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"The Ballad of Cassandra Southwick" is a poem written by American Quaker poet John Greenleaf Whittier in 1843. It details the religious persecution of Cassandra Southwick's youngest daughter Provided Southwick, a Quaker woman who lived in Salem, Massachusetts and is the only white female known to be put up at auction as a slave in the United States.
The saying Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad, sometimes given in Latin as Quos Deus vult perdere, prius dementat (literally: Those whom God wishes to destroy, he first deprives of reason) or Quem Iuppiter vult perdere, dementat prius (literally: Those whom Jupiter wishes to destroy, he first deprives of reason) has been used in English literature since at least the 17th century.
One view was that the end of the world would see all the believers brought up to join the Kingdom of Heaven. The other view was that the end times would have God come down to directly rule Earth, and the chosen people would then be given dominion over the entire world. [3] Hill does not see the two verses referring to different things.
The poem itself is a plea addressed directly to God, who is invoked in his Trinitarian form ("three-person'd God"). The speaker does not suffer from an internal problem here, unlike in a number of Donne's other Holy Sonnets (such as I am a little world made cunningly or O, to vex me ); he is sure of what he needs and how to reach his end goal.
The poem was created as part of a friendly competition in which Shelley and fellow poet Horace Smith each created a poem on the subject of Egyptian pharaoh Ramesses II under the title of Ozymandias, the Greek name for the pharaoh. Shelley's poem explores the ravages of time and the oblivion to which the legacies of even the greatest are subject.
The phrase is commonly used in modern-day contexts to express that a ruler's wish may be interpreted as a command by his or her subordinates. It is also commonly understood as shorthand for any rhetorical device allowing leaders to covertly order or exhort violence among their followers, while still being able to claim plausible deniability for ...
Midnight: The poem is set during the dead of night which is seen as peculiar for the ending of one's life as they are completely unprepared to accept or face their fate. [4] The invisible troupe: This is the symbol of an ominous message, the bad omen of the unavoidable end. It connects the poem with the story handed down to us by Plutarch. The ...
[7] [8] The poem is a monologue in free verse describing his household (a boy reading to him, a woman tending to the kitchen, and the Jewish landlord), and mentioning four others (three with European names and one Japanese) who seem to inhabit the same boarding house. The poem then moves to a more abstract meditation on a kind of spiritual malaise.