Get help from the best in academic writing.

Releasing the Moment in Clampitt’s Poem Fog

The photographer sights, clicks, stops; the moment is captured; the vision settles. The poet sights, clicks, begins; the moment is released; the vision starts. Tess Gallagher says, “the poem is always the enemy of the photograph.” The art of poetry demands more than external vision; a poem takes the reader outside and inside to see, hear, touch, and feel every detail. In Amy Clampitt’s poem “Fog,” she immerses the reader’s senses in the entirety of the moment’s external grace and its secret inner core.

Clampitt seeks out what is hidden to the eye. She wants what the camera cannot record. Her subject allows her to show off poetry’s distinct function and strength. Fog obscures, shrouds, limits, dissolves; it defeats sight. “Fog” reveals, illuminates, widens, and intensifies; it gives sight. There is a pleasing poetic irony in Clampitt’s ability to render so present to the mind’s eye precisely what the eyes themselves cannot see at all. “A vagueness comes over everything, / as though proving color and contour / alike dispensable” (Clampitt 610). As things disappear, “the lighthou…

The Battle Between Heart and Conscience in Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn

The Battle Between Heart and Conscience in Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn

Society can have a huge impact on an individual’s moral growth. Sometimes the impact is positive but other times the learned habits and set morals of society have a negative effect. In Mark Twain’s novel, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the main character, Huck, struggles with what society teaches him and with what he knows to be good and true. During different conflicts concerning either the king and duke, various women or Jim, Huck’s sound heart wins the battle over his conscience, which the reader knows to be ill-formed.

Right from the first time Huck hears the story of the king and duke’s amazing pasts Huck knows, “these liars warn’t no kings nor dukes at all” (Twain 166). However, Huck also does not want to make any trouble so he goes along with the lie. Society may have taught Huck’s conscience that lying is wrong but in this case the truth would have caused unnecessary danger and havoc. Another time that Huck sees right through the king and duke, is during the Wilks’ inheritance situa…

Leave a Comment

Your email address will not be published.