Ployjai Pintobtang

2202234 Introduction to the Study of English Literature

Acharn Puckpan Tipayamontri

October 28, 2010

Reading Response 1

My Ride with Seamus Heaney in "Digging"

"Digging," a poem by Seamus Heaney sets me on a journey where past, present and future meet. Beginning with the present, the son, Seamus Heaney, is holding a pen in his hand, "snug as a gun" while his father's boot "nestled on the lug." They're using their different weapons, yet, with the same purpose: to dig. The poem carries me through the past where his father and his grandfather perform their duty as farmers then shows me how that influences Seamus Heaney as a present writer. His experience as a son and a grandson of farmers "awaken in my (writer's) head." And though he has "no spade to follow men like them (farmers)," he uses his different kind of weapon, his pen, to dig for something good as well as his father and his grandfather did. So in the end, the poem takes me to the different future than those of his old men yet has its root from them.

Chutamas Chandchai

2202234 Introduction to the Study of English Literature

Acharn Sorn Nangsue

June 21, 2010

Reading Response 1

A Symbiotic Story

For many, stories begin with “Once upon a time,” establishing setting and mood for the characters and plot that follow.  In Sherman Alexie’s “A Good Story,” the story begins with the narrator’s mother telling him, “You should write a story about something good, a real good story” (140).  It is the reader, not the writer who starts the story.  But Alexie provokes us further.  Junior responds to his mother’s request by putting forward his own: “Okay…If you want to hear a good story, you have to listen.”  The successful making, or “quilting,” of a story depends on the reader’s participation.

Alexie claims that he is not trying to “pull that Indian shaman crap on” the reader with exotic Indian Americanness in telling a story (xii).  This is, after all, a modern Diet Pepsi drinking, potato chip munching, sandwich eating, HUD house dwelling tribe of Indians, not the Disney Pocahontas running through the forest singing “Colors of the Wind” type.  Yet, this very image of basketball playing half-braided brown youths looks very exotic against the stereotype.  Junior’s earlier demand comes back to chide us: “If you want to hear a good story, you have to listen”—a good story is a good story with the proper cooperation of parties involved.  The proper names of things are proper because we make it proper.  “Uncle Moses sat in his sandwich chair eating a sandwich” (141).  It is proper that one should eat a sandwich in a sandwich chair.  His “it-is-a-good-day song” is what it is because he hums it and makes it so.

The web of a story is spun out for us in this interdependent way.  Arnold’s straight words to Moses in response to why he hid from going on a field trip, “Because I wanted to see you,” is an “unplanned kindness” and, for Moses, “a good thing” (143).  When Arnold asks for a “good story,” his story—his actions which lead him to Moses sitting in front of the house, and his kindness—therefore, is what is told.  This “good story” is a proper name for it, fulfilling as it does the request of the willing and attentive listener, Junior’s mother, who responds, also properly, with an approving “it-is-a-good-day song,” which in turn finishes the story quilted of diverse pieces of material fitting together in a symbiotic relationship.

Chutamas Chandchai

2202234 Introduction to the Study of English Literature

Acharn Sorn Nangsue

June 21, 2010

Reading Response 1

A Symbiotic Story

For many, stories begin with “Once upon a time,” establishing setting and mood for the characters and plot that follow.  In Sherman Alexie’s “A Good Story,” the story begins with the narrator’s mother telling him, “You should write a story about something good, a real good story” (140).  It is the reader, not the writer who starts the story.  But Alexie provokes us further.  Junior responds to his mother’s request by putting forward his own: “Okay…If you want to hear a good story, you have to listen.”  The successful making, or “quilting,” of a story depends on the reader’s participation.

