurring phrase, “which in our case we have not got” reflects that the soldiers do not have the necessary parts of their guns, but there must be some deeper meaning to that. The third stanza refers to the safety-catch always being released, which suggests that was is not safe. The repeated transition between the mundane and the ethereal pictures of nature suggests that while the gruesome consequences of war are carried out, peaceful enjoyment could be had instead.