by harlanegr5 on May 13, 2009 at 11:39 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
So lets summarize this act (scene 2) of the play:
poison, stab, stab, poison and stab… DEATH!!!
THE END
..
just kidding:
Claudius: *Plotting… Hamlet and Laertes… dual!.. and in case Laertes can’t win: sword poison… drink poison… Hamlet = X_X (<- dead) *wuahahaha*
Dual!!!
*Hamlet* Score!
Claudius: Drink (from poison cup)
Hamlet: Nahhhh, I’ll keep fighting first
*Hamlet* Score 2!!!
Hamlet: I’ll continue to fight
*Gertrude* rises to drink
Claudius: NOOOOOOOO don’t drink
Gertrude: glug glug glug
*Laertes* Stabs Hamlet
*Sword switch*
*Hamlet* Stabs Laertes
*Gertrude* X_X
Laertes: The king did it (poison)
*Hamlet* Throws *dramatically* sword at king, proceeds to make him drink the poison
*Claudius* X_X
*Hamlet and Laertes* Forgiveness
*Laertes* X_X
*Hamlet* X_X… but wait, there has to be one more long, drawn out speech before he dies.. of course. In short: Horatio, live and tell everyone about this… and yeahh *insert more words*
Essentially this was a pretty.. creative way to kill off all (minus Horatio) of the characters. They all seem so bright, yet at the same time so stupid. They are all very articulate (what else could you expect with Shakespeare?) however they seem to lack common sense and constantly seem to be stuck on the past.
What really makes this play a tragedy for me is the fact that had these characters had/used common sense they could have managed to avoid all if not most of their deaths.
by harlanegr5 on May 13, 2009 at 11:12 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
Okay.. Ophelia
Yes, your father died, but going insane.. not the best way to handle this situation. How about maybe some therapy or something. The singing, unnecessary.
The whole dependency on guys thing is starting to get old. I mean seriously, the only independent women was Hester and she got called a sinner. Then there’s Lucie Manette, you two should probably become friends because you have oh so much in common. First you and your brother were inseperable, then brother went to France. So you moved on to Hamlet. Daddy didn’t approve of Hamlet followed by Hamlet going crazy. You move on to Dad. Dad gets stabbed by crazy Hamlet, you break down and start singing things like “They say the owl was a baker’s daughter.”
And your death, although some may argue was a complete mistake, I would highly doubt. First off, lets give you the benefit of the doubt and say that you weren’t committing suicide but happen to fall in to the water while picking flowers.. call me naive but most people your age know how to swim… correct? So had you just happen to fall in the water while picking these hypothetical flowers you hypothetically then could have swam yourself to the edge of the river, but no, you drown. So it is my thought that although you may not have been planing your own death you certainly did not fight it.
The character of Ophelia seemed to me a little pathetic. She was like a leaf in the wind, and the men in her life were the wind. She would go wherever they blew her cough*don’t.see.Hamlet*cough and when they died (or went crazy or to Paris or something…) she went crashing down (or went crazy).
by harlanegr5 on May 7, 2009 at 12:41 am · Filed under Uncategorized
By far the most bizarre act in the book.
What is Hamlet doing? I mean, his actions aren’t just something that a mad person would do, they’re downright stupid.
First off the play.. Claudius, why on earth would you get up and scream for the lights and storm out, if Hamlet can act mad you could try acting innocent. The reaction just kind of set in stone the fact that you did it. Whether the crazy person thought so or not, you could have tricked everyone else, I mean lets face it, the other people in this novel.. not exactly intelligent. And Hamlet… why? This was so unnecessary, now Claudius knows you know what he’s done. A little undercover could have helped you out in the long run, maybe it wouldn’t have ended in such a tragedy.
Secondly, Polonius being stabbed.. I’m sorry but whose thought pattern goes “something behind a curtain… stab it” maybe pull the curtain away or something but just taking out a sword and butchering the thing? If everyone thought like that there would be a lot of little children playing hide and seek that would be killed. Then after he just killed the father of his love, Ophelia, he makes a few unemotional comments about it and then gets right back to harassing his mum about marrying Claudius. He then sees his fathers ghost, talks to it while his mum is still there and cannot see it, and then manages to convince his mum he isn’t mad, he’s just acting. Is it just me or is Gertrude a little.. well… stupid?
