Hark! Achtung! Attencion!

I hope you've enjoyed what I've posted up so far, and that its been of some help to you... please understand that in order for this blog to keep going with essays, I'm going to need far more essays on far more topics than just the ones I do; I mean, I feel that its better to post them up for people to read, rather than let them slowly rot away on my com's hard disk... As Honoré de Balzac once said,

"It is as easy to dream a book as it is hard to write one."

The quality of writing doesn't matter (it has to be, of course, of at least a minimal academic standard). The ideas do, because this site wasn't set up with the intention of letting people copy essays wholesale; rather, it was set up with the dream of one day providing an opportunity for the appreciation of essays written by fellow IBDP students, as well as to provide ideas to students who are rushing for that deadline. Please, if this site has benefited you in any way, do make a personal contribution by sending one of your essays in.

If you have anything to contribute, please send any entries to:

Oracle_163@yahoo.com.sg

on any subject at all =) Credit or anonymity will, of course, be offered if requested...

Looking forward to seeing some essays soon! =)

Prac Crit on Soyinka's "Massacre , October '66"

To begin with, the poem was written by Soyinka to express his disgust over the massacre of the Igbos by fellow Nigerians in 1966. The poem adeptly expresses the inhuman nature of this killing with extensive use of metaphors and imagery to mask out the brutality of the killings he had witnessed. The title itself is short, presented in a matter-of-fact tone and unemotionally linked to the inhuman and senseless slaughters which might have occurred to this period, and it suggests that Soyinka, as the poem, might want to distance himself emotionally from the atrocities which the Nigerians might have performed during this event.
The poem proper begins by stastying that “Shards of sunlight touch me here/Shredded in willows”, which suggests incompleteness and sharp tactility. Literally, “shards” could evoke broken glass and evisceration, which may be linked to shrapnel, and is a poignant reminder of fragmentation. This is further enhanced by the fact that he “sought to reach/A mind at silt-bed” “through stained-glass/Fragments”, which is again, very visual and tactile. The next stanza continues with the fact that the “lake stayed cold”, which could symbolise the lack of life, coupled with the “October flush of dying leaves”. October, the season of autumn, represents death and loss, as opposed to spring, the season of rebirth and renewal. The theme of death is fleshed out very significantly here, and it is reminiscent of the senseless slaughter of many of the Igbo people. Again, the description of the massacre is veiled, and not immediately apparent. To the casual onlooker, without knowledge of the context of the poem, it would be very hard to tell that Soyinka was writing about this incident, and perhaps the purpose of writing it in such a style is to avoid negative attention from the Nigerian government, who was very strict regarding the publishing of these issues. When the “gardener’s labour flew in seasoned scrolls/Lettering the wind”, we are reminded of the “dying leaves” being the victims of the massacre, and the fact that the gardener “labour[ed]” in vain, shows that trying to save these victims was a pointless task, as well as the fact that man’s labour is ultimately fruitless. The fact that they “letter[ed] the wind” could show that the deaths which occurred were openly committed, but yet from what happened in the massacre itself, no one took responsibility for these deaths. This contrast is perhaps what Soyinka wants us as the audience to realise.
Below, the massacre is also shown to be an “idyll sham”, which conveys the sense of beauty, peace and tranquillity. However, when we see that the narrator “trod on acorns”, describing “each shell’s detonation”, we see that the explosions are sharp auditory sensory input, which reminds us of explosions and bombs shattering. Again, he compares the “detonation” of the acorn shells to the “skull’s uniqueness”- how similar they are to a skull shattering. This horrific comparison evokes shock in us, because it is not what we are expecting, and we realise that beneath this “sham” of nature which the narrator has painted to us, the cover-up of the massacre, there lies something deeper which we perhaps are not aware of, which the people in power try to cover up.
With this realisation “Came sharper reckoning”. When the narrator talks about the “favoured food of hogs”, he talks about acorns, which in turn we draw back to the reference about heads, and we realise that the acorns which the narrator is referring to, “cannot number high”, as compared to the amount of heads, or lives, which the massacre has claimed. The issues of “heads sharply crop[ping] to whirlwinds/[the narrator] has briefly fled” also comes up, where the killing of the Igbo people seems to be systematic and efficient, and the intensity of the massacre is revealed, when he describes the killing as a “whirlwind”, something which he may have “briefly fled” through luck.
Again, the “oak rains a hundred more”, a hyperbole of the number of victims who were targeted during the massacre, which is a “kind of confusion to arithmetics of death”, showing that the massacre is, in fact, immeasurable, due to the countless lives it has claimed. In contrast to the “sharper reckoning” which the narrator has attained, we see that the massacre brings chaos; regardless of the fact that the destruction is systematic, it is, at the same time, total, and referred to later as “autumn the removal man/Dust[ing] down rare canvases”, almost as if it is a natural process. It is not, however; in contrast, the massacre is artificial, and man-made, and it being described akin to nature is ironic, and from the irony, we are able to note Soyinka’s distaste of the massacre itself, and at the same time, see what really happened beyond the cover-ups which the people in power initiated.
The next stanza details beautifully the crux of the whole poem. To him, to let a “loud resolve of passion/Fly to a squirrel”, is as if the squirrel, nature, and representative of a human life, is being annihilated by this “loud resolve of passion”, or the fury and madness in which the massacre was committed in, in a explosion of “burnished light and copper fur”. Again, “burnished…copper” provides a very artificial, piercing sensation, and reminds us that the massacre is artificial, and destructive to man, because man here is represented by objects of nature, such as the acorns as described previously above. When the narrator sees this, he has a “distant stance without the lake’s churchwindows”, a line which hints that he wants to look at the incident transparently, through all the cover-ups the people responsible have initiated, from an onlooker’s point of view, hence the term “without”. Once he feels he has attained this, gained his “sharper reckoning”, he realises that, for the victims of the massacre, “for a stranger”, he cannot help but feel love, as a Nigerian to a Nigerian and a human to a human. Through this stanza, he is able to effectively evoke our sympathy for the victims of the massacre, as well as call us to look at the issue in a clear frame of mind.
The rest of the poem falls into place once this is established, that the “host of acorns [falling]” are simply men who fall once they have been shot, as they “are silenced all, whose laughter/Rose from such indifferent paths”, detailing the narrator’s slow revelation of how senseless the killing is. There is a double meaning in the word indifferent, meaning “neither good or bad”, and at the same time, also meaning “being neutral in alignment”, showing how everyone who was an Igbo, was slaughtered, no matter how important they were, and whether they were passionate revolutionaries or simply passive people. To him, this epiphany is moving, and even shocking, when he realises that “oh God/They are not strangers all”. Again, the massacre is referred to as a “desecration”, which “mocks the word/Of peace- salaam aleikum- not strangers any”, meaning that the “idyll sham”, as referred to above, was such a blatant pretence at covering up, that it was mocking, and even derogatory, not only to the people involved in the massacre, but also to him and his countrymen, and his religion, and everything that they have stood for. “Salaam aleikum” here means “peace be with you”, which is a common greeting for Muslims, but here it is realised that this greeting is part of the idyll sham which was created, and it loses, even tarnishes its significance in its part of Igbo culture. Again, the “Brain of thousands pressed asleep to pig fodder” is indubitably referring to the fact that many people have actually believed the audacious “idyll sham” which was constructed, and Soyinka here is expressing frustration, and even disbelief, that people are too blind to see what he perceives as the real truth of the massacre, and coming to terms with one’s self. To him, “Shun pork the unholy”, is just another excuse propagated by the people in power, for them to live their lifestyle of power, and be able to get off scot-free for initiating the massacre, and the “priest” here reveals that the people in power might even be using religion as a justification for their actions, albeit styling themselves as in control of the religion itself; their words seem to form a sort of cult-religion in itself, whose illusion Soyinka wishes to banish. Therefore, in a mocking tone, Soyinka wishes us to see that the only real “desecration” is the one that he has mentioned- that of secretly condoning the massacre or being in denial of its existence.
In conclusion, he “borrow[s] seasons of an alien land”, again, searching for meaning in the chaos of the “whirlwind” and “confusion… [in the] arithmetics of death”, only to realise that he finds it “In brotherhood of ill, pride of race around [him]/Strewn in sunlit shards”, that fact that he and his countrymen stand united in the aftermath of chaos and death, but for the wrong reasons. It is interesting to note that the Igbo war ignited was a civil war, and the underlying message of the poem was that during the massacre, Soyinka was not able to trust even his fellow countryman, due to the very nature of the war. The impermanence and ephemeral nature of Man and his relationships is also touched upon in this poem, hinted at his borrowing of “alien lands/To stay the season of a mind”. We realise, after reading the poem, that Nigeria is not united as a country, but as a confederacy of people, and that people are only united by visualising the “mockery of waves” in the “idyll sham”, as if it was a painting, and no one could look beneath the surface except him, to visualise the incident through clear “churchwindows”. To him, the “brotherhood of ill” is what he wishes to destroy, the fact that we are all united for the wrong reasons, and what he wants us to unite under, is under the banner of acceptance, of the realisation and acceptance that the atrocity did occur under Nigerian hands, and that people should all look through this “idyll sham” and look at this clearly.
The poem itself is deceptive in its stanzas with four lines each, seemingly regular, but in free verse. Again, this deception is vital in showing that a deeper message lies within the poem, as in the massacre itself, and how it was portrayed by the people in power. Pastoral symbolic references are also used to “cover up” the horror of the massacre in a seemingly innocent way, and are also representative of the way that the massacre was covered up. The tone is carefully neutral, and the mood, sombre, carefully disguising what Soyinka really feels, and we realise that this passion and anger is all the more intensified, due to it being veiled. Writing on the theme of death, transience of human life, and generally on the massacre itself, Soyinka is able to convey his feelings over effectively through such techniques, making “Massacre, October ‘66” a text which may evoke ambivalent feelings in us.