Alexie claims that he is not trying to “pull that Indian shaman crap on” the reader with exotic Indian Americanness in telling a story (xii).  This is, after all, a modern Diet Pepsi drinking, potato chip munching, sandwich eating, HUD house dwelling tribe of Indians, not the Disney Pocahontas running through the forest singing “Colors of the Wind” type.  Yet, this very image of basketball playing half-braided brown youths looks very exotic against the stereotype.  Junior’s earlier demand comes back to chide us: “If you want to hear a good story, you have to listen”—a good story is a good story with the proper cooperation of parties involved.  The proper names of things are proper because we make it proper.  “Uncle Moses sat in his sandwich chair eating a sandwich” (141).  It is proper that one should eat a sandwich in a sandwich chair.  His “it-is-a-good-day song” is what it is because he hums it and makes it so.

The web of a story is spun out for us in this interdependent way.  Arnold’s straight words to Moses in response to why he hid from going on a field trip, “Because I wanted to see you,” is an “unplanned kindness” and, for Moses, “a good thing” (143).  When Arnold asks for a “good story,” his story—his actions which lead him to Moses sitting in front of the house, and his kindness—therefore, is what is told.  This “good story” is a proper name for it, fulfilling as it does the request of the willing and attentive listener, Junior’s mother, who responds, also properly, with an approving “it-is-a-good-day song,” which in turn finishes the story quilted of diverse pieces of material fitting together in a symbiotic relationship.

Chutamas—

The title of your response, “A Symbiotic Story,” is good, but I think you should also have a one-sentence introduction stating the main idea of your response before proceeding to the discussion.

The first paragraph is clearly and logically developed. I like the way you picked up on Alexie’s use of the communal activity of “quilting” as a metaphor for the cooperative way in which stories are made.

In paragraph 2, a topic sentence outlining the main idea of the paragraph would be helpful to the reader. Otherwise, the paragraph starts well and your marshalling of details from the story to describe the modern Indian tribe is well executed. However, clarity becomes an issue when you introduce the word “proper.” It is used three times in one sentence alone and its meaning becomes unfixed. You need to establish early on your understanding and employment of the term “proper.”

Paragraph 3 begins with a good topic sentence. However, the slippage in meaning in your use of “proper” continues to affect clarity. The conclusion is nice and you return to the term “symbiotic,” but apart from the title this is your only use of that word. It should be explicated early on in the response if it is central to your discussion.

Overall, an insightful response but for the full effect you need to clearly explicate key terms used in your discussion so that clarity doesn’t become a problem in conveying your thoughts to the reader. Furthermore, in fully responding to the question in the ‘Weekly’ you should refer to the Aristotelian tradition as background in discussing Alexie’s innovations in the short story form. Also, have you directly addressed the final part of the question, i.e. “how [the story] has affected the listener and teller”?  A final point is that in paragraph 2, you tantalizingly raise the issue of conscious exoticism and how Native American products are viewed by non-Indians, but leave it hanging. It’d be great if you could elaborate further on this point.

Tida Damrongvej

2202234 Introduction to the Study of English Literature

Acharn Puckpan Tipayamontri

June 10, 1998

Reading Response #1 (Bless Me, Ultima)

What was Ultima to the narrator?  I pieced together an answer to this question while following the narrator's division of the world.  He basically divides his world into one that is established by the community and one that is its alternative.

From the very first chapter of the novel, he introduces two possible starting points to his tale: "Let me begin at the beginning.  I do not mean the beginning that was in my dreams and the stories they whispered to me about my birth, and the people of my father and mother, and my three brothers—but the beginning that came with Ultima" (1).  Antonio, the narrator, makes a distinction between a historical origin and a personal birth.  He has a history whose origin is defined through local conventions of ancestry, and he has a history whose beginning exists outside of that definition.

Using Ultima to mark a beginning outside of tradition, Antonio declares her as the embodiment of an alternative world.  Ultima's character, in many ways, is fitting for the role.  She comes to live with Antonio's family and is respected without having to be a part of the family.  She and the narrator's father are the only people in the household not observing the fast before holy communion.  Ultima's powers of cure works where those of God supposedly fails.  Existing side by side with, but not attached to the dominant religion and culture, the figure of Ultima offers an option of seeing and living in the world without the binds and obligations of a mainstream mentality and custom, although this is a mainstream within a minority culture in the larger culture of America.

