Question 1:
The old grievance refers to the war injury Jake has that prevents him from
performing sexually. This “grievance” is what keeps him from being able to please
the love of his life, Brett. He never describes his war wound in detail, probably
because it causes him a lot of pain. At one point he says that “it’s funny,” but then
jumps back, saying that actually it was “quite sad.” Not until the end of the book
does he really elaborate on the issue. This injury and his failure to talk about it
reflects the common theme of failure to communicate and express one’s self in the
“Lost Generation.” (Erika)
“The old grievance” is Jake’s unfortunate wound. It afflicts his self esteem because
he can’t pleas women and so he constantly compares himself to other men, trying to
decide whether he has any masculinity left after he was hurt. In the end, when he
travels to Spain, he learns to forget about his wound and realized he is manly; his
personality and love for manly hobbies (fishing, bullfights, etc.) give him confidence.
His masculinity is also reassured by the way that Brett keeps coming back for his
company. It proves to him that his personality is good enough. (Lauren)
Question 2:
The meter of Langston Hughes’s “Flight” is trimeter. This story is about an African
American boy who is running away from a group of people who accused him of
touching a white woman. The group of people want to lynch him. The trimeter helps
with the anxious feeling of the story. The quick and fast paced rhythm makes it seem
as if the reader is being pushed though the poem by the voice, similar to how the
African American boy is being told to run for his life. (Hong-Ha)
Question 3:
April is the cruelest month because, as we learn later in “The Waste Land,” if what is
planted is evil, what will sprout is evil. The tone is almost fear of what could sprout,
come April. Lines such as “Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing” evoke hopeless, scary
images with things (lilacs) that are beautiful in a regular context. Like the images,
Eliot uses line breaks to draw the reader’s attention to the last work on each line. In
this case, Eliot draws out attention to verbs to intensify the emotion, words like
“breeding,” “mixing,” and “stirring.” These words intensity of the bleak, almost gross
tone of the passage. (Alex)
The writer of the poem refers to April as “the cruelest month” because of some
traumatic even in history, most likely WWI. After the war, April is cruel because it
represents the world’s renewal after a cold winter, even though the people haven’t
yet recovered from the trauma. The line breaks the author uses in this park always
seem to end a line with a verb. This intensifies the emotion in the poem because it
shows that the world is active and always changing. The words make it seem as if
the author doesn’t like that change. (Muhammed)
Question 4:
The blues is used as an avenue to speak about the pain and deep suffering of racism
and economic inequality. Something cannot be talked about or written about and
music is used as a medium to “to make us listen.” Blues is the “only light we’ve got
in all this darkness.” Even though the music speaks to a man’s sorry, it is the truth
and must be heard. The “It” In this passage, as I read it, is Sonny’s brother, and the
“we” are all Black people. For Sonny’s brother, to not hear and feel the truth of the
music is to lose is brother and to be blind to what is happening with race relations
all around him. For the “we,” to not hear and feel the truth is not to fight. If they
cannot hear their pain and feel every bit of it, then they cannot be strong enough to
rise above and rise against it. (Kristina)
Question 5:
This is an imagist poem, and it is called that because in this style, the author focuses
solely on the object, describing in very few works the image of a scene. The tone is
apologetic, by playful. We see this in the fact that Williams describes the fruit as “so
sweet/and so cold,” after apologizing for its absences. The line breaks seem to
amplify the playfulness of the poem. The fact that lines and stanzas are so succinct
lends some lightness to the text. (Jake)