Analysis of the song "Show Me What I'm Looking For" by Carolina Liar

Blog about your favorite song. Type out the lyrics and explain how the sound and rhythm of the song work to enhance the meaning. Explain why the song is important to you.

My favorite song is "Show Me What I'm Looking For" by Carolina Liar. It has never been particularly important to me; I just love how the song sounds. However, it has become more meaningful to me these past few weeks, what with the stress applying to transfer to universities. The lyrics "show me what I'm looking for" describes the roadblock in my life where I have to decide what is it I want to major in and what direction I'm seeking for my future. The line "Mistakes become regrets" is one of my favorite lines in the song because I've come to regret the B in a Philosophy class that completely skewered my GPA. On a serious note however, the line reminds me that any time I procrastinate, it will come back to haunt me.

The song sounds a bit wistful, but not wistful enough to be sad - I have never liked sad songs. Like a poem, songs have rimes, and this song has rimes as well. There's a rime in almost every other line. There is no fixed rhythm, although the last words in the lines are stressed. The rimes are mostly masculine rimes, where there is a stress on the final syllable, and where most of the rimes are one-syllable. Like in this part,

"Wait, I'm wrong,
Should have done better than this
Please, I'll be strong, I'm finding it hard to resist
Show me what I'm looking for"

The song is about how a person is not sure how to proceed in his/her life. Confused and feeling lost, the person decides to turn to God for an answer (of course, the part "Oh Lord" in the song could just be used because it sounds good, but I like to think that it is a true reference to God).

There are discernible pauses in the song which enhances the singer's plight. If he sang the song without pauses, the lines would not have as much meaning. There is a pause at the end of every line as well, including the lines in the chorus. They are somewhere in between run-on lines and end-stopped lines - the pauses are not complete stops, but they are not too short either.

Show Me What I'm Looking For - Carolina Liar
Wait, I'm wrong
Should've done better than this
Please, I'll be strong
I'm finding it hard to resist

So show me what I'm looking for

Save me, I'm lost
Oh Lord I've been waiting for you
I'll pay any cost
Save me from being confused
Show me what I'm looking for
Show me what I'm looking for
Oh Lord

Don't let go
I've wanted this far too long
Mistakes become regrets
I've learned to love abuse
Please show me what I'm looking for

Save me, I'm lost
Oh Lord I've been waiting for you
I'll pay any cost
Save me from being confused
Show me what I'm looking for
Show me what I'm looking for
Oh Lord

Show me what I'm looking for
Show me what I'm looking for
Show me what I'm looking for

Save me, I'm lost
Oh Lord I've been waiting for you
I'll pay any cost
To save me from being confused
Wait, I'm wrong
I can't do better than this
I'll pay any cost
Save me from being confused

Show me what I'm looking for
Show me what I'm looking for
Show me what I'm looking for
Show me what I'm looking for
Oh Lord

Root Cellar by Theodore Roethke

Blog about one poem that you read for today. Explain its denotative and connotative meaning. Discuss its use of imagery and/or figures of speech. Use the checklists to help you think of what to analyze about the poem you selected. Make sure you include specific quotes from the poem. 

Theodore Roethke's poem "Root Cellar" is full of imagery and metaphors. This rich imagery provided insight into how the poet may have intended the poem to be imagined by the reader. The poet apparently spent a lot of time in a large commercial greenhouse run by his family, and the "root cellar" could either be about a greenhouse or literally a cellar. It seems to me that it is about a greenhouse though. The word "root" in the title means plant root, so a root cellar could be a room full of plants. A cellar is used for storage; and what storage room is stuffed full of plants? A greenhouse, of course.

The poem is about the unpleasant surroundings in a greenhouse. The poem evokes a kind of claustrophobic mood - the word "cellar" in the title contributes to this as well. When I imagine a cellar, I imagine a dark, damp place. The last line, "Even the dirt kept breathing a small breath" is a metaphor for the way dirt absorbs oxygen and carbon dioxide from the air. The usage of a metaphor in this line dramatizes the dirt's will for life in the dark, claustrophobic greenhouse full of plants which are also competing for life. The second line "Bulbs broke out of boxes hunting for chinks in the dark" (455) sounds like a metaphor, although plant bulbs really DO hunt for spots of light in darkness.

"Shoots dangled and drooped

Lolling obscenely from mildewed crates

Hung down long yellow evil necks, like tropical snakes. (455)"

These three lines in the poem are rather sinister and recalled to my mind a haunted house. Shoots dangled and drooped evokes a hopeless feeling, like how drooping plants signify its imminent death. "Long yellow evil necks, like tropical snakes" is a simile of plant winding plant stalks and snakes.

When I came to the line "And what a congress of stinks!" (455) the smells that automatically came to mind were of plant compost and fertilizer. This created an unpleasant effect in my mind where a whole jungle of plants are aggressively jostling for space in a small greenhouse and releasing a variety of disgusting smells.