Kanokwan Surapornchai

2202234 Introduction to the Study of English Literature

Acharn Puckpan Tipayamontri

June 10, 2009

Reading Response #1

A Second Best Sonnet

Shakespeare’s role-playing begins in bed according to Carol Ann Duffy’s “Anne Hathaway.”  The willed item is an ever-changing stage for loveplay where the stellar poet engages in earthly delights.  Encasing this “living laughing” Shakespeare is his widow’s recollective sonnet “held” together by approximate rhymes.  World and words half rhyme and seas and kisses is light rhyme that is also a near rhyme which Duffy seems to dub “soft.”  The feminine unstressed syllable of kisses transforms Shakespeare’s words as they reach their goal (“these lips”) into realized action.

After this relaxed initial quatrain, the rhymes dissolve even further as the repeated o’s of body, now, softer, now, echo, assonance bring enjambment, continuous over seven lines, to the eye-sonance touch-noun end-rhymes and finally an end-stop, producing word-making and love-making as one act.  More dissimilar eye-sonances substituting for end rhymes (romance-taste, on-love) in the release of built emotions through the next dreamy five lines make the sonnet seem to lose its structure altogether.  The finish, however, is a resonant couplet containing an identical rhyme that insists, in hearkening back, on that identical bed in line 8 with a perfect twist.  This is a turn and final statement in Hathaway’s lesser voice pronounced with the lingering identical chime of the exact head-bed—the best coupling among second best rhymes in a second best sonnet about the second best bed.

Anchalee Kamnoedkaeo

2202234 Introduction to the Study of English Literature

Acharn Puckpan Tipayamontri

June 3, 2009

Reading Response #1

Beds that Fly

In the movie Basic Instinct (1992), the character Catherine Tramell, played by Sharon Stone, notoriously invokes Coleridge’s idea of “suspension of disbelief” as an alibi.  “You make it up,” she says, “but it has to be believable.”  Tramell is being interrogated as a murder suspect and her defense is a literary pact between writer and reader.  “I’d have to be pretty stupid to write a book about a killing and then kill him the way I described in my book.  I’d be announcing myself as the killer.  I’m not stupid.”  In effect, she can’t be the murderer because she wrote about the murder.  That the story is convincing shows her skill as a fiction writer, not as perpetrator.  Putting your disbelief on hold is why you can enjoy Harry Potter.  You are willing to ignore your disbelief for the moment of reading that paintings can talk, that sprinkling powder over your head can get you from one place to another across town in a flash.  Put another way, if you want to enjoy reading, you should be willing to believe.  This is the demand of Sylvia Plath’s The Bed Book which offers us such fantastic notions as Snack Beds with automatic dispensers “Just a finger to stick in / The slot, and out come / Cakes and cold chicken” (39–41).  We are not stupid.

Plath’s poem asks us to “see if the Big Dipper’s / Full of stew” (173–74) and dares us to revel in springing “From a Bounceable Bed” even though “You bounce into the blue—” (l. 163–64).  I did not feel lost in that open blue.  In letting go of my preconceptions and inhibitions, I was too busy entertaining new combinations of things, actions and ideas, and the outcome is better than cakes.  For me, having traveled with Plath from Timbuktoo to Aunt Joan’s and enjoyed every minute of it, reading is believing.

Works Cited

Anchalee Kamnoedkaeo

2202234 Introduction to the Study of English Literature

Acharn Puckpan Tipayamontri

June 3, 2009

Reading Response #1

Beds that Fly

In the movie Basic Instinct (1992), the character Catherine Tramell, played by Sharon Stone, notoriously invokes Coleridge’s idea of “suspension of disbelief” as an alibi.  “You make it up,” she says, “but it has to be believable.”  Tramell is being interrogated as a murder suspect and her defense is a literary pact between writer and reader.  “I’d have to be pretty stupid to write a book about a killing and then kill him the way I described in my book.  I’d be announcing myself as the killer.  I’m not stupid.”  In effect, she can’t be the murderer because she wrote about the murder.  That the story is convincing shows her skill as a fiction writer, not as perpetrator.  Putting your disbelief on hold is why you can enjoy Harry Potter.  You are willing to ignore your disbelief for the moment of reading that paintings can talk, that sprinkling powder over your head can get you from one place to another across town in a flash.  Put another way, if you want to enjoy reading, you should be willing to believe.  This is the demand of Sylvia Plath’s The Bed Book which offers us such fantastic notions as Snack Beds with automatic dispensers “Just a finger to stick in / The slot, and out come / Cakes and cold chicken” (39–41).  We are not stupid.

