Paraphrase: In the first stanza, the speaker mainly describes the doe and its surroundings. The speaker says that the doe is all white with golden antlers. The speaker says that the doe is standing in the shade between two streams in a green opening in a forest. In the second stanza, the speaker tells how he left his work to follow the doe because she was so beautiful. The doe must have run off into the woods because he compares his looking for the doe to a miser searching for his treasure. He also seems to be happy while he is looking for the doe. In the third stanza, he finds the doe once more. The way I interpreted this stanza was that the doe was wearing a collar with a diamond on it. I came to this conclusion because the stanza’s first two lines say, “Around her lovely neck ‘Do not touch me’/Was written with topaz and diamond stone[.]” It seems as though the doe was once owned by someone because the stanza continues the inscription on what I believe to be the collar: “‘My Caesar’s will has been to make me free.'” I think it is some kind of ghost deer that was once owned by Julius Caesar. The last stanza basically says that he was chasing the deer until noon. He says that he was so tired he could barely see, and he fell into the stream. When he got out the doe was gone…
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Title: The title is the subject of the poem. It is not a very specific title so the reader can make many inferences about what the poem will be about. The title just simply says “The White Doe.” It does not say “The White Doe that was Spotted by a man Working in the Woods and Decides to Follow but falls into a Stream.” So until the reader actually reads the poem, he or she will not really know what the poem will be about. The title contributes to the overall effect of the poem because the white doe is the subject of poetry in the poem.
Theme: What the poet is trying to tell the world is that just because someone throws something a way does not mean one can take it from the garbage and keep it as his or her own. If the person that threw the object away wanted someone else to have it, he or she would put it up for sale or give it away.
The Failure of Technology in White Noise by Don Delillo
The Failure of Technology in White Noise by Don Delillo
One particularly unfortunate trait of modern society is our futile attempt to use technology to immunize ourselves against the fear of death. The failure of technology in this regard is the general subject of Don Delillo”s book White Noise. Throughout this novel, technology is depicted as the ominous messenger of our common fate, an increasing sense of dread over loss of control of our lives and the approach of inevitable death in spite of the empty promises of technology. In this essay I will examine Delillo”s portrayal of technology and its role in our society.
The title of Delillo”s book, White Noise, reminds one of an electronic static of the sort encountered on television when a station goes off the air. But I think white noise can also refer to the indiscriminate flow of information we are exposed to on a daily basis in our modern society, that which ultimately destroys the immediacy of real life. If you see enough people gunned down on television, enough mangled bodies in twisted cars, enough violence, destruction and despair in the newspapers, you grow numb to it. In one sense, I think this is what White Noise is. Have you seen those devices they sell for insomniacs? They are white noise generators intended to put us to sleep. White noise is sound at all frequencies broadcast indiscriminately, and that is what Delillo hints that television and the modern media are doing to us now. The indiscriminate flood of information is not making our society more aware; rather, it is putting us all to sleep.
White Noise is a book obsessed with death at the hands of our own technology. The protagonist is a middle aged man who is the chairman of a department of Hitle…
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…e novel where the products on the supermarket shelves are quietly rearranged, throwing a sense of shock and panic into the shoppers (i.e. the masses) until they can adjust to the new system. After surviving the initial traumatic change, we see the shoppers quickly resume their mindless lives on the road to death, comfortably numb and smugly secure. This is a sad indictment of what life in this twentieth century is for our media and technology-manipulated American society. Delillo”s analysis implies, then, that safety can only be found in conformity and a dead life dictated by others. Furthermore, life is only really experienced at its fullest in the random moments when the “white noise” breaks down and becomes silent momentarily, only to quickly arise and embrace us once again in its death grip.
Works Cited:
DeLillo, Don. White Noise. London: Picador, 1986.