Prac Crit on Soyinka's "Telephone Conversation"

Soyinka wrote this poem while he was studying at Leeds in England, and the context is significant because he, an African, was in a foreign land, and therefore plagued by much prejudice. To overcome this stigma, he used his poem, “Telephone Conversation”, as a political vehicle to show how racial prejudice has permeated all aspects of daily life, and to show how narrow minded one can be when this form of prejudice is involved in daily life.
The very title of the poem suggests a black person involved in a conversation over the phone, trying to find a place to stay in a foreign country, and we see that he is in a similar predicament to Soyinka’s when he was overseas, both regarding finding a place to stay and at the same time, overcoming the mindset that the westerners, or white people, have against people with black skin. Here, the poem starts off with the narrator considering renting a room, and we see that to him, the “price seemed reasonable, location/Indifferent”. Here, it is important to note the double meaning of the word “indifferent”, meaning both a lack of partiality, and also “neither good or bad”. This pun immediately has the effect of catching the audience’s attention, as well as revealing the narrator to be smart and witty, which will be explained later when more details about the narrator surface. The apartment is also attractive because the “landlady swore she lived/Off premises”, which is a advantage because the apartment the word “swore” reveals that the landlady was desperate to rent out the place, and that she lived off-premises, which, to the narrator, was important because she would not ever see him and realize that he was black. Therefore, to him, “Nothing remained/But self-confession”, showing that the narrator felt it was his duty, and his obligation to show how he was different from everyone else. This is immediately reinforced by the fact that he “warned” her that he was African. The effect of this is instantaneous, and immediately, there is “silence”, which is essentially the “Silenced transmission of/Pressurized good-breeding”, where the landlady is shocked out of her wits by this admission. On the literal level, we realize that the landlady is shocked but trying to be polite by not saying anything insulting. On the other hand, we realize that due to her views, there is pressure on her not to say anything, and that in general, there is a great amount of tension in the situation. Again, “good-breeding” is ironic, because the narrator relates this “good-breeding” to something which exists exclusively in white people who possess a racial prejudice against black people. The use of irony in this instance shows that the landlady may in fact be less polite than what our first impressions of her seem to show.
Finally, when the landlady gathers her wits, we see that “Voice, when it came,/Lipstick coated, long gold-rolled/Cigarette holder pipped.”, which in fact portrays the landlady as someone who possesses a certain amount of positive affluence in Western society. Essentially, Soyinka wants us to see racial prejudice as it is evinced in the woman because he wants us to realize that racial prejudice permeates every level of Western society, from bottom to top. Also, he brings into question the landlady’s moral values, and whether they are respectable or not. From the description of her voice being impersonal and, perhaps, slightly considerate, from the play with words on “Pressurized good-breeding”, we also see that the narrator is initially grateful for her lack of passion against his racial attributes, because he wants to look at the situation as optimistically as possible, and when she has not yet replied, he retains a glimmer of hope that she may not be as racially prejudiced as other people in the country. Again here, however, we see that her “Pressurized good-breeding” is ironic because she talks to the narrator in a judgmental tone below, and this verbal irony again shows the contrast between the landlady, and who she stands for, versus the narrator and who he stands for.
Finally, the narrator is “caught…foully” by her reply, where the word “foully” is use to connote both the “stench/of rancid breath of public hide-and-speak”, and at the same time, reminding the narrator that he is black, and that to white people, this seems foul. In her reply to his admission, the landlady asks “HOW DARK?” (which is essentially the all-important question in the poem), and the narrator is caught unaware by this question. We see that the question is so offending to him that there is an ellipsis to denote a pause or gasp of shock, before he realizes that “[he] had not misheard”, followed by another ellipsis. It is important to note that the narrator, offended as he is by the question, remains silent when the landlady continues- “ARE YOU LIGHT/ OR VERY DARK?” From this continuation of her reply, we can deduce that the capital letters are used to show that the landlady talks like someone who boasts of his or her power in society, but possesses little in reality, because we see that the narrator is able to subtly poke fun at her and outwit her in the latter part of the poem. However, when the narrator hears her reply, he begins to understand the reality of the situation. To him, “Button B, Button A” are similar to different choices because public telephones in England at that time had two buttons, “Button B [and] Button A” which one had to press before making a call. To the narrator, the buttons are like choices in the conversation, which he is able to make, or the various responses he could give to her. Also, the lucid description again shows him that the situation “was real”.
As soon as he recognizes his quandary, he begins to notice the environment, the “Stench/ of rancid breath of public hide-and-speak”, which is essentially a pun on the common phrase “hide and seek”, and reveals this seemingly innocuous conversation to be something akin to that, as if he was playing a verbal hide and seek with the landlady. Also, the fact that the words “stench” and “rancid” are used to describe this activity shows that he is reviled in the western society, and that this stigma is inescapable when faced with racial prejudice. Continuing, he begins to realize the presence of the “Red booth. Red pillar box. Red double-tiered/Omnibus squelching tar”, which are essentially anaphors, or repetitions to represent anger, derived from the colour red. It is also important to note that this is the only moment in which the narrator shows some shred of emotion, and that he is careful to keep his emotions veiled; this is perhaps due to the fact that he keeps his character meticulously shielded so as to prevent the landlady from realizing that he is black, even over the phone. Also, the fact that the omnibus was “squelching tar” shows how western society was oppressing him, because tar, the colour of black, also symbolizes his skin colour, and red, as explained above, his anger.
Stunned by this, the narrator also realises at the same time that both he and the landlady are “shamed/By ill-mannered silence, surrender/Pushed dumbfounded to beg simplification”- him by the fact that he is black, and therefore shamed and surrendering to the fact that he has been identified as a black person, and the landlady being shamed by revealing her prejudice, and also surrendering to the fact that she has prejudice against black people. Continuing, the narrator goes on to say that the landlady is “considerate… varying the emphasis”, which is again ironic, because she wants to quantify her expression of race, which is a very simple-minded view of race, and the irony here can be related back to the previous instance of irony where the narrator described the landlady’s “Pressurized good-breeding”, and which shows him to be subtly poking fun at her supposed superiority to him.
We are able to note that when the landlady says “ARE YOU DARK? OR VERY LIGHT?”, she seems to look at him in a monochromatic fashion, in the mutually exclusive colours of black or white, and to him, “revelation came” of her being a primarily shallow person, and also the fact that she was starting to view his patronage in a unfavourable light. From this point onwards, the narrator seems to realise that his position is one of a lost cause, and he starts to insult her subtly by saying “You mean—like plain or milk chocolate?” Here, plain chocolate and milk chocolate are the same colour, and what is unexpected is her assent, “clinical, crushing in its light/Impersonality”. There is a double meaning on the word “Light”, here, which could additionally mean light in terms of shades, as well as “not serious”. We also see that the narrator has already changed his stance towards the landlady, when his “wave-length adjusted”; again a pun on “wave-length adjusted” meaning that his stance towards her changed, and “wave-length adjusted” also meaning that the truth about his skin colour was clarified in their conversation. Following that, we realise that he chose to be honest by saying “West African Sepia… Down in [his] passport”, and admit his differences, whereas the landlady is forced to admit her ignorance when she asks ““WHAT’S THAT?” conceding/”DON’T KNOW WHAT THAT IS.”” Again the wit of the narrator, expressed thus far by the use of puns and irony in the poem, is contrasted with the narrow mindedness and ignorance of the landlady, who is forced to admit this fact by the narrator’s use of high diction, which the words “sepia” and “spectroscopic” can attest to. Essentially, the entire first stanza introduces the situation, as well as showing us how the narrow mindedness of the landlady causes her to want to categorise the narrator into “LIGHT OR VERY DARK”- to her, there is no “spectroscopic” range of colours except black, bad, and white, good.
In the second stanza, we see that the narrator refuses to give the landlady what she wants- a direct answer to her question. He avoids her probing questions with “Not altogether”, and goes on to mention how his face is “brunette”, and how other parts of him are “a peroxide blond”, and is all mentioned in a somewhat mocking tone. When he refuses to let the landlady quantify him as either dark or light, he starts to feign politeness and even goes so far as to pretend ignorance of what she’s asking for. Here, his diatribe, in addition to the caesuras to feign a dramatic pause, begins to annoy the landlady, and we assume that she finally realises that he is mocking her. When her “receiver rear[s] on the thunderclap/About [the narrator’s] ears”, she is on the verge of putting down the phone, and this shows us that she is, in fact, very shallow, because she probably has not understood anything, or even perceived that he was mocking her, from his reply.
The poem also ends on a comical note, when we see that the narrator “pleaded” with her, while he was in the midst of talking about his “bottom” and before she put down the phone, whether she would “rather/See for [herself]” the narrator’s bottom. This insult is, at the same time, a pun on the last phrase, and also concludes the poem effectively, because we sympathise with the narrator for not being able to complete the transaction successfully.
All in all, the poem emphasizes the narrator’s skin colour and his African descent, as well as to show how the speaker is a well-educated individual. The free verse of the poem contributes to a relaxed mood of conversation and also emphasizes the underlying tension, while the comical tone which the poem is written in serves to make the mood fairly light-hearted. In addition to that, we see that the speaker is, himself, a well-educated individual, and that the scenario of the black and supposedly unintelligent man outwitting the woman shows how wrong people can be in judging by skin colour, in addition to showing how stereotypes as displayed are not always true. As a final note, irony and sarcasm are used with great effect to show the ridiculousness and absurdity of racism, which is an underlying theme throughout the poem, and which has been developed successfully.

Prac Crit on "The Wood Pile" by Robert Frost

I took this from a site which I am now unable to find; it was from an American Poet's forum and it was a very well written piece on Frost's "Wood Pile"... Sadly, the only reference I can find to it online is from http://angolbdf.argyre.hu/sem4/amlit/tetelek/7b.doc, and even that essay is one which plagarised bits of the analysis which was taken from the forum too... Anyway, here is the reproduction of the analysis in full; please read through it and appreciate it, it is not my work, but I have used it for referencing my own Prac Crit, and found it very useful. Again, all effort has been made to contact the writer of this wonderful piece of work, and I hereby disclaim all credit for this excellently written work.