Plath’s poem asks us to “see if the Big Dipper’s / Full of stew” (173–74) and dares us to revel in springing “From a Bounceable Bed” even though “You bounce into the blue—” (l. 163–64).  I did not feel lost in that open blue.  In letting go of my preconceptions and inhibitions, I was too busy entertaining new combinations of things, actions and ideas, and the outcome is better than cakes.  For me, having traveled with Plath from Timbuktoo to Aunt Joan’s and enjoyed every minute of it, reading is believing.

Works Cited

Anchalee—

This is an excellent first response. I like that you’re bringing in different kinds of texts (Coleridge’s prose, film script, films) to your analysis of Plath’s poem to show how they are relevant to literary study, but be careful that they do not hog your attention and detract from your focus on The Bed Book. Changing your word choice of “notions” in “such fantastic notions as Snack Beds” to a more thingy noun would work better with the logical order of the thinking process that you innumerate—a movement from concrete to abstract: things à actions à ideas. Overall, lively prose and a keen examination of your act of reading.  Good job!

                                 PT

Anchalee Kamnoedkaeo

2202234 Introduction to the Study of English Literature

Acharn Puckpan Tipayamontri

June 3, 2009

Reading Response #1 (revised)

Beds that Fly

Suspension of disbelief is what makes fiction come alive.  This pact between writer and reader coined by Coleridge is notoriously invoked as an alibi by the character Catherine Tramell played by Sharon Stone in the movie Basic Instinct (1992) when being questioned for murder: “You make it up, but it has to be believable.”  Fiction can be made to seem real but it is not reality, Tramell reminds her interrogators, “I’d have to be pretty stupid to write a book about a killing and then kill him the way I described in my book…I’m not stupid.”  The writer agrees to verisimilitude, the reader agrees to put their disbelief on hold, and the fictional world is enabled for our enjoyment: thriller dramas where writers can kill without being killers, fantasy series like Harry Potter where sprinkling floo powder can get you across town via fireplaces, and, in this case, Sylvia Plath’s The Bed Book where Snack Beds come with automatic dispensers “Just a finger to stick in / The slot, and out come / Cakes and cold chicken” (39–41).  We are not stupid, and our enjoyment does not come at the price of intelligence.

The opposite is true.  Plath’s poem shows us “An Elephant Bed” that can give “A trunk-spray shower” (129, 139), asks us to “see if the Big Dipper’s / Full of stew” (173–74), and dares us to revel in springing “From a Bounceable Bed” even though “You bounce into the blue—” (163–64).  I did not feel lost.  In that wide open blue, I let go of my white little preconceptions of beds and of my jam rambling inhibitions and was fantastically busy eating up new combinations of things, actions and ideas, and the outcome is better than cakes.  For me, having willingly suspended my disbelief in traveling with Plath from Timbuktoo to Aunt Joan’s and enjoyed every minute of it, reading is believing.

Works Cited

Danai Hengtrakul

2202234 Introduction to the Study of English Literature

Acharn Puckpan Tipayamontri

June 3, 2009

Reading Response #1

Breakfast vs. Delicious Plums

Two people depend on “the plums / that were in / the icebox” in Williams’ “This Is Just to Say.”  For the unseen “you,” the reader of this message, they are breakfast.  For the speaker, they are more than that.  The understated title, for all its trivial anticipation, actually announces a complex string of serious comparisons.  Reading the poem as a contrastive display of wants and values releases the true juiciness of Williams’ provocative act. 

