Analysis: Of Plymouth Plantation - William Bradford

Of Plymouth Plantation (1620-1647) paragraphs 124-125, 130-133, 153-157, 162, 216-217, 413-416

Leading to the events in Of Plymouth Plantation:

1517: Martin Luther wrote his 95 Theses
-- His work protested the Catholic Church's corruption and change from a religious institution to a bureaucratic, military, business corporation.
-- Luther split the Catholic Christianity into Protestantism and Catholicism.

1535: Sir Thomas More claimed people could start anew in the New World for religious freedom

1547: Henry VIII established the Anglican Church
-- This was a result of his desire for divorce with his wife, Catherine of Aragon, since she could not produce male heirs for him. He could not divorce her easily, however, because Catherine was the daughter of Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand of Spain. The Pope was unwilling to grant him divorce because of the Catholic Church's alliance with Spain.
-- Henry VIII established the Anglican Church, which is similar to Catholicism, except you can divorce and it is fully under the control of the British monarch.

1564: John Calvin advocated an austere version of Christianity
-- The branch of Protestantism he founded was Calvinism.
-- Calvinism states that God knows your fate (heaven or hell), so if you see good things in your life, chances are, you'll go to heaven. If you see bad things happen in your life, chances are, you'll go to hell. This concept is called predestination.
-- Thus, people work harder to achieve good things to reassure themselves that they are going to heaven.

1600's: Puritans and Separatists are driven outside of Britain by oppression.
-- First, they tried Holland.
     -- This worked too well, as their kids began to assimilate to Dutch culture and speak Dutch. This was not favourable for the Puritans and Separatists, so they needed to move again.
-- So, they tried the New World.
     -- They took the Speedwell and the Mayflower over to the New World to find religious freedom.
     -- These ships were freight-hauling ships and not meant to cross the Atlantic.
     -- The journey was terrible, especially they inauspiciously left in late summer, which resulted in living through a harsh winter aboard a weak ship. When they arrived at the New World, weather was harsh as well.

Finally... William Bradford.
-- He was a signatory of the Mayflower Compact aboard the Mayflower in 1620. He was chosen by the Puritans to represent, lead, and supervise them as Governor.
-- He wrote a journal on his life in the New World, called Of Plymouth Plantation.
     -- A theme in this memoir is religion. The Puritans and Separatists left the old world for religion, and it remains a constant companion on their journey. Bradford hardly gets through a paragraph in his journal without praising God.

Examples:

• "Being thus arrived in a a good harbor, and brought save to land, they fell upon their knees and blessed the God of heaven who had brought them over the vast and furious ocean..." (paragraph 124).
• "Neither could they... view from this wilderness a more goodly country country to feed their hopes; for which way soever they turned their eyes (save upward to the heavens) they could have little solace or content in respect of any outward objects" (paragraph 125).
• "'... They cried unto the Lord, and He heard their voice and looked on their adversity,' etc. 'Let them therefore praise the Lord, because He is good: and His mercies endure forever.' 'Yea, let them which have been redeemed of the Lord, shew how He hath delivered them from the hand of the oppressor... Let them confess before the Lord His loving-kindness and His wonderful works before the sons of men.'" (paragraph 125).
• The Mayflower Compact begins with: "In the name of God, Amen... Having undertaken, for the glory of God and advancement of the Christian faith and honor of our king and country..." 
• He mentions God repeatedly in paragraph 217 as a superior authority figure with omniscience and infinite wisdom.
• and so on.

This provides a sharp contrast to American Literature afterwards. A central theme of intellectual progress in America is the neglect and questioning of religion; as literature progresses, you will see fewer mentions of religion. At this point, however, William Bradford exemplifies a heavy reliance on religion as motivation, organization, and legitimacy.

Analysis: John Smith - The Generall Historie of Virginia

The Generall Historie of Virginia (1624) paragraphs 8-16

A brief history of exploration in the Americas before Smith:

35,000 years ago: würmglaciation (the Ice Age)
-- Low water levels cause underwater lands to become accessible.
-- Where the Aleutian Islands were there was a Bering Land Bridge that nomads used to cross from Asia to the Americas.

6th century AD: Christianization
-- Europeans knew what lay north, east, and south, so they assumed whatever lay to the west must be "paradise."
-- A monk named Brandon was the first to sail west, to find the "paradise." He claimed he found it.

6th-8th century AD: Scandinavian exploration
-- Scandinavian ships were superior technologically (e.g: they had compasses).
-- Scandinavians migrated south during winter to keep away from the worst of the weather. There, they raped and pillaged southern countries to survive.

