Use what you have learned from
reading these pieces to write
a paragraph that provides an analysis of how the theme
of the power of silence is depicted in the two pieces, addressing the
writers’ use of style and diction.
As
a starting point, you may want to consider what is emphasized, absent, or different
in the two texts.
Develop
your paragraph by providing textual evidence from both texts.
Use
the provided lined paper to compose your response.
You must IDENTIFY the
grammatical, literary, and syntactical terms (from this sheet in the middle
column) WITHIN your paragraph. Do not simply summarize and quote. Remember
that this paragraph is about the writing, not an assessment of the characters' growth
throughout the book.
Reading Passage A: “The Secret Life of Bees”
By: Sue Monk Kidd
Excerpt from pgs. 192, 196, 199
|
Reading Passage B: I Feel It All
By: Leslie Feist
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The
light swept across the surface, making a spatter of ink gold splotches
before it stopped, abruptly. May lay in the river, just beneath the
surface. Her eyes were open and unblinking, and the skirt of her
dress fanned out and swayed in the current. (192)
May
lay in two feet of water with a huge river stone on top of her chest.
It weighted her whole body, holding it to the bottom. Looking at her, I
thought,
She will get up now. August will roll away the stone, and May will
come up for air, and we will go back to the house and get her dry. I wanted to reach down and touch her, shake her shoulder a little. She couldn’t have died out here in the river.
That would be impossible. (192)
I
imagined how May had rolled the rock from the bank out into the river,
then lay down, pulling it on top of her. She had held it tight like a
baby, and waited for her lungs to fill. I wondered if she had flailed
and jerked toward the surface at the last second, or did she go without
fighting, embracing the rock, letting it up soak up all the pain she
felt? I wondered about the creatures that had swum by while she died.
(196)
Mostly, I saw the blaze of anguish and love that had so often come into her face.
In the end it had burned her up. (199)
|
I feel it all, I feel it all
I feel it all, I feel it all The wings are wide, the wings are wide Wild card in sight, wild card in sight Oh I’ll be the one who'll break my heart I'll be the one to hope Can I know more than I knew before I know more than I knew before I didn't rest, I didn't stop Did we fight or did we talk Oh I’ll be the one who'll break my heart I'll be the one to hope Can I love you more I love you more I don't know what I knew before But now I know I want to win the war No one likes to take a test Sometimes we don't pull or flex Put your weight against the door Kick-drum on the basement floor Stranded in the thought of woods Looking like the winter bird On my head the water pours Cops stream through the open door Fly away Fly away the one who want to make I feel it all I feel it all The wings are wide Wild card in sight, wild card in sight Oh I’ll be the one who'll break my heart I'll be the one who'll break my heart I'll be the one who'll break my heart I'll end it, though you started it The truth, the lies The truth, the lies |
ReplyDeleteIn addressing Sue Monk Kidd’s use of style, in The Secret Life of Bees, around the theme of the power of silence, the first observation is that Kidd uses a first person narrative style. This makes the writing more powerful because I’m looking through Lily’s eyes while I read. The passage has a lot of detail. I can feel, hear, taste, see, and smell wherever Lily is, and what she’s looking at and feeling. I can empathize with her. Kidd makes use of this surplus of detail by adding in all of the characters’ thoughts. Dialogue isn’t always necessary. Consider this part of the passage, “She will get up now. August will roll away the stone, and May will come up for air, and we will go back to the house and get her dry.” I felt like I was standing there with Lily, feeling everything that she felt. It felt like we were connected. As far as Kidd’s use of diction, she uses the right amount of words and phrases to make the narrative stronger and richer in detail. The poem by Leslie Feist, I Feel It All, uses a much different style and diction. The style is a first person poem, and the diction is repetitive, with rhyming words. The poet uses no white space and the line breaks are pretty constant. She is talking to herself, so like Kidd’s passage; she is able to show the theme of the power of silence. What is absent in Feist’s piece, is what is present in Kidd’s—lots of descriptive detail. I couldn’t perfectly see the scene, and I barely understood what the glub was going on. One minute I thought that the author thought that cops were breaking in to kill her, and the next, it looks like she’s drowning. This is shown when the poem says, “On my head the water pours Cops stream through the open door.” The only thing that these two pieces have in common is their use of movement. Though there is no dialogue, the verbs used give the reader the image of movement. This is my analysis of the two pieces side-by-side.
