The Telephone Explication

“The Telephone” by Robert Frost is quietly intriguing in its use of tone to create the feel of conversation. The first and third stanzas are metaphors, while the shorter lines tend to be said without emotion, and involve no figurative language. This is a surprisingly strange contrast since there isn't a cut-and-dry line in the whole poem from the other speaker. On one hand, quotes such as, “When leaning with my head against a flower, I heard you talk.” And “You spoke from that flower on the window sill,” have a lot of flow in how you would read them, and seem almost childish and harmless. On the other hand, a line such as, “First tell me what it was you thought you heard.” is far more abrasive. You can tell this by the length of the line, and when read aloud, it is not something you would say to someone you wanted to impress. In contrast with the other lines, which are airy and metaphorical, the shorter ones have neither of those traits. This small change creates an entirely new scene around two, three-dimensional characters.  

Traveling Though the Dark

1. The speaker's dilemma is that there is a dead deer laying on the side of the road, and he is debating whether or not he should push it into the river. On one hand, having the deer on the road is dangerous for oncoming traffic, on the other, the deer is ripe with a baby. He is the kind of person who would stand on a dark, cold street, taking the time to decide whether or not to push a dead deer into the river, and this shows compassion and selflessness. He calls his hesitation "my only swerving" because he doesn't want to be the bringer of death. In line four, he comments that the dead might cause trouble for other drivers and so he felt the need to remove it. These two lines connect because both are alluding too a possible death- one being a fellow driver, the other the mother deer. 
2. "She had stiffened already, almost cold" and "...her side was warm; her fawn lay waiting" both come within two lines of each other, but they signify very different things. They are both talking about the same deer, but one gives an image of a baby doe, something cute and warm, while the other describes the emaciated body of its mother it seemed to have crawled out of. Another contrasting statement is in one line "...alive, still, never to be born". At first glance, you think the baby might be dead because two of the describing words are reminiscent of a still-born, and 'alive' doesn't really stand out within this line of dead words. The third example is the description of the car that comes directly before the pushing of the deer into the ravine. The car is described with lines like "under the hood purred the engine" and "The car aimed ahead its lowered parking lights", words like 'purred' and 'aimed' give the car a human effect using personification, which is strange because no other living things in this poem are described similarly. Even the living seem already dead. 
3. The author, in this circumstance, is using slant rhyming. Every end word in the second and fourth line in each stanza was loosely rhymed. Like 'deer' and 'dead' or 'waiting' and 'hesitated". The line that has no connection is "It is usually best to roll them into the canyon:" because canyon doesn't rhyme with anything in the first stanza. 

The Flea and The Man He Killed Questions

The Man He Killed

1.     “Half-a-crown” is a money piece, in this line, he’s saying he would lend it to the man he killed if they’d met on better terms.

2.     He uses the word ‘because’ twice in one stanza when he is trying to justify his actions to the reader, when in reality, he doesn’t understand any better than the reader does. Since the word ‘although’ comes at the end of a stanza, your voice has a half pause, and the use of enjambment gives this word extra weight. It’s like he’s having a conversation with you, and then suddenly realizes his argument might be flawed, and rethinks his words. I think the words ‘old’ and ‘ancient’ may be referring to the speaker’s past. He might be using this metaphorical hyperbole as a symbol for his life before the war, as in, if they had met somewhere he would’ve been before he began killing, maybe they would’ve been friends.

3.     I don’t think this is necessarily true, not in all circumstances. Hardy’s poem is about an experience that causes turmoil for the everyday man who found himself in a bad situation. “The Man He Killed” isn’t a classic, or elevated, poem, it’s a man telling the audience about someone he killed in cold blood- someone who he may have been friends with! Poetry is the telling of experience, regardless of the amount of sophisticated language.

The Flea

1.       Preceding the first line, the woman in this situation is denying a man what he wants (sex), and he is asking why she won’t since she gives him everything else. Between the first and second stanza’s, he is making his argument that their blood is already in the flea together, when she threatens to kill the flea (Though use make you apt to kill me) he says that by doing it, she would be killing both of them as well since they now live inside the flea. Between the second and third stanza, she kills the flea (Cruel and sudden, hast thou since…). During the third stanza, the male character tells her that by sleeping with him, she would loose the same amount of innocence as she did by killing the flea, which is none.

2.     The speaker and the woman seem to be unmarried (probably a sin at the time) but dating anyway. Even though they’ve been together and love each other, she is still denying him what he wants most: sex, and that’s what they are arguing about here. She kills him in the third stanza by murdering the flea that their blood is mingling in, meaning that he isn’t actually dead, but she regrets giving into his pleas.

