Trees- Emily Dickinson

This poem by Emily describes a summer day and also tells how the Sun appears and disappears
behind the clouds who are so many in numbers that can enfold the sun till eternity. But the
whimsical sun comes out at times to do the duty as to help the orchards grow, the birds and
snakes and many other lives to sustain.
In this poem Dickinson makes her preference pretty clear for the glories of such a day over even
the finest art. She begins in the trees. The morning winds have come up, buffeting the branches
until the trees bend and swing like the tassels one pulls to open a curtain or call the servants. As
the sun rises the air quiets and "Miniature Creatures" such as bees and swarms of gnats come
out, filling the air with the rapid beating of their tiny wings. The poet is enamoured by this
music, but notes that it can never "satisfy". It is a tease, most beautiful when out of reach, always
leaving one wanting more. Clouds sometimes cover the sun. Dickinson treats the sun if it were a
monarch. He shines "whole" at times, while sometimes he is "Half" or "utter hid" as if he need not
show himself at all. He has "Estates of Cloud" to shield him from the gaze of mere mortals. But
just as the most reclusive king will venture out for some pet fancy or other, so the sun has a
"whim" to "let the Orchards grow".
Dickinson then turns her attention to earth. A couple of birds are lazing about, and a snake
whispers his "silver" conversation as it slithers around a stone to find a spot of warmth. The
flowers also respond to the sun. Dickinson has them slitting open their calyxes a wonderful
image as if so full of energy that they must burst out by force. Like flags eagerly raised by
embattled troops, the flowers are "hoisted" up to soar on their stems, their petal hems full of spicy
fragrance. A glorious summer day has even more riches, but the poet admits she "cannot
mention" everything. She concludes the poem by saying that even a masterpiece by Sir Anthony
van Dyk (1599-1641) would seem "mean" or shabby by comparison.

The Wild Swans at Coole

Summary
With the trees in their autumn beauty, the speaker walks down the dry woodland paths to the
water, which mirrors the still October twilight of the sky. Upon the water float nine-and-fifty
swans. The speaker says that nineteen years have passed since he first came to the water and
counted the swans; that first time, before he had well finished, he saw the swans mount up into
the sky and scatter, whelling in great broken rings / Upon their clamorous wings. The speaker
says that his heart is sore, for after nineteen autumns of watching and being cheered by the
swans, he finds that everything in his life has changed. The swans, though, are still unwearied,
and they paddle by in the water or fly by in the air in pairs, lover by lover. Their hearts, the
speaker says, have not grown cold, and wherever they go they are attended by passion or
conquest. But now, as they drift over the still water, they are Mysterious, beautiful, and the
speaker wonders where they will build their nests, and by what lakes edge or pool they will
delight mens eyes, when he awakes one morning to find that they have flown away.
Form

The Wild Swans at Coole is written in a very regular stanza form: five six-line stanzas, each
written in a roughly iambic meter, with the first and third lines in tetrameter, the second, fourth,
and sixth lines in trimeter, and the fifth line in pentameter, so that the pattern of stressed
syllables in each stanza is 434353. The rhyme scheme in each stanza is ABCBDD.
Analysis
One of the most unusual features of Yeatss poetic career is the fact that the poet came into his
greatest powers only as he neared old age; whereas many poets fade after the first burst of youth,
Yeats continued to grow more confident and more innovative with his writing until almost the
day he died. Though he was a famous and successful writer in his youth, his poetic reputation
today is founded almost solely on poems written after he was fifty. He is thus the great poet of
old age, writing honestly and with astonishing force about the pain of times passage and feeling
that the ageless heart was fastened to a dying animal, as he wrote in Sailing to Byzantium.
The great struggle that enlivens many of Yeatss best poems is the struggle to uphold the integrity
of the soul, and to preserve the minds connection to the deep hearts core, despite physical decay
and the pain of memory.
The Wild Swans at Coole, part of the 1919 collection of the same name, is one of Yeatss earliest
and most moving testaments to the heart-ache of living in a time when alls changed. (And
when Yeats says Alls changed, changed utterly in the fifteen years since he first saw the swans,
he means itthe First World War and the Irish civil war both occurred during these years.) The
simple narrative of the poem, recounting the poets trips to the lake at Augusta Gregorys Coole
Park residence to count the swans on the water, is given its solemn serenity by the beautiful
nature imagery of the early stanzas, the plaintive tone of the poet, and the carefully constructed
poetic stanzathe two trimeter lines, which give the poet an opportunity to utter short, heartfelt
statements before a long silence ensured by the short line (Their hearts have not grown old...).
The speaker, caught up in the gentle pain of personal memory, contrasts sharply with the swans,
which are treated as symbols of the essential: their hearts have not grown old; they are still
attended by passion and conquest.
Background on the Poem and the Author
William Butler Yeats is probably Ireland's most famous poet. He received the Nobel Prize for
Literature in 1923. Throughout his poems, we see his longing for the quiet life that nature can
bring. He wrote 'The Wild Swans at Coole' and published it in 1917 in a whole book of poems
under that same title. Yeats was inspired to write the poem after seeing 59 wild swans at Coole
Park, which was an estate owned by Lady Augusta Gregory in Ireland.

