PARADOS Ps AND Qs

1. Dirce was a woman, who, after a large amount of tragedy, was murdered. The god Dionysus created a stream where she was murdered, commemorating her death. The significance of the two armies fighting next to the stream is that here is a place where a woman was murdered, and something beautiful was created. But for the two armies, people were killed next to this stream, but there was no commemorative creation. Instead more violence and death was created, not something life giving.

2. Windy phrases mean that Polyneices, the commander of one of the army, was continuously giving orders, creating a whirlwind of orders. The windy phrases was used to contrast the two pr others, one an overwhelming dictator, and the other a calm captain.

3. Metaphor "He the wild eagle screaming"
    Simile  " Rose like a dragon behind him, shouting war"

4. The parados is referencing man as a whole. The men in the army, and the the men affected by the deaths.

5.  "... his noisy power"
    " Or pine fire took the garland of the towers"

6. The his in line 100 is referring to Polyneices.

7. We are to think of either the sound or the movement of the tongue when we read the word "Bray"

8. He and his in lines 107-110 is referring to God. Their in line 110 is referring to the people who worship the god.

9. Summary of lines 119-122
These brothers united by blood, will fight only to be killed the same way they killed the other.

10. This in not personification. The city of Thebes is singing, yet its the people that are singing, not the actual city.

Sort of a Song

By William Carlos Williams

What an interested poem. On first read, the poem has a disconnected feel.  The poem seems as if there are two topics, one being the first stanza dealing with a snake and writing, and the other stanza calling the first stanza a metaphor.

¨Let the snake wait under

his weed

and the writing

be the word,¨  describes the accused metaphor  as the snake being the devil, or the evil in the world. Williams describes the snake as hiding in plain sight. Williams describes in the metaphor that the writing is ¨slow and quick, sharp

        to strike, quiet to wait

        sleepless¨, or just as a snake would be described.

The second stanza seems to be as if Williams is analyzing himself, describing the literary techniques he used in the first stanza. He writes

¨ -through metaphor to reconcile”  describing  his techniques, and how it is used in the stanza above. Williams then continues talking about some ideas he has about the poem, stating that ¨Saxifrage is my flower that splits the rocks”. The saxifrage is a tiny flower, seen mostly in the wildflower bunches. Williams is essentially saying that the smallest things make the biggest changes, and he relates this to his own writing.

Williams wrote a poem and in the poem he create a beautiful stanza, and then dissects it in the second one. WIlliams is proving he knows what he is doing, and in this case I must applaud him for his creativity.