13th century AD: Marco Polo's adventures
-- Marco Polo goes to China and brings back new ideologies and innovations, such as spices, soap, silk, and spaghetti.
-- He opened up the Silk Road, which brought forth banks as a convenient method of storing money.
-- These banks then caused art patronage, which bloomed into the Renaissance.
-- Then, progress in the Renaissance improved boating technology to make seafaring a new tradition.

1602: Bartholomew Gosnold's journeys
-- Gosnold intended to go to the New World and stay, creating a British trading outpost.
-- He found Cape Cod, Martha's Vineyard, and the Elizabeth Islands.
-- He established a post at Cuttyhook.
-- Then, he sailed to Jamestown with Captain John Smith

Finally... John Smith
-- Smith was born a commoner and became a soldier of fortune (a mercenary). He was a prisoner of war and slave to a master who set him free. As soon as he was set free, he enlisted to be on Gosnold's Virginia voyage.
-- When he returned from Jamestown, he wrote an exciting memoir of his adventures.
-- This writing became popular among middle class office workers in particular, who led dull lives and enjoyed the thought of becoming an adventurer like Smith.
-- Smith was the first to introduce the idea of the American Dream. In his memoir, he writes: "Here every man may be master and owner of his owne labour and land... If he have nothing but his hands, he may...by industries quickly grow rich."
-- It is important to note that everyone who came to North America came for the American Dream, except for slaves.

Essay: Caleb's Crossing - Geraldine Brooks

Caleb's Crossing (2011)

Prompt: In what way is Geraldine Brooks' Caleb's Crossing the story of Bethia's crossing as well?

Although Caleb’s Crossing, by Geraldine Brooks, mainly features a Native American man’s cultural assimilation and journey to graduate from Harvard, readers cannot reflect upon Caleb’s crossing without first noting the crossing of the narrator, Bethia. As the Mayfields pull Caleb into their English culture, Bethia is increasingly drawn into Caleb’s world as well. Bethia begins her transition into Wampanoag culture at a young age, when she accidentally eavesdrops on a Native American teaching her father Wampanaontoaonk, then learns the language herself. This skill catalyzes her relationship with Caleb, whose friendship with her is a two-way street, regarding the sharing of knowledge. When Caleb tells Bethia his name is Cheeshahteaumauk, she christens him “Caleb”, which represents a milestone in his crossing; then, Bethia is also given a new name, “Storm Eyes”, which indicates a benchmark in her own crossing.

As Bethia shapes Caleb’s cultural transformation by explaining to him the English language, church, and etiquette, Caleb reciprocates and teaches her his Wampanoag skills, traditions, and religion. She recounts: “... I followed this wild boy hungering after his knowledge of the island-- his deep understanding of everything that bloomed or swam or flew… Day following day, I grew in knowledge of the island, as we foraged in one place more remarkable in prospect or abundance than the last” (24-25). Bethia learns to value Wampanoag skills during her friendship with Caleb, just as Caleb grows to appreciate English inventions.

Her adolescence is marked by two sides of herself: a proper English self in front of her parents and her brother, and a wild and free self displayed in the presence of Caleb. This eventually culminates into the blending of both: during a journey with her brother, Makepeace, into Wampanoag territory to claim a beached whale, Bethia is bewitched by the tribal dancing. She loses the boundaries within herself: “Slowly at first, my limbs found the rhythm. Thought ceased, and an animal sense drove me until, in the end, I danced with abandon. If Satan had me in his hand that night, then I confess it: I welcomed his touch” (32). At this point, Bethia has succumbed to her desires, and despite her father’s teachings, she has willingly participated in a pagan ritual. By the end of Caleb’s life, Bethia fully embraces Wampanoag traditions and seeks help from Caleb’s uncle, Tequamuck, the antithesis of her own father, to save him: “... I brought my lips to his ear and whispered to him the last of the words that Tequamuck had given me” (298). As Caleb lies in his deathbed, Bethia further demonstrates the completion of her crossing by admitting that she trusts spiritual powers of a pagan healer.

Additionally, Caleb’s harsh journey into the adult world parallels Bethia’s coming of age. As a story that spans from Bethia’s twelfth year to her death, Caleb’s Crossing shows the reader Bethia’s inevitable maturing and gaining of wisdom. Her transition into adulthood is marked with the deaths of her family members; just as Caleb loses his father, brother, and tribespeople to disease, Bethia loses her mother, sister, and father to disease and drowning. These events shape Bethia into a more cynical, understanding adult. Whereas during her adolescence, Bethia believes her sins cause punishment in the form of death of loved ones, stating “I killed my mother” (5), and “I saw more punishment for my idolatry” (116) about her sister’s death, as an adult, she realizes that good and bad are not black and white: “To be sure, father and every other minister in my lifetime has warned that Satan is guileful and adept at concealing his true purpose. But since that day I have come to believe that it is not for us to know the subtle mind of God” (295). These thoughts demonstrate that through hardships, Bethia has crossed into a wiser and more reflective adult.