It is not only that he has eaten the plums (past tense, sin committed), and the “you” was waiting till later (future intention, object not consumed), but also conning us into sympathizing with that defiant and remorseless stance, forgetting that the other party has been deprived of a meal, and one so important as that which will break a night-long fast.  We are asked to weigh the value of two worthies.  On the one hand there is breakfast, on the other, plums—the same thing but meaningfully different.  One is tasteless, the other “delicious / so sweet / and so cold.”  One is probable, the other certain; deferred vs. immediate gratification.  Present vs. future.  Planned (“saving / for”) vs. unplanned.  Singular vs. plural.  Categorical vs. specific.  Of the two that hang in the balance, Williams seems to claim that your preserving of staid, conventional bodily sustenance is not worth my now joltingly flavorful sensual nourishment.  In this poem so short and sweet, reading is simply comparing: your thing vs. my aesthetic.

Nilobol Wongsam

2202232 Introduction to the Study of English Fiction

Acharn Puckpan Tipayamontri

November 6, 2008

Reading Response

Guilty Pleasures

Billy Weaver, in Roald Dahl’s “The Landlady,” gives a clear criterion for his preferred place to stay when he asks the porter “is there a fairly cheap hotel not too far away from here?” (142).  Having also taken the “slow afternoon train”—presumably cheap as well—which deposits him at a late hour (“about nine o’clock in the evening”) in Bath, Billy reveals himself to be an aspiring businessman who is concerned not with the business of how much he could make but with how little he would spend.

Yet, as he follows the porter’s ready reply to try the pub Bell and Dragon, he encounters a bed and breakfast.  Here, Billy observes the “brilliantly illuminated” temptation: “tall and beautiful” pussy-willows which “looked wonderful” beside green velvety curtains, “a bright fire burning in the hearth,” “a pretty little dachshund” curled up asleep in a room “filled with pleasant furniture,” containing “a baby-grand piano and a big sofa and several plump armchairs” (143).  Billy’s vacillation in front of this lavish visual so averse to his sense of thrift recalls an earlier contrast between seeing and feeling: “the moon was coming up out of a clear starry sky over the houses opposite the station entrance.  But the air was deadly cold and the wind was like a flat blade of ice on his cheeks” (142).  The setting for this story establishes a discomfiting tension between the pleasantness of what is seen and the unpleasantness of what is felt.

 The word “dithering” (143), used to describe Billy in front of the house window, contains both the physical and mental push and pull between his pleasure at the sight and displeasure of the idea: “he was a tiny bit frightened of them [boarding-houses].”  It is also a continuing reminder of the “deadly cold” in the expositional discrepancy.  By the time Billy sees the landlady’s “warm welcoming smile” (144), its contradiction to his earlier feeling toward “rapacious landladies” makes the conflict between seeing and feeling almost a motif in the story.

Accepting to stay at the “fantastically cheap” bed and breakfast (144), then becomes an act of guilty pleasure for Billy not because of indulgent spending but because of indulgent skimping.  His disapproving instincts lose to apparent low cost: “The old girl is slightly dotty…but at five and sixpence a night, who gives a damn about that?” (145).  The landlady’s guilty pleasures bring these words back to haunt Billy.  Her pleasure in having beautiful boys smacks of illicitness: “They were tall and young and handsome, my dear, just exactly like you” (148) and “we don’t want to go breaking any laws at this stage of the proceedings” (146).  This vocabulary shift to “proceedings,” evocative of the court, hints at a shift in the story where the business at hand is no longer economic but (il)legal.  One suspects that an overnight stay at a local bed and breakfast is turning into a longer mysterious series of events.  Our act of continuing to read is Dahl pulling us inexorably into the mire of a murder that we would rather not be a part of, much like Billy Weaver being drawn into the house despite his trying to hold back (144).

“When I’m writing for adults, I’m just trying to entertain them,” says Dahl (West 65).  To continue reading is to continue seeing Billy’s downfall.  Ignoring his feelings and believing only his eyes probably costs Billy his life.  Even though the anticipated climactic murder never takes place explicitly in the text, are we ignoring our feelings of guilt as we are “entertained” by the pleasure not of killing, an illicit act, but of reading about it?

