They All Just Went Away

Joyce Carol Oates' essay titled They All Just Went Away, is very thought provoking. It was written in 1995 and is a first hand account of a family that lived in a broken home where,” the roof of the house was made of sheets of tin, scarred and scanned like skin, and the front was covered in simulated-brick asphalt siding pieced together from lumberyard scraps" (Oates 558). The father was a drunk who beat his family. His wife never reported him, but instead lied and said he never laid a hand on anyone. One day he lit the house on fire and although it didn't burn the whole thing down, it still tore apart the family. Her use of rhetoric devices such as the imagery of the houses and, "the lyric smell of honeysuckle"(Oates 555)", make the narrative feel more real, as if the reader is there looking at the ashes of what used to be. She is also able to use metaphors to explain what a home is by saying," [...] the house is the mother's body, you have been expelled and are forbidden to now reenter"(Oates 554). This makes the reader understand that a house is meant to feel safe and familiar but at the same time so unreachable. She is able to speak to her audience of anyone who has ever felt like they might be alone, and make them see how her life changed as well as the life of one of the girls from the old broken house. In the end she befriended one of the girls who lived there but she would never admit her father broke her home. Instead she blamed it on lightning. She protects her father as her mother always had because that is what was done in her family. Joyce Carol Oates proved her point that a home is the people living inside a building and not the building itself, very well. Her ability to make readers feel apart of her story makes it more of an impact and heartfelt. Anyone interested in reading a well-written, short essay may want to consider reading They All Just Went Away. 


Lighting Strike
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The Figure a Poem Makes

Robert Frost is a poet who won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry more than one time throughout his career. He is very highly respected in the literary world and considered to be one of the best ports so far. Although he is famous for poetry, he also wrote a very insightful essay called, The Figure a Poem Makes in 1939. It is written to his fellow poets (hence the use of the word we throughout the essay) about how a poem should be written. He uses hyperbolas to show that poems must be written wildly and naturally so that it will," run itself and [carry] the poet with it", so it's always loved. Of course a poem does not literally run off with its creator but it does show that the poem is in control of the direction it is going. The poet must let the poem take its intended course rather than try to control it. Mr. Frost also uses different types of figure of speech such as when he says that, "like a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride on its own melting" (Frost 178), to show how one must leave the course of the poem up to the poem itself because that is what he wanted to tell people. He feels that a poem must be wild in order to be worth reading or writing. Using these types of rhetoric devices makes the idea that poems must be written on their own accord very understandable. It also makes it seem as though the only correct way to write a poem is to let go of a person's hold on the poem and let it take the writer somewhere special so it is going to take the reader to a special place too. Robert Frost's The Figure a Poem Makes is a very well written essay. 

Flying Poem

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The Devil Baby at Hull-House

The Devil Baby at Hull-House by Jane Addams is a wonderfully written essay. It is written to men to show them that hard-working women make up the bulk of women in the word. They may go through terrible times but they keep on moving forward. Jane Addams was a suffragette leader and pushed women's rights as much as possible because she believed that men and women should be treated as equals. The Devil Baby at Hull-House was originally published in, "The Atlantic Monthly, 1916; collected in The Long Road of Woman's Memory"(Addams 75). It begins with the story of a devil child living in her town. People from all over gathered to pay money and see the demon child but there never was one. While some got angered and felt conned, others felt it was their time to talk about their lives and the demons that plague them. She sees how the women seem to be calloused and no longer feel then pains of life. Jane Addam's use of imagery in her narrative paints a picture in the minds of readers. A little girl went crazy because she saw, "blood splashed on the wall" (Addams 78), after her father killed himself. He had previously been trying to kill the girl and her mother. She," [...] shivered and shook all that night through, and the next morning she had lost her voice [...]" (Addams 78) making her madness more visible. It also made that part of the essay more haunting. She also had the brilliant allegory of the devil child also being a representation of the demons these women had to deal with cause the men in their lives had been either of no help in, or the cause of, the worst tragedies these women had to bear. This made her point that women continue to push through their hard times and work hard, very strong. 

Suffragette Women Talk

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