Common Topics in Blake's Poem London, Chopin's Story of an Hour, and Hughe's Dreams Deferred - Literature review Example

Shackled Spirits One of the elements that make great literature great is its ability to enlighten the reader regarding a common emotion experienced by all human beings. Even when they’re talking about places, times and events that are vastly different in time and place, works of literature can link the reader to the author on an emotional level that transcends the words on the page and resonates as a sense of connection with the human race. This is what is meant when authors are told to show, not tell, their audience about their main theme. By connecting with the emotional experience of the characters or the events, the reader, regardless of their own experience, begins to understand what it meant to be living during a period of economic depression, what it felt like to be subordinated to a point where you didn’t even have control in your own home or to be relegated to eternal poverty and hopelessness because of the color of your skin. Ideas such as these can be found in many forms of literature. For example, William Blake’s poem “London”, Kate Chopin’s short story “Story of an Hour” and Langston Hughes’ poem “Dreams Deferred” all center upon the theme of the shackled spirit and in all three, the authors show their audience what it feels like through the use of powerful imagery and simile. In “London”, Blake describes the way in which the human spirit had been shackled under economic despair in 1794, the year the poem was written. Traces of political unrest can be found in the poem as the scenes and sounds of a typical walk down the London streets are reported. The first lines of the poem, “A mark in every face I meet, / Marks of weakness, marks of woe” (3-4), provide the first hint that something is not right within the city. The signs of decay and desperation are seen in every face, suggesting that they are community-wide rather than the personal problems of just a few. This idea of community despair is reinforced in the second stanza as the speaker says, “In every cry of every man, / In every infant’s cry of fear, / In every voice, in every ban, / The mind-forged manacles I hear” (4-8). From the youngest to the oldest, Blake indicates everyone is suffering from this same sense of legal oppression (‘ban’ refers to new laws being posted), so they are suffering from something that is outside of their control. This is again reinforced in the third stanza when the speaker indicates that business is down, “How the chimney-sweepers cry” (9), money is scarce “Every blackening church appals” (10) and the city’s defenses are weakened as “the hapless soldier[‘s]” sigh becomes visible as it “runs in blood down palace-walls” (12). Throughout the poem, although no mention is made of the specific issues that cause the people to feel this way, the affects are nevertheless made clear. The power of Blake’s poem to reach the reader on an emotional level occurs as a result of his careful application of imagery. In the first four lines of the poem, he uses the word ‘charter’d’ twice and only slight variations of the word ‘mark’ three times. The imagery he invokes with the concept of ‘charter’d’ is of a grid spread over the entire area in which one must ask permission to step from one stone to the next, even over the constantly flowing river. He sees marks in people’s faces, calling to mind the care lines etched into every older person’s face and the signs of need and want that can be seen on street corners. At the same time, this use of concrete imagery in its effects on the city and the body were also intended to call to mind the concept of business charters that were making it difficult for small shops and merchants to make a living in the face of the ‘charter’ holding companies that had the sanction of the crown. The word ‘mark’ was used to refer to physical traces of need, but it was also commonly used as a term of exchange, as in a form of currency. The idea of being shackled by the restrictions of financial need is something most people can identify with. The most powerful image used in the second stanza is the image of the ‘mind-forg’d manacles’. Immediately, we get the idea of heavy metal restraints, but we must see them as ‘mind-forged’, created by the mind intended to imprison the mind but leaving the identity of the controlling mind in extreme doubt. Is it the government, the king, capitalism, society, or the individual himself? The third stanza contains even more powerful imagery as the shackling of the collective human soul of the city begins to fall into ruin. Chimney-sweepers, notoriously happy and care-free, are seen crying thus symbolizing the death of happiness; churches, the most sacred places and therefore the most likely to be cleaned even in the worst of times, are becoming blackened illustrating how the souls of the people are dying. As everything is falling into the ruin described in the third stanza, Blake leaves his reader with the final image of a prostitute’s call for business drowning