Works Cited

Dahl, Roald.  Tales of the Unexpected.  London: Joseph, 1979.

West, Mark I.  “Interview with Roald Dahl.”  Children’s Literature for Education 21.2 (1990): 61–66.

Tida Navakul

2202232 Introduction to the Study of English Fiction

Acharn Puckpan Tipayamontri

June 16, 2008

Reading Response

From Lady to Child: The Moving Identity of Vera

Vera is first introduced in Saki’s “The Open Window” as “a self-possessed young lady of fifteen” (4).  This identity quickly slides into the next, less mature-sounding, one even as she acts in the very adult role of playing host to the nervous Mr. Framton Nuttel who is visiting for the first time with a letter of introduction from his sister.  By the second sentence, the young lady in control of the conversation is referred to as the niece, identified merely as a temporary replacement for her aunt through their kinship.  We soon see behind the young lady niece who receives her uneasy house guest with such poise.  The story turns out not to be a simple parlor scene when yet another identity is revealed: “‘Her [aunt’s] great tragedy happened just three years ago,’ said the child” (5).  This dramatic shift from lady to child makes one wonder.  What has transpired seems to be an exposition to a different development.  “‘Then you know practically nothing about my aunt?’ pursued the self-possessed young lady” becomes not the voice of a grown up niece making polite drawing room conversation but that of a child gauging her audience in setting up a game.  While the men are out snipe-shooting for their entertainment, the child at home is doing some hunting of her own.  Vera, stalking her prey, we realize when the aunt arrives and asks whether she is “amusing you [Mr. Nuttel],” is ironically amusing herself (6).  The shifting label for Vera from lady to niece to child suggests that perhaps what she would rather be is none of these.  Perhaps what she most prefers has nothing to do with age, but activity.  Tracked through Vera’s moving identity, this short story is a conflict of desire, of a child trapped in the role of a young lady.   She wants excitement and adventure, and, thwarted, seeks them where she can, making do with “romance at short notice” as her “specialty” (7).  In the end, she is not even Vera.  Operating as she does in fiction rather than in truth, she is perhaps more suited to “authoress.”

Pete Jaidee

2202232 Introduction to the Study of English Fiction

Acharn Puckpan Tipayamontri

June 16, 2008

Reading Response

The Open Window

“That window wide open on an October afternoon” in Saki’s short story named after it is such an invitation for imagination (5).  Space for this view seems even greater when we discover that it is actually a door: “a large French window that opened on to a lawn.”  The story that follows, wild though it may be, however, is marked by precision.  It was “three years ago to a day” is very precise.  How freely can imagination run when it is curbed by such control?  The men did not merely go shooting, but specifically “snipe-shooting.”  The window is not open to infinite possibilities.

There was only one opportunity for this precise machination to work.  That is a limit in terms of time.  There was only one event that needs to happen.  That is a limit in terms of activity.  There was only one place where the event can happen.  That is a limit in terms of space.  There was no room for choice.  There was no room for chance.  Everything is definite.  “The open window” was open to one assured happening.  The time was “twilight” but there could be no two ways about it (7).  The event happens exactly the way it is known and said to happen:

three figures were walking across the lawn towards the window; they all carried guns under their arms, and one of them was additionally burdened with a white coat hung over his shoulders.  A tired brown spaniel kept close at their heels.  Noiselessly they neared the house, and then a hoarse young voice chanted out of the dusk: “I said, Bertie, why do you bound?” (7)

Each detail was fixed and in place, down to dusk, white coat, spaniel, and song.  Open windows can mean a limitless multitude of things, but despite the temptingly wide open image of its title, for Saki’s “The Open Window” to be the masterpiece that it is, the open window must be closed to all but a singular experience.  There is nothing to imagine because all is known.  You are not allowed boundless wonder because everything is told.  What does it mean, then, that the open window is in fact very closed?  It means that, in this perverse condition of strict limitation that showcases the meticulousness of plot where every element must fit unerringly together, this open window, so locked against possibilities and so restricting to imagination, is perfect.

