"Seize the day, boys. Make your lives extraordinary."

"Now let us sport us while we may, / And now, like amorous birds of prey, / Rather at once our time devour / Than languish in his slow-chapped power" ("To His Coy Mistress," 37-40).

I like identifying and creating arguments, and my favorite essay last year was the argument essay, so I'm going to answer question three. "Outline the speaker's argument in three sentences that begin with the words If, But, and Therefore. Is the argument valid?

If we had all the time in the world, we could develop our love slowly, but we are immortal; therefore, we must utilize our time well.

I think that the speaker is a little bit extreme in comparing playing "coy" (title) to developing love from the "Flood" to the "conversion of the Jews" (8-10) and to admiring each other for "thirty thousand" years (16). Personally, I think the speaker is just trying to get into his mistress's pants as he refers to her "long-preserved virginity" (28). But they're overstatements, so I guess it makes sense rhetorically. The truth behind it is that the speaker and his lover cannot wait to love each other -- they must "devour" their time now (39).

Carpe diem, right?

I think it's a valid argument, though the comparisons are a little bit extreme. Being shy and flirtatious is nice to an extent, but it can't become the extent. We need to be "like amorous bird of prey" and such. Similes are good.

You're not all that special, but you are.

"And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare / As any she belied with false compare" ("My mistress' eyes," 13-14).

In the first twelve lines of Shakespeare's sonnet, the speaker identifies a handful of love cliches and disproves that his mistress exemplifies them. For example, the first line identifies the cliche "your eyes are like the sun," but the speaker denies this simile -- his love's eyes are "nothing like the sun" (1). The speaker is viewing his lover from a very literal standpoint, and relative to other poets, he is humbling his lover. I would say that the tone in the first twelve lines is judicious and condescending.

I quoted the final two lines at the beginning of this post; they mark a shift in tone, as observed in question three in the textbook. It's a "yet" kind of deal, so the speaker is saying, "My lover isn't as great as other guys claim there lovers are, buuut . . ." something. He thinks his love is as "rare" (13) as all of those other women whose lovers have lied to them. Even though he spends twelve lines describing the ways in which his mistress is not special, he still calls her special in the last two lines. I'd call that a passionate and admiring tone.

You know whose eyes are kind of actually like the sun?

EXPLOSION!

"Or does it explode?" ("Dream Deferred," 11).

The basic structure of Hughes's poem is this:

• First stanza: four rhetorical questions, each presenting one simile
• Second stanza: one declarative sentence, presenting one simile
• Third stanza: one rhetorical question, presenting one metaphor

The speaker begins by comparing a dream deferred to a dried-up raisin, an oozing sore, smelly meat, and crusty candy. All of these comparisons suggest that an abandoned dream deteriorates and pesters us. The second stanza compares it to a heavy load, suggesting that it drags us down.

There's nothing wrong with those comparisons because they all have truth to them, but they aren't as vivid as the final metaphor, directly comparing a deferred dream to an "explosion." When we abandon a dream, the results are sudden, sharp, and violent -- this image makes abandoning a dream less appealing.

The speaker uses his first four rhetorical questions to deny that things like raisins and meat are not vivid enough comparisons for a deferred dream. The second stanza's declarative sentence is a detached resignation -- maybe it's just something that drags us down like a load. Then, the third stanza's rhetorical question is an assertion that a deferred dream and an explosion have the same effects. The metaphor and the italics single out that image as the most significant one.

Dying and Journeying are Very Different Things

"And though it in the center sit, / Yet when the other far doth roam, / It leans, and hearkens after it, / And grows erect, as that comes home" ("A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning," 29-32).

Donne's poem presents images of both death and journeying. It seems to me like the speaker is using figurative images of death to compare them to his journey in which he will depart from his love -- in other words, I don't think he's going to die soon.

The initial stanza is a simile -- "as virtuous men pass mildly away" (1) -- to introduce a figurative image of death. The title also presents a picture of mourning, public grief over someone's death. However, details in the poem suggest to me that the speaker is not pondering his impending death.

The "priests," or the true lovers in the poem, engage in "refined" love that is "inter-assured of the mind" (17-20), and when they depart, their souls behave in a special way. Their souls endure an "expansion," hearkening after each other, and even if they are two different souls, they are like "compasses" because they spin in the same direction (25-28). Then, there are implications of those lovers reuniting -- "as that comes home" (32) and "makes me end where I begun" (36).

I suppose they could be reuniting in the afterlife, but the images of a journey -- the compass and the longing for company -- seem to be predominant.

Toad on the Road

"For something sufficiently toad-like / Squats in me, too; / Its hunkers are heavy as hard luck, / And cold as snow" ("Toads," 25-28).

It's like a more elegant version of "The Lazy Song." I despise that song.

My goal in this post is to identify the two metaphorical toads described in the poem. The first one is easy because it's explicit: "the toad work" (1). That first toad represents the speaker's questioning view of work as he ponders a bunch of alliterative lifestyles -- "Lecturers, lispers, / Losels, loblolly-men, louts" (10-11). Those people "don't end as paupers," "seem to like" their lives," and do not actually "starve." So essentially, the first toad (work) restrains the author who doesn't understand the necessity of it.

I'm going to say that the second toad is the speaker's pragmatic and positive view of work. The similes I quoted at the beginning of the post suggest that this toad is steady and unyielding. With a pun on the word "stuff" in the sixth stanza, the speaker develops his point that work and pensions are "stuff" that form dreams (which apparently happened in The Tempest -- I don't recall). The second toad won't allow the speaker to "blarney" or get everything he wants "at one sitting" (32). He has a steady conscience (the second toad) that reminds him that work creates dreams, which require patience and effort to achieve. That's a more uplifting and reasonable view of work than the one presented in the first half of the poem with the restrictive toad.

Has anyone else read Toad on the Road? It's a classic.

I shall begin at the beginning.

"'Embryos are like photograph film,' said Mr. Foster waggishly, as he pushed open the second door. 'They can only stand red light'" (Brave New World, 11).

For my summer reading, I'm going to start with Aldous Huxley's Brave New World . . . in your pants.

Yes, it is four in the morning.

The first chapter is impressively quotable, but I think I found one excerpt that successfully encapsulates the predominating idea of the chapter. Obviously, the well-informed Mr. Foster presented us with a simile when he compared the racks of human embryos to photograph film.

What Mr. Foster said here piled onto a goldmine of dehumanizing language in this chapter. The Director's generalization speech -- complete with "incubators," "optimum temperatures," and "ripened eggs" -- did an exceptional job of reminding me of the baby chicks we hatched in third grade. However, to me, the blatant comparison of the embryos to lifeless photograph film was the most effective rhetorical technique Huxley used to portray the, uh, process as systematic and tasteless.

Furthermore, behind the dehumanizing process was a backdrop of passiveness. As Mr. Foster made the film comparison, he said it "waggishly," as if it were a quaint joke. So in the year A.F. (after . . . ffff . . .) 632, multiplication and predestination of embryos is totally normal.

Which brings me to what I think the main idea of this exposition was -- to set the reader in an era in which radically unfamiliar treatment of embryos and children and who knows what else is culturally acceptable. Mayyybe? Also, I'm pretty sure we're not supposed to envy this speculative world, but I'm guessing that its flaws are going to manifest themselves later on.