Dantes Inferno essays

Dante's Inferno essays It is an accepted fact within many schools of thought that, Dante's Inferno is a groundbreaking work that set a standard for its genre and also demonstrated many new visual and psychological concepts about the after life. Yet, it is also clear that the Inferno is a product of its time and must be judged within the context of it. Within the work there are countless demonstrations of both conformity and departure from the classical Christian moral and ethical view upon sin and punishment but one of the most striking conformities is with regard to the idea of divine right, in the sense that politics were guided and backed by God. "First he must descend through Hell (The Recognition of Sin), then he must ascend through Purgatory (The Renunciation of Sin), and only then may he reach the pinnacle of joy ..." (Dante, Ciardi 3) Dante's Inferno is clearly an example, on a grand scale of the thoughts and standards of his time, as well as a culmination of the classical ideals associated with philosophy, sometimes conforming to Christian ideals but often departing from it. In many ways the work can be seen as one of the first applications of what we like to think of as the renaissance work of reinterpretation of Greco-Roman Philosophy, a genre that in Dante's time, much of which was only recently accepted by the Roman Catholic Church as being anything other than the heathen words of the pagans. Within the front matter of the Ciardi translation of Purgatory, a previous beloved book of the Divine Comedy, there is a clear demonstration of the roots of Dante's quest. Seeing corruption abound within the church, he wondered how any man could even dream to reach salvation: What hope was there that men in general might be persuaded to a just life in this world and salvation in the next when they saw their spiritual leaders behave in such a way' Surely ...

Reading Notes on Robert Frost’s Poem “Nothing Gold Can Stay”

Reading Notes on Robert Frost’s Poem â€Å"Nothing Gold Can Stay† Robert Frost wrote a number of long narrative poems like â€Å"The Death of the Hired Man,† and most of his best-known poems are medium-length, like his sonnets â€Å"Mowing† and â€Å"Acquainted with the Night,† or his two most famous poems, both written in four stanzas, â€Å"The Road Not Taken† and â€Å"Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.† But some of his most beloved poems are famously brief lyrics- like â€Å"Nothing Gold Can Stay,† which is condensed into only eight lines of three beats each (iambic trimeter), four little rhyming couplets containing the whole cycle of life, an entire philosophy. Double Entendreâ€Å"Nothing Gold Can Stay† achieves its perfect brevity by making every word count, with a richness of meanings. At first, you think it’s a simple poem about the natural life cycle of a tree: â€Å"Nature’s first green is gold,Her hardest hue to hold.† But the very mention of â€Å"gold† expands beyond the forest to human commerce, to the symbolism of wealth and the philosophy of value. Then the second couplet seems to return to a more conventional poetic statement about the transience of life and beauty: â€Å"Her early leaf’s a flower;But only so an hour.† But immediately after that, we realize that Frost is playing with the multiple meanings of these simple, mostly single syllable words- else why would he repeat â€Å"leaf† like he’s ringing a bell? â€Å"Leaf† echoes with its many meanings- leaves of paper, leafing through a book, the color leaf green, leafing out as an action, as budding forth, time passing as the pages of the calendar turn... â€Å"Then leaf subsides to leaf.† From Naturalist to PhilosopherAs the Friends of Robert Frost at the Robert Frost Stone House Museum in Vermont point out, the description of colors in the first lines of this poem is a literal depiction of the spring budding of willow and maple trees, whose leaf buds appear very briefly as golden-colored before they mature to the green of actual leaves. Yet in the sixth line, Frost makes it explicit that his poem carries the double meaning of allegory: â€Å"So Eden sank to grief,So dawn goes down to day.† He is retelling the history of the world here, how the first sparkle of any new life, the first blush of the birth of mankind, the first golden light of any new day always fades, subsidies, sinks, goes down. â€Å"Nothing gold can stay.† Frost has been describing spring, but by speaking of Eden he brings fall, and the fall of man, to mind without even using the word. That’s why we chose to include this poem in our seasonal collection of poems for autumn rather than spring.