Huckleberry Finn saving Jim

Huck’s decision to rescue the captive Jim in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was a significant development in Huck’s character.  Throughout the book Huck had been wrestling with the morals he had grown up with.  He knew he had been helping Jim escape slavery since they first decided to travel together, and Huck believed that it was wrong to help Jim.  Since Huck had been taught that slaves like Jim were property, he was essentially stealing Jim from his Miss Watson.  Huck had been ignoring his morals until Jim was turned in by the King and the Duke.  Huck was torn between his newly developed friendship with Jim and doing what his society said was right, letting Miss Watson know where Jim was.  After a while, Huck made the decision to rescue Jim, saying “All right, then, I’ll go to hell” (p. 223).  Huck made the decision to go fully against his moral sensibilities.

Due to the difference in culture between me and Huck, I didn’t like Huck’s earlier comments on Jim, since he didn’t see him as a human being.  Huck acts very racist and that put me off even though I understood that he was from a different culture.  As the story progressed, Huck’s uneasiness with helping Jim escape still left me unsympathetic for him.  When Huck finally came to the realization that Jim deserved freedom, I began to really connect with Huck for the first time.  As the escape progressed, I became proud of Huck for doing what was right with a real will.  When he, Tom and Jim came were shot at during the escape, I nearly applauded.  Huck really grew as a character, and this was his finest moment.

Robert Frost's poetry: Simply deceptive or deceptively simple?

Robert Frost, the classic American poet, wrote many poems about all kinds of things.  He wrote about building stone fences, choosing a path in a wood, or stopping to watch the snow fall.  But, are his poems just descriptions of scenes, or are they more?  Would it be too much to look at his poems metaphorically?  To put it another way, are Frost's poems simply deceptive or deceptively simple?

You could argue the point either way, but I feel that Frosts poems are deceptive; they have a deeper meaning to them.  The Road not Taken could just be a tale of a walk through the woods one day, but his wording implies that it is a metaphor about life and decisions in general.  In on point, Frost says "yet knowing how way leads on to way, I doubted if I should ever come back".  If he was going for a actual walk, why wouldn't he ever come back to that fork in the trail.

Another example is Mending Wall.  There Frost recounts a seasonal task of repairing a stone fence with his neighbor.  Frost questions as to why there needs to be a fence, and his neighbor just responds: "good fences make good neighbors".  Frost is making a commentary about the barriers people create between each other in their lives.  He asks if such barriers that keep us all separate are necessary.  The general, unspoken response is that such barriers, like the separation between classes and ethnic backgrounds, are necessary to keep the peace.  "Good fences make good neighbors".

Many of Frost's poems have hidden meanings just below the surface.  You don't have to dig for them like you do in some other poet's work, but they are there and are worth noticing. 

In the fashion of Stein

Brown streaks silver line, pipe in all but name and function.  Char rim, homeless forest.  Sunshine and columbines.  Night and flight, a pale moon over the plains.  Joy, bliss, love, kiss, sadness and pain, lost.  Marks beyond meaning, decoration, disguise, deceit. 

The poem "Cape Hatteras" by Hart Crane in the collection "The Bridge" stood out to me as the poet trying to come to grips with several large changes in his society.  The main change mentioned was the invention of the airplane.  Crane's poem serves as a bridge between the idealized past and the present.  He seems almost resentful of the Wright brothers success, asking the then dead writer Walt Whitman "if infinity be still the same as when you walked the beach" (lines 48-49).  The implication is that inventions such as the airplane are destroying the wonder and grandeur of the world by making it easier to travel.  He longs for the older idea of the world, that the heavens are infinite.  On line 32 he writes "But that star-glistered salver of infinity, The circle, blind crucible of endless space, Is sluiced by motion,-subjugated never".  He notes how machinery has subjugated the rest of the world, mentioning dynamos humming, belts on spool feeding machines slapping, flywheels in motion, and other machines that he refers to as "steely gizzards" (line 75).  As the poem progresses, he offers another complaint of technology, particularly the airplane, that it would be used in war. 
He writes  "Hell's belt springs wider into heaven's plumed side" (line 96), suggesting that the airplane was corrupted for its role as a weapon of war.  Later, to make it a bit more clear, he says "Tellurian wind-sleuths on dawn patrol, Each plane a hurtling javelin of winged ordnance, Bristle the heights above a screeching gale to hover" (lines 107-109).  Crane stands on a bridge between past and present, far preferring to be of the side of the past rather than the present. 

This blog is part of an assignment for my American Literature class.

The title for my blog is derived from my Nom de Plume and the household room were literature can be most comfortably discussed, preferably with a mug of hot coco and a companion of the canine and/or feline varieties.