The idea of emotions is represented in both of these passages. This first passage of the Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd demonstrates the feelings that May might have been feeling during her death. She created a visual image when she says, “her eyes were open and unblinking, and the skirt of her dress fanned out and swayed in the current.” She metaphorically showed that the rock lying down on May’s chest as she died were like her feelings and problems weighing down on her. This writing passage by Sue Monk Kidd is more formal and is in the point of view of Lily Owens. The symbolism showed in the piece is that no matter how hard your emotions are hurting you never let them kill you. Compared to the reading passage, I feel it all, by Leslie Feist. In this piece there is a lot of anaphora, or parallelism. Throughout the passage, the author is constantly repeating similar sayings in two lines. For example the first two lines in the poem are, “I feel it all, I feel it all, I feel it all, I feel it all.” A little later on in the poem it also says, “Can I love you more, I love you more.” This shows that the author is constantly repeating lines throughout the passage. The tone of this passage is a little happier and more informal compared the passage from the Secret Life of Bees. The symbolism showed in this passage was that you should just let your emotions free. Overall, both passages demonstrated two different ways to get a point across.
ReplyDeleteBoth reading A and reading B are talking about the power of silence. However, they are both working differently. Reading A is about silence because May is usually a very talkative character. Lily knows that May has just died so Lily is silent and is just thinking. However, Lily is describing the other characters actions without speaking. She says “she will get up now. August will roll away the stone and May will come up for air, and we will go back to the house and get her dry.” The entire reading is Lily’s narration and it affects the way of the writing. In reading B, it uses a lot of repetition. There is no talking, there is only feeling. For example, “I feel it all, I feel it all”. The author is feeling all these emotions but not talking about them. This piece is different from reading A because it uses repetition and no punctuation. The style of the writing is that it is a poem and it uses repetition.
ReplyDeleteIn a reading passage from “The Secret Life of Bees” Sue Monk Kidd is describing every detail when May is seen in the river dead. Her writing is in a paragraph type of form. In the passage it states “I imagined how May had rolled the rock from the bank out into the river, and then lay down, pulling it on top of her.” This shows how the power of silence can create a variety of images of what happened in someone’s head. Additionally, figurative language was used in the piece. The passage states “She had held it tight like a baby, and waited for her lungs to fill.” This is a simile comparing her holding the rock tightly, like it was a baby. The rock on May’s chest symbolized all the emotions and pain she has to endure weighing down on her. In the poem “I Feel It” Leslie Fiest is emphasizing many feelings. Heart Break is used many times in the poem. Tons of repetition is used throughout the entire poem. I think that when “I feel it all” is used it means that Fiest can feel the silence. The writing is in stanzas and rhyming is also used in it. The word stranded is used in the writing and I believe stranded can relate to silence because when you are stranded, you don’t have anyone to talk to, therefore they both relate. Overall both pieces show the power of silence in different ways.
ReplyDeleteSilence is more powerful than speaking. The power of silence is depicted in these two pieces as a something one uses to think, hope, comprehend and express their emotions. In Reading Passage A, an excerpt from “The Secret Life of Bees”, Lily writes of May’s suicide and the silence that follows, both from May and the living. Nobody speaks as they stare at May’s corpse. Lily herself thinks in the excerpt from page 192, “She couldn’t have died out here in the river. That would have been impossible.” At this moment in time, Lily’s tone shows that she is trying to overcome the shock, horror, and sadness washing over her, like the river over May’s motionless body, as she is realizing that May, someone close to her, is truly gone. Of course, Lily knew that she was not going to get up and breathe yet, the silence let her hopes rise and slowly sink. Mutely, Lily stared at May and, in the excerpt from page 199, “saw the blaze of anguish and love that had so often come into her face. In the end it had burned her up”. Using imagery, the sentences show how silence has an ability to last through time and even death since May’s feelings still project to Lily. The shortness of the second sentence highlights the importance and simplicity in the fact that anguish and love, two emotions seen clearly on May’s face, had killed her, not the rock weighing her body down or anybody else. In Reading Passage B, a poem called I Feel It All, also touches upon the idea of expressing feelings through silence. Parallelism is used throughout the song to emphasize certain ideas such as, “I’ll be the one who’ll break my heart”. This differs from the “Secret Life of Bees” passage due to the fact that, here, the author speaks, not of expressing emotions outwardly, but inwardly. While Passage A has a mood that was more melancholy and shocked due to sudden changes in the narrator’s circumstances, Passage B expresses feelings of sadness and displeasure at oneself that have been building up for a while. This shows the negative side of silence, the short phrases like needles of disgust aimed at oneself. It almost seems like the writer was scolding herself was the point of the song when the lines “I didn’t rest, I didn’t stop.” By writing out “But now I know I want to win the war”, in the song, the singer expresses her internal conflict against herself and how now she wants to fight the self-disgust boiling inside of her mind. This links in towards Passage A with how silence can give one hope. Silence’s power is evident throughout the two passages by demonstration how it allows one to ponder, believe, understand and show one’s emotions with more ease.
