Hawthorne starts off the piece with beautiful imagery that takes you back to a time of idealism and gaiety. He personifies Midsummer Eve as a woman with roses in her lap, bringing lush vegetation to Merry Mount. He then goes on and describes the seasons as teasing friends, enjoying the company of each other. This beautiful use of personification sets the mood of the story, he weaves this beautiful, idealistic, fairy-tale environment to show exactly how perfect and gay Merry-Mount is. However, this can also be a foreshadowing of the tragedy that is to come.
He uses very colorful language in his description of the may-pole. He uses an analogy comparing the colors of the banner to the rainbow. Again he personifies the surroundings to underscore the gaiety and happiness of Merry Mount. He writes that the garden flowers and blossoms laughed gladly forth amid the verdure. .
However his third paragraph, in which he describes the people seems critical. He compares the people to Gothic monsters and calls them the Salvage Men. It seems that he is criticizing them for the corruption they are entrenching themselves in. But when he talks about the Lord and Lady of the May, the adjectives he uses are very positive. He calls them youthful, lightsome, jovially. This is drastically emphasized when his adjectives suddenly take a critical turn and he says the priest is dressed in a heathen fashion and seemed to be the wildest monster there. .
His most effective line in the whole piece was "Should the grisly saints establish their jurisdiction over the gay sinners, then would their spirits darken all the clime, and make it a land of clouded-visages, of hard toil, of sermon and psalm, forever."" This one line provides many entities to be inferred. Firstly, this line expresses his view on the puritans. He sees them as people who take the fun out of life, the "dark clouds- of society. Secondly, this line provides the reader with the feeling of desolation and darkness that is beginning to fall upon the merry people of Merry Mount.
"WitchCraft is a nature-based, life-affirming religion that follows a moral code and seeks to build harmony among people and empower the self and others," states Silver RavenWolf, Wiccan Priestess and author of several books on the subject of Wicca. Despite beliefs forced upon people as a whole, Wi...
During the Elizabethan time period, there was a hint of foreshadowing. The Elizabethans, much like today, were broken down into social classes. However, the class you were born in is the class you were to remain for the rest of your life. In order to understand the things they had to ...
Druidism is a mystical religion that is believed to have originated in Ireland with the Celts. Who are the Druids really though? And what are their beliefs specifically? Was Caesar accurately describing them as being involved in human sacrifices, or was he giving a biased opinion in order to demo...
At the center of the event there is a thing called a Maypole and is a pole to locate the center of the festivities. ... During the festivities they dance around and sing, "Little frogs, Little frogs their are so fun to look at, no ears, no tails, but whatever" this is what they say when they are dancing around the Maypole (Bailey, 1992, p 12). ...
The collection contained the following short stories: My Kinsman, Major Moulineux, Young Goodman Brown, The Maypole of Merry Mount, The Gray Champion, Legends of the Province House, Howe's Masquerade and Lady Elinore's Mantle. ...
A Midsummer Night's Dream is one of Shakespeare's early "festive comedies,"" written around 1595-6. Despite the many thematic references to "dreams- and the fantastic setting of the Athenian forest, the play also contains a fair amount of commentary on Shakespeare's contemporary English world. The play's title, for instance, refers to an English holiday custom: on "Midsummer Eve,"" or the night of the summer solstice on June 23, English men and women would spend the night outdoors around bonfires, telling supernatural tales of fairies and witchcraft. The play not only ...
What Shamanism Is By the Silver Circle Shaman (pronounced SHAH-maan) is a word from the language of the Tungus people of Siberia. A Shaman is a man or woman who enters an altered state of consciousness at will. The Shaman does this to contact and utilize an ordinarily hidden reality to acquire knowledge, power and to help others. The Shaman usually has at least one or more spirits in his or her personal service. The trance or "ecstatic" state of consciousness the Shaman enters can be termed as the Shamanistic State of Consciousness (SSC). ...
