This is foreshadowing, because [spoiler] the lawyer loses his temper with Baretleby.

This isn't a particularly exciting first sentence, and when you think about a story about a "very elderly man," you wouldn't imagine the story is very exciting either. Just from the bland beginning, you almost assume that this very elderly man might start going into some long-winded explanation or philosophical inquiry about something, or otherwise be boring and grey like this man. I wonder if Melville's slow-going beginnings were what turned so many readers and critics away from his work.

Melville struggled to sell his stories during his lifetime, and he couldn't even make enough money as an author to earn a living. Moby Dick, which eventually he became famous and respected for, sold so poorly, that Melville considered giving up on writing novels entirely. Given his life story, I can only imagine that Melville himself sometimes felt like Bartleby.

The word "love" is used a ton in this translation, but I feel like there was no one word or phrase repeated in this way in the other translations, so where is this repition coming from for it to be in this translation? Discrepancies like these are what make me question the validity and accuracy of Bible translations, and why I think the Bible's meaning should be taken to be more flexible.

This part of the passage makes it easy to compare different translations using this same passage. One can see the list-structure of the sentences here, all naming things that love is not. The structure shines through in all the English translations of this text.

They're using words such that versions of them don't exist in our language today. How can we know for sure that the Bible has been translated correctly if English is so much different today, and if words existed back then that have no equivalent existing today?

Already, one can tell that this version is going to be very old fashioned and might even classify as "middle english" or "old english," which are completely different from the english we know and understand today.

They are harping so much on this "right hand man" thing because "Right Hand Man" is another song that comes earlier in the play, and so it's referencing back to itself. The fact that it does this also pretty much highlights this part for us saying "look, this part is important" just like how Ashleigh was saying above me.

I love how a lot of the rhyming sounds in this part of the song are not "real" rhymes, they are "off" rhymes, yet some how these are working more and sounding closer to the actual sound than anymore off rhyme I've ever heard, and it just makes the word choices at least for the purpose of rhyming seem all the more clever.

Interesting that they would be focusing on the fact that he's an immigrant when he is still a white man and since America isn't really a country yet so how would they have a national pride so much so that they don't like or make distinguishments between themselves and immigrants?

Saying there's "something in the water" must just be another way of saying that you don't know the cause of something or you don't know the reason why about something, because this phrase is used in songs a lot in many different contexts. The "something in the water" is also never usually revealed so it must be a common metaphor for not knowing the cause of something mysterious.

I relate to this part a lot, because saying "Then it's a dorm room" almost seems like saying "and then suddenly I was at college," which is kinda how I feel with my whole situation at Clemson right now.

I had no clue who this was and thought this was another song from Hamilton at first. Phoebe Bridgers is an American singer-songwriter whose genres include indie rock, alternative, and emo. Go give some of her songs a listen cause upon looking her up I realized this is exactly the type of music that I like to listen to!

When we learned about poems' "content genres" in Chapter 4 of Vendler, we learned that a "nocturn" is a type of poem that takes place at night, or a night scene. While first reading this poem, I thought at first that it was a nocturn, the whole feel of it just seems to take place at night. However, when I read it again, I realized that he is just describing nature and "Innisfree" in general, not specifically at night. I'm not sure what to make of this feeling of it being night, but I think it says something about the poem's tone. If anyone has anything more specific or more helpful to say about this, please comment below. Why did I think the poem takes place at night?

This line has a really nice rhythm because the "I shall have some peace there" and "peace comes dropping slow" both have the same amount of syllables or beats, and the rest of the words in the line are just fillers that you hardly even notice. It made the statement about peace here stand out to me a lot.

The assignment today said to pay special attention to the root words in this poem, but I can't seem to find a ton of words that have distinct roots that could give it more than one meaning, at least not any I can recognize easily.

"Figure" here is referring to the woman that the artist is painting, her physical body and face being represented. Figure can also mean the subject of a painting, or a model that someone sets up just to paint as opposed to an actual human. Is figure used here to suggest that the woman is merely a model, something pretty to look at and paint?

The moon can be said to "wan" or be "waning" whenever the moon phases are decreasing after the full moon. This makes sense since in the line just before this one, the speaker compares the woman to the moon saying she is "fair as the moon." To say she is not waning would suggest that she is still shining bright, like the full moon.

Enjambment is used again here. To end the line on "black" especially when describing someone or something leads one to believe that it's in a negative connotation, but then following with "as an eighth note" puts the "black" description in a positive connotation since music is generally a happy thing that most people enjoy. Here, there is almost a hopeful tone since the author is taking a word "black" that's usually associated with something negative like evil, and instead turning it into something positive and even a compliment. This is the exact kind of effect that enjambment is supposed to have.

Here, we return to the original scene that began at the beginning of the poem after we've went on a rabbit trail about Jimmy Hendrix and then about remembering the speaker's little brother. This structuring/arrangement mimics the little thought trails that we might go on in real life while we're still present in some main event. It makes me feel like I'm kinda there with the speaker while he watches his little brother come home, my thoughts trailing off along with his...

I've seen others commenting on the negative connotation that the speaker gives to winter. Whenever the speaker says "too happy" either about the brook or the tree, it seems like they're even trying to tell nature that winter is a negative thing. "You're too happy tree, be sad instead 'cause bad things are gonna happen to you." I don't know, it's just weird to me because like others are saying, in my experience poems about winter are happy or reverent of nature's beauty, but in this poem, the speaker is trying to say to us as readers and to nature itself that we're "too happy" about winter.

I wonder why the poet thought it was appropriate to use "drear-nighted" rather than dreary nighted or dreary night. I get that he did it in order to make the meter more regular, but since "drear" isn't an actual word, it's a shortened word, I wonder why he chose to just shorten it at his will. If it were me and I was trying to think of a word that fit with the rest of my rhythm, I doubt that changing an existing word or making up a new word of my own would be my first instinct.

I wonder why the poet thought it was appropriate to use "drear-nighted" rather than dreary nighted or dreary night. I get that he did it in order to make the meter more regular, but since "drear" isn't an actual word, it's a shortened word, I wonder why he chose to just shorten it at his will. If it were me and I was trying to think of a word that fit with the rest of my rhythm, I doubt that changing an existing word or making up a new word of my own would be my first instinct.

This part of the poem is the only part that's "real." The split brain that she talks about, the seams, the balls on the floor, none of that is actually real. All these images are things she's using to represent one thing: her mind slowly falling apart or deteriorating. The thoughts here that she can't seem to string together or connect to one another, that's the part that's real, everything else is just being used to describe her state of mind.

I love the rhythm here. "Apparition" and "of these faces" have the same amount of syllables, but one is a big long word while the other is a string of short words. It makes the poem read like a song or maybe like rap, and I like it a lot.

is this word supposed to be "groaned" but just spelled weird?