out the needs of the baby and destroys the sanctity of marriage as he refers to the ‘marriage-hearse’ in the fourth stanza. Here is a clear image of the destruction of decent society and any hope for betterment in the future. The human soul is lost under a repetitious cycle of greed and unmet need, shackled by the neglect of society to recognize the true need enough to make a change. This same idea of the shackled soul leading to ultimate ruin can be found in Chopin’s “Story of an Hour” as the constrained condition of women, and the unhealthy effects this had on their souls, was made clear to those who could feel. When the story opens, it is already obvious that Mrs. Louise Mallard is a woman considered to be in delicate health. Her sister and her friend come over to tell her of a tragic accident in which her husband was killed because they don’t want her to be shocked by an official visit. Louise’s reaction is exuberantly predictable, “She wept at once, with sudden, wild abandonment, in her sister’s arms” (Chopin ), but then goes to her room immediately and locks herself in. From this point, she sits in a chair looking out the window for most of the rest of the story. As Louise begins to envision her life as just beginning, the reader begins to understand the degree to which her spirit had been shackled under the social expectations others had for her. While she begins to mouth the word ‘free’ to herself, she is seen to start coming to life: “The vacant stare and the look of terror that had followed it went from her eyes. They stayed keen and bright. Her pulses beat fast, and the coursing blood warmed and relaxed every inch of her body” (Chopin ). The degree of this constraint is made clear as the woman quickly begins to adapt to her status as a widow: “There would be no one to live for during those coming years; she would live for herself. There would be no powerful will bending hers in that blind persistence with which men and women believe they have a right to impose a private will upon a fellow-creature” (Chopin). This sense of the will, the individual soul, being bent under the will of another is similar to the sense of oppression conveyed in Blake’s poem even though it takes place in a sunlit room in a comfortable location. However, it gains greater weight because of the author’s decision to create a more personal experience, inviting the reader into the individual’s thoughts as she undergoes a process of awakening. Having accepted that she is now as free as a the birds she has always envied, Chopin shows Louise fully coming to life, introducing the strong imagery that will drive home her point. The impression she has given of the setting in which the story takes place is on a quiet street and in a comfortable home where even the air temperature seems to have human comfort as its primary concern. Louise has been looking through a curtained bedroom window in a bedroom large enough to accommodate her bed and a comfortable chair to sit. She has been looking at green trees and listening to children laughing and birds building their nests. All the symbolism at play here sets the reader up for the expectation of the beginning of a new life. This impression is strengthened as Chopin describes the physical processes that are taking place within Louise’s ‘weak’ heart that has suddenly started pumping warm blood strongly through her veins. “Her fancy was running riot along those days ahead of her. Spring days, and summer days, and all sorts of days that would be her own. She breathed a quick prayer that life might be long. It was only yesterday she had thought with a shudder that life might be long” (Chopin). Having created such a strong expectation for a long life full of happy events for a soul that has just found a sense of itself, Chopin then allows her reader to feel the same sense of shock and despair felt by Louise as she walks down the stairs toward her new life and sees her husband, and the solid door of her old life, swing shut in her face. The sight of her husband walking in the front door alive and well immediately recaptures Louise in her nearly lifeless status as housewife. Having had even just that single moment to discover what it meant to be free, Louise’s physical death thus stands in as a symbol of the spiritual death most women experienced through their social atmosphere and evokes the same sense of a blackened soul that Blake calls forward in his image of the darkened churches. While Blake based his poem on the community experience and Chopin provided the more intimate experience of an outside character, Hughes brings the reader more directly into play in his poem “A Dream Deferred”. He uses simile and metaphor to make his point without ever referring directly to an external character. This forces the reader to respond to the rhetorical questions Hughes asks as if they were being asked of them. The poem opens by explaining the line of inquiry with the question, “what happens to a dream deferred?” Hughes makes this a rhetorical question by providing a list of possible answers of his own, each of which