ReplyDeleteThe two pieces of literature both show a reoccurring theme of the power of silence. In passage A, Lily, Rosaleen, June, and August are all silent as they stared down at May’s body crushed under the big stone. When people are shell shocked in a traumatic way, people stay silent. Lily did this exact thing by not saying a word. This is shown throughout the entire piece because Lily never says a single word aloud. However, you can feel all her emotions in much deeper way then you could if they were spoken. In passage B, the author uses repletion very much. This allows the author to get their point across multiple times in the text. The text shows the power of silence because the author wants the bad things to fly away. Silence is very powerful especially when bad situations happy because when they do happen silence will take control of the mood.
ReplyDeletePassage A from “The Secret Life of Bees” by Sue Monk Kidd and Passage B from I Feel It All by Leslie Feist both have an underlying tune of the power of silence. In Passage A from “The Secret Life of Bees”, May has just died and they are standing by the river in shock and awe completely silent. The silence set the tone of the whole passage and lets the reader know that something devastating has just happened without even explaining their feelings. In I Feel It All, it is talking about how she was just jilted, got into an argument, and is being the better person by shunning him, hence silence. Also, each writer has their own strengths. Sue Monk Kidd uses italicized writing like “She will get up now. August will roll away the stone, and May will come up for air.” She uses this to express the character’s thoughts and in this case it shows Lily’s eternal optimism. Leslie Feist uses repetition like repeating “I feel it all” four times in the beginning to set the mood as serious for the poem to come. The title of I Feel It All, relates to the poem because it is about her getting jilted from a relationship and all of the emotions that she is feeling and she “feels it all”.
ReplyDelete4muskateers4
How does it feel to die? No one knows. It will forever remain a mystery. These 2 passages touch up upon the mystery of death and how it feels. The first reading was excerpts from multiple pages in The Secret Life of Bees. “I wondered…” is a phrase that is repeated quite a few times in the last excerpt, describing how the character (in this case Lily) was wondering exactly what it felt like when May had put the rock on her chest and let it weigh her down. The other reading, I Feel it All, tells a story about “feeling it all”. Throughout the entire poem, the phrase “I feel it all” is repeated quite often. This phrase has quite a bit of importance. Not only is it the title of the poem, but it has a bit of meaning behind it. In the phrase, “It” could have quite a few different meanings, but I feel that “It” is most likely referencing the feeling of pain. The author mentions things such as arguments and broken hearts, and I feel that pain is a good description of both. I also feel that if “It” references pain, the it connects very well to the excerpts from the book. May might have been in pain when she died, or she might have not. What was felt will forever remain a mystery.
ReplyDeleteThe power of silence is the similar topic in both writings. In the “Secret Life of Bees”, Kidd shows that silence can have both positive and adverse effects. Silence may add up the uncertainty of something. In this case, it was May’s death. In “I Feel It All”, Fiest shows the reader of her poem that silence can possibly break one’s heart. The usage of the words “I can” in the poem shows potential of someone. There is no evidence of time period. Sue Monk Kidd uses strong terminology to describe May’s death and Lily’s emotions. Kidd also uses figurative language.
ReplyDelete
ReplyDeleteLoss is a very large part of human life. This theme is clearly depicted in “The Secret Life of Bees” by Sue Monk Kidd as well as “My Lost Father” by Lucille Clifton. First, in the excerpt of “The Secret Life of Bees”, the death of May is described. In the book, it says, “May was dead. August knew, too, but she put her ear to May’s chest, listening.” This shows that a death is shown in this novel. It also shows that death is an occurrence of denial. August checked May, for even a sliver of life, even though she knew it was too late. Also, in the excerpt, after August announces that May has left them, there is a break between paragraphs. Though this is used to pass time and make the situation more dramatic, I thin the author also used it as a moment of silence for May. Lily also mention how, “Even now that’s the picture that will keep me up in the night, not May’s eyes, open and staring, or the stones resting on her like a grave slab. Her hands.” I think this shows that when death occurs, a person will remembered by what they did, not by how they looked. In the poem “My Lost Father”, it says “the banners of regret” which I think also shows that denial comes with death. Regret may be for not spending enough time with the deceased, or some how pinning the death on yourself, but overall considering the fact that the death could’ve been made less painful or been avoided. This is all denial. It also says “he leaves a wake of tears” which shows that death can be painful and upsetting. Furthermore, there are numerous spaces between the words, which I think are, once again, left as spaces for mourning. They are meant to help us remember the deceased. Sentences in this poem are not full, which I believe was done to show that death can leave the living with pain, and this pain can be so great to bear the full sentences are difficult to write. Both of these pieces show loss and pain in similar ways.
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