How to write a thesis statement?

thesis statement AN EXPLANATION OF THE SUBJECT IS NOT A THESIS STATMENT A thesis has a point of view. It has an opinion about the subject, but it is not the subject.

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five points calculation

Five Points
E = 27%
F = 26%
G = 27%
Oral exam - 20%
TOTAL:  100%   

Describing a Meaningful Picture for the 8th Grade

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The Split cherry Tree - Task for part one

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Imagery

Imagery Definition

Imagery means to use figurative language to represent objects, actions and ideas in such a way that it appeals to our physical senses.

Usually it is thought that imagery makes use of particular words that create visual representation of ideas in our minds. The word imagery is associated with mental pictures. However, this idea is but partially correct. Imagery, to be realistic, turns out to be more complex than just a picture. Read the following examples of imagery carefully:

• It was dark and dim in the forest. – The words “dark” and “dim” are visual images.
• The children were screaming and shouting in the fields. - “Screaming” and “shouting” appeal to our sense of hearing or auditory sense.
• He whiffed the aroma of brewed coffee. – “whiff” and “aroma” evoke our sense of smell or olfactory sense.
• The girl ran her hands on a soft satin fabric. – The idea of “soft” in this example appeals to our sense of touch or tactile sense.
• The fresh and juicy orange are very cold and sweet. – “ juicy” and “sweet” when associated with oranges have an effect on our sense of taste or gustatory sense.

Imagery needs the aid of figures of speech like simile, metaphor, personification, onomatopoeia etc. in order to appeal to the bodily senses. Let us analyze how famous poets and writers use imagery in literature.

Imagery Examples in Literature

Example #1

Imagery of light and darkness is repeated many times in Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet”. Consider an example from Act I, Scene V:

“O, she doth teach the torches to burn bright!
It seems she hangs upon the cheek of night
Like a rich jewel in an Ethiope’s ear;”

Romeo praises Juliet by saying that she appears more radiant than the brightly lit torches in the hall. He says that at night her face glows like a bright jewel shining against the dark skin of an African. Through the contrasting images of light and dark, Romeo portrays Juliet’s beauty.

Example #2

John Keats’ “To the Autumn” is an ode rich with auditory imagery examples. In the last five lines of his ode he says:

“Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The redbreast whistles from a garden-croft,
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.”

The animal sounds in the above excerpt keep appealing to our sense of hearing. We hear the lamb bleating and the crickets chirping. We hear the whistles of the redbreast robin and the twitters of swallows in the sing. Keats call these sounds as the song of autumn.

Example #3

In prose, imagery aids writers to accomplish a vivid description of events. Below is an example of an effective use of imagery from E.B. White’s “Once More to the Lake“:

“When the others went swimming my son said he was going in, too. He pulled his dripping trunks from the line where they had hung all through the shower and wrung them out. Languidly, and with no thought of going in, I watched him, his hard little body, skinny and bare, saw him wince slightly as he pulled up around his vitals the small, soggy, icy garment. As he buckled the swollen belt, suddenly my groin felt the chill of death.”

The images depicting the dampness of clothes, in the above lines, convey a sense of chilly sensation that we get from wet clothes.

Example #4

In “The Great Expectations” written by Charles Dickens, Pip (the hero of the novel) uses many images to describe a damp morning in a marsh:

“It was a rimy morning, and very damp. I had seen the damp lying on the outside of my little window… Now, I saw the damp lying on the bare hedges and spare grass,…. On every rail and gate, wet lay clammy; and the marsh-mist was so thick, that the wooden finger on the post directing people to our village—a direction which they never accepted, for they never came there—was invisible to me until I was quite close under it.”

The repeated use of the words “damp” and “wet” makes us feel how rough it was for him in that damp and cold morning. The thick “marsh-mist” aids our imagination to visualize the scene of mourning in a marshland.