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In the first stanza Yeats describes a sweet autumn scene.

The weather is dry and calm.
The trees are covered in multi-coloured leaves.
It is October.
Coole Lake is like a mirror reflecting the sky.
The water is lapping at the edge of the lake.

! Fifty-nine swans float on the water.

! In the second stanza, Yeats admits that it is nineteen years since he first counted the
swans on Coole Lake.
! By emphasising the word autumn here, he is showing that he views himself as being in
the autumn of his years.
! He remembers that the swans flew away loudly as a group in huge broken circles.
! This sudden flight disturbed the tranquillity of the scene.
! In the third stanza, he claims to have looked a lot at the fantastic swans.
! Now he feels emotional; his heart is sore.
! Everything in Yeats life has changed during those nineteen years.
! When he first heard the bell like beat of the swans wings he walked more energetically
and with a happier heart.
! He likes to observe the swans at twilight or dusk, as well as in October.
! These times mirror each other because they show beauty or light fading and are a
reminder of time moving on.
! Yeats admits the swans have not grown weary.
! They remain faithful to their lover or partner swan.
! They paddle as friends in the water.
! They fly together.
! Their hearts are still young.
! The swans still have passion and desire for success.
! In the final stanza, Yeats gazes fondly at the swans.
! They are mysterious and beautiful.
! He questions their future.
! He wonders where else they will inhabit.
! He imagines they will fly away from him to show their beauty to other people.
! As he ages, Yeats feels that he no longer has the respect of nature.

Themes
Nature
Yeats shows the beauty of the autumn scene. He is in woodland beside a lake at twilight, on a dry
October evening. The beautiful leaves of autumn decorate the trees. Fifty-nine swans float
peacefully on a lake. Stones create a nice scene on the lake. He knows the swans will fly away to
other lakes in magnificent circular formations. They make a splendid bell like sound whenever
they fly away together. The swans are close-knit and full of energy and a love of life. They look
mysterious as they paddle calmly on the still waters. Yeats has a picture of a beautiful setting of
the swans building their nests in rushes near water. Above all else, they delight all who look on
them
Aging

Yeats is concerned with his aging. He feels he is losing the energy and love of life that the swans
still possess. He feels the swans will leave him when he reaches old age. He is highly aware that
nineteen years have passed in his life since he first observed the swans at Coole Lake. The swans
as a species do not agethey are unwearied. By stating that their hearts have not grown old, he
seems to mean that his heart has aged, year by year. He walks more heavily now than nineteen
years before when he had a lighter footstep. His heart is sore and weary rather than full of
passion. He has a sense of the coming ending of his own life. The fact that things change is
known as transience. Autumn highlights the transience of the year; twilight highlights the
transience or passing of day. The poem shows a sharp awareness of human transience: alls
changed.
Immortality
The swans represent permanence or immortality. Their passion, energy, desire for success and
beauty will last. They as a species will outlast the poet. Their hearts remain young. The passing
of time does not cause the swans to fade.

Broken Images
Girish Karnads Bikhre Bimb was born as Odakalu Bimba in Kannada and was written
exclusively for Ranga Shankaras opening festival in October 2004. When the 35-day festival
was designed to celebrate the birth of Ranga Shankara, it was decided that a new production of
its nature was more appropriate for a later date.

Subsequently Karnad also wrote the English version A Heap of Broken Images. Three unique
things happened when Ranga Shankara produced the play in March 2005

a.Girish Karnad directed his play for the first time (the last time Karnad directed a play was 40
years ago when he did Badal Sircars Evam Indrajit)
b.Ranga Shankara produced its first play
c.A play opened in two different languages

The two plays performed to full-houses at the Ranga Shankara auditorium, between March
22nd and 27th of 2005. From then on, there were six shows of the plays every month for a period
of six months at Ranga Shankara which is a record of sorts.

Rave reviews in both the print and electronic media greeted the play that successfully straddles
both theatre and technology for the first time in Indian theatre.

The one-act one-performer play tells the story of Manjula Nayak, a professor of English
literature who has been an unsuccessful writer in Kannada. She finds international acclaim
when she writes a novel in English, which becomes a bestseller.