Tida Navakul

2202232 Introduction to the Study of English Fiction

Acharn Puckpan Tipayamontri

August 2, 2007

Reading Response

The Modern Eve

We have discussed the significance of names in class looking at the name Peregrine.  Its association with falconry hearkens back to an old culture of chivalry and legacy, one that corresponds nicely to “the walls” where “George Peregrine’s ancestors, painted by the fashionable painters of the day, looked down upon them,” the current couple upholding the Peregrine heritage (53).  Being a bird of prey, the peregrine falcon also matches George’s love for the hunt with several “trophies of the chase” to show off his skill (54).

I have extended the examination of names to that of Evie, which comes from Eva, and shares the same root as Eve, the biblical first woman, the helpmeet and companion of man, and mankind’s first mother.  The name Eve is derived from Latin Ēva from Hebrew Havva which means “a living being” or “Life.”  In the biblical story, Adam gives names to all the animals and also to his wife.  Each name designates a different animal and defines what the animal is.  In the same way, Eve means, and is, life, and part of her identity is “mother of all living.”

In Maugham’s “The Colonel’s Lady,” Evie as George’s wife, contrary to the legacy of her namesake, is said to be “barren” (55).  Unlike Adam’s Eve, she cannot be a mother.  She cannot continue the Peregrine family line.  George thinks “she hadn’t any vitality,” is “faded” and “thin as a rail” (55) and goes to another “blonde and luscious” woman (56), one who seems more fertile and full of life than Evie.

George, however, is wrong.  Evie’s book, Dashwood says, “throbs” with passion “in every line” (60).  Contrary to George’s perception, Evie shows that she is full of vitality (from the Latin vitalis “of life” from vita “life”).  She gives birth to a new tradition and generation of man.  Her legacy is a society where women can be creative, not in the physical terms of making babies, but in the intellectual and emotional terms of producing a work of art.  This is the creation and contribution of the new Eve—“fresh and original, very modern without being obscure” that from conception has taken on a life of its own and grown beyond the imagining and control of its parent, just like a child (59).

Renu Panya

2202242 Introduction to the Study of English Poetry

Acharn Puckpan Tipayamontri

July 3, 2008

Reading Response

The Life of Death: Personification in Billy Collins’s “My Number”

Billy Collins’s poem “My Number” presents death in action.  Death’s description is suggestive of personification, where an inanimate thing, an animal, or an abstract idea “is made human or is given human qualities” (Coursebook 28).  He breathes (l. 3).  He reaches for (l. 2), tampers with (l. 6), scatters (l. 7), and loosens (l. 8) things.  But how human are these “human qualities”?  How human-like is it to kill a woman who has already lost her husband, or to snatch away a person who wants to find his way home, or to give disease for which there is no cure?  The token gesture to humanize death is doubly undermined by the hypotheticality of the questions in which the personification is couched and by the inhumanity of Death’s supposedly human actions.

What human can have a reach that is limitless in space (can be everywhere from Cincinnati to British Columbia to roller coasters and dark lanes) and time (is never too busy)?  What person can find every life no matter how hidden?  What person has breath that ends life rather than begins it?

It seems the speaker’s questions try to humanize death so he can deal with him as a person who can be persuaded, who will “find it hard to find” his house (l. 10, 1), and who has ears and can hear him talk.  The speaker is not brave in talking to death, but afraid.  If personification humanizes death and gives it life, perhaps taking away personification can end its life?  The personifying imagery makes death more clearly person-like (having a car, “stepping from a…car” l.11), bringing him closer and closer in space and the tense shift from “Is something so?” (first three stanzas) to “I will” (l. 17) to “I start talking” bring death closer and closer in time.  The hypothetical becomes a definite future, and finally an ongoing present.  At the end, the actions cease, personification of death stops.  Death is no longer a person who can make arrangements (l. 5) or park a car (l. 12).  The pronoun for death is no longer a “he” but a “this” (l. 17), a definite vagueness that is here.  The sense of doom throughout the poem forebodes the failure to make death human, and this last word speaks of the more important failure: after personification, death’s life continues.