Matthew Arnolds Dover Beach Essay example -- Poem Poetry Essays

Matthew Arnold's Dover Beach Great works of poetry convey a feeling, mood, or message that affects the reader on an emotional, personal level. Great works of poetry can do that -- translate a literal story/theme -- but masterpieces, like Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach," are a double-edged sword, containing a second, figurative theme -- a message between the lines and underneath the obvious. Not only is Matthew Arnold's 1867 poem, "Dover Beach," a unique and beautiful literary work describing a lover's longing for trust and faith, but on a figurative plain it also stands as a metaphor for that constant evil called war. Literally, "Dover Beach" flows through four irregularly rhymed sections that increase in emotional impact and describe a lover's need for faithfulness in an otherwise dark and unfaithful world. In this traditional sense, the narrator of "Dover Beach" is either a man or woman standing at a window wearily reflecting on the world while staring at the beauty of the night coast. In the first section (Arnold's poem is very prose-like in its lack of a distinct structure or rhyme scheme, sputtering through the first nine lines in an abacdbdce rhyme scheme), the lover declares that "The sea is calm tonight." The poem continues with simple imagery of the atmosphere, describing the full tide, the moon, the beaches of Dover, the night air, the waves, all of which we presume are viewable from the narrator's window. The scene is cemented: a moon-bathed beach, the waves drawing back, only to crash back in a "grating roar of pebbles." "The eternal note of sadness" is set as the lover begins to question the beauty he sees and the love he longs to keep. The next two sections of "Dover Beach" describe a w... ...re ignorant armies clash by night." Whether Arnold intends to imply that these things were murdered and driven from the world by war or that they never even existed in the first place is left to the readers to decide for themselves. On a traditional, literal level, Matthew Arnold's poem, "Dover Beach," is a vivid voice praying for faithful love in a beautiful yet evil and faithless world, but figuratively, the poem is a metaphor for the cycle of war and the darkness it brings to the world. The waves represent the battles, the pebbles the innocent people flung about by their power, and that note of despair present throughout the entire poem hints at no possible end for weary romantics like the poem's narrator. Crying both for the endurance of love and an end to war at the same time, "Dover Beach" stands as a poetic masterpiece of one eternal note: sadness.

Prison Environment Essay

  The prison environment could be define as a place to help persons convicted of crimes change their way of lifestyle, if it is a problem and serve out their sentence. The prison discussed in my readings is an environment where anyone from the cook to the janitor could influence someone to make a change in their thinking and their actions. What was once ran like a country under dictatorship, has now become a place where inmates are treated with respect and dignity. The environment of a prison is leaning more to a nurturing way of dealing with the inmates versus a clad iron system. Institutional management and custody are influenced by the constant growing population and the rise of gangs in the system. If there was less turnovers of correction officers in the prison the culture could possibly be change. Secure custody methods play an important role in the prison environment. Secure custody methods are how personnel keep a count of the inmates, keep them safe from one another as wel l as keeping order in the prison. A few of the methods used are; the count which is when personnel count the inmates to make sure that all are accounted for. During this process there is minimum to no activity until the task is complete. Another method is the sally port. This is basically two gates that can’t be opened at the same time. It operates by a person passing through the first gate in order for the next gate to open. Lastly, prison rules and contraband control are the other secure methods. Prison rules are likely broken on a consistent basis so that method of securing is probably not that efficient. The high count of gang members, more than likely play a large role in prison rules being broken as well as contra band being smuggled into the prison. The prison environment has improved over the years, but there is still room for improvement. The methods used to secure the facility should be revised. By revising these methods chances are the prisons will began to make a change towards the better.

Book Review Barbara Kingsolvers Animal Vegetable Miracle

Book review: Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver Barbara Kingsolver was already an established novelist when she moved from drought-ridden Arizona to her family farm in Virginia, as chronicled in her book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. Kingsolver was determined to go totally local by growing her own food and only consuming foods grown locally and in season. The ultimate goal of Kingsolvers experiment was to have a zero carbon footprint. This meant eschewing citrus fruit flown in from Florida and California and selecting locally-grown rhubarb instead; collecting her own chicken eggs, and killing her own turkeys. Kingsolver was unimpressed by going organic, given the extent to which corporations dominated the organic industry and she was unimpressed by vegetarianisms argument that it offered a more sustainable lifestyle. Im unimpressed by arguments that condemn animal harvest...while ignoring, wholesale, the animal killing that underwrites vegetal foods Kingsolver writes (Kin gsolver 222). Pesticides, she points out, kill animals to ensure that we have vegetables and soy burgers. Kingsolver is mainly known as a novelist but uses a multi-dimensional approach to address the contentious issue of what is the best way to eat in her resulting memoir. She includes diary entrees by her teenage daughter Camille Kingsolver who was forced to participate in her mothers experiment as well as her husbands scientific views of locavorism and the pro-organic movement.