The story starts with her introducing the audience to her novel in a TV studio, prior to a film on
it is telecast. After she finishes her introduction, she is confronted by her own image on the screen
which poses questions on betrayal of her language and identity when she chooses to write in
English.
The story of Broken Images starts with the author, Manjula Nayak, giving a short presentation
introducing the movie version of her now-bestselling book. In the talk, she explains how she's
been criticized for writing it in English instead of her native language, why she chose that
language (because, she explains, that's how it came to her), and how much her family supported
her through its writing. At the end of her presentation, she prepares to leave the set but her image
on the monitor televising her presentation keeps talking. Only this time, her image on screen is
addressing herself on the stage. The audience doesn't know exactly who the character on the
screen is supposed to representManjulas inner self or her outer one, her conscience or her
egobut regardless, the TV Manjula begins probing her on-stage self about the same issues shed
discussed in the presentation, slowly unravelling the real story of how and why the book came
about and the role her family played in it.
A one-character, one-act monologue, the play marks a departure from Karnads earlier concerns
with mythology, the epics and the roots of tradition (Yayati, Tughlaq, Nagamandala).This time
around, he still explores roots but they are of another kind, those expressed through language, the
search for identity, the technology driven hyper, virtual reality created by a media focused on
navel-gazing and engaged in both inventing and celebrating celebrityhood, to the exclusion of all
else.
BROKEN IMAGES has one set a TV studio but a multi-layered theme. It weaves in issues as
far apart as the hegemony of English over Indian languages and the hollowness of a media which
bestows greatness on a work that lay unnoticed in its original language but when translated into
English becomes the toast of the global literary world. It also deals with psychological repression
of an inverted kind. The central character Manjula, the now successful, Kannada-turnedEnglish writer has a handicapped, wheelchair bound sister, Malini. But it is the disabled Malini
who turns out to be the really healthy and whole person. It is Malini who not only wins the love
of Manjulas husband, Pramod, but is far more centered and happy than her caretaker sister,
Manjula.Not just that. After her death, it is Manjula whose loveless married life ends by Pramod
walking out and moving to Los Angeles and the phenomenal success that she has wrested from
Malini by stealing Malinis unpublished MSS tasting like poison.
The metaphor of Manjula aka Shabana talking about her heroic exploits with the book on a live
television show ends with her finding that her image just does not leave the monitor. It is not her,
of course. It looks like her but it is Malini and the conflict between the self and the image,

between delusion and reality, between the outer mask and the inner truth that emerges in the
tussle between the sisters and is the very stuff of the drama.
Broken Images takes many a side swipe at all those writers in English who are constantly in the
news, for fat advances from foreign publishers, for works that are many years away to seeing the
light of day, for invitations to foreign colleges, lecture tours and autograph signing sprees. There
are also the questions that stare in the face: are the Indian English cut off from the "smell of the
soil," have they sold out to a market-driven economy, have they struck a trade-off with their
conscience by not writing in their native language, etc. etc.
In appropriating the stolen novel, one in which her sister has caricatured her and made her out to
be a pushy, conniving, duplicitous relative, a defiant Manjula shouts: "I wrote the novel in
English because it burst out in English....What baffles me - actually, hurts me - is why our
intellectuals can't grasp this simple fact." We see Manjula Nayak subjected to an interrogation
that teases, taunts and finally strips the secrets from her soul. The TV image reveals the sordid
truth about Manjula's marriage, her far from easy relationship with her dead sister Malini and
the mysterious circumstances in which the best-selling novel that was written by Malini (with
the help of Pramod who, too, was always at home) and now published by Manjula, finds her
conceits punctured and her deceptions gradually unravelled.
Finally she is forced into anger or emotional collapse. The 55-minute play progresses towards a
tight and stirring finish as Manjula seems to morph into Malini as "differences of ink and blood
and language" are obliterated in a Babel of voices and a jumble of television images.
Girish Karnad's 'A Heap of Broken Images' is a scathing look at the Indian literary establishment
as well as a moving story of conflict and desire for fame. The play highlights the conflict between
writing in one s own language and foreign language
A HEAP of Broken Images (English) explores the dilemma of Indian writers who choose to write
in English. It is a scathing look at the Indian literary establishment as well as a moving story of
conflict and the desire for fame. The play (Odakalu Bimba in Kannada and Bikhre Bimb in
Hindi) was penned by Girish Karnad in 2004 and has traveled to various festivals across the
country and has been independently staged to critical acclaim and popular success in Delhi,
Mumbai, Kolkata, Chennai, Pune and Hyderabad.
The play starts off from T.S. Eliots Wasteland:
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter,
The discordant images refer to generation gap, spiritual disintegration, communication lapse and
political instability in a transfigured existence. And in this pseudo-modern world, we have
limited ourselves to broken electronic images.
The electronic media has given birth to a new kind of reality termed virtual reality-a reality
that the media daringly project and the audience willingly believe.

