The Tide Rises, The Tide Falls

English Project
The Tide Rises, The Tide Falls
by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
This poem is about the reoccurring cycle of life. Nature has been here much more than us, and humans are always entering and going out. The tide, which represents nature, is forever young, while man is forever older. Man has a time limit, while nature has none.
The literary focus in this poem is meter. Meter isknown as the pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables in a poem: stressed syllables receive more emphasis, more volume, while unstressed syllables receive less emphasis, less volume. This gives rhythm to the poem. The meter in this poem is iamb. An iamb is a poetic foot consisting of two syllables; the first unstressed and the second one stressed. Example:
[…] Along the sea-sands damp andbrown […]

from: Self Reliance
by Ralph Waldo Emerson
In this essay, the author tries to convince us that everything we get is for our own work and effort. Human beings, us, have the capacity to made whatever we want to, but sometimes we don’t give our best because of been fearful of getting near to divine beings. If God created us we should be perfect and go beyond everything, not to resignoneself just because we think we are not going to be understood, that doesn’t matter as long as we give our best.
The literary focus is figures of speech. Figures of speech are words that describe one thing in terms of another.Examples of some figures of speech are simile, metaphors and personification. Simile is the comparison of two things that uses words such as like or as.
Personification isgiving human-like qualities to nonhuman things. Metaphor is a comparison that does not use words such as like or as. Example:
Text | Interpretation |
“imitation is suicide” | Imitating others can lead to the loss of one’s self. In this sense, imitation is like suicide. |
“no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground” | To work at it andtend to it in order for it to become fruitful and worthwhile. Just as anything you do in life, what you put into it is what you get out of it. |

The Minister’s Black Veil
by Nathaniel Hawthorne
This story is about a reverent, Mr. Hooper, who appears a Sunday morning in the church wearing a black veil over his face. He delivers his sermon that has to do with the notion of secret sin and, afterchurch, he goes out to join other people of the congregation. People act like they don’t know him and try not to walk beside him. Later, that afternoon he has a funeral- he is still wearing the black veil- and conducts a wedding. The village people think he is going crazy and wants to talk to him and ask why he is wearing a black veil, but they seem not to have enough courage to do it. At the nextday, the only person who is not fearful of the veil, Elizabeth who seems to be his fiancée tells him to take off the veil; he refuses and says that he has promise to wear the veil forever in recognition of the time when we all throw away our veils. Elizabeth says that he should take off the veil immediately to stop rumors such as that he has gone insane or that he has a sinful scandal. He againrefuses and she starts to cry and breaks off her engagement to Mr. Hooper, thinking that he will take off his veil, but he doesn’t. The congregation continues to gossip and Mr. Hooper continues as well to wear the veil. He wears it until the day he dies, in which he confesses that the veil is a symbol of the secret sin that we all hide. After this, he dies and they bury him.
The author of thisstory is Nathaniel Hawthorne, who is regarded as one of the earliest and greatest examples of American short fiction. It’s based on a real event. A clergyman named Joseph Moody, nicknamed "Handkerchief Moody", accidentally killed a friend when he was a young man and wore a black veil from the man's funeral until his own death.
The literary focus of this reading is symbolism. A symbol is a thing...