The full analysis is reproduced below:


"The Wood-Pile" is thoroughly typical of many of Frost's mature nature poems. At once narrative and dramatic, the poem seems astonishingly clear even on first encounter. There at its center are the solitary speaker, a familiar figure, and his story, this one—like Frost's others—told in the inevitably simple, straightforward and calm, almost laconic language that characterizes dozens of Frost's other narrative lines. There is the typical stripped minimum of physical action—walking. Here, as elsewhere, the walking is seemingly aimless, has no manifest destination: it is an epitome of Frost's conviction that "Calculation is usually no part in the first step of any walk" (402). But, again as elsewhere, however much the walking appears to lack direction, it is clearly mysterious in that it radiates a high sense of personal destiny. "Every poem," Frost once remarked, "is an epitome of the great predicament; a :figure of the will braving alien entanglements" (401). The speaker simply appears in our field of vision and—to use Yvor Winters' negative criticism in a positive way—seems to be "spiritually drifting." There is the familiar winter landscape, bleak, desolate, initially amorphous and forbidding. There is the appearance of the small bird and the speaker's curious pretense of talking with such creatures. There is the woodpile itself, like the tuft of flowers, the mending wall, the road not taken, the west-running brook, so enigmatically and hypnotically there. And there is the almost dreamlike state of meditation it induces, in some ways calling to mind the sleepy vision of "After Apple-Picking." Finally, there is what Frost called "the vocal imagination," the speaker's voice, his style: that particular quality of sound "which indicates how the writer takes himself and what he is saying . . . , the way he carries himself toward his ideas and deeds" (403). Frost once joked: "Let the sound of [Robert Louis] Stevenson go through your mind empty and you will realize that he never took himself other than as an amusement. Do the same with Swinburne and you will see that he took himself as a wonder" (298). In "The Wood-Pile" Frost clearly takes himself neither simply as an amusement nor as a wonder but as both.
On another level of its structure, beneath the relaxed surface of the language, the poem progresses by way of a series, almost a system, of oppositions, ambiguities, and contrarieties that might be called Hawthornian. "In order to know where we are," Frost has noted, "we must know opposites." The "frozen swamp" is the first obvious instance of this characteristic structural phenomenon and suggests immediately multiple ambiguities in the external landscape: hardness-softness, cold-heat, solidity-fluidity, stability-instability, a surface level and a dimension—as yet untouched but present—beneath the surface. All this is registered against the blankness, the flatness of the minimally specified "one gray day." In the first line, then, we have concentrated an action, a place, a time. There is also a typically Frostian subtlety in the simple prepositions surrounding the action and thus wrapping it in still another operative ambiguity: "Out walking in"—the phrase is so solidly idiomatic, so much a mode of common speech, that all its powers of suggestion (namely, the juxtaposition of externality and internality) are playfully hidden, buried beneath the plainness of the words themselves. This particular tension is elaborated in the relationships between lines 1 and 2. Whereas the first line addresses itself to a continuous physical action and the external landscape, the second is concerned with a pause and a turning inward to the mind of the persona and his fearful response to that landscape. The speaker's decision to "turn back" emphasizes the sharp disjunction existing between this particular mind and this particular reality. The fear and confusion are isolated only momentarily, however, since they are immediately answered to by the courage of the counter-resolution of line 3. There, as the grammatical shift from "I" to "we" signifies, it is not Frost's purpose to annihilate the fear but to use it: the fear and the courage, the will to proceed and the hesitancy to do it, now almost formally define two dimensions of the persona. He has become at once his own reassuring guide and cautious initiate. And since it is the "we" who shall see, what is to be discovered will be informed by both. Still another ironic opposition is in Frost's use of the negative qualifier "No" to decisively introduce the positive affirmation of "going on" and thus to undermine the negative preference to "turn back." It is as if there is in the persona's emotions a mathematical logic in which two negatives interpenetrate to form a positive. The playful blending of "amusement" and "wonder" here illustrates what Reuben Brower calls Frost's "delight of saying the ordinary thing and discovering that it is art."
We might at this juncture turn back to ask what gives rise to the fear in the first place. The question leads back to that "frozen swamp" and to the realization that the place is forbidding and inscrutable because it suggests nature in its least regenerate aspects. It is essentially primordial, totally unformed. Hinting as it does at a sweeping geological sense of time and age, it provides another, prehistoric tension with the fragile minuteness and ephemerality of the mere "one gray day."
In line 4 the speaker, going on, now, as it were, gives himself to the place. He is no longer "out" altogether but in some sense "in." The distance between mind and reality is now diminished even to the point of tactile intimacy implied in the word "held." He who would see submits willingly to being acted upon by the still undefined force within that which he would see. But the explicit oppositions and tensions persist: in the "now" an the "then," the one foot and the implied other, the "here" and the "Somewhere else." Even the syntax displays similarly precarious balances: "The hard snow held me" announces a categorical, absolute condition, and points to a sureness of footing and, concomitantly, an intellectual and emotional security. But the line moves on by way of a concessive clause that turns back on the earlier statement and attaches exceptional circumstances contrary to it. The sentence contains elaborated images of impenetrability and penetrability that are quietly paradoxical because of the conditions they are associated with. The impenetrability suggests sureness and constancy, the penetrability doubt and instability, even danger. What normally seem to be positive and negative connotations are equally mixed in each of these syntactical units, then, and they are joined in fact by a conjunction—"save"—whose playful punning transforms the usual logic of "except" and suggests that the categories of positive and negative have again interpenetrated. To see is, of course, to penetrate into the truth or meaning of a phenomenon or thing. In a Frost poem, however, to see is always to know that there is a point at which the thing to be seen resists and defies penetrability, a point of its being beyond which it is alas unknowable. "The Wood-Pile," like "Neither Out Far nor In Deep," is from this angle a metaphor about the process of penetration and the ultimate limits of that process: a metaphor about the process of the interpenetration of him who sees and that which is seen. It is at once, like so much of Hawthorne's work, an exploration into the wilderness and into the self, a journey at once out and in.
What the persona sees in lines 5 to 9 is merely a "view," since he has as yet penetrated very little—only enough, in fact, to be confronted with an overwhelmingly confusing verticality. He sees merely one-dimensional lines without shape, and the measure of his plight is that he cannot find a language to give a name to the place. But, although he is thus suspended between his desire for certainty and the fact of his fearful uncertainty, his uneasiness and doubt are now informed by his awareness of them. Trying to solve the riddle of the landscape, he comes to know something not so much about that landscape as about himself. He is, he says, "just far from home." If "just" points up the severe, even terrifying, limits of his knowledge at this point of the process, it also simultaneously emphasizes his diminished anxiety regarding those limits. The word at once generates a sense of terror and dispels it. The effect is almost that the terrors of "homelessness," of being lost in undifferentiated space, comprise a condition the speaker has known before and finds so persistent and multifarious as to demand his constant re-engagement.
The small bird now appears, and in a way that seems equally fortuitous and gratuitous. The speaker responds immediately by recognizing it as a dramatic projection of his own fearfulness. In the following lines, the bird's activity adds a horizontal dimension to the speaker's growing spatial consciousness; and, giving the scene intersecting lines, if not shape, it permits the speaker to have for the first time a perspective. Again, the process moves by way of the artful opposition between bird and tree and the little joke by which physical laws seem overturned: the bird "puts" a tree—that is, assigns it a specific material place—between itself and the speaker. The bird is clearly what the speaker has come so far to know best, and he comes to know it by way of what he has previously come to know about himself. As Frost's deliberately confusing pronoun references in lines 12 and 13 imply, the speaker intimately identifies with the bird at the same time he tries to assert his superiority to it. The condition that allows him this intimacy, however, is his physical separation from the bird, marked by the one tree standing between subject and object. The tree, like the mending wall, signifies one of those barriers without which the world would, for Frost, not make sense. The speaker's teasing identification with the bird leads to his awareness of himself as the source of the bird's fearfulness; and this, in turn, clarifies his own relationship with the larger, unredeemed scene, the source of his own fear, which is thus brought further under the control of consciousness. The speaker's awareness is now many- layered, and he now has words for what is at stake. The bird's white tail feather is, of course, that by which he is what he is: it is the unmistakable mark of his irreducible identity and, paradoxically, the sign of his surrender. His fear of its loss turns back on and elucidates the speaker's recognition of his homelessness. "Home" is now understood to mean that point in space where one is at ease, where the self "belongs," where identity is safe.
Counterbalancing the gradual emergence of clarity and shape in the landscape is the gradually emerging personality of the speaker: at every stage of the poem, we know the speaker only to that extent which the speaker himself has come to know and understand the landscape. Frost once remarked that if the style of a poem "is with outer seriousness, it must be with inner humor. If it is with outer humor, it must be with inner seriousness. Neither one alone without the other under it will do" (351). The cautious sobriety and reserve within the vocal imagination as it initially addressed the outer terror are now cut across by a tone of humorous self-parody as the speaker engages in reflection. Now he can indulge in the quietly extravagant joke of a pathetic fallacy—"like one who takes / Everything said as personal to himself." Now too, however, the speaker's enlarged awareness and confidence are juxtaposed to, and measured by, his own self-deception. The speaker is himself deceived in thinking that the way for the bird to become "undeceived" is simply to flee the scene—to go "the way I might have gone." The bird, given free play, does not flee but, willing to get lost in order, apparently, to find itself, goes behind the woodpile. He seeks it out as a refuge, a home, in a final effort to discover and preserve identity in this place. Bird and man now embrace the woodpile, bind it by both courage and fear; and what the speaker sees there is conditioned, then, by his awareness of the bird on the opposite side. The logic of this perceptual symmetry, of course, is that the pile of wood has consolations to offer the man—consolations against the threat of formlessness, mindlessness, absence of order. And consolations there are indeed, in the lovely wholeness, the solid three-dimensionality of the woodpile. Here is, at last, the physical universe filled out in shapely and substantial form, caught in a moment of exacting perception that sees into it with a clarity and completeness incorporating at once modes of analysis and synthesis, modes of physical labor and intellectual love: "It was a cord of maple, cut and split / And piled—and measured, four by four by eight." The moment of perception constitutes a symbolic reenactment of the original building of the woodpile. The cutting and splitting and piling refer us simultaneously to the fact of the pile of wood and to that process by which it came to be. The speaker imaginatively duplicates all of the separate, divisible stages of the process of physical activity and then, in an evaluative act of measuring, finds a language—"four by four by eight"—that expresses perfectly the fact of its fully unitary and integrated wholeness of being. Process and fact, energy and form, coalesce and become one in a single continuous act of perception, and in that act the courage and fear have themselves been transformed into love and meditative forgetfulness.
The moment is a perfect illustration of Frost's distinction between what it means to believe in things and what it means, on the other hand, to believe things in (339). The latter is the special task of him who would be poet and person. In this symbolic reenactment, the speaker believes into existence an entity which was potentially there in the emerging but partial lines of the earlier stages of his journey inward. The woodpile, according to Frost's poetic theory, had its beginnings "in something more felt than known" (339). While in one sense, then, the speaker only "reveals" and "discovers" the woodpile, in another he can be said to have "made" it. We have here what William James, in "Humanism and Truth," called a quasi-paradox: "A fact virtually pre-exists when every condition of its realization save one is already there. In this case the condition lacking is the act of the counting and comparing mind. . . . Undeniably something comes by the counting that was not there before. And yet that something was always true. In one sense you create it, and in another sense you find it."
