Jeannette Walls’s The Glass Castle Dr. Matthew

Transcript:Jeannette Walls’s The Glass Castle Dr. Matthew:
Jeannette Walls’s The Glass Castle Dr. Matthew Fike Department of English HMXP 102-003 Outline Epigraph Structure Writing in Class Concepts Images What lies beneath Themes Parents’ contradictions The Glass Castle The Moral Paper topics Epigraph as printed in TGC Dark is a way and light is a place, Heaven that never was Nor will be ever is always true From: Dylan Thomas’s “Poem on His Birthday” “Poem on His Birthday” http://plagiarist.com/poetry/1136/ Preliminary Points The poem was written in 1952, a year before his death. It continues a life-long fascination with death but conveys the feeling that his end was drawing near. He sees not only fecundity in the natural world but also the death of other creatures and recognizes that their death, like his own, is inevitable. Nevertheless, he seems to praise the Creator. The Poem (12 stanzas) Stanza 1: The poet “celebrates and spurns” his 35th birthday, watching the birds and thinking of various images of nature’s mutability. Stanza 2: These reminders are personally relevant because he realizes that he “Toils towards the ambush of his wounds; / Herons, steeple stemmed, bless.” He journeys toward the time when there is no escaping the ills of old age. The herons, whose beaks are narrow like steeples, “walk in their shroud” in the next stanza (that is, they are walking reminders of the poet’s mortality). In stanza 2, they “bless” (they bestow some kind of good; OR, more likely, they strike their prey; cf. French, blesser, to hurt). In the latter sense, the word “bless” is part of a strand of references to predation. More on the Poem Religious language permeates the poem. For example, God is “Him / Who is the light of old.” This God is specifically Christian. “In a cavernous, swung / Wave’s silence, wept white angelus knells.” The Angelus (an juh luh s) is a devotion in memory of the Annunciation (when the angel Gabriel tells Mary that she is pregnant with Jesus). A bell announces (knells) when it should be recited. (Knells are also typically associated with funerals.) The point: So there is a contrast between the mutable world that the poet sees with his “five / Senses” in a later stanza and the consolation that the Christian Heaven offers. In other words, he sees in nature not only signs of his own mortality but also reminders of a life after death. Blessings: Toward the end