"Hope" is the thing with feathers

The word hope in its own right holds no certain certitude. Everyone has their own definition of the word and what it means to them, in fact, if you ask any two people you probably won't get the same answer from both of them. This masterpiece by Emily Dickinson shows why the word hope has so many meanings and so many explanation. She shows us that hope uses more than just one sense, she uses sight and hearing which shows us that hope is all around us. She uses a lot of unclear language in a clear attempt to get the reader to make the reader make an interpretation of the poem with a base point (being hope).

She uses ambiguity in this poem to make her own meaning of it but also to allow us as readers to make our own conclusions. Her first line ""Hope" is the thing  with feathers" is the first of many lines to use ambiguity basically meaning one point, that hope can fly and take you anywhere you want, other than that as the reader we have to make our own conclusions. I feel like she uses ambiguity on purpose to basically tell us what she feels like hope means to her but only she can understand. This leaves the reader having to make their own conclusions about what hope means to them. I feel like the subject of hope is such an open-ended subject where in explaining it there is always ambiguity somewhere in your explanation so in this poem she makes us think creatively by making us use our senses to make us understand what she is saying. She says she has "heard it in the chillest land and on the strangest sea" which to me means that no matter what situation she was in she could always hear hope somewhere. In this last line she says "yet never in extremity, it (hope) asked a crumb of me" to me this means that she asked hope for everything yet it never asked for anything back, one might say "well, hope is not a person" well thats the thing, hope is a spirit that needn't anything in return but will be there when you need it most in the extremest of conditions and in the best of times.

In conclusion, ambiguity in this poem is not being unsure, it is being you. It is taking Dickinson's words and molding them into your own meaning, as you read you will see that almost every word she uses can be molded into a new meaning by everyone who reads it. Dickinson had her own meaning of it when she wrote it and never intended it to be understood the same way by any reader as is the deal with most poems unless they are just a story poem (a story written in stanzas using poetic language). All poems are open to interpretation and this poem is a perfect example of that point.

Review of CIDINT

The show The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime featured a charismatic cast with an amazing stage and intriguing lights and sound effects, the show was incredibly futuristic which I enjoyed. The show was based heavily off of the novel which tells the story of an autistic but very smart boy named Christopher who has two goals in the near future, to find the killer of his neighbors dog, Wellington and to get an A* on his math A-level exam. The play stayed very true to the novel in that it did not change a lot of the storyline around a lot and used charismatic acting, lighting effects and sound effects to emphasize the symptoms of Christopher's autism. They also managed to include some comedic elements and language into the play which was fun too.  I do feel like the play was a bit confusing in the beginning as to explaining who was who and what was going on but once you caught on you basically knew the story and understood everything you saw. The lights sometimes made it complicated to know where you were and who lived where but the lighting really came to life in the train scene which was quite well done. I liked the distant affection that the parents showed Christopher as well, Christopher doesn't like to be touched, but when prompted he touches his mother and father's hands as I sign to show them that he does love them which occurs repeatedly throughout the show and just adds a very touching element to the show. I feel the show ended nicely with Christopher getting an A* on his exam and his parents are both very proud of him and it is just a very touching scene and Christopher's own victory, I also like how in the last scene when he asked his mom that since he got an A* on the exam that he could do anything but right before she could respond, the screen cut to black which in my opinion was a genius way to end a brilliant show. In all, I was impressed with all aspects of the play and am happy that I took the time to go see it, it definitely exceed my expectations and I would recommend it to any avid play-goer looking for something new or a beginners first show, be it what it is, it is a great show and I enjoyed it very much.

Nature is what we see

In this poem, there is one stanza consisting of 12 lines and it is one long sentence. The meter changes quite a bit in this poem, the first two lines are 6/1 (6 syllables to 1 line) and then the next lines vary from 7/1, 8/1 and sometimes even 9/1 and then go back to 6/1 for the end.  The rhyme pattern for the first three lines is ABA and then I believe the rhyme pattern for the next five lines is BCABA and the rhyme scheme ends as there are no more rhymes to include. The tone of this poem is uplifting as it talks heavily about nature and all things nice. In this poem she connects nature to harmony which means nature is peaceful. She also connects it to heaven which in a way, I think, is that it is everlasting.

The poem says that Nature is the most peaceful ant beautiful part of our world. She talks about the most beautiful aspects of nature or her favorite parts anyway. She also says "Our wisdom is impotent to her simplicity" which is basically saying that what we know is powerless to how simple nature is because nature is just beautiful and we will never know why or how nature is how it is because it is simply just there which is the definition of her "simplicity". She talks about the senses, sight and hearing and then gives examples of what we can see (the hills, the afternoon, the bumblebee, the squirrel) and then she talks about what we can hear (The Bobolink, the sea, the thunder, the cricket). I feel this is significant because it truly does emphasize that nature is all around us and that it invokes all of our senses.

Themes in Poetry

3 themes I found were religion, family and youth.

With religion, I found in the first poem about the figs that they were related the figs back to Allah and how it seemed that the figs were his fruit. It said "I'm talking about a fig straight from the Earth - a gift of Allah"

With family, I found that in all poems he would talk about his father or in the case of the third poem his Grandmother. In each of his first two poems he says Papa or father, in the first one he says "My father, in Arabic, chanting a song" and in the second one he says "It was never too strong for us: make it blacker Papa". He seemed to relate all of these poems back to his family or include them in it so we can infer that he had a close-knit relationship with his family

For youth, it is clear that since he uses Papa and Father and mother all the time that he is talking about memories of his childhood. He even speaks to being a young age in the first poem when he says; "At age six, I ate a dried fig and shrugged".