Like the white tail feather, the woodpile is totally singular. It is a far larger, more elaborate and complex symbol of individual form and identity. In its four-by-four-by-eightness there is a marvelous solidity as well as form, a substantiality that makes it not only palpable but, at least initially, permanent. In its apparent permanence it has a homeostatic capacity that heroically confronts the ephemeral and formless flux of the entropic environment. But just as soon as the speaker has become aware of its shape and form—its thereness—he is compelled, notice, to describe it in terms of what is not there: "And not another like it could I see." Thus, in the very process of celebrating the magnificence of its being, he uses language, has a perception, that points ironically to a sad sense of the diminishedness of things. Frost was himself fascinated by what he called "carrying numbers into the realm of space and at the same time into the realm of time" (333). In the same essay, he later quotes Einstein that "In the neighborhood of matter space is something like curved" (334). What Frost has done in "making his count" of the woodpile's dimensions is to carry those numbers into time, and in doing so he has transformed the straightness and angularity of the landscape into curves, into roundness and sphericity. This transformation is initially hinted at, I think, in the multiple suggestiveness of "cord," which is not only the specific name given to 128 cubic feet of fuel wood but, here, a pun on the mathematical term denoting a straight line which joins two points on an arc or curve. The change wrought in the speaker's perception of the scene is a brilliant poetic realization of Frost's conviction that "We are what we are by elimination and by deflection from the straight line."
Once he exists in a definitively three-dimensional physical universe, the speaker muses on the fourth dimension in trying to penetrate further into the meaning of the physical fact. Immediately, he meditates on—has a creative vision about—what is not there, what is quintessentially impalpable and increasingly indefinite, what is further and further back in time and of completely mysterious origin. Whereas the physical journey moves forward in space, its ultimate outcome is an inward journey, a meditation, which is a heightened mode of "turning back from here," an action no longer informed by fear alone. The implied and emergent curves of the woodpile the speaker's vision now makes explicit in the imagined loops of the runner tracks he cannot see; and these imagined curves in turn lead the speaker back into an awareness of the actual curved lines explicit in the woodpile itself: the warping bark, the sunkenness, the strings of clematis circling round and round. But the Hawthornian tensions and polarities, of which those curves are the ultimate expression, persist: between the imagined facts and the observable realities, in the references to different points in time, between the one side and the other, between what the clematis had done, what the tree is still doing, what the stake and prop are about to do. All these details catch, in a single, powerful image, a moment of process in which exquisite physical and spiritual form and imminent formlessness, growth and decay, stasis and flux fully interpenetrate, the implications of each participating in and giving value to the other. Now, although the speaker is completely at home in this place, his meditation does not lead to any reassuring consolation or benevolent resolution that would cancel these tensions and contrarieties; instead, it reaffirms and heightens them. For if the speaker's turning inward to the mind is a turning outward to the imagined identity of the woodcutter, and thus implies a consoling movement from solitude to human relationship, it also leads simultaneously to the speaker's recognition of his still distant separation from that imagined home with the "useful fireplace." The very process by which the speaker, along with the frozen swamp, has been warmed by the woodcutter's selfless and forgetful act of love issues in no comfortable, Emersonian notion of transcendent compensation. The condition of distance, of being "far from home," still attaches, as does the implied need to continually "turn to fresh tasks." Space and time have indeed been redeemed within the process of the speaker's vision to the extent that the woodpile as fact and process—as seemingly senseless material waste—is now endowed with a poignant significance and spiritual usefulness. But the implications of that redemption presuppose the necessity of continual other ones at different times, in different places. Seeing the woodpile in all its magnificence, the speaker sees also that its heat warms "only as best it could." And while there are duration, clarity, and beauty in the "slow, smokeless burning," they are apprehended in a vision that focuses on the inexorable fact of decay. The woodpile and the loving vision it induces only momentarily stay the confusion of a universe moving toward nothingness.
The condition of lostness, of homelessness, is not finally overcome; we are, at the end, still more aware of tensions than of unities. Whatever triumph there is lies in the fact that homelessness has now been defined and formalized by intelligence and love, by the process of growing awareness by which the woodpile and the poem have simultaneously come to be. In one sense, Frost himself provides the best gloss on the way the poem works when he says that "it makes us remember what we didn't know we knew" (394). He would agree with William James, I think, that "All homes are in finite experience" and that "finite experience as such is homeless." The process of the poem does not take us from an attitude of fearful doubt to one of certainty in the immutable. Instead, it begins with a felt doubt that arises out of the formless inscrutability of a new place and takes us to an affirmation of that doubt, which, now formalized, persists even after the loveliest but inevitably mutable forms of that place are fully understood. Frost's persona cannot stay there at the woodpile: his existence, it is clear, presupposes the necessity of perpetually walking on to an endless series of other new places equally unformed. What he walks on to, conscious all the while of the roads he does not take, is most often, as Frost says in "Directive," "a house that is no more a house / Upon a farm that is no more a farm / . . . in a town that is no more a town."
from "Hawthorne and Frost: The Making of a Poem." Frost: Centennial Essays. Copyright © 1973 by University Press of Mississippi.
________________________________________
"The Wood-Pile" is like a sequel to "Home Burial," with the man in this instance wandering from a "home" that seems little more than an abstraction to him and to us. More a meditation than a dramatic narrative, it offers the soliloquy of a lone figure walking in a winter landscape. It is a desolate scene possessed of the loneliness of "Desert Places." Attention is focused on the activity of consciousness in this isolated wanderer, and nothing characterizes him as a social being or as having any relationships to another person. While the poem has resemblances, again, to Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey," or Coleridge's "Dejection: An Ode," it is more random in its structuring and has none of the demarcations of the descriptive-reflective mode. A better way to describe the poem is suggested in a talk by A. R. Ammons, "A Poem as a Walk." "A walk involves the whole person; it is not reproducible; its shape occurs, unfolds; it has a motion characteristic of the walker" (Epoch, Fall, 1968, p. 118).
The man in the poem is not, like Stevens' Crispin, "a man come out of luminous traversing," but more like the "listener" in Stevens' "The Snow Man." In each poem is a recognition of a wintry barrenness made more so in Frost by a reductive process by which possibilities of metaphor - of finding some reassuring resemblances - are gradually disposed of. At the end, the speaker in Frost's poem is as "cool" as is the listener in Stevens, and also as peculiarly unanguished by the situation in which he finds himself. It is as if the wintry prospect, the arrival at something like Stevens' First Idea, a cold clarity without redeeming deceptions, has in itself been an achievement of the imagination. It is something won against all such conventional blandishments as the "misery" of what Harold Bloom calls the "Shelleyan wind" in "The Snow Man" or the flirtatious bird in "The Wood-Pile."
The persistent difference between Frost and Stevens applies here, too, however. It resides in the kind of context the reader is asked to supply for each of the poems. Thus, despite the absence of characterizing detail, the speaker in "The Wood-Pile" shapes, from his very opening words, a human presence for us in his sentence sounds, his voice; he makes us imagine him as someone in a human plight "far from home." By comparison, the "voice" in "The Snow Man" belongs not to a person but to a quality of rumination, and Bloom is succinctly generalizing about the poem - he calls it Stevens' "most crucial poem" - when he remarks of its author that "the text he produces is condemned to offer itself for interpretation as being already an interpretation of other interpretations, rather than as what it asserts itself to be, an interpretation of life" (Poetry and Repression, p. 270).
"The Wood-Pile" is about being impoverished, being on the dump - to recall two related states of consciousness in Stevens - with no clues by which to locate yourself in space. All you can assuredly know about "here" is that you are far from "home":
Out walking in the frozen swamp one gray day,
I paused and said, "I will turn back from here.
No, I will go on farther -- and we shall see."
The hard snow held me, save where now and then
One foot went through. The view was all in lines
Straight up and down of tall slim trees
Too much alike to mark or name a place by
So as to say for certain I was here
Or somewhere else: I was just far from home.
If this is a situation that resembles winter visions of Stevens, the sound resists any effort to bring visionary possibilities into being. The voice of this man ("So as to say for certain I was here / Or somewhere else") cannot be expected to test the poetic potentialities of what is seen and heard and can even less be expected to cheer itself up by indulging in the hyperbolic or the sublime vocabularies. There is an informality even in the initial placements - "out walking . . . one gray day" - of the spondaic effect of "gray day," as if it were a scheduled occurrence (like "pay day") and of the possible metaphoric weight in what he says, as in the allusion (but not really) to the lack of adequate support he can expect in this landscape ("The hard snow held me, save where now and then / One foot went through"). Such anxious and innocuous precision about the relative hardness of the snow or the size and contour of the trees is humanly and characterologically right. It expresses the kind of paranoia that goes with any feeling of being lost and of losing thereby a confident sense of self. Paranoia, displaced onto a small bird chancing by, becomes the motive for metaphor: the bird is endowed with the characteristics being displayed by the man observing him:
A small bird flew before me. He was careful
To put a tree between us when he lighted,
And say no word to tell me who he was
Who was so foolish as to think what he thought,
He thought that I was after him for a feather --
The white one in his tail; like one who takes
Everything said as personal to himself.
One flight out sideways would have undeceived him.
And then there was a pile of wood for which
I forgot him and let his little fear
Carry him off the way I might have gone,
Without so much as wishing him good-night.
There is a combination here of yearning, competitiveness, and resentment that threatens to become ludicrous, a parody of the romantic search for associations and resemblances. And the parodistic possibility is increased by the syntax of the lines about the bird's tail-feathers. They could mean that the bird was foolish to think that the man had this particular design upon him. But the lines could also be the speaker's rendition or imitation of what he thought the bird was thinking, i.e., "Who does that man think he is to think that he can get hold of my tail-feathers?" In any event, there is more "thinking" proposed than could possibly or profitably be going on. That the paranoia and self-regard confusingly attributed to the bird are really a characterization of the man who is observing the bird is further suggested by the accusation that the bird is "like one who takes/ Everything said as personal to himself" - a jocular simile, given the fact that there is only "one" person around to whom the comparison might apply. If all this is to some degree comic, it is feverishly so, the product of intense loneliness and displacement. From its opening moment the poem becomes a human drama of dispossession, of failed possessiveness, and of the need to structure realities which are not "here," to replace, in the words of Stevens, "nothing that is not there" with "the nothing that is."
The only probable evidence of structure that he does find, already put together, is the "wood-pile," a forgotten remnant of earlier efforts to make a "home" by people who, when they did it, were also away from home. The pile of wood, which lets the speaker promptly forget the bird, once more excites his anxious precisions. He still needs to find some human resemblances, evidences in zones and demarcations for the human capacity to make a claim on an alien landscape. What he discovers is sparse indeed, his reassurance equally so, as we can note in his rather pathetic exactitudes:
It was a cord of maple, cut and split
And piled -- and measured, four by four by eight.
And not another like it could I see.
No runner tracks in this year's snow looped near it.
And it was older sure than this year's cutting,
Or even last year's or the year's before.
The wood was gray and the bark warping off it
And the pile somewhat sunken. Clematis
Had wound strings round and round it like a bundle.
What held it, though, on one side was a tree
Still growing, and on one a stake and prop,
These latter about to fall. I thought that only
Someone who lived in turning to fresh tasks
Could so forget his handiwork on which
He spent himself, the labor of his ax,
And leave it there far from a useful fireplace
To warm the frozen swamp as best it could
With the slow smokeless burning of decay.
The poem here could be read as a commentary on the earlier "The Tuft of Flowers" where, instead of a bird, a butterfly acts as a kind of pointer who "led my eye to look / At a tall tuft of flowers beside a brook" and where these flowers, in turn, direct his attention to signs of work having been done by another man with "A spirit kindred to my own;/ So that henceforth I worked no more alone." "The Wood-Pile" is obviously a much starker poem. The "tuft of flowers" was left as a kind of signature, a greeting and communication; the pile of wood was simply forgotten by the man who cut and carefully stacked it, as he went on to the distractions of other things. The wood-pile cannot therefore prompt the gregarious aphorisms which bring "The Tuft of Flowers" to a close: "'Men work together,' I told him from the heart,/'Whether they work together or apart.'" Remnants of a human presence in the swamp only remind the walker that he is completely alone in a place that has been deserted. And his aloneness is the more complete because there are no alternatives outside the present circumstances which give him any comfort. Even when he thinks of a fireplace it is not with images of conviviality but only with the observation that it would be "useful." The wood burns of itself, with a warmth that cannot be felt and without giving any evidence whatever that it belongs in the world of men and women. "With the slow smokeless burning of decay" is a line whose sound carries an extraordinary authority and dignity because it has emerged out of the more sauntering vernacular movements at the beginning of the poem. It induces a kind of awe because it is the acknowledgment of nature as a realm wholly independent of human need or even human perception, and it belongs not only in what it says but in its very cadence with Wordsworth's evocation at the end of his sonnet "Mutability" of "the unimaginable touch of Time."