And then to end this act Hamlet drags the body of Polonius out of the room.
by harlanegr5 on May 7, 2009 at 12:23 am · Filed under Uncategorized
So first off, Hamlet is now acting like a lunatic? How exactly will this benefit him in any way shape or form. So he can kill his uncle and blame his madness? and then everyone treats him like some crazy man that belongs in the nut-house. Great plan Hamlet, great plan.
And then Polonius, now playing the concerned parent who goes to confront Hamlet’s parents about their children’s love affair, what exactly happened? Before he told Ophelia that she could NOT see Hamlet, and thought that Hamlet had tricked her into believing that he loved her, now he’s done a complete 180 and now thinks that Hamlet has gone insane because he cannot see Ophelia. What exactly does he expect to accomplish here anyways? I mean Hamlet isn’t exactly a little boy anymore so what exactly is talking to his parents going to accomplish?
And frankly, the fact that Gertrude and Claudius even have to spy on Hamlet and get Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to find out what is making him go crazy is a little dumb.. I mean his father supposedly dies of snake poisoning and then his mother marries his uncle, who’s, for lack of a better word, a prick, within months of his fathers death. That would be enough to make anyone go a little wacky.
And Hamlet… a play… really? Is that entirely necessary, I can think of so many ways that would show his Uncles guilt that wouldn’t throw Hamlet under the bus by showing Claudius he knew what had really happened. Who would want to reenact their fathers death anyways? I mean, for someone who is “supposedly” faking the whole mad thing, he’s making it seem like he might be a little wack-o without the acting.
Frankly this entire act seemed rather unnecessary. How about like 4 sentences: Hamlet starts acting more crazy and upsets Ophelia. Polonius thinks that its because he is love-sick and goes to confront Gertrude and Claudius about it. Gertrude and Claudius also notice Hamlet has been mad and have their own way of trying to figure it out.. cue Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Hamlet decides that the best way to see if Claudius did kill his father is to act out his fathers death.
by harlanegr5 on April 20, 2009 at 11:04 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
In Act 1 of “Hamlet” we are introduced to a wide variety of situations, ranging from a ghost-sighting to a wedding to an awkward encounter with a step son and father. None of the scenes seem to tie together very well yet but one thing we know for sure is there is a deeper, darker story behind each of these opening scenes. One major question we are all wondering right now is how exactly did the 2 months between Hamlet’s father, the king,’s death (murder?) play out that would lead his mother, Gertrude, to move on to Claudius so quickly. Hamlet seems completely in awe that she could move on so quickly, and when he confronts her about it (Act 1, Scene 2, Lines 75+) Claudius even dares to say that his emotions are “unmanly.” We know that there has been a ghost sighting in Act 1, Scene 1, and as that plot line progresses we become aware that this ghost is Hamlet’s deceased father. Another side plot going on in this act while the whole king/Gertrude/Claudius chaos is going on is the budding romance between Hamlet and Ophelia, but as we learn in scene 3, just like in Romeo and Juliet, this is not approved by the family of Ophelia, and is unknown by Hamlet’s family, but we can at this point assume that it would be unapproved of as Ophelia is a lower class than Hamlet, and Hamlet was intended to have an arranged marriage. The last scene set the story line for the rest of the play, when the ghost, Hamlet’s father and the king, told Hamlet that he was in fact murdered, and that it was done by none other that Claudius, Hamlet’s new step dad.
by harlanegr5 on April 2, 2009 at 10:17 am · Filed under Uncategorized
I really liked how this project steered away from the conventional type of research paper. I felt like I learned a lot from other people’s blogs as well as contributed to the blogging world as well. It made me feel like what I was writing was more significant than had we just wrote a paper because what we say is posted online for anyone to read after this. If I were to change anything about this I think that I would have only one blog due a week and start it earlier than we did, because it worked quite well as a backburner type project, and more time would allow us to better understand our poet. I also really loved learning about the other poets in class, because a lot of the poems I heard were ones that I had heard once or twice before, but never knew who wrote them, so it was cool to get background information on them.