is phrased as a question in its own right. The first answer Hughes provides is that the dream could “dry up / like a raisin in the sun” (3-4). This image suggests something so dried up and hard that it can’t functions as it should. The second answer Hughes comes up with is that the dream might “fester like a sore – / and then run” (4-5). In this situation, the dream is like a wound that won’t heal and that oozes everywhere. The third answer he gives to the question is that the dream deferred might “stink like rotten meat / or crust and sugar over” (6-7). In this possibility, the dream has become like something unpleasantly hard and containing an unpleasant odor. Another answer Hughes offers is that the deferred dream might be like a heavy load (10). Each of these questions uses the literary technique of simile by making a comparison that uses the words ‘like’ or ‘as’ to make the connections as a means of hinting at the greater metaphor he’s trying to paint. The format Hughes chooses to use for this poem also introduces a significant amount of imagery. Strong mental pictures that can often also include associated scent memories makes it necessary for the reader of the poem to examine their own responses to the questions Hughes asks. Each of the answers Hughes suggests has different physical effects which would manifest in different types of associated behaviors and Hughes suggests that the individual forced to defer their dream indefinitely might become any one or even all of these things in turn. All of the possibilities he suggests can be found in the lines of Blake’s poem as the people trudge in and about London’s depressed streets. Several of them can be found in Chopin’s story and the ways in which Louise has evidently behaved in the past as compared to her reactions to her possible future. Like Chopin, Hughes chooses to end his poem with a sudden shift that brings a shock to the reader and forces them to consider the impact of the piece. There is no simile present in the final line which also serves to break the meter of the poem as he asks, “Or does it explode?” (11). Because he doesn’t compare it with anything or confine it in any way, Hughes allows this line to be vaguely threatening, loose and chaotic. It has a similar feel to it as the final lines of Chopin’s story and the image of the marriage-hearse in Blake’s poem. There is an stark ending, life does not go on, things have come to a full and jarring stop. The suddenness of this statement shocks the reader into full realization of the natural emotion that has been building in them through all of the connections that have been made thus far in the poem and they must consider whether they are taking care of their own dreams and those of the people they love. While the reader might have recognized a point within the poem that they identify with more than others, this realization only serves to increase their inner feelings of anger and resentment toward whatever has caused them to defer their dreams to this point. This emotion, easily conjured and kept festering through the length of the poem, is given its release and its expression in this final line, suggesting it is the ultimate end of the dream as the explosion carries all with it. In all three of these works, the authors discuss the central theme of the human soul being shackled under the burdens of external and internal social pressures. The people in Blake’s poem are all shackled by the mandates of their government and their times as is made clear through the imagery invoked, but Blake leaves the door open on the possibility that they could bring about a change if they stopped giving in to their despair as seen in descriptions such as the ‘mind-forg’d manacles’ they wear. Chopin makes the experience more personal as she tells the story of her character, illustrating the various ways the woman must subsume her character under the dubious comfort and protection of the man she married. When faced with the choice of freedom or spiritual death, though, this character opts for actual death in a surprising move that reveals the depth of her imprisonment. Hughes brings the discussion one step closer by not engaging an outside character. Instead, he presents his narrative as if it were a conversation strictly between himself and his reader, offering, in the end, the same kind of shocking realization brought forward by Chopin after having worked his way into the mind of his reader through compelling imagery and shared experience. Again, he suggests that a choice must be made. While all three authors suggest changes must be made at the social level, only Blake seems to offer much hope that the needed change can begin within the individual mind. Perhaps this is because only Blake was writing from the perspective of the white male, the dominant member of society and thus a sense of individual power to bring about change. However, that is a question for another discussion. Works Cited Blake, William. “London.” (611-612). Chopin, Kate. “Story of an Hour.” (32-35) Hughes, Langston. “A Dream Deferred.” (723) Read More