If the speaker "resembles" anything at the end of the poem, it is the wood-pile itself, something without even a semblance of consciousness; it is wholly self-consuming. As in "Desert Places," another poem about a lonely man walking in a landscape of snow, the man in "The Wood-Pile" could say that "The loneliness includes me unawares." This line is a little poem in itself. It has a syntactical ambiguity more common in Stevens than in Frost. It can mean both that the loneliness includes him but is unaware of doing so, and that the loneliness includes him and he is not aware of its doing so by virtue of his near obliteration. In either case he is not so much included as wiped out; he is included as if he were inseparable from, indistinguishable from, the thing that includes him. He is on the point of being obliterated by the landscape, rather than allowed to exist even as an observer of it, much less a mediating or transcending presence.
The "persona" narratives from the book - "Mending Wall," "After Apple-Picking," and "The Wood-Pile" - also strive for inclusiveness although they are spoken throughout by a voice we are tempted to call "Frost." This voice has no particular back-country identity, nor is it obsessed or limited in its point of view; it seems rather to be exploring nature, other people, ideas, ways of saying things, for the sheer entertainment they can provide. Unlike poems such as "Home Burial" and "A Servant to Servants," which are inclined toward the tragic or the pathetic, nothing "terrible" happens in the personal narratives, nor does some ominous secret lie behind them. In "The Wood-Pile," for example, almost nothing happens at all; its story, its achieved idea or wisdom, the whole air with which it carries itself, is quite unmemorable. A man out walking in a frozen swamp decides to turn back, then decides instead to go farther and see what will happen. He notes a bird in front of him and spends some time musing on what the bird must be thinking, then sees it settle behind a pile of wood. The pile is described so as to bring out the fact that it has been around for some time. With a reflection about whoever it was who left it there, "far from a useful fireplace," the poem concludes. And the reader looks up from the text, wonders if he has missed something, perhaps goes back and reads it again to see if he can catch some meaning which has eluded him. But "The Wood-Pile" remains stubbornly unyielding to any attempt at ransacking it for a meaning not evidently on the surface.
This surface is a busy one, as when the speaker meets the bird:
A small bird flew before me. He was careful
To put a tree between us when he lighted,
And say no word to tell me who he was
Who was so foolish as to think what he thought.
He thought that I was after him for a feather --
The white one in his tail; like one who takes
Everything said as personal to himself.
One flight out sideways would have undeceived him.
The bird is teased for its egoism in thinking that the world revolves around his subjective hopes and fears, and his nervousness is amusing because never was there a less predatory or even purposeful figure than the walker in this poem, who early along - in deciding to continue rather than turn back - put it this way: "No, I will go on farther - and we shall see." See what? See things like a bird lighting in a tree, and be free to make up a story about why it doesn't speak, or how jealously protective it is of the white feather in its tail? Being free to "see" means indulging in such harmless playful fantasies the freedom of whose play is a measure of its solitary creation, far from any human or social situation. Perhaps the point of maximum play occurs in the lines about the bird's caution as he lights in the tree and determines to look only: "And say no word to tell me who he was / Who was so foolish as to think what he thought." The monosyllabic tongue-twisting aspect of these lines is effective in mixing up the reader: who is more "foolish," man or bird, and how on earth can one tell?
Then there is the wood-pile itself, a cord of maple, split, piled and measured
... four by four by eight.
And not another like it could I see.
No runner tracks in this year's snow looped near it.
And it was older sure than this year's cutting,
Or even last year's or the year's before.
The wood was grey and the bark warping off it
And the pile somewhat sunken. Clematis
Had wound strings round and round it like a bundle.
What held it, though, on one side was a tree
Still growing, and on one a stake and prop,
These latter about to fall ...
This is a thoroughly unexciting presentation of what might lay claim to be the world's most unexceptional phenomenon, yet it engages the man enough to occupy him for the remainder of the poem. More interesting than anything it "says" is the way the presentation resists, as solidly as does the sunken woodpile, our readerly efforts to find a message in it, to take it as a symbol for something or other important. In so resisting us, the woodpile confirms the teasing character of the whole poem, always leading us on, promising that around the next corner, past the next tree, we shall see something, if we but have faith to follow the walker: and then, sure enough, there it is - an old woodpile with clematis wound round it, its very situation (its "stake and prop" about to collapse) precarious.
This is all we see, except that Frost moves to reflection, concluding the poem with these lines in which the pile of wood is extended into something more:
I thought that only
Someone who lives in turning to fresh tasks
Could so forget his handiwork on which
He spent himself, the labor of his ax,
And leave it there far from a useful fireplace
To warm the frozen swamp as best it could
With the slow smokeless burning of decay.
The final line has been rightly admired, but its brilliance almost blinds us to the fact that the reflection which it concludes is in no sense a stunning or profound one. The thought that "someone" who abandoned this pile of wood must be one who "lived in turning to fresh tasks," is certainly uncontroversial and hardly provocative of further speculation. Again the interest lies not in "content" but in the way a sentence develops over seven lines, winding from the "I" to the "someone" and finally to the "handiwork" whose thermal activity is celebrated in the ingenuity of the final three lines. As with other moments in the poem, no great claims are made, no meanings are held out for everyone to use, no praise or blame is assigned to motive or action.
Early in "The Wood-Pile" the walker is surrounded by "tall slim trees / Too much alike to mark or name a place by / So as to say for certain I was here / Or somewhere else . . ." By the poem's end a marking has been taken, a place named, though in a way so fanciful as to establish that it is poetry we are responding to when we try to think of that decaying pile, warming the frozen swamp as best it can.
To alter the walker's final thought: only someone, like a poet, who lives in turning to fresh tropes could write a poem like the one Frost has written here, and it is an appropriate conclusion to what remains the most original, even revolutionary, book he would ever write. We need to recall once more the language Edward Thomas used in defining and in praising it, about how Frost trusted his convictions about the validity of speech in poetry, of sentence sounds employed with "no purpose to serve beyond expressing it, when he has no audience to be bullied or flattered, when he is free, and speech takes one form and no other." Despite the presence of back-country characters and scenes in this "book of people," it is as a book of sentence sounds that it most truly exists, as a triumphant vindication of the poetic theory Frost had designed, and as a monument to how much could be accomplished by trusting to the rendering of speech. At the end of "Home Burial," the wife lashes out at her husband in exasperation: "You - oh, you think the talk is all . . ." But for the composer of these poems, the talk is all, whether that of his imagined characters or of himself speaking aloud.
________________________________________
. . . In "The Wood-Pile" the narrator finds in his frozen swamp ambiguous evidence of order and cultivation that does not yield simple revelations. The facts—the behavior of the bird and the woodpile itself—become hard to read in this ecologically complex environment.
The narrator's purposes remain obscure, though he seems ambivalent about them. Is he escaping, fleeing, or seeking something? At first he wants to "turn back" but then continues with "we shall see." See something literally or colloquially, as in "see what will happen"? There is a ruefulness in his recognition that he is "far from home":
[lines 1-9]
Ungraspable, beyond our naming or taming, the place is inhuman. One senses that the narrator is testing himself, attempting to overcome his fears and expectations in an environment indifferent to his ego. All the while he convinces himself of a decision and of his power of choice, both of which are soon mocked.
What he eventually sees are indications of life and form—the little bird and the woodpile—that do not conform to the uniformity of the trees; they are evidence of the Lucretian swerve of independence and order in a chaotic world. He attempts to infer some intention, purpose, or design from these facts, which resist comprehension. The bird, probably a white-tailed junco, becomes the target of the narrator's projections about purpose. According to the narrator, this bird is defensive, sure that he is after him for his white tail feather. But the narrator checks his own anthropomorphism with the wonderfully ambiguous qualifying phrase "Who was so foolish as to think what he thought." The real problem is the antecedent of the relative pronoun who, the bird or the narrator. Is the narrator foolish to try to think what the bird thought, or is the bird foolish for thinking that the narrator is after his tail feather? Both readings reveal something about the narrator and his quest for meaning:
[lines 10-16]
On one level the narrator appears to be mocking the bird for his paranoia and egotism, "like one who takes / Everything said as personal to himself." But the foolishness may be the narrator's for projecting onto the bird his own thoughts and his human tendency to see the world in terms of his own ego.
But the narrator's attention to the white feather in the bird's tail suggests that the bird may well indeed have something to fear; the narrator's attention to it betrays his lack of indifference to an unusual trophy, a thing of beauty, that he might want to capture or possess (not unlike the narrator seeking the trophy nest in "The White-Tailed Hornet"). The narrator asserts his own freedom from this desire with the line "One flight out sideways would have undeceived him," while confirming his own inability to liberate himself from this desire to take off "the way I might have gone," if he were still not bound to his instincts. The bird goes behind the woodpile, according to the narrator, "to make his last stand":
[lines 17-22]
Why does the bird go behind the woodpile? Probably not to make his last stand. Rather, the woodpile is the location of his nest, as the junco is the kind of bird who builds nests in fallen logs and close to the ground. The white feather, despite the attention of the narrator, serves the purpose of mating, not beauty for human eyes.
A carefully cut "cord," perhaps a play on chord, of the hardwood maple, it seems a religious sacrifice or a work of art, at least purposefully ornamented and finished by the clematis. But the clematis itself is seeking material upon which to grow. And it might also show the bird's real motive in going to the woodpile—seeking the seeds of the clematis for food. There is a network of growth and destruction. These aspects of the tangled swamp are lost on this seeker of ordered perfection comprehensible in human terms:
[lines 23-34]
Its isolation and age are remarkable indications of what appears to have been an inexplicable and, more important, deliberate action of waste. The environment overwhelms, threatens, and destroys any angular form of human order that can be imposed upon or made from it. The tree growing next to it—like the Darwinian Tree of Life, which encompasses both life and extinction—supports the pile, while the man-made stake and prop are "about to fall." The human destruction of a tree to create form is subsumed by the larger Tree of Life. . . .
The speaker of "The Wood-Pile" seems surprised that someone could build such an altar as the woodpile, "far from a useful fireplace." As a form set against the chaos of nature, it appears to serve no survival function, and that is its glory. What kind of individual would do this?
[lines 34-40]
The speaker's revelation is ambiguous. His own quest for perfection (the white feather, the perfect work of art) is mocked by the thought of a creator who moves on from form to form. There is a Lucretian lesson in this, that the fear of death and the concern with immortality are likely to produce fear and foolishness. The woodpile is an example of waste for its own sake. Its creator moves on with little concern for how others perceive what he has done or for the future of what he has made. But was his motive the "sheer morning gladness at the brim," as the speaker of "The Tuft of Flowers" said in hope of discovering a common faith? If the woodpile is a metaphor for a human effort at form or art or individuation—free from practical constraints—it reveals only that all attempts at transcendence lead back to some form of ecological function in the material world: "To warm the frozen swamp as best it could / With the slow smokeless burning of decay." The woodpile takes on a life of its own. Like Darwin, Frost moves past thinking about who made the cut wood, a creative agent of change, to the wood itself, which serves a purpose even in its death. Indeed, its presence and decay allow for clematis, and the clematis provides seed for birds. And it does in its decay actually allow enough warming so that trees can grow, from the bacterial breakdown into methane, though the phrase ''as best it could" indicates the limits Frost tends to ascribe to any single effort. The woodpile with its apparent merging of formal and final causes at the hands of an absent creator would be an example of l'art pour l'art were it not for the fact that its apparent ecological function defeats the projections and hopes of the narrator. Here too, Daphne eludes Apollo. The speaker would be as indifferent as the bird, as indifferent as the woodchopper, and indifferent to the woodpile itself as its purpose and design collapse into the swampy chaos of biological interpenetration and transformation. The conclusion expresses a recognition of the vanity of human pursuit in a pluralistic and inhuman universe.