http://brianegr5.edublogs.org/2009/03/19/eating-together/#comment-7
http://peteregr5.edublogs.org/2009/03/19/at-the-cancer-clinic/#respond
https://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=36363606&postID=4112991581398878956&page=1
I think that this poem is really beautiful, but also sad and lonely. Especially where he talks about walking back and looking for the buttons, retracing their steps. It reminds me of T.S. Eliot’s poem “Rhapsody on a Windy Night” when he talks about the street light that he finds himself under at the end of a poem. The entire poem reflects “Rhapsody on a Windy Night” and just the way it makes you feel in general. Like you lost someone, or something is missing. Very sad and reflective on the past.
http://booboomyloveax.blogspot.com/2009/02/seamus-heaney-mid-term-break.html
I think that this poem is fantastic. It encompasses some of T.S. Eliot’s traits like how he emphasizes time, which parallels Eliot’s poem “Rhapsody on a Windy Night.” It also shows how he was influenced by Patrick Kavanagh when he uses his families past (his brother’s death) as the subject of the poem. It’s tragic but also manages to show some beauty in the world, like when he says how the snow falls outside or describes the candle flickering. It gives you this calm sense about his death- almost as though he has come to terms with the fact that he cannot change it and is simply wallowing in it now, but is not angry or anxious like he was in the beginning of the poem when he describes waiting to come home.
http://romeroenc1102.blogspot.com/2009/03/digging-by-seamus-heaney.html
I agree with you when you say that this poem is about hard work, and I feel like in the beginning of the poem he is conflicted with whether what he is doing is worthy or equal to the hard work that his father and grandfather did. In the end, I think that he is finally sure that by digging into himself- his feelings, he is working as hard as his father and grandfather did, and although it isn’t physical labour it is still hard work and equally important. I love how he uses the word digging in a metaphoric sense… digging inside one’s self, as well as in a liter sense, his father and grandfather digging on farms.
This poem also shows Heaney’s influence by Patrick Kavanagh, because he also talks about family heritage.
http://cmosier.blogspot.com/2009/02/mid-term-break-plog-3.html
I agree with most of what you said, however, I would disagree that it was a blank tone. I think that he was overwhelmed with sadness and didn’t know how to handle himself in the beginning of the poem. At the end of the poem however, I felt as though he had accepted what had happened as fact, as though being around the funeral and his father had finally sunk in, and he was almost in a sense calm. The way he noticed the snow falling and the candle light made the whole scene appear to contrast the rest of the poem, because the child was just lying there, whereas before the narrator was waiting impatiently to go home, then crowded around by strangers, the final scene is the first scene in which everything seems at peace.
by harlanegr5 on April 2, 2009 at 10:16 am · Filed under Uncategorized
I stared out the window all day,
Waiting for the bell to ring.
At three o’clock the bus took me
Home.
In the living room I saw my mum staring at the TV
She had never been one to watch the news,
But the reporter sounded as afraid as she was.
My brother ran outside, giggling and skipping in the
Yard.
When I walked into the living room, I was surprised
By the tears streaming down her face
And she quivered as she told me
She didn’t know if everything was going to be
Okay.
Confusion, as she tried to comfort me,
I could feel her shake because no one
Knew.
At nine o’clock the TV was still on,
But there had been no new information, just repeats by
the shocked anchors.
Next morning I woke up and went to the radio.
Raindrops and dim lighting flickered through the room; I heard them
for the first time that day. Calmer now,
still with sounds of fear in their voice,
they talked of the fallen towers,
no foundation left, they had knocked it all
down.
Just two piles of ruble, one for each of the proud buildings that had stood there before.
