Category: Writing

A Chance of Hope

On a road traveled, overgrown with time

Now a footpath memory, of bittersweet pines

The sign, with a smile, marks a turn, taken

Leading down to a tree, where first love was forsaken

A raging river of life, which flowed unbridled

Reduced to a stream, narrowing and idle

Where seeds of love, were sewn to the winds

Now echoes of lovers, reverberate within

Hallowed ground for a heart, with unbearable wounds

Once a cradle of love, now a visited tomb

Like a miner for gold, panning sands of time

With unstoppable tears, of melancholic brine

As the sun breaks through, the glint of a shard

Glitters in the light, like a twinkling star

Suddenly as despondency is relieved by hope

Panning faster, more appear, thawing love with a jolt

The stream rises and rushes, in response to the melt

Flowers bloom, birds sing, as new warmth is felt

Standing and smiling, pocketing the gold

Returns to reality and hopes love will grow

I read the poem, A Chance of Hope by Daniel Turner, and I interpreted the poem as he is exploring the idea of hope and its role in our lives. In the poem, Daniel uses rhyme and imagery to bring across the idea that without hope, all the wonderful things in our lives could not be brung about. Hope plays an important role in our lives and the way we live them. We live with expectancy and in bad situations, we can be “relieved by hope” that we can recover and learn from our mistakes. Turner is mainly exploring the idea of hope and love and how they intertwine to create a “ new warmth” of a relationship. I believe that hope is interconnected with every part in our lives and I have experienced the power of hope very frequently. In a recent sporting event, I took part in, I was competing with a good friend in a ski to bike race from the top of Cardrona to the bottom. I had not trained for the event but as a past time, I bike almost every day. I went into the race hoping and believing I could do well and came out with 2nd. This could be expanded to the larger world on a larger scale. A combination of training, hard work, and preparation mixed with hope and self-belief are the winning attributes in any discipline. Relating back to the ideas expressed by Turner in the poem, Love and hope are tightly interlocked as all you can do are be your own person and hope that you liked for who you are.

Another strong theme apparent to me in this poem is the idea of the natural cycle of life, ups and downs, twists and turns, experienced by everyone. The poem starts with positive imagery of “bittersweet pines The sign, with a smile, marks a turn” which gradually descends into an increasingly negative space, with “unstoppable tears”, at rock bottom, only to rise again towards a brighter future. This captures the emotional rhythm of life and the changeable world experienced by humankind. Turner uses the striking images of nature to express his inner feelings, taking the reader along on his journey. This creates a symbolic experience of deeper meaning with the hope being the powerful undercurrent that pulls Turner through. The use of nature to capture and communicate emotional meaning can also be seen in ‘Sixteen Trees of Somme’  where the author uses wood as an analogy to express a deeper meaning.

Script Publication, Fantasy

Harry Potter and the Cursed Child

Author J.K Rowling

The latest story of Harry Potter is a tale of bravery, redemption and time travel. Albus Potter is a young wizard who is the son of the great Harry Potter. Although for Albus this is no honor, he wants nothing more than to be a normal wizard. As for adventure, it beckons him, just as it did his father. Along with being in the vast shadow of his father accomplishments, he feels the weight of those who have fallen at Harry’s expensive. Albus and his closet friend Scorpius will learn the hard way what happens when you mess with time.

An extremely relatable problem that Albus faces is the complications that come with friendship. When Albus first boards the Hogwarts Express, his destiny is changed forever when he meets Scorpius. Scorpius is the son of Draco Malfoy, but there are rumors that he may have a different origin. Some say that before the dark lord fell he created a child and rumor has it that Scorpius is that child. Although Albus is not bothered by this accusation, Harry is torn between ruining his son’s first real friendship and protecting him from his horrible past. Another friendship incident in the book which is very impactful to the story is Delphi’s betrayal. Albus and Scorpius trust her to guide them into the past and believe that she has good intentions only to have their trust thrown away and the dark lord almost return. Friendship is an invisible rope which holds us together. All through the previous books Harry and his friends scrape at the edges of death and are pulled through by the tight-rope of their friendship. There are millions of friendships across the globe, and this drama has taught me that no matter how hard it becomes, a good friend is something to fight for as they do not come along every day. I have faced hard times were just having the support of a good friend has helped me get through it.