Prac Crit on Frost's "Mending Wall"

Robert Frost as a poet writes on two levels of understanding- the literal level and the metaphorical level. Here, the main focus of his essay is to question why there is a wall between him and his neighbour, who lives “beyond the hill”, with the theme being on breaking down barriers, which is expressed both literally and metaphorically. On a literal level, he wonders about the significance and effects of a physical obstruction between him and his neighbour, and questions the need to maintain such a obstacle. On the metaphorical level however, the wall is representative of both a social barrier between humans, as well as representing a division between both the individual as a human, and nature in general, together with the implication of the need for such a clear distinction. Firstly, we shall analyse this on a literal level before discussing the metaphorical.
The title “Mending Wall”, when read in conjunction with the rest of the poem, implies that the wall is a obstruction preventing him from communicating well with his neighbour, and thus slowly segregating himself and destroying the relationship on a literal level. The symbolism of a wall here being a clear boundary or marker for an area, as well as affording protection from any unknown hostile intruders serves to reinforce this interpretation. At the same time, however, we note that this annual process of “Mending Wall” is the only time where he is able to meet his neighbour and share his emotions with him. Already the fact that he questions his neighbour “what [he] was walling in or walling out” establishes an emotional connection between the two humans, and the communication of emotions between them. Therefore, the process of “Mending Wall” could also be used to describe the mending of relationships between both of them, thus, the contrast between the two meanings of the title relate to the contrast between both the metaphorical and the literal level.
On the literal level, there is “Something… that doesn’t love a wall/ That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it/ And spills the upper boulder in the sun”, which describes an unknown presence which actually attempts to physically destroy the barrier between the two men by slowly weakening the wall stone by stone, and whom the speaker perceives as hostile in nature. An interesting implication about the unknown entity here is the fact that it uses elemental forces of nature to aid it in the destruction of the wall, both the “frozen-ground-swell” as well as the implication of the sun, another symbol of nature and life, giving it strength to “spill the upper boulder” of the wall. There is also a sense of anonymity in the identity of the entity destroying the wall, leading us to believe that the “something” could be a mysterious, supernatural force which the speaker, and humanity in general, is unable to oppose, which leads on to the fact that it could be fundamentally an abstract concept which exists in opposition to humanity, and thus is wearing down the wall of human differences in that sense. Frost even states here that the “work of hunters is another thing”; this entity exists as a higher power which does not want the wall up. Therefore, the personification of the “something” in the poem, as well as the fact that “no one has seen [the gaps] made or heard them made”, evokes primal fear in humans of the unknown, a concept we are able to link up with the notion of the neighbour being an “old stone savage”. Thus, from line one to line ten, we are able to see that the enemy without is supernatural and even magical in nature, and is not even a manifestation of the arbitrary passions or lusts (or even evil) of man, as symbolized by the hunters (who ravage the wall entirely, leaving “not one stone on a stone”) but natural forces, which seem to turn the very land against the speaker and his neighbour. To enhance this, Frost uses imagery and personification with the phrases “love”, “sends” “spills” and “makes gaps” from lines 1-4 to vividly describe the degradation of the wall, as well as to create a very realistic visual image for the audience. It is important to note that on a literal level the wall is also being destroyed by nature, by small animals and frost, and other elements, which hints to us that a wall is unnatural, and therefore, not able to exist and complement nature. This, in addition to the fact that the gaps are so big that “two can pass abreast”, could mean that nature wishes both the speaker and his neighbour to co-exist harmoniously and relate to each other more often.
Therefore, from line eleven onwards, we see the speaker’s need to make constant reparations to the wall, where he has to “walk the line” at “spring mending-time”, something which he does only annually. However, it is unclear whether this need stems from the intimate knowledge the speaker possesses of the neighbour’s habits and eventual need on his side to repair the wall, or whether it arises from his own unconscious desire to have a wall between them. This is justified by every human’s need to have his or her own personal space. As ironic as it seems, Frost’s only chance to relate emotionally to the neighbour is during this period, where they rebuild the wall between them, which symbolizes, on another level, the rebuilding of personal barriers to prevent one person from becoming too emotionally attached to the other. Strangely, the neighbour does not feel the same urgent need to rebuild the wall, and it is always the speaker who has to “let [his] neighbour know”, rather than the neighbour taking the initiative to invite the speaker to rebuild the wall. Thus, we are forced to question who really needs the wall, if the neighbour seems to be so disinterested in the rebuilding of a physical boundary between him and the speaker. In addition to that, spring is the time for rebirth, renewal and regeneration, and rebuilding the wall at this time of the year hints at the speaker’s urge to grow closer and connect emotionally to his neighbour, as well as to provide an overall light and nonchalant atmosphere within the poem, almost as if the neighbour would not care if the wall was up or not. The speaker’s exclamation of “Spring is the mischief in me”, and his casual admonishment of “Stay where you are until our backs are turned!” only serve to reinforce this mood. To the speaker, the rebuilding of the wall is “just another kind of outdoor game,/One on a side. It comes to little more”, and we see that the portrayal of the rebuilding of the wall as a game is effective in showing that the friendship between the speaker and his neighbour is strengthened whenever they come to play this “game”.
Therefore, by looking at the reparation of the wall as the mending of friendships, we could interpret the fallen stones, the “boulders that have fallen to each [person]/”, some which are “loaves, and some so nearly balls” as the faults or mistakes of both the speaker and his neighbour, which have led to arguments and the weakening of their friendship, which is represented by the weakening of the wall. Replacing them on the wall thus signifies the speaker resolving disputes and making up with his neighbour, and thus the faults, those “boulders that have fallen to each”, are now forgiven and replaced on the wall of friendship. On the other hand, the wall does denote a sort of physical boundary between both of them, and their property represents their respective personal space. The neighbour’s repeated quote of “Good fences make good neighbours” is a repeated cliché on his part to justify why the wall should be repaired, and it is, to him, an important matter, and should be treated with the utmost seriousness. This is in stark contrast to the speaker who is jovial in nature, and looks upon the rebuilding of wall as simply a game, “nothing more”. He therefore visualises the neighbour as being “an old-stone savage armed”, someone highly conservative in nature, and probably backward in the times, and provides a grimly comical view of him repairing the wall, befitting the situation and making light of the issue. It also begs the questions of whether the neighbour is “old” in terms of age or attitude, and reflects Man’s primal origins, where he lived as a caveman who “move[d] in darkness… Not of woods only and the shade of trees”. There is also an implication that his neighbour moves in the darkness of his own ignorance, and is therefore trapped in the past, set in his ways, and unable to change his own views.
The differences between the two men are very great, and even the fruits here can be seen to represent them. The speaker’s “apple orchard” symbolises someone who is warm, sweet, as an apple, while the neighbour is “all pine”, prickly, cold, unyielding. The poem therefore describes the two men very differently; the speaker provides the thoughtful, philosophical view, while the neighbour stubbornly sticks to his thoughtless, meaningless cliché, by repeating his view of “Good fences make good neighbours”, something which has held true to him for a long time, being “his father’s saying”, and which he believes will hold true for ages to come. “Mending Wall”, therefore, reflects that humans will always be different, and will always possess a certain personal private spot, no matter how close friends they might be, and thus do we wall in our own secrets, hidden in the “darkness” of what we do not want others to see. Frost therefore is able to use irony, in both the title and the neighbour’s repetition of “Good fences make good neighbours” to mean both the fact that the speaker and his neighbour need to be closer to each other, and the fact that they both need their privacy, which is the reason for the wall. It is only the speaker’s introspection and thought which help to convince us of this fact, and ultimately the poem’s symbolic representation of barriers and the stanzaic structure and free verse used, which imitate a wall in itself, convey the messages effectively in a tone which is not too critical of humanity.