This is in correspondence with Mid-Term Break. This is talking about 9/11 and the chaotic nature when the news was first heard, but then the unknown afterwards, when all you can do is wait for more information, but nothing that we can do afterwards can change the outcome of what happened. How although tragic and sad, there is almost a calmness the day after because there is nothing you can do, but simply wait and listen.
by harlanegr5 on April 2, 2009 at 10:15 am · Filed under Uncategorized
Another more modern poet that influenced Heaney was Patrick Kavanagh. Heaney was introduced to Patrick Kavanagh when he transferred to St Thomas’ secondary Intermediate School in west Belfast. The headmaster, Michael MacLaverty, introduced him to Kavanagh and that is when he began to write poetry as well.
~ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seamus_Heaney
As Seamus Heaney described in his paper, Eliot was an excellent influence, but god like in the poetry world, making it necessary for him to have a more realistic poet to aspire and note to:
“Yet much as I was learning from Eliot about the right way to listen, he could not be the starter-offer of poetry for me. He was more a kind of literary superego than a generator of the poetic libido, and in order for the libidinous lyric voice to get on with its initiations, it had to escape from his overseeing presence. So I turned towards more familiar, more engageable writers like Patrick Kavanagh, R. S. Thomas, Ted Hughes, John Montague, Norman MacCaig. All of a sudden I was making up for not having read contemporary Irish, Scottish, and English poetry; and that way, I got excited and got started.”
~ http://www.bostonreview.net/BR14.5/heaney.html
Seamus also talks about how Patrick influenced him by showing him that he should not be concerned about the mechanics of the poem, but he should be concerned with what the poem is about:
“Then later again, in the pure consequence of Elizabeth Bishop’s style, in the sheer obduracy of Robert Lowell’s and in the barefaced confrontation of Patrick Kavanagh’s, I encountered further reasons for believing in poetry’s ability – and responsibility – to say what happens, to “pity the planet,” to be “not concerned with Poetry.”
~ http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1995/heaney-lecture.html
In the poem “Digging” Heaney is influenced by Patrick Kavanagh by using his past- his ancestry- and utilizing it in his poetry:
“Kavanagh took his subject matter from his local native world of rural Monaghan, Heaney, from the life and landscape of the farming community where he grew up. Thus ‘Digging’ memorializes the cycles of manual labour on his family’s farm. The narrative of the poem serves to establish a sense of historical continuity even though the poet feels he cannot take his place with the traditional labouring generations of his forefathers. He can though, honour his family and community by preserving them in verse.
Between my finger and thumb
The squat pen rests.
I’ll dig with it.”
~ http://www.authorsden.com/visit/viewArticle.asp?id=21760
by harlanegr5 on April 2, 2009 at 10:12 am · Filed under Uncategorized
Seamus Heaney was extremely influenced by T. S. Eliot. So much so, in fact, that not only did he win the T. S. Eliot Prize in 2006 for his collection of poetry “District and Circle” bur he also wrote an entire paper called “The Power of T. S. Eliot.” Seamus Heaney said that reading the poetry of T. S. Eliot was like “A shiver that fleetingly registered itself as more pertinent and more acutely pleasurable than the prevailing warmth.” Seamus also states that “All this persuades me that what is to be learned from Eliot is the double-edged nature of poetry reality: first encountered as a strange fact of culture, poetry is internalized over the years until it becomes, as they say, second nature.”
“Eliot’s revelation of his susceptibility to poetry lines, the physicality of his ear as well as the fastidiousness of its discriminations, his example of a poet’s intelligence exercising itself in the activity of listening, all of this seemed to excuse my own temperamental incapacity for paraphrase and my disinclination to engage a poem’s argument and conceptual progress. Instead, it confirmed a natural inclination to make myself an echo chamber for the poem’s sounds. I was encouraged to seek for the contour of a meaning within the pattern of a rhythm. In the “Death by Water” section of The Waste Land, for example, I began to construe from its undulant cadences and dissolvings and reinings-in a mimetic principle which matched or perhaps even overwhelmed any possible meaning that might be derived from the story of Phlebas’s fate.” In this paragraph Heaney specifically starts talking about how his poetry started to reflect Eliots’, and how he started to pick up traits that Eliot had within his poetry.
