"Death Be not Proud" and "To Sleep" Questions + Black Elk:

1) Death be not Proud:

I would not avoid him but rather be with neutral terms with him. The reason for this is because I would want to die at some point and I would like to have that be a nice and natural easy death. I would also want to ask questions about certain things we humans don’t know about the process of dying. He speaks to death in a very negative way as though he is seen as a loser who means nothing to him.

2) He uses a capital D in order to refer to death as a person instead of a thing. He did this in order to show that death has super powers to take our lives but he still resembles humans, it is as if he is trying to bring him down to our level where we can understand the concept more fully.

3) Triumphant, condescending and angry are all some of the tones the speaker uses in this poem. A clear example of this would be the fourth line, “Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me.”, and the last line “And death shall be no more; Death thou shalt die.” Of course these tones are also present throughout the whole poem.

4) One of the reasons that the speaker gives us is the fact that he doesn’t think death should be proud because even though it has the ability to take lives away from us we can have control over that in the first place and the speaker gives an example of this by saying “one short sleep past, we wake eternally”.

5) It has a special power that we humans don’t have and that is to take someone’s life away anytime and anywhere. This makes us label it since the dawn of time as something that stimulates negative feelings. These feelings than eventually want to have some form of thing or force to blame the death on and what better would suit the job than death the concept.

6) He suggests that it can be defeated if one takes his/her life before death.

7) It says a lot of things. It is obvious that in most cultures death is not seen very positively but one of the major things that are associated with death that makes us see it as such of an adversary is that it stands for the end of life. Whether the culture calls for the belief in after life or not it has this metaphorical meaning that whatever comes after that was one chance for the person to live that life. I think that another way of viewing death is positively. One can see death as their time to rest from life or as just the transitioning between lives.

To Sleep:

1) Sleep, the poetic device being used here is personification since sleep is brought down to a human form so that we can conceptualize it more vividly.

2) “O soft embalmer of the still midnight,” Sleep is an embalmer because when we are asleep we somehow resemble a corpse that has been preserved. It is like when we sleep we take this temporary rest which is similar to dying in a way but it will end once the day starts.

3) Forgetfulness is divine because if we didn’t forget we would be stressed the whole time not having a break in which we give our mind a break and have some time to reflect upon what we wish to do not what we had done.

4) Sleep saves the speaker from the past days and his actions. It is as if it is like a safe haven for the speaker to relax and have his woes leave him. He values it so much because he wants to forget all what has happened to him during the day. He might have been suffering Insomnia and so really yearns for that sample of sleep.

5) He describes it as something that is curious and always comes to him strongly when he sleeps. Conscience is personified with a capital C. Also he used the simile burrowing like a mole to describe how deep his conscience can get under his skin and head. Another example is of poetic devices he uses is personification when he mentions that his conscience is curious. This gives something that is not person human features which makes it easier for us to conceptualize the meaning of the poem.

6) “And the seal hushed Casket of my soul”. These two share the same general meaning of an object or force that is shaped to hold things. So for example a casket is like a chest were you place valuable things. Whereas the soul is something in everyone that contains your conscience. Therefore when you seal these containers you are basically trying to keep them away from you to relax.

7) Sleep is like ‘mini death’. In a way it sort of is the same thing but one of them is temporary while the other lasts forever.

8) I might have to say that he will think about in the same nature. The reason for this is because he shows through the whole poem that he is seeking some form of peace and death in a way is peace.

Black Elk:

1) The most things that speaks out for me is the seamless infusion of nature with language and how that culture uses it to describe things that occur naturally in the earth. I also think that the culture is linked so closely to what they look at in nature and this quote represents this, “I was born in the Moon of the Popping Trees (December) on the Little Powder River in the Winter When the Four Crows Were Killed (1863), and I was three years old when my father’s right leg was broken in the Battle of the Hundred Slain” One doesn’t get it instantly but the names have greater meaning than what they sound. Another feature of this excerpt is technique in which the author used metaphor to resemble emotions felt. For example in the third paragraph, “It is like some fearful thing in a fog, for it was time when everything seemed troubled and afraid”. This quote uses the weather which is a part of nature to explain a human emotion. Unlike the previous example this feature uses nature in a more figurative way that stands for emotion instead of a more literal meaning. The last feature that I picked up and I found quite unique about this excerpt is the simplicity of the language. It is very down to the point and straightforward as seen in this example, “… and they wanted to have a road up through our country to the place where the yellow metal was;”

2) I think he means either crescent moon which makes sense because anyone who eats from a circular shape makes a crescent like shape with his mouth. This nature metaphor might also resemble a moon that has many craters and therefore is bitten.

3) In different parts of the world humans have different views of things. This all can be due to other factors such as time, location and environment. Here we can seen that language does lead to certain boundaries but it is our way of describing what is around us or what we value the most. In this text we can see that Black elk looks with a nature eye over everything whereas in other parts of the world people look at what they think is most valuable to their identity and they incorporate it within their language making it communicate what they percept.

4) Well firstly I definitely speak more than one language and sometimes combine both of them which makes it even more different, but that aside I think that the restricted use of vocabulary can be seen as a major difference since I am 100% sure that I don’t speak in that sort of monotone voice. My language is also influenced by my surrounding which is not very similar to that in Black Elk’s world and that might act as a huge difference. This tells us that your surrounding does affect your language greatly and that in different cultures we value different things. With Black Elk for example he took nature very seriously whereas I might take something else more seriously like schooling and my Arabic culture, and this might be seen in the language that I speak.

9) For one thing it is not as angry and mad at death as the other poem. It definitely does not have the same challenging tone and it seems to want death to overcome him for a short period of time unlike the other poem which doesn’t care what death does but rather how it approaches one.