Analysis: The Summer Day - Mary Oliver

The Summer Day (1992)

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean-
5 the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
10 Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
15 which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

—Mary Oliver

Oliver begins the poem with three rhetorical questions increasing in specificity. The first question surprises the reader, because the answer should be obvious: God; yet Oliver asks it anyways. This introduces Oliver's theme of questioning authority. The second question compares a swan and a black bear, which are polar opposites in colour, nature, and symbolic elements (swans inhabit the water, while bears inhabit the earth). The reader can then infer that Oliver intends to include everything in between these two opposites in nature within the question. The third question brings the character of the grasshopper, which is observed with unusual attention in lines 4-10.

Oliver uses the grasshopper as a warning to the reader to pay attention to nature and not to take even small grasshoppers for granted. In line 5, Oliver refers to the grasshopper as "herself," which is personification and suggests an equality in value between the speaker and the grasshopper.

After line 10, Oliver abruptly changes her topic with yet another rhetorical question. "I don't know exactly what a prayer is," she says. She contrasts this with "I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down / into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass, / how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields, / which is what I have been doing all day" (12-15). Using this comparison, Oliver suggests praying is abstract and useless, while love of nature is concrete and tangible. Prayers are said and evaporate into thin air, never to be seen again, while the nature around us can be experienced and should be appreciated. By saying "which is what I have been doing all day," Oliver suggests her actions should be followed.

Oliver defends her actions by asking more rhetorical questions: "Tell me, what else should I have done? / Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?" (16-17). With these two lines, Oliver presents her last argument: pay attention to nature and spend life without wasting time on religion. The best way to appreciate life is by not taking things for granted and by trusting only tangible nature.

Finally, Oliver connects her argument to the reader's own life by asking, "Tell me, what is it you plan to do / with your one wild and precious life?" Life is wild, not to be constrained by religion, and precious, not to be wasted on religion.

Analysis: The Pasture - Robert Frost

The Pasture (1915)

I'm going out to clean the pasture spring;

I'll only stop to rake the leaves away

(And wait to watch the water clear, I may):

I sha'n't be gone long.--You come too.

5 I'm going out to fetch the little calf

That's standing by the mother. It's so young,

It totters when she licks it with her tongue.

I sha'n't be gone long.-- You come too.

—Robert Frost

The first thing we notice is the simple form of the poem. Two quatrains, each ending with the repetition of "I sha'n't be gone long.-- You come too." The rhyme scheme is abbc. 

The function of the poem is very subtle. The perspective is second person, with the speaker, a farmer, talking colloquially to an unknown audience, trying to persuade him or her to join him for pleasure. The setting is the transitional season of autumn. The overall tone of this poem is neutral, almost distracted.

The farmer's task is not a burden, and neither is the company requested of the audience. Both are enjoyable, comfortable tasks.

A recurring theme is the number two. There are two stanzas, two lines of rhyming in each, two cows, and two repetitions of "I sha'n't be gone long.-- You come too."

Introduction: The Curriculum

Literature is wisdom with examples artfully rendered.

On this blog, we will be covering four hundred years' worth of American Literature. Our study will feature American writers including John Smith, William Bradford, John Winthrop, Anne Bradstreet, Jonathan Edwards, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Phillis Wheatley, William Cullen Bryan, Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Herman Melville, Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Henry Dana, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, Mark Twain, Charles W. Chesnutt, Bret Harte, Henry Adams, Sarah Orne Jewett, Stephen Crane, Jack London, Edith Wharton, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Edwin Arlington Robinson, Robert Frost, Willa Cather, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Amy Lowell, Langston Hughes, E.E. Cummings, T.S. Eliot, Sterling Hayden, Zora Neale Hurston, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, John Steinbeck, Irwin Shaw, Ernie Pyle, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, J.D. Salinger, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Sylvia Plath, James Baldwin, John Updike, Bernard Malamud, E.L. Doctorow, Mary Oliver, Billy Collins, and Woody Allen.

We will study grammar usage and writing strategies. We will review and analyze texts to search deeper, often hidden, meanings.

We will receive perspectives of those generous enough to give accounts of their personal histories. We will understand the effects of their contexts on their writing.

I do not presume to be an expert on the English language; I am a student who has very limited experience with the world. I can only aim to share the guidance I have received in my learning and elevate my own comprehension of the English language by doing so. I hope this exercise will illuminate both my flaws and my strengths in writing and analysis.