A significant theme throughout the book which helped me create a connection to the character of Albus, and I found myself reliving his actions in my own life, was the idea of expectation.  Although the expectation is usually intended as a good thing, sometimes the pressure can result in failure. Albus experienced this throughout the script, as he is laden with reputations of the Potter name to fulfill.  Albus is plied with expectations and in the end, it becomes too much.  He fails the ultimate test when he is sorted into Slytherin House, the disbelief is felt by everyone including the reader, as Albus becomes the first one in his family to enter Slytherin. The bad decisions that Albus makes, are in my opinion forced by his need to belong and the weight of broken expectations on his shoulders.  This causes self-doubt which spirals him into rebellion in an attempt to earn his worth.  This is relatable to younger modern readers who constantly face the high expectations of their parents, in and out of their school lives. I have experienced self-doubt and the weight of expectations before entering my mock exams which I had to spend hours preparing for and was expected to perform at a high level. This culminated in me freezing up in one particular important exam, as the pressure of doing well overwhelmed me and ultimately resulted in an unsatisfactory result. Expectation can be a positive force that encourages you to believe in yourself as well to set high personal aspirations. This reminds me of the novel Sixteen Trees of Somme set in Norway. It is a story of an orphan coming of age and going on a journey of self-exploration to discover his inner person and his place in the world just as Albus did in the Cursed Child.

Novel

All the Light We Cannot See

Anthony Doerr

“All the light we cannot see” is a beautiful novel about a French girl who suffered from being blind and a young talented German boy, whose paths collide in occupied France as they both try to survive the devastation of World War Two. Marie-Laure has been blind since she was six and she lived in Paris until the invasion when she moved to Saint Malo, a small coastal town in France where her great-uncle lives. Werner, the young German boy, is from a dead-end town and wouldn’t have made it past the mines but he was lucky. He was selected to join the brutal Hitlers Youth Academy for his knack in radios. He had been deconstructing and rebuilding radios since he was a young boy and learned the art of radio technology and electronics. The enchanting storyline brings you along in their journeys while also helps to embed the characters into your heart with Doerr’s “stunning sense of physical detail and gorgeous metaphors” (San Francisco Chronicle).

The story is based on acceptance and appreciation that disability can be an ability. The idea that you could be weakened by something like blindness or deafness but strengthened in other compensating ways, creating a new and different experience of life. Throughout the book, Marie-Laure never sees herself as anything less than any other person and believes that her disability can be used to her advantage. Marie-Laure’s father builds models of Paris and Saint-Malo to allow her to navigate throughout the city unaccompanied. Sight becomes no longer necessary as she uses her heightened senses of touch and hearing to her advantage and to escape when the Germans come looking for her. This opens the gate to an independent lifestyle without the constant need for a caregiver and the opportunity to navigate the world on her own. This independence only gradually develops as her doting father was always around so she relied heavily on him and it wasn’t until he was gone that she matured and developed her confidence. I have not had any personal experience with a blind person but my sister suffers dyslexia and struggles with reading and writing on a daily basis. What my family and I have come to discover is that she is very creative and has a conceptual mind which benefits her greatly in other areas.

I connected to the character of Marie-Laure and appreciated her struggles but was impressed by her strengths even more and the emotional connection I had to her character provided me an engaging and heartfelt experience from the book. 

Novel

Butter

Erin Lange

The novel ‘BUTTER’ by Erin Lange is a story of a lonely obese adolescent in the harsh society of today. This novel highlights the issues today’s youth faces when using the internet in the harmful ways. An unfortunate encounter with his childhood bully causes the main character to indulge in a whole pound of butter, therefore earning him the nickname “Butter”. Butter doesn’t have many friends and spends a lot of time alone but he plans to turn this around and make history. “Watch as I eat myself to death – live on the internet – tune in if you can stomach it”.

One of the many ideas portrayed in ‘BUTTER’ is the multitude of problems arising with the internet. The ability to communicate instantly and universally creates many different social issues including 24/7 bullying and peer pressure. In the novel, Butter sets up his website stating that others could join in, comment and interact while he prepares to eat himself to death and by doing so he opens the gate to further and around the clock bullying and pressure. He was relentlessly insulted and even encouraged by his peers to commit suicide. Butter is one of the millions around the world suffering from the internet’s harmful effects. The world is evolving so fast that there is no time to establish effective boundaries and rules. Kids have grown up with parents telling them it’s bad to talk while eating, never to swear, to eat with proper manners but the world has overlooked the internet, the one sole thing with the worst effects. I have had personal events where I have been affected by the internet and the absence of guidance has played a big part in my life. The lack of limitations and extremely magnified reality in social media is also seen to have caused serious effects in the controversial TV series ’13 Reasons Why’. The main character ends up killing herself as a result of multiple extreme sources of bullying mainly prominent on social media.

I feel that I have connected with the character Butter as I too have been bullied about my appearance. In previous years of my schooling people used to call me names and make fun of skinny body as a joke at my expense. This helped me to feel emotionally connected to the situation that Butter was experiencing and this, in turn, caused me to be more engaged in the novel.  Although I have only experienced bullying on a very minimal level the way the kids treated Butter and the way many other kids are treated across the world because of their genetic appearance or for any reason, changed my approach to how I interact online and with my peers.

The interpersonal connection I felt with Butter caused me to become more engaged and enhanced the experience. The relevant issues also are seen in the book began a changed lifelong approach to social media and how I interact with it.