Electronic channels are quite often far from the truth in an age where news channels have
rendered themselves into gossip channels. Here, we find the image fighting itself back, unveiling
the truth on the other side. At the end of the play the term virtual reality exchanges itself-as the
human being seems virtual or fraudulent and image grows to be more real.
The writer also highlights the age-old conflict between writing in ones own language and a
foreign language, through the objective correlative of the writers confrontation with her own
image.
Girish Karnad ascertains that the play was the result of a conversation that he had with the
writer Shashi Deshpande who had an emotional encounter at the writers conference in
Neemrana between the regional writers versus the English writers.
Again, the Kannada writer UR Ananthamurthy is supposed to have burst out against English
writers claiming that English writers were like prostitutes since they wrote with an eye for
money and global reach the language offers.
A Heap of Broken Images A synopsis:
Manjula is a lesser-known Kannada short story writer till she wins accolades for her maiden
English novel. The announcer at the television studio introduces the literary genius Manjula
Nayak. As she has finished her rehearsed 15-minute speech, she prepares to leave the room when
she encounters her image on the screen that is not her reflection.
The image interrogates Manjula in a scene reminiscent of the trial of Benare in Silence! The
Court is in Session. The truth is unraveled as Manjula is entrapped in a whirlpool of questions
from which she has no escape. The only alternative left for her is to wear her heart inside out.
The novel is said to be based on her crippled sister who suffers from meningomyetocele and
whose whole life was confined to the wheel chair. She was always the focus of attention.
Manjula had to always settle for second place and was constantly disregarded. Malini excelled in
all areas over Manjula - in looks and in intelligence. It was later that she met Pramod, married
him and settled down in Jayanagar. Her father left most of his assets in Malinis name. After her
parents demise, Malini moved in with them. Manjula affirms that her sister had adjusted
beautifully with them and died a few months before the book came out.
However, later the truth unfolds. Manjula has not penned even a word of the novel, and has
literally stolen Malinis identity, creativity and language. Apparently, it was her revenge for
years of agony. Malini had first caught her parents attention and later Pramods.. Manjula is
often portrayed as the venomous first cousin in the novel, she says, as Malini stalked her and
pinned her down in coruscating prose. Finally, the image on the screen becomes real in
comparison to the deceptive human being on the other side. The image of Manjula morphs into
Malini at a climatic juncture in the play.
Therefore, the writer Manjula Nayak stands as a metaphor for all those writers limited to their
native language (Kannada); not out of responsibility, but due to lack of choice. The image of
Malini projects the Indian English writer who is ostracised for his stupendous success because
the native writer (Manjula) has to settle for second place. Given an opportunity, Manjula steals

Malinis work in English, though she pretends to be addicted to the Kannada language. The
sisters rapport with Pramod symbolises their bond with their motherland. Manjula is with him
out of the matrimonial ties of responsibility, and fails to live up to her responsibilities of a wife,
as Pramod continuously pines for attention. Malini is with him purely out of love. As the image
finally morphs, it ascertains:
However I am in truth Malini, my genius of a sister who loved my husband knew Kannada and
wrote in English. (284)
When the image claims that Malini loved my husband it is evident that Manjula did not. More
significantly, Malini knew Kannada and therefore knew her roots. Manjula looks into a broken
mirror to reveal bits and pieces of the personality - some hers, some of her sister - but totally
disjointed. Hence the term Broken Images.
The objective correlative of these broken mirror images is the different small screens that flash
different images of Manjula at the end of the play. These are in contrast to real broken mirror
parts that at a fraction of time reflect the same image of the person in all the pieces. The only
coherent image appears to be the image of Malini that eloquently asserts:
I am Malini Nayak, the English novelist. Manjula Nayak, the Kannada short-story writer was
decimated the moment she read my novel. She thus obliterated all differences of ink and blood
and language between us and at one full stroke morphed into me. (283)
The Kannada writer betrays herself the very moment she makes association with an English
novel by reading it. This is why Malini avows that the Kannada-writer was decimated at the
very moment she read the English novel. This leaves the readers wondering that if writing in
English is termed prostitution, then what does it make the Kannada writer reading the English
novel at the other end.
A Heap of Broken Images is essentially Karnads response to his critics. The significance of the
play reverberates as Manjula utters a Kannada proverb in the play: A response is good. But a
meaningful response is better. (265)