1729 words

IHS Project: A Review and Comparison of the Management of Political Space Between Israel and Singapore With Regards to Foreign Policies

IHS Project, Year 4, 2005



Title: A Review and Comparison of the Management of Political Space Between Israel and Singapore With Regards to Foreign Policies


Aims and Thesis Statement:
Israel has always been in a volatile situation, with enemies on all sides of the country’s border who have been trying to enter undercover throughout the centuries and to undermine the security of the country. This has unsettled much of the Israeli population, which are composed predominantly of Jews, but with a sizeable minority as well, comprising not only (Druze) Arabs but Muslims and Christians, all of whom believe that Israel is a place of great spiritual significance to their faith. The Arabs, on the other hand, believe that Israel belongs to them, due to the massive amount of territory they control around the small country (Refer to Annex A). Thus, they have spent many troops and resources in an effort to retake Israel, all to no avail. My aim here is to find out Israel’s foreign policy, and why it is so effective against a nation several times its size. Also, I hope to compare this to Singapore’s foreign policy when dealing with its overseas neighbours, because Singapore is in as much the same situation as Israel is- surrounded by countries which are predominantly Muslim in faith, leaving Singapore in a precarious situation. A comparison and analysis would show why these policies are effective or ineffective.

Definition of Terms: By “Management of Political Space”, the essay refers to the political maneuvers conducted by the lawmakers and sovereignty of the country
By “Israel and Singapore”, the essay refers to the countries as and where relevant in the era or period stated or mentioned in the same sentence; if not, the period is taken to be in the 21st century.
By “Foreign Policies”, the essay refers to a set of political behavioural rules the country follows when in political contact with another country; this is to ensure that the country’s national interests are upheld with only the best in mind.

Background and Analysis of the Situation at Hand:
The majority of Jews in Israel originate as descendants of Jews who underwent a massive Diaspora to their “homeland” while seeking escape from persecution. Lasting centuries, the Diaspora has brought the percentage of Jews in Israel to 80.1% of the whole population with the rest being mostly Arab in nature. However, the trouble only started when Palestine Mandate was signed in June 1922 by the League of Nations, defining Britain as the Mandatory of Palestine and leading to a massive influx of Jews entering Israel to escape persecution as the call of the Anti-Semitic movement became popular in more and more countries. As Article 2 of the Palestine Mandate defined,
“…Government of His Britannic Majesty, and adopted by the said Powers, in favor of the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, it being clearly understood that nothing should be done which might prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country”.
And thus, the Jews flocked to Israel, which whom many regarded as their homeland. This upset the Arabs, who believed that Palestine belonged to them alone, and as a result, the Great Arab Revolt of 1937 occurred, which was subsequently put down by the British government after three years. Consequently, Arab hostility has been mounting ever since the British officially recognized the State of Israel in 1948. Almost immediately after Israel gained independence, the bordering Arab countries of Syria, Lebanon, Transjordan and Egypt attacked Israel, with hopes of destroying the newly declared state; however, their attack was repulsed, and when the war finally ended in January the next year, Israel controlled 24 % more of Palestine than had been allocated to it by the UN. This was then followed by the signing of peace and armistice agreements during the next five months.
The question is: How did Israel survive under continual attack by an Arab enemy with 11 times its GDP?
Firstly, it can be noted that ever since Britain was the first colonial mandatory in Palestine, both Israel and the Arab League have been relying on their Western superpower Allies to either gain an edge in the Israel-Arab conflict, or to circumvent war as an option. Currently, Israel, as a predominantly Jewish country with its population having suffered countless persecutions, retains an active army known as the unified “Israel Defence Forces” (IDF), which has been built up over the years, and now possesses an active standing strength of 170,000 members, and which can be reinforced to 455,000 men in 48 hours. Being formally at war with its neighbour states of Syria, Saudi Arabia and Lebanon, military preparedness has always been the key issue in the state of Israel; in fact, the country spends 30% of its Gross National Product (GNP) on military spending alone. This rate of spending allows Israel to constantly upgrade its military equipment, researching technology to allow Israel to upgrade its own arms (Israel is suspected to even be an undeclared nuclear power), while at the same time purchasing heavy weaponry from its allies, for example, missiles from the United States. These, in addition, to the four major wars the Arab Nations have conducted so far against the State of Israel, and the fact that it is experiencing ongoing conflict, give it a directly (forced) aggressive stance against its immediate neighbours with little chance of initiating and concluding peace treaties.
In comparison, the island-republic of Singapore retains its status as the smallest state in South East Asia, and lacks natural resources, possessing human labour as its only resource. Surrounded by Muslim states, Singapore reports one of the highest per capita GDP in the region (US$25,000), and yet maintains the fragile balance of peace in the region, even though it has an innate vulnerability as a small nation. This is not surprising, when we look at the changes and experiences Singapore had undergone to develop its foreign policy so thoroughly.
Firstly, our army, albeit small, is modeled on the Israeli concept of National Service in order to forge an operationally ready force, where all males age 18 and above and required to undergo a compulsory stint of military service ranging from two to two and a half years with reservist training for a few weeks each year. The Israeli men, however, serve for three years with similar reservist training. Singapore even upgrades her arms as regularly as possible, importing weapons frequently from allies where need be, such is the similarity between hers and Israel’s military establishment. Thus, we can see that both countries rely on an outward show of aggression and military preparedness to discourage any possible attackers.
Secondly, Singapore possesses a strong and efficient authoritarian political and judiciary system under the People’s Action Party (PAP), the party in power ever since Singapore was granted self-governance in 1959. Classified as a parliamentary democratic state, the PAP has taken the opportunity whenever possible to politically publicise itself to the people while in office, thereby removing all possible chance of the opposition being granted control in Singapore. Israel, too, is a parliamentary democratic state in nature, with the conservative Likud party being predominantly in power. Possessing a Presidential figurehead and a 120-strong parliament known as the Knesset, Israel’s manner of rule in the country is very similar to that of Singapore’s.
To avoid offending its neighbouring countries, however, Singapore has taken a stand to be “friends with all who sought friendship” and to “remain nonaligned”, and this is where the difference occurs. Where Israel is already at conflict with others, Singapore is maintaining its best not to offend neighbouring countries by stressing on the concept of “Total Defence”, where a melting pot of racial groups would be only classified as Singaporeans, equal regardless of race. This concept has worked so far in Singapore’s history, and although Singapore has come close to offending other nations with this form of foreign policy, she has never gone into full blown war since independence, unlike Israel.