Once on This Island

I am writing this from a perspective of a performer who was a part of the cast of the show. The show was about a peasant girl who falls in love with a rich boy when his car crashes in her village and she takes him under her care. After he is taken away by his relatives, the girl then travels to find him, when she does find him, he allows her in and makes her his temporary mistress until Andrea, the girlfriend of the boy, comes home and the boy, who is named Daniel is scolded by his parents for falling in love with a peasant and is forced to throw her out of the hotel. Andrea and Daniel are married and in an absolutely heartbreaking ending Ti Moune, the peasant girl, died of starvation outside of the Hotel where Daniel lives. My part in the play was that of a storyteller named Armand and I played Daniel's father. The performance overall was amazing and everyone did so well. I had trouble keeping control of my emotions as I let tears fall on the last two songs of the play on the last two days of the show. The musical score is absolutely brilliant, all with catchy lyrics and brilliant melodies and some of the songs are more on the beautiful song with heartfelt lyrics and gorgeous chord progressions and harmonies that truly touch the heart and will make any audience member shed a tear or two. Saturday was definitely our best show because the audience got into it and we really saw their emotion towards the end as a few of them cried at the last two songs which kind of made me feel a little better since I had also cried on those last two songs. The choreography that we incorporated into the show was fun to learn and really did flow with the music, each movement that we did had a specific part to the song and everything was just so well put together. I missed two weeks of rehearsal and I did have a hard time bouncing back into things and at some parts even doubted my own abilities to prepare for the show and learn all of the dance moves and remember all of the lyrics but Ms. Guarino and the rest of the cast pushed me and helped me to prepare and made me feel confident in myself and pushed me to put on a great performance and I want to thank Ms. Guarino for believing in me and not giving up on me because I honestly believe any director would have given up on me and just found someone else but she worked with me and helped me along the way and I am happy that I was able to deliver. This production was amazing led by an amazing cast and I am so glad that I was able to be a part of it. I love all of you

Scenework Reflection

Right now we are making decent progress and have a firm, steady basis on the direction we are heading in with this assignment. We have a firm script that we are still cleaning and polishing up but other than that all we have to do is memorize our lines and we will be ready to perform. We need to work on memorizing our lines and remembering our blocking but otherwise, the chemistry between the actors in our scene is really good, we all get along and are the same page about everything. After watching others work, we feel like we are in good shape about most things, today in class, we just took time to run through our lines and try and get some memorization down while we could have been running some blocking as well which we should have done, we just read our scripts aloud and tried to memorize what we could which was basically our whole first scene and a lot of the second scene. Our progress up to this point has been quite stellar and we are in a good spot and are ahead of a few groups in terms of our preparations and our performance is looking very promising. Our interpretation of the text is clearly interpreted in the scene quite clearly, we will be using more props and costumes to depict where we are and who we are so yes, I do believe that the audience will understand who we are and where we are and that we will do a good job of interpreting the scene to the audience. Also we are having issues with timing and how fast we speak. We are all decently fast speakers so we are definitely going to have to slow down if we are going to get 20 minutes in, also we could add a little bit more dialogue to our scripts for some characters such as Papa Ge's character who doesn't speak as much in the 2nd, 3rd and 4th scenes as much as he speaks in the 1st scene. Erzulie also fades out near the end of the performance but Erzulie did almost all of the talking in the first scene so she has enough lines, Asaka and Agwe have  dialogue in, I believe, the 3rd scene. If anyone needs more lines it is definitely Papa Ge because I feel like maybe sometimes he doesn't speak enough towards the end and the way the performance is enacted, he is supposed to stand in a corner with a toothpick in his mouth muttering comments whenever he feels like it. I feel like that if we leave him standing around for too long that the crowd will forget that he's there and when he finally does say something in the 3rd or 4th scene, they will be like "wait, who's that again?", so if we need to amp up anyone's line count it's definitely Papa Ge. Other than this I feel like our performance is stellar and that with a little bit of time to run our performance in the black box and memorize we will be ready to give a good show.

Proposal

For this project, we decided to change the perspective of the story of My Love, My Love. The main characters of the script will be the gods- Erzulie played by Charlie Swan, Papa Ge played by Taylor, Asaka played by Grace Greene and Agwe played by Michael Davis- and the story will be told from their point of view. Desiree always looked to the gods for guidance in the beginning of her journey, and though we, the readers, do not see much of them, they are accredited with responsibility for many of the story’s events.  They are the puppet masters of everything that goes on on Earth. To show this in our scene, we have set the gods in a control center. The setting is going to be an office where each god handles their daily tasks of controlling the universe. The gods will be doing tedious office work, but their decisions will be affecting many lives. The Gods will receive mail concerning their “principles.” (Erzulie will deal with love, Agwe with storms, etc.) The scene is going to show a fantasy-reality situation. The Gods are going to be dressed as businessmen, but they are going to be making decisions about people’s lives. We’ve decided to present the story this way to show how the gods just treated people as their pawns. 

The main conflict for our scene will be gods messing in each other’s departments. Agwe will be messing with Erzulie’s and no one will be listening to Papa Ge. Asaka and Agwe are in an underlying conflict that has disrupted the entire office (proving once and for all that office romances are not a good decision,) but most of the story will be focused on the gods trying to navigate around each other in regards to Desiree’s life.