Function of Imagery

The function of imagery in literature is to generate a vibrant and graphic presentation of a scene that appeals to as many of the reader’s senses as possible. It aids the reader’s imagination to envision the characters and scenes in the literary piece clearly. Apart from the above mentioned function, images , which are drawn by using figures of speech like metaphor, simile, personification, onomatopoeia etc. serve the function of beautifying a piece of literature.

Verse Definition

Verse Definition

The literary device verse denotes a single line of poetry. The term can also be used to refer to a stanza or other parts of poetry. Generally, the device is stated to encompass three possible meanings, namely a line of metrical writing, astanza, or, a piece written in meter. It is important to note here that the term “verse” is often incorrectly used for referring to “poetry” in order to differentiate it from prose.

Verse Examples

Example #1 Daffodils by William Wordsworth

I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o’er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

The above quoted stanza from William Wordsworth poem presents to the reader various examples of a verse. It can be noted here, that the use of the tool of verse adds a scenic element to the structure of poetry.
There are generally two types of verse namely free verse and blank verse.

Example #2 Free Verse

A free verse poem has no set meter; that is to say there is no rhyming scheme present and the poem doesn’t follow a set pattern. For some poets this characteristic serves as a handy tool for the purpose camouflaging their fluctuation of thoughts, whereas others think that it affects the quality of work being presented.

i. After the Sea-Ship by Walt Whitman

After the Sea-Ship—after the whistling winds;
After the white-gray sails, taut to their spars and ropes,
Below, a myriad, myriad waves, hastening, lifting up their necks,
Tending in ceaseless flow toward the track of the ship:
Waves of the ocean, bubbling and gurgling, blithely prying,
Waves, undulating waves—liquid, uneven, emulous waves,
Toward that whirling current, laughing and buoyant, with curves,
Where the great Vessel, sailing and tacking, displaced the surface;

As can be seen from the stanza quoted above, there is an absence of rhyming effect and structure in each verse.

ii. Fog by Carl Sandburg

The fog comes
on little cat feet.
It sits looking
over harbor and city
on silent haunches
and then moves on.

Here, it can be observed that there is no form or rhyme scheme present in the verses quoted above.

Example #3 Blank Verse

There is no rhyming effect present in a blank verse poem. However, it has an iambic pentameter. It is usually employed for presenting passionate events and to create an impact on the reader. Shakespeare was an ardent user of blank verse.

i. An Example of a Blank Verse Poem

Furball Friend

Sweet pet by day, hunter by night. She sleeps,
she eats, she plays. My feet, caught in white paws.
She’s up the fence, watching her prey – a bird.
Poor thing, better run quick, ’cause watch, she’ll pounce!
She’ll sweetly beg for fuss, but don’t be fooled.
’Cause one minute she’ll purr and smile, then snap!
She’ll spit and hiss – and oh – surprise! A mouse.
He’s dead. A gift. Retracts her claws. Miaow!
Figure of eight between my legs, looks up
at me and purrs. The sound pulls my heartstrings.
Her big blue eyes like dinner plates – so cute.
Cunning she is, she knows I can’t resist.
Curling up tight, we sleep entwined as one.
Despite her quirks, I would not change a claw
of her. Cheeky Sammy: my snow-white queen.

The poem quoted above depicts the use of blank verse throughout. Here, it is important to note that there is no rhyming scheme present. Also, it can be seen that there is presence of iambic pentameter throughout the verses.

Functions of Verse

The use of the literary term “verse” in a piece of writing has a pleasing effect on the reader’s mind. It is usually employed in poetry writing. The poets make use of the tool of verse in order to provide their poetry with a structure. It serves as an avenue through which writers project their ideas in the form of a composition having rhyme, rhythm and deeper meanings. The device provides the writer with a framework for poetry writing.

Stanza Definition

Stanza Definition

In poetry, a stanza is a division of four or more lines having a fixed length, meter or rhyming scheme.

Stanzas in poetry are similar to paragraphs in prose. Both stanzas and paragraphs include connected thoughts and are set off by a space. The number of lines varies in different kinds of stanzas but it is uncommon for a stanza to have more than twelve lines. The pattern of a stanza is determined by the number of feet in each line and by its metrical orrhyming scheme.