Recommendations for Changes:
Israel therefore should tailor her aggression policy to be one more based on diplomacy; with issues like the present disagreement between Egypt and Israel regarding the ownership of the West Bank and Gaza Strip lands looming, Israel’s step towards a more peaceful solution would surely be welcomed by the superpowers in the West, and currently, generating public sympathy in the West seems to be its surest guarantee of survival. It should therefore follow Singapore’s concept of peace over war.


http://factbook.wn.com/Israel
http://i-cias.com/e.o/israel_1.htm
http://www.jafi.org.il/education/100/maps/
http://www.mideastweb.org/mandate.htm
http://countrystudies.us/singapore/56.htm
http://www.science.co.il/Arab-Israeli-conflict.asp

Geography- Agriculture and the Green Revolution

An essay about agriculture and the effects of GM Food... This was done in secondary four, so it is definitely below IB standard

Qns:
i) Has the introduction of GM (genetically modified) food benefited humans?
aii) What is agro-technology?
bi) Define and explain the concept of traditional breeding in agriculture.
bii) Explain why agri-business is becoming more and more common today.
ci) Define and explain what the "Green Revolution" refers to.
cii) Evaluate the usefulness of the "Green Revolution".

i) No, I do not believe that genetically modified food has benefited the agricultural sector and the environment. Firstly, although genetically modified foods (GM foods) are currently considered safe to eat, and there have been no evidence of any adverse effects so far on people, its long-term effects are yet unknown, and might prove damaging to its consumers. Also, there might be a case where unintended effects of GM foods are placed into the GM crop, perhaps during experimentations or gene technology, rendering the crop undesirable and unsafe for consumption, which will not happen when crops are grown using traditional methods. Not to mention, GM foods might threaten biodiversity; in the case of losing a ‘pure’ strain of crop by adding genes to it, or having the side effect of mutating the gene of an animal which consumes the crop, we are possibly pushing a race to its extinction in this manner. Also, introducing a GM crop with resistance to, for example, fruit bats, would affect the delicate balance of the environment, and possibly starve the fruit bats in the area, this in turn leading to a proliferation of other pests, therefore it is disadvantageous to the environment. There is also the matter of harvesting the crop; introducing the concept of genetic modification has reduced competition from farmers who grow their crop in the traditional style and prevented them from purchasing GM seeds to grow their crops differently because the majority of them are poor and therefore unable to afford such a level a technology. This, in turn, creates a greater rich-poor divide in the agricultural economy and thus consolidating the power of multi-national corporations (MNCs) like Monsanto, who deal in GM crops. This monopoly which the MNCs hold adversely affects the agricultural economy.
On the other hand, GM crops are grown with less pesticides used as compared to normal crops, reducing damage to the environment, and also allowing a greater yield due to less damages incurred by pests, because of their inborn tolerance to pests. Facts have proven that 40% less pesticide is used in cases where BT cotton is grown. Also, present and future GM foods may have additional nutritional content, for example, soya bean with added vitamin A. This would allow the agricultural sector to have a more thriving economy due to greater demand for these foods.
However, the disadvantages outweigh the advantages since these biological advantages do not deliver certainty; therefore GM foods are not zero-risk and not its advantages are not necessarily proven in all areas like the addition of nutrition. As a result, it does not benefit the agricultural sector and the environment.

ii) Agro-technology has, on overall, forced people to invest more capital in the agricultural sector in exchange for added yield. Agro-technology also allows people to grow crops requiring a special climate under any conditions, and also increases the yield and efficiency with which the crop is produced. This also results in improved quality of the crop and less manpower needed to harvest and tend to these crops. However, this form of technology is expensive, and only the elite companies in the agricultural sector are able to afford this; therefore, the rich-poor divide in the agricultural sector is widened.

1bi) Traditional breeding focuses on crops with a special immunity to certain adverse effects, and crosses them with other crops which have other desirable effects, for example, producing a yield higher than the average crop. This careful selection of crops eventually (theoretically) results in a strain which is both resistant to pests and high yielding. However, one difference is that this method is extremely time consuming as compared to genetic modification.
Also, only closely related species can be successfully bred; therefore, if a species does not possess a resistance to a certain kind of insect or epidemic, the species as a whole cannot be protected against these effects.
GM food on the other hand, allows for gene transfer between virtually any plant or animal, thereby cancelling these limitations. Also, traditional breeding might bring some unwanted traits into the plant; for example, if a cabbage is resistant to pests, it might also taste bitter, the quality which discourages pests from consuming it. However, genetic modification targets specific genes and transfers only that effect across; in that sense, it has an overall advantage over traditional breeding, apart from being very expensive to perform.

ii) Agri-business is defined as the act of “farming engaged in as a large-scale business operation which utilizes modern science and technology to produce high yield through optimal performance”. This form of farming results in high yield through use of new technology in farming like High Yielding Variety (HYV) seeds and genetic modification to produce exceptionally abundant crops with preferred traits. However, this form of farming requires a high starting capital due to the fact that the required technology and machinery needs to be purchased.
Agri-business is becoming more and more popular because the turnover as compared to using traditional methods of farming is higher, and because crops grown through newer technology like genetic modification are now in higher demand as compared to traditional crops. The traditional method of farming also possesses many limits ; for example, if a farmer wanted to introduce a certain resistance-gene into a crop to reduce capital loss due to pests, the time it would take to breed such a crop through careful selection and cross-breeding would be very long (fifteen years, at least), whereas genetic modification, although expensive, allows for the farmer to transplant the gene into the crop almost immediately. There are also no added side effects as compared to natural breeding, where the crop might accidentally gain an unwanted trait in addition to resistance to pests (see example in question 1bi) above). Thus, agri-business is more desirable as compared to traditional breeding, and therefore there is a shift towards the agri-business sector.
Also, agri-business is now becoming more “trendy” in the business world of agriculture, and it is therefore in more demand by investors, who invest comparatively more in this sector as compared to crops grown using traditional methods. Farmers therefore capitalize on this and thus prefer to grow crops using agro-technology.
Finally, with the advent of agro-technology, new techniques have allowed the shelf life of agro-technologically grown food to be extended. It is therefore more desirable as compared to easily perishable crops, and this is extremely important as far as the world is concerned, because there is currently an increasing demand from the burgeoning population of the world to raise the current productivity of crops; therefore, agri-business is more popular in the agricultural business world not only because more crops can be produced, but also because these crops tend to survive when exported as compared to other crops which ripen and spoil easily (refer to tomatoes in Figure 1).
As a result, since agri-business produces more desirable crops, and a resulting higher capital for the farmer, more and more people are beginning to grow crops in this sector of business.

1c) The Green Revolution is the process of technologically modifying current agricultural techniques to increase the efficiency of crop growth, resulting in a higher productivity rate (especially in agricultural sectors in less developed countries). This is especially popular in poor countries where people are desperate for food, and there is, as a result, a higher demand for crops.
The Green Revolution first started out in Mexico under the Cooperative Wheat Research and Production Program, which aimed to find a solution to feed the starving population of third world countries through the cooperation of farmers in growing crops. The result was so successful in producing high-yielding crops which possessed resistances to natural elements that technologies used to grow these crops were exported abroad to assist farmers in meeting the food demands of their countries. In the end, more experimentation occurred, creating improved crop yield and other benefits.
The Green Revolution can currently be broken down into two smaller categories- the continued breeding and crossing of new plant varieties and the application of newer, modern technology into the agricultural sector (for example, genetic modification to boost a crop’s yield). The breeding of crops for various desirable traits has made much progress since the time the Green Revolution was introduced, and it has brought so many high yielding varieties (HYV) of crops that the majority of the public in industrialized companies now consumes these hybrid strains of crops as compared to traditionally grown crops. The breeding of new plant varieties now not only aims to increase crop yield, but also to increase shelf life, engineer resistances (against pests and herbicides) within the crop itself, and to help boost the appearance of the crop to make it more appealing.
The second category, introducing modern technology into agriculture, has helped greatly increase crop yield for farmers all over the world by introducing techniques which are now taken to be the standard for farmers delving into agri-business. Continued research into these techniques have come up with inventions like chemical fertilizer to allow any crop to grow in almost under any condition by providing the sufficient amount of nutrients for the crop, and the development of pesticides and herbicides to lower the loss of turnover by eliminating potential pests. Although with its drawbacks, pesticides have proven effective so far, with minimal crop loss and efficient weed control. Coupled with the introduction of heavy machinery to reduce labour required in harvesting the turnover, the Green Revolution has made much progress since its introduction into human society. Indeed, all these factors have helped prevent approximately one billion people in India from starving thus far, in addition to boosting India’s and Pakistan’s economy in the business of agriculture and securing its place in the world of agriculture for a long time to come.

ii) The Green Revolution has, in my opinion, greatly improved the lives of people throughout the world today. Firstly, its techniques have allowed food production to double and even triple in various third world countries, solving the problem of having people starve in these countries due to lack of food and achieving food security in developed countries as well as developing countries. In addition to this, the Green Revolution has helped to boost India’s economy by making it one of the world’s biggest agricultural producers.
However, the Green Revolution is also under fire for destroying the biodiversity and delicate balance of the environment by ensuring that less varieties of crops are grown in place of the HYV seeds, and this could also lead to herbicide-resistant weeds and other anomalies which are not normally found in nature. Also, there is an increased tendency for larger companies dealing in agri-business to monopolise the agricultural sector by selling sterile HYV seeds in order to gain revenue, resulting in farmers being forced to buy these sterile seeds from them again and again. Pollution also occurs in addition to dependence on fertilizers and the degradation of the natural fertility of the land due to possible run-off from pesticides and herbicides into oceans and lakes, resulting also in the lessened fertility of the land. This forces farmers to depend solely on fertilizers to ensure that crops grow well.
However, comparing the disadvantages and advantages of the Green Revolution, I feel that saving many human lives is a notable achievement, whereas many of these ‘disadvantages’ also apply to other large scale businesses in agriculture like the running of plantations, and is therefore not exclusive to the Green Revolution alone. I thus feel that the Green Revolution has drastically improved the lives of many people, and is therefore an advantage.