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Thread: Literary Crit - Can you do it?

  1. #1

    Default Literary Crit - Can you do it?

    Im finding it impossible to write a literary Crit essay (500 words) on this poem -

    Request To A Year
    by Judith Wright
    Written in 1940

    If the year is meditating a suitable gift,
    I should like it to be the attitude
    of my great- great- grandmother,
    legendary devotee of the arts,

    who having eight children
    and little opportunity for painting pictures,
    sat one day on a high rock
    beside a river in Switzerland

    and from a difficult distance viewed
    her second son, balanced on a small ice flow,
    drift down the current toward a waterfall
    that struck rock bottom eighty feet below,

    while her second daughter, impeded,
    no doubt, by the petticoats of the day,
    stretched out a last-hope alpenstock
    (which luckily later caught him on his way).

    Nothing, it was evident, could be done;
    And with the artist's isolating eye
    My great-great-grandmother hastily sketched the scene.
    The sketch survives to prove the story by.

    Year, if you have no Mother's day present planned,
    Reach back and bring me the firmness of her hand.



    This is what I have - which is crap.

    Literary Criticism – Request to a Year

    Upon first impressions, the poem, “Request for a year” by Judith Wright can be described as a ballad. The poet seems to be writing in reflection. The main subject of the poem seems to be the poets Great Great Grandmother whose character is brought out by the recollection of a past event.

    The poem starts of portraying the Grandmother in a very positive light as a “Legendary devotee to the arts”. The Poet seems to be envious and would like to be attributed with the grandmother’s attitude. In the second stanza the reader learns more about the main character, she is seen as someone who is the head of a large family who has little time for personal pleasures such as the arts. At this point the reader understands that the setting of the poem is in the nineteenth century with the grandmother being a typical mother of eight children.

    The poet then uses a direct informal image through the painting.
    The reader is presented with an image of the grandmother perched on a rock observing the rest of her family in crisis. She calmly observes her son in peril and her daughter saving him, she is seen as calm showing no emotion or panic, the line, “Nothing. It was evident, could be done” shows that she was rational and calculating, but at the same time the reader wonders if this is really a poem paying tribute to a mother, who shows no sign of emotion. The reader gets the impression that the painting is of more importance than her own son.

    The mother is a symbolic of times past, her sketch is like a window into he past which the poet uses to draw the reader into the story. As the poem concludes there is a sense of nostalgia, the main character can be described as a firm hand in times of crisis, yes, showing no emotion we ask ourselves, would we as parents sit and sketch while our son was in peril? Why does Wright regard such emotionless outdated Behaviour in such high regard?
    Well, if I, Belisarius, the Black Prince, and you all agree on something, I really don't think there can be any further discussion.
    - Simetrical 2009 in reply to Ferrets54

  2. #2
    Sidus Preclarum's Avatar Honnête Homme.
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    Lit Crit is imho the worst exercise ever : it kills any pleasure that could have been had out of the text...
    on a sidenote, looks like the definition of a ballad changes much from one language to another .

  3. #3

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    I have to re learn how to do it within a month.
    Well, if I, Belisarius, the Black Prince, and you all agree on something, I really don't think there can be any further discussion.
    - Simetrical 2009 in reply to Ferrets54

  4. #4
    MoROmeTe's Avatar For my name is Legion
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    Well, here is my stab t it... certainly better thatn yours, I say:

    Quote Originally Posted by MoROmeTE
    The first part of the poem presents the idea behind the lyrical composition. The poem is but a call of an empty and unsatisfied artist to the muses, represented in the impersonal form of the “Year”, which is not suited to offer gifts but of which the author nevertheless requests a gift. To address the call to such a force implies a certain level of despair on the part of the artist who cannot live up to the standard she sets for herself, as an artist and as a human being.
    This standard has a form, an impersonation. This impersonation is that of her great grandmother, a figure of times past, a legendary devotee to the arts and also a great woman. The fact that the great great grandmother is an example to the author is evident from her description. She “has eight children, which quickly but thoroughly describes her fulfillment as a woman, in an age long gone when women were rejoicing in having children, but she was also a legendary devotee to the arts, who still found the resolve and the power to paint in grievous circumstances, that are described in the body of the poem. [Add some comments about that description here, if you want]
    The causes of the failure to be of the author are of personal as well as social origin. We can discern some of the social causes from the implied glorification of a old forgotten timeframe represented by the great great grandmother, when people could be art lovers, drifting out of reality into imaginary, and also fulfilled women and men. The present of 1940 is greatly opposed as the arts ceded room to the expectations of reality, and of a painful reality, that of war. The personal reasons are linked with the impossibility of the author to have the same spirit as her great great grandmother in the circumstances of the 1940. She cannot be as still and devoted to the arts as to paint, with words, the picture of grim reality. She wants the power her ancestor had and so she cries out to the muses, the year, to give her the firmness of the hand that her great great grandmother had, so that she can fulfill herself as an artist even in the circumstances of the day.
    Tell me how you like it... typos aside.


    In the long run, we are all dead - John Maynard Keynes
    Under the patronage of Lvcivs Vorenvs
    Holding patronage upon the historical tvrcopolier and former patron of the once fallen, risen from the ashes and again fallen RvsskiSoldat

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