Percy Shelley’s “Ozymandias”

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert… near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:

And on the pedestal these words appear:
‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.^[4]

1). Name one language feature effect used in the poem?

hyperbole

2).

“Colossal wreck, boundless and bare”

3).

Shelly uses hyperbole to communicate the overlying effect of hubris in the poem. The broken man out in the desert tells a story of his life which he led with self-confidence and now he has nothing.

 

 

Analysis.

The basis of the book, Lord of the Flies by William Golding, finds all of the horrible aspects of society and links it back to original human nature. We follow the group of English school boys as they lose their humanity and minds and we are constantly reminded of our capacity for violence. A prominent example of this in the text is the part where Simon has a fit and believes that the pig head on the stick, recently killed by Jack and his gang of hunters, spoke to him and refereed to itself as the Lord of the Flies. “Fancy thinking the beast was something you could hunt and kill […] you knew didn’t you, I’m part of you. Close. close. close. I’m the reason why it’s no go why things are what they are.” It is highly likely that Golding is conveying that the speaking pig head of Simon’s imagination is representing the moral decay and waking hunger for violence and death of the boys on the island. The Lord of the flies, also known as Beelzebub, meaning the devil.

The continual decay of the boys is shown in two main ways. The first being all of the falling throughout the book, the boys falling out of the sky in the plane, the rock falling into the jungle off the cliff, the parachuter falling into the trees from the sky, the conch falling and breaking and most importantly Piggy falling off the rock and Ralph falling at the navy mans feet. These all emphasis the falling of human kind and civilization. The second is the loss of Piggy’s sight and it comes as loss of reason. Jack takes the glasses in order to a make fire for his feast, disregarding the signal fire which needs to be lit, it represents the transition from reason to savagery.

Allegory

William is linking the small society of the island back to human society in the world and using small scale events and characters to represent larger constitutions in the outside world. The demoralization of the boys because of loss of law and order only barely measure the effects of the same conditions would have on the world.

 

Object Analysis

Fire.

• How is it described/introduced in the text?
• How is it used? It is a signal beacon for passing ships as a sign of life on the island in hope that it will come and rescue them. The boys relied on it for any hope of survival.
• Find quotes where it is mentioned?
• What ideas does it convey? The fire is symbolizing civilization and the children’s hope of being rescued. Ralph grasps to keep the fire going as he believes so strongly as it’s their only hope. When the fire is disregarded by Jack and his group they are throwing out civilization.

Pig Head.

• How is it described/introduced in the text?
• How is it used? It is stabbed by a two ended stick and stuck in the ground by the hunters as a gift for the beast.

Character analysis.

Name: Ralph

Appearance: Fair Hair, Male, Young, Taller than Piggy, Past Childhood, Boxers Body.

Language: “Seems to me we ought to have a chief to decide things.”

Origins: English Countryside.

Relationships:

• with Piggy ( intellect and reason ) : cooperative relationship.
• with Jack ( competitive / rival ) : evil.

Quotes.

“Maybe there is a beast… maybe it’s only us.”

“Ralph wept for the end of innocence, the darkness of man’s heart, and the fall through the air of the true, wise friend called Piggy.”

“We did everything adults would do. What went wrong?”

“The rules!” shouted Ralph, “you’re breaking the rules!”
“Who cares?”

“The thing is – fear can’t hurt you any more than a dream.”

Quote weaving.

The boys try to establish order but without adults or a higher power they are always “breaking the rules!”. They did everything the “adults would do” yet they still feel into a state of savagery.

Practice Exam. Not Finished.

Question 1: Describe at least one important object in the written text. Explain why that object was important.

In the novel Lord of the Flies by William Golding, the main theme finds all of the horrible aspects of society and links it back to original human nature, this is portrayed through the important object, the pig’s head on the stick. Throughout the novel, Golding imposes little clues and symbols conveying that as the boys spend more time away from civilization and as they lose their humanity, original human nature comes through and they turn to violence and savagery.

The important object in the text revolves around the idea of the boys living in a small scale society but without rules or laws they quickly descend into savagery, and the pig’s head on the stick is this center of this symbolism. In Chapter 9 when Simon has a fit and believes that the pig’s head stabbed upon the stick, recently killed by Jack and his gang of hunters, spoke to him and referred to itself as the Lord of the Flies. The Lord of the flies, also known as Beelzebub, meaning the devil which is Golding placing a large clue towards the intentions of the scene. The Lord of the Flies goes on to say “Fancy thinking the beast was something you could hunt and kill […] you knew didn’t you, I’m part of you. Close. close. close. I’m the reason why it’s no go why things are what they are.” This shows that Golding is conveying that the speaking pig head of Simon’s imagination is representing the moral decay and waking hunger for violence and death of the boys on the island.