“[One] can outlast death not in a divine after life but only in a human one. If the poet dies or forgets his beloved, he murders her” (Ramazani 131); Thomas Hardy’s belief of the “poet’s duty of remembrance” establishes the basis for his, “Ah, Are You Digging on My Grave?”. “[Fearing] he abandoned his own wife before her death,” Hardy wrote the poem to assume “the memorial responsibilities of the poet” (Ramazani 131). Whereas Hardy tries to atone for his sins “by continually grieving over his dead wife”, the fuel behind William Wordsworth’s “We Are Seven,” is a question of being and existence (Trilling 57). This question stems from the fact “that nothing was more difficult for [Wordsworth] in childhood than to admit the notion of death as a state applicable to his own being” (Noyes 60). Despite the vastly different intentions of the poets, Hardy and Wordsworth both depict relationships between the living and the dead in their poems; however, while Hardy humorously satirizes how the living forget the dead, Wordsworth demonstrates a child’s refusal to acknowledge the dead as being gone.
In their poems, Hardy and Wordsworth both elicit the use of conversation; however, the fictional conversation in “Ah, Are You Digging on My Grave?,” contrasts the non-fictional dialogue in “We Are Seven”. Hardy’s poem “uses the ballad convention of ‘The Unquiet Grave’- a dialogue between living and dead” (Johnson 48), in this case, between a deceased woman and her dog; Wordsworth’s poem consists of an actual confrontation he had with a little girl when he traveled through Europe. Hardy’s willingness to use disembodied voices for the intended purpose of creating…
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…ument Wordsworth brings up, the girl replies, “Nay, we are seven!” (Wordsworth 1333). She lacks the ability to accept death and “this [absence] of awareness [makes] the poem so touching” (Drabble 51).
What began as a simple everyday conversation finished as a didactic and somewhat emotional poem. Wordsworth, through a real life conversation, presents “the obscurity and perplexity which in childhood attend our notion of death, or rather our inability to admit that notion'” (Noyes 60). In direct contrast to Wordsworth, who did not intend to writie a deep, meaningful poem, Hardy knew exactly what he wanted to accomplish by writing, “Ah, Are You Digging on My Grave.” People too easily remove the dead from their memories, and Hardy wanted to admonish his readers of the importance of remembering the dead; just because the dead are gone, they should not be forgotten.
Comparison and Contrast in The Great Gatsby
Comparison and Contrast in The Great Gatsby
The success of Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is in part due to his successful characterization of the main characters through the comparison and contrast of Daisy Buchanan and Myrtle Wilson, Tom Buchanan and George B. Wilson, and Nick Carraway and Jay Gatsby. The contrast is achieved through two principle means: contrasting opposite qualities held by the characters and contrasting one character’s posititve or negative qualities to another’s lack thereof. Conflict is generated when the characters sometimes stand as allegorical opposites. On the other hand, comparison of two characters is rather straightforward. This comparison and contrast is prevalent in Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby.
To begin with, Daisy and Myrtle have similarities and differences. The similarities revolve around the characters’ marriages. First, both have an affair sometime in the novel. Myrtle’s sister, Catherine, whispers to Nick: “Neither of them can stand the person they’re married to” (33). Partially as a result of this intolerance, both begin affairs. Daisy says that she loves both her husband, Tom, and illegitimate boyfriend, Gatsby: “I love you [Gatsby] now — isn’t that enough? … I did love him [Tom] once, but I loved you too” (133). Daisy says that she loves both Tom and Gatsby. Here, Daisy’s character must be taken into account. Daisy might just as well love Gatsby’s shirts, house, or other status symbols as she loves Gatsby as a person. Similarly, she might also only love Tom’s status symbols. Myrtle certainly only loves Tom’s status symbols. She tells Nick, “He had on a dress suit and patten leather shoes, and I couldn’t keep my eyes off him…” (36). This is the point …
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…ization.
Works Cited
Bewley, Marius. “Scott Fizgerald’s Criticism of America.” Mizener 125-41.
Eagleton, Terry. The Function of Criticism. London: Verso, 1984.
Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. Collier Edition. New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1925.
“Fitzgerald, F. Scott.” Microsoft Encarta 97 Encyclopedia. Redmond, WA: Microsoft, 1996. CD-ROM. 1997.
Posnock, Ross. “‘A New World, Material Without Being Real’: Fitzgerald’s Critique of Capitalism in The Great Gatsby.” Critical Essays on Scott Fitzgerald’s “Great Gatsby.” Ed. Scott Donaldson. Boston: Hall, 1984. 201-13.
Spindler, Michael. American Literature and Social Change. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1983.
Trilling, Lionel. “F. Scott Fitzgerald.” Critical Essays on Scott Fitzgerald’s “Great Gatsby.” Ed. Scott Donaldson. Boston: Hall, 1984. 13-20.