Roethke used described the scene with words like "leaf-mold, manure, lime" - these are words that emphasized the age and the filth of the greenhouse. It is possible that the greenhouse is either not very well kept or has been abandoned for a long time.

Lastly, I noticed that there are lots of slippery "sss" sounds in the poem, like in the last word in some lines - crates, snakes, stinks, planks. Reading the poem, I felt like those words were chosen because they emphasized the words; the sound effects are those that sound indignant and sickened. I could almost imagine the poet's disgust of the greenhouse.

Although I took the poem in the most literal sense, the last two lines in the poem,

"Nothing would give up life;

Even the dirt kept breathing a small breath."

is rather wistful and full of meaning. The poet may not entirely hate the root cellar; he may have some sort of respect for the plants' love of life.

Hopeless Teenage Dream

Walking home from school one night, my friend Hopeful turns to me
"What is it about that girl that haunts me in all my dreams...?
Is it her wit, her looks, or her smile that shines like sunbeams
 A teenage dream! and like a dream she's better than she seems..."

"You sound so much in love, Hopeful," I tentatively say
"But she's my best friend, and please, I don't want to cause you pain
"Because I know her heart, and when I talk to her it's plain
Your love for her is doomed for naught but rainy skies of gray."

Hopeful looks down at the floor and heaves a heavy sigh
"I know, but like a fool I cannot stop this love for her...
"My friends call it infatuation, but I know better!
It must be love if this drives ME, a guy, to even cry."

What to say to Hopeful? That his new "love" for her is great?
It's sad but true, that it takes two, to seal a happy fate.

Response to Poem

For the sake of my friends' privacy (and my livelihood) the friends I have sent this poem to will be known as Jack and Jill in this post. I did not intend to have such a poem sent to Jack and Jill. I have never been the poetic type, so I went for the knee-jerk reaction and chose the sadly predictable theme of friendship. To be honest, I did not expect much, no disrespect to the great poets out there intended. Needless to say I was excited to find the poem "After The Movie" by Marie Howe. What makes this poem so special is that there is nothing about the lovely perks of friendship, no hand holding, no skipping around the park singing wonderfully innocuous songs. This poem was different. It described the complex relationship between Jack and Jill perfectly. Without giving too much away, Jack is infatuated with Jill, but Jill does not return the favor. Jack and Jill are my best friends, and used to be best friends too.

The poem is about a conversation between the narrator and Michael. Michael believes that a person is capable of both loving and murdering someone. The poem ends with "we both know the winter has only begun." This signifies the shift in their relationship - the beginning metaphorical frost that has sprung between the former bosom buddies. Although murdering might be pushing it a little (I am pretty sure that Jill is not the murderous type), she is oftentimes frustrated by my Jack's open infatuation with her. Being the cold type, things can get pretty frosty when Jack becomes too bold with his infatuation.

I sent the poem to Jack. He replied almost immediately. The first word is too graphic for an English blog, so I am not going to write that down here. He then makes light of the whole matter and thoughtfully observed that Michael is the name of Jill's ex-boyfriend. I asked him if he's aware of his infatuation for Jill, because what he is feeling is definitely not love. His surprising answer was that he knows this already, thank you very much. But he cannot help his desire for her. I told him that's really sad. I wish I could have seen Jack's expression, but I can only summarize his verbal response. Jack also said that Michael is nuts, and that only poets can come up with these things. He is also interested in what movie they saw, because as according to him, the plot is "sicko." Jack also points out the line in the poem "Simone Weil says that when you really love you are able to look at someone you want to eat and not eat them." and cries out in disgust, "OMG, a Twilight reference!" before I told him that the poem was written before the immensely popular vampire novels were published.

I wish I could say that Jack had some sort of epiphany about this futile infatuation, and said something insightful and maybe even poetic. However, as you probably know by now, my friends are not wired for poetry.

The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams

            The Glass Menagerie, a play written by Tennessee Williams,  tells a story of a broken family of three - Amanda Wingfield, the mother, and Laura Wingfield and Tom Wingfield, her children. Amanda "continues to live vitally in her illusions (993)" and her grown-up children are seemingly lost souls in need of direction. Crippled from birth, Laura is painfully shy and has an obsession with her collection of glass animals while Tom longs to find adventure and freedom from his mother's domineering paranoia and Southern charm in the household.

         
 In a sense, the relationships and the events that transpired in the play gave a sense of everything being fragile, with the possibility of everything crashing down at any moment, like a glass house. Indeed, this is what happens as things unfold in the play. Amanda Wingfield lives in illusions of grandeur and seems unwilling to part with her past glory days when she was young and beautiful, and had seventeen gentlemen callers. She obviously fancied herself to be the popular young girl she once was. This is evident from the way she carried herself - in one part, she "flounces girlishly toward the kitchenette (999)." Her sole purpose was to find Laura a suitor, a quest that proved futile in the end.