Another factor that Seamus picked up from Eliot is the use of time. In T. S. Eliot’s poem “Rhapsody on a Windy Night” he states the time of night as the poem progresses. We can see Heaney doing the same thing in his poem “Mid-Term Break.”:
T.S. Eliots Poem
“Rhapsody on a Windy Night”:
Twelve o’clock.
Along the reaches of the street
Held in a lunar synthesis,
Whispering lunar incantations
Dissolve the floors of memory
And all its clear relations,
Its divisions and precisions,
Every street lamp that I pass
Beats like a fatalistic drum,
And through the spaces of the dark
Midnight shakes the memory
As a madman shakes a dead geranium.
Half-past one,
The street lamp sputtered,
The street lamp muttered,
The street lamp said, “Regard that woman
Who hesitates towards you in the light of the door
Which opens on her like a grin.
You see the border of her dress
Is torn and stained with sand,
And you see the corner of her eye
Twists like a crooked pin.”
The memory throws up high and dry
A crowd of twisted things;
A twisted branch upon the beach
Eaten smooth, and polished
As if the world gave up
The secret of its skeleton,
Stiff and white.
A broken spring in a factory yard,
Rust that clings to the form that the strength has left
Hard and curled and ready to snap.
Half-past two,
The street lamp said,
“Remark the cat which flattens itself in the gutter,
Slips out its tongue
And devours a morsel of rancid butter.”
So the hand of a child, automatic,
Slipped out and pocketed a toy that was running along the quay.
I could see nothing behind that child’s eye.
I have seen eyes in the street
Trying to peer through lighted shutters,
And a crab one afternoon in a pool,
An old crab with barnacles on his back,
Gripped the end of a stick which I held him.
Half-past three,
The lamp sputtered,
The lamp muttered in the dark.
The lamp hummed:
“Regard the moon,
La lune ne garde aucune rancune,
She winks a feeble eye,
She smiles into corners.
She smoothes the hair of the grass.
The moon has lost her memory.
A washed-out smallpox cracks her face,
Her hand twists a paper rose,
That smells of dust and old Cologne,
She is alone
With all the old nocturnal smells
That cross and cross across her brain.”
The reminiscence comes
Of sunless dry geraniums
And dust in crevices,
Smells of chestnuts in the streets,
And female smells in shuttered rooms,
And cigarettes in corridors
And cocktail smells in bars.”
The lamp said,
“Four o’clock,
Here is the number on the door.
Memory!
You have the key,
The little lamp spreads a ring on the stair,
Mount.
The bed is open; the tooth-brush hangs on the wall,
Put your shoes at the door, sleep, prepare for life.”
The last twist of the knife.
Seamus Heaney’s Poem,
“Mid-Term Break”:
I sat all morning in the college sick bay
Counting bells knelling classes to a close,
At two o’clock our neighbors drove me home.
In the porch I met my father crying–
He had always taken funerals in his stride–
And Big Jim Evans saying it was a hard blow.
The baby cooed and laughed and rocked the pram
When I came in, and I was embarrassed
By old men standing up to shake my hand
And tell me they were “sorry for my trouble,”
Whispers informed strangers I was the eldest,
Away at school, as my mother held my hand
In hers and coughed out angry tearless sighs.
At ten o’clock the ambulance arrived
With the corpse, stanched and bandaged by the nurses.
Next morning I went up into the room. Snowdrops
And candles soothed the bedside; I saw him
For the first time in six weeks. Paler now,
Wearing a poppy bruise on the left temple,
He lay in the four foot box as in a cot.
No gaudy scars, the bumper knocked him clear.
A four foot box, a foot for every year.
Heaney also stated in his essay on Eliot that “What one learns ultimately from Eliot is `something upon which to rejoice” and also said that “He showed how poetic vocation entails the disciplining of a habit of expression until it becomes fundamental to the whole conduct of a life.” Seamus Heaney not only learned about how to write poetry for T. S. Eliot but also how to enjoy and read it. He learned that poetry was not just for fun, but also a way to express yourself.
“Perhaps the final thing to be learned is this: in the realm of poetry, as in the realm of consciousness, there is no end to the possible learnings that can take place.”
http://www.bostonreview.net/BR14.5/heaney.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seamus_Heaney
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