Stanzas Examples in English Poetry

On the basis of a fixed number of lines and rhyming scheme, traditional English language poems have the following kinds of stanzas:

• Couplet
• Tercet
• Quatrain
• Quintain
• Sestet

Let us make ourselves familiar with the above mentioned kinds of stanzas:

Couplet

It consists of two rhyming lines having the same meter. Consider the following couplet stanza examples:

Example #1

Alexander Pope wrote his Essay on Criticism in rhyming couplets:

“True wit is nature to advantage dress’d;
What oft was thought, but ne’er so well express’d.”

Example #2

Read the rhyming couplet at the end of Sonnet II by Edna St. Vincent Millay:

“Whether or not we find what we are seeking
is idle, biologically speaking.”

Example #3

A rhyming pair of lines in iambic pentameter is known as a heroic couplet. Initiated by Chaucer, heroic couplets are commonly used in epics and narrative poetry. Among the well known examples of stanza, we find Edgar Allan Poe’ssonnet To Science:

“Do not all charms fly
At the mere touch of cold philosophy?
There was an awful rainbow once in heaven:
We know her woof, her texture; she is given”

Tercet

A tercet comprises three lines following a same rhyming scheme a a a or have a rhyming pattern a b a. Sir Thomas Wyatt introduced tercet in 16th century.

Example #1

Read the following tercets from Wyatt’s poem Second Satire with a rhyming scheme a b a:

“My mother’s maids, when they did sew and spin,
They sang sometimes a song of the field mouse,
That for because their livelihood was but so thin.

Would needs go seek her townish sister’s house.
Would needs She thought herself endured to much pain:
The stormy blasts her cave so sore did souse…”

Example #2

Famous Romantic poet, Alfred Lord Tennyson employed tercets in his poem The Eagle with a rhyming scheme a a a:

“He clasps the crag with crooked hands:
Close to the sun it lonely lands,
Ringed with the azure world, it stands.

The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls;
He watches from his mountain walls,
And like a thunderbolt he falls.”

Quatrain

It is a form of stanza popularized by a Persian poet, Omar Khayyam, who called it a Rubai. It has common rhyming schemes a a a a, a a b b, a b a b.

Example #1

Read the following example from Edward FitzGerald’s Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam:

“Come, fill the Cup, and in the fire of Spring
Your Winter garment of Repentance fling:
The Bird of Time has but a little way
To flutter–and the Bird is on the Wing.”

Example #2

Thomas Gray employed Quatrain in his poem Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard:

“The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,
The lowing herd wind slowly o’er the lea,
The plowman homeward plods his weary way,
And leaves the world to darkness and to me.”

Quitain

Quintain also referred to as cinquain is a stanza of five lines which may be rhymed or unrhymed and has a typical stress pattern. Its invention is attributed to Crapsey.

Example #1

Below is an example of cinquain taken from Crapsey’s November Night:

“Listen…
With faint dry sound,
Like steps of passing ghosts,
The leaves, frost-crisp’d, break from the trees
And fall.”

Sestet

Sestet is a kind of stanza that consists of six lines. It is the second division of Italian or sonnets of Petrarch following an octave or the first division comprising eight lines.

In a sonnet, a sestet marks a change of emotional state of a poet as they tend to be more subjective in the second part of the sonnet.

Example #1

Read the following lines from Mathew Arnold’s The Better Part:

So answerest thou; but why not rather say:
“Hath man no second life? – Pitch this one high!
Sits there no judge in Heaven, our sin to see? –
More strictly, then, the inward judge obey!
Was Christ a man like us? Ah! Let us try
If we then, too, can be such men as he!”

The poet answers the rude inquirer passionately as soon as the sestet commences.

Function of Stanza

Stanza divides a poem in such a way that does not harm its balance but rather it adds to the beauty to the symmetry of a poem. Moreover, it allows poets to shift their moods and present different subject matters in their poems.