        
   I chose to focus on Amanda Wingfield because she is a complex character with many layers to her. I admire her vivacity and persevering attitude, especially because Laura and Tom are difficult people, and completely unlike their mother. Amanda's intentions were all good, although she is so child-like and bossy that she often provoked her children to do the exact opposite of what she wants them to. Her attitude drove away her husband (his grinning picture sat over the mantel) and it eventually drove away Tom. She is described to have "aged but childish features (1010)" and is full of "Southern charm". I find it quite sad that Amanda still loves her husband even though he left her. Her sentimental personality made her unable to let go of the fact that her husband had left her for good - she often referred to him in the play as she lectured Tom about this and that. She seems to be unaware of her attachment to her husband. For example, after telling Tom to comb his hair, Amanda said, "There is only one respect in which I would like you to emulate your father. (1015)" When Tom asked what it was, Amanda replied, "The care he always took of his appearance. He never allowed himself to look untidy (1015)."

           
Amanda's dream for Laura to have a suitor was close to realization for her when Tom brought home his friend from work, Jim O'Connor. However, Jim only managed to hurt Laura's fragile feelings and nothing hopeful transpired from the visit.

           
And so, in the end, everything shatters like Laura's glass unicorn shattered in the play - Amanda's dreams for Tom and Laura, Laura's hope that Jim could love her, and Tom's shaky relationship with his mother.

          
The title "The Glass Menagerie" could easily have been applied to the family instead of Laura's collection of glass animals. I looked the word "menagerie" up on dictionary.com and one of the definitions is "an unusual and varied group of people." The Wingfield family is an unusual and varied group of people. The play is almost like a tragedy except that the family was already not so well-off to begin with. As the play nears to an end, all speech is muted out. As Amanda can no longer be heard, "her silliness is gone and she has dignity and tragic beauty (1048)." Perhaps the play aimed to show that beauty is not enough to capture a man's heart, even though this is probably just a minor theme in the play. After all, Amanda was beautiful, but she had a "tragic beauty" because her outward looks was not enough to convince her husband to stay. Jim O'Connor called Laura pretty but was not charmed enough by her to stay either.

          
I was disappointed that the play ended with hardly any closure for the reader. There was nothing to suggest much hope for the characters. One of the closing lines of the play, when Amanda shouted to Tom, "Go, then! Then go to the moon - you selfish dreamer! (1048)" struck me as being particularly significant because a selfish dreamer is exactly what Amanda is. She made Tom give up his dream of adventure and tried to convince Laura that having a husband is the best thing there is. This makes her the selfish dreamer, the one who dreamed for her children what she once dreamed for herself, but was never able to make those dreams become reality.

Symbolism in "The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

I always start out by reading the author introductions at the beginning of every story, and I found the introduction about Charlotte Perkins Gilman to be one of the most insightful introductions - at least in terms of the story that followed. It said, "After the birth of her one daughter, she experienced a severe depression. The rest cure her doctor prescribed became the basis of her most famous story, "The Yellow Wallpaper (265)."

What is significant about this is that those very elements are present in the story - the protagonist's bed confinement, her baby whom she is not allowed to see, and the severe mental disease she is inflicted with - and the story became so much clearer to me. It was immediately obvious from the very beginning that the protagonist is an unreliable narrator. The reader is informed that "...there is really nothing the matter with one but temporary nervous depression - a slight hysterical tendency- what is one to do? (266)"

 In the story, the protagonist is confined to a room and is highly disturbed by the yellow wallpaper on the walls, seeming to find strange shapes and forms everywhere she looks. She feels that her husband, John, a physician, does not think that she is as sick as she says she is. She went on to say, "John does not know how much I really suffer. He knows there is no reason to suffer, and that satisfies him. (267)" I wonder if this symbolism pertains not only to the protagonist but also to the author. It is written to sound as if depression is a minor disease and something that should not be taken seriously. Gilman was inflicted with depression and had to rest; it seems as if she is frustrated about this "unnecessary" cure and is channeling her frustration through the protagonist in the story.

The wallpaper becomes a point of obsession for the protagonist and she starts to think that it may be alive. She talked about the wallpaper in this quote, "Behind the outside pattern, the dim shapes get clearer every day ...I wish John would take me away from here! (272)" Although she is talking about the wallpaper, I think the author may be hinting at how stifling rest cure is, and how it could drive someone to commit suicide. There are numerous other words about the wallpaper, such as "The color is hideous enough, and unreliable enough, and infuriating enough, but the pattern is torturing. (273)" The wallpaper is like a symbol of the aggravation of the rest cure. "I find it hovering in the dining-room, skulking in the parlor, hiding in the hall, lying in wait for me on the stairs. (275)" This could hint at the measures taken by other people to make sure that the protagonist (and perhaps the author) stays confined in her bed.

