Haiku

Reflective concrete

The streets in pouring rain

I mourn the long lost moon

This haiku is set in early april, when the moon is blocked by heavy fog and the city turns into a fast flowing river. You can feel the weight of each raindrop hitting your head while you're trotting alone on an empty street. You mourn the moon when you miss the light that gives hope that summer is almost here. Reflective concrete is the illusion created when street lights are reflected on the wet road.

Similes & Metaphors

(Snow boarder picture )

The sky is as empty as a blank canvas

-comparing the sky's emptyness to a blank canvas

The trees were covered in a white blanket as if at any moment they wouldnfall into a never ending slumber.

-transferring the quality of white and soft from the blanket to the snow on the trees

(Sunset picture)

The sun was a golden force breaking the horizon.

-transferring the quality of breaking something from the force to the sun

The clouds were like waves riding on a red ocean.

-comparing clouds and waves

-analogy of waves are to ocean as clouds to the sky

(Own picture)

The lake is the mirror of the sun

-transferring the quality of reflection from the mirror to the lake.

PLOT 101

Ordinary world:  setting

                          character

Desruption

Conflicts:  Man vs man

                Man vs society

                Man vs himself

                Man vs nature

                Man vs technology

Rising action

Climax

(Denouement)

Resolution: Return to ordinary world /

                   Establishment of a new order

Forshadowing = Tells us at the beginning what's going to happen at the end
Inference = what is implied/implicit

Implicit  - implied / you can see clues but not certain

Explicit  - explicitly said or mensioned

CHARACTER 101

CHARACTER

flat characters

-caricature; 1 over-the-top characteristic

-archetype; 2-3 characteristics

round characters

-

growing characters

-changed by conflict

-----------------------

Billy's characteristics:

Polite 

Honest

Trusting

Curious

Naive

Landlady' characteristics:

Picky

Secrative

Manipulative

"The road not taken" explanation

Commentary

This has got to be among the best-known, most-often-misunderstood poems on the planet. Several generations of careless readers have turned it into a piece of Hallmark happy-graduation-son, seize-the-future puffery. Cursed with a perfect marriage of form and content, arresting phrase wrought from simple words, and resonant metaphor, it seems as if “The Road Not Taken” gets memorized without really being read. For this it has died the cliché’s un-death of trivial immortality.

But you yourself can resurrect it from zombie-hood by reading it—not with imagination, even, but simply with accuracy. Of the two roads the speaker says “the passing there / Had worn them really about the same.” In fact, both roads “that morning lay / In leaves no step had trodden black.” Meaning: Neither of the roads is less traveled by. These are the facts; we cannot justifiably ignore the reverberations they send through the easy aphorisms of the last two stanzas.

One of the attractions of the poem is its archetypal dilemma, one that we instantly recognize because each of us encounters it innumerable times, both literally and figuratively. Paths in the woods and forks in roads are ancient and deep-seated metaphors for the lifeline, its crises and decisions. Identical forks, in particular, symbolize for us the nexus of free will and fate: We are free to choose, but we do not really know beforehand what we are choosing between. Our route is, thus, determined by an accretion of choice and chance, and it is impossible to separate the two. 

This poem does not advise. It does not say, “When you come to a fork in the road, study the footprints and take the road less traveled by” (or even, as Yogi Berra enigmatically quipped, “When you come to a fork in the road, take it”). Frost’s focus is more complicated. First, there is no less-traveled road in this poem; it isn’t even an option. Next, the poem seems more concerned with the question of how the concrete present (yellow woods, grassy roads covered in fallen leaves) will look from a future vantage point.