3.     MARK but this flea, and mark in this, Look at this flea, How little that which thou deniest me is, You deny me so little, why this? It suck'd me first, and now sucks thee, The flea takes blood from both of us. And in this flea our two bloods mingled be And I want our blood too mix like it is inside the flea. Thou know'st that this cannot be said What the flea does isn’t shameful, A sin, nor shame, nor loss of maidenhead So why is shameful for us to do the same thing? Yet this enjoys before it woo, It enjoys the benefits of you before marriage, And pamper'd swells with one blood made of two; And helped itself to me without consent. And this, alas ! is more than we would do But even that is more than we would do. The male character is comparing sex to the feeding of a flea off both of them. 4.     I think he is using the line “parents grudge, and you” to paint a picture of the inside of the flee; a dark, romantic place where the two lovers can go without the wrath of their parents finding them. 5.     The living walls of jet represent the inside of the flea. If the woman kills the flea, she will kill her boyfriend, herself, and insult the institution of marriage. 6.     She thinks she is victorious when she crushes the flea, but the boyfriend thinks differently. Changing his story, he now says that since she killed the flea and suffered no harm, it must mean that having sex with him wouldn’t be as shameful as she thought in the first place. 7.     I think she will keep denying him, and he may leave her because she won’t listen to his “logic”. 8.     The Flea is a man persuading his girlfriend to sleep with him using skewed logic and comparing their relationship to the feeding of a blood-sucking insect. The Apparition, on the other hand, is a man attempting to scare his girlfriend into having sex with him by telling her he will come back and haunt her after death if she doesn’t give in now. The Flea is far more cordial in the sense that that boyfriend wants his girlfriend to want to sleep with him, not force her, and the other boyfriend is threatening her until she submits.

"My Last Duchess" by Robert Browning

“My Last Duchess” by Robert Browning is about not only a man with a high stature in his world of politics, but the Duke of Ferrara no less. Coming from his point of view, he is a man who could (and should) have everything he wants, regardless of what it is. In this case, a wife who devotes every smile, blush, and quite frankly, her entire life, to him. A theme throughout this dramatic monologue is how the Duke treats his wife: with entitlement and complete disregard for her general well being.

The Duke eludes to these feelings first in the lines, “I call that piece a wonder, now: Frà Pandolf’s hands worked busily a day, and there she stands.” In the bolded portion, he refers not only to the painting, but also to his wife as she was in life: a mere object. Also, the comma before ‘now’ indicates he regards his wife with wonder in the painting, but in reality, appreciated her much less. In the italicized portion, a mysteriously placed page break separates two statements, which gives the line a new meaning that compliments his egotistical nature. Even though it isn’t apparent here, after ‘hands’ the poem carries on to a different line, which means that the remainder of the quote was meant to be about the wife; that she worked a busy life, and now smiles at only him. This last portion is again hinted at during the lines, “But to myself they turned (since none puts by the curtain I have drawn for you, but I)”

            

The Road Not Taken Blog Entry

I think the "The Road Not Taken" by Robert Frost is an allegory a life-altering decision the author is deciding to make. Also, I believe both of his choices are equally tantalizing. Robert Frost hints at this in two lines: “Oh, I kept the first for another day!” and “In leaves no step had trodden black.” I took the latter to mean no one had had the chance to sully the trail before he got there. One troubling line is in the last stanza, “I shall be telling this with a sigh,” Does this mean the author regrets the decision he made? Or that he is nostalgically curious toward the trail he did not take in the first place? This poem is about life being full of choices, and the leap of faith you take when you make one. His choice of path probably led him toward a new job opportunity, or someone he wished to marry, but either way, he chose it, and now, he has to deal with the outcome.

1.     I don’t necessarily think he regrets his decision, but that he wonders what would’ve happened if he had taken the other road. The same way that a student may think they should’ve taken just Pre-Calculus instead of fast track, or a small business owner wondering whether they really should’ve started their own firm.
2.     It’s like The Butterfly Effect, little things can cause big changes. Even though he may have been deciding between two different career paths, maybe the love of his life worked at Walmart, he chooses Fred Meyer, and now they’ve never met. Or say he chooses Walmart, they meet, she gets pregnant, and now he’s stuck at a dead-end cashier job with another mouth to feed. Either way, he’s lost something but also gained from his experiences.