The last part of the story is quite disturbing as the protagonist starts to go out of her mind (although she does not know this). She defiantly gets out of bed and starts to peel off all the wallpaper she could reach, making "All those strangled heads and bulbous eyes and waddling fungus growths just shriek with derision! (278)" The bed where she is regularly ordered to stay in becomes the last standing obstacle to her freedom when it refused to move. "I tried to lift and push it until I was lame, and then I got so angry I bit off a little piece at one corner - but it hurt my teeth. (277)" At this point, the protagonist is starting to hurt herself to tear off the wallpaper. She finally succeeds and said, "It is so pleasant to be out in this great room and creep around as I please. (278)" Free from the rest cure, the protagonist feels liberated and probably better than she felt for a while, although she is at the most serious stage of her disease.

"I've got out at last in spite of you and Jane. And I've pulled off most of the paper, so you can't put me back! (278)" This sentence has the most meaning in the story because the wallpaper is the symbol of aggravation. By tearing down this barrier, the protagonist is finally free from the rest cure. "I've got out at last... you can't put me back!" could also express the author's hopeless dream to be free from rest cure.

It is almost melodramatic that in the end, the author committed suicide. Her battle with depression has evidently been lost. The story ended with John fainting and the protagonist unaware of her dangerous mental state, and it is not unlikely to imagine the protagonist eventually committing suicide, like the author who penned the story. "The Yellow Wallpaper", with its symbolism and dark tone, serves as an unintentional reminder that depression is a disease not to be taken lightly.

The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien

Immediately after reading the first paragraph of the story, I knew that although it is about American soldiers at the Vietnamese war, it is mostly about just how very detached from the war, both emotionally and physically, these soldiers were.

There was very little about the actual war itself in the story. O'Brien instead focused his attention on the things each soldier carried. The tone throughout the story is light, although there were moments when the author reminds you of the gravity of the situation these soldiers were in. The protagonist is probably First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross because he is in both the beginning and ending of the story, and we are given more insight into his mind than any of the others. The story begins with Jimmy Cross apparently more focused on his love for Martha than on the war. This becomes the prevailing theme of the story - soldiers who were risking their lives, but whose thoughts were occupied with anything but the war. Jimmy Cross' thoughts were forever with Martha, and "he had difficulty keeping his attention on the war (345)."

The second paragraph of the story started with "The things they carried were largely determined by necessity." This line is funny especially after I read of the things these soldiers carried - along with the vital things like canteens of water and C rations, the soldiers carried cigarettes, packets of Kool-Aid, chewing gum, and other things you would not normally expect soldiers in such a heavy war to carry.

The title becomes clear to me as I continued reading the story. It seems that the things each soldier carried reflected their individual personalities and characteristics. Hygienically-inclined Dave Jensen, for instance, carried "a toothbrush, dental floss, and several hotel-sized bars of soap he'd stolen on R&R in Sydney, Australia (341)." Religious, spiritual Kiowa carried "an illustrated New Testament (342)" and his grandfather's hunting hatchet, and Mitchell Sanders carried condoms with him.

I think the author is trying to say that these soldiers are really just kids at war. There is a line in the story that captures this perfectly - when Lieutenant Cross was looking at the tunnel, he could not help but think of Martha instead of the dangers that could be awaiting the soldiers. He was "just a kid at war, in love. He was twenty-four years old. He couldn't help it." Although this line refers to Jimmy particularly, I think it applies to the soldiers under his command (except for the love part). They make light of their situation at war, and are even able to make jokes. It is not the intense, 24/7 life-threatening situations we see in Hollywood movies depicting the war.

The soldiers in the story are brave, but it is not courage. "Rather, they were too frightened to be cowards (353)." Other than the physical objects, they carried their fear inside of them and maintained tough, fierce exteriors when really, they were scared and were just trying to endure each day to the best of their abilities.

The end of the story finds Lieutenant Jimmy Cross realizing that Martha never loved him. Whether this is actually true is never imparted to the reader, but this epiphany changes his character. This "loss" hardens his heart, and he decided to himself to "not tolerate laxity. He would show strength, distancing himself."

Jimmy Cross somehow lost meaning in his life when he lost his love. I interpret the quote to mean that as long as the soldiers still find meaning in their lives, whether through devotion to religion like Kiowa, or through the love of food like Henry Dobbins, they could never be fully attentive to the war because there are more important things in life for them. The war is really just a duty, and a duty the soldiers were not particularly interested in.

This line captures the whole meaning in the story: "It was very sad, he thought. The things men carried inside. The things men did or felt they had to do. (354)."