Karla Vedan4th period

Sept. 28, 2011

Chapter 20, … So Does Season, talks about “seasons as having each their appropriate emotions” according to how they’re used (Foster 176). When you think of spring, what comes to mind? What about summer, winter, or autumn? Different seasons give you different feelings or scenes.

With Spring, Foster describes it has to do with “childhood and youth” (Foster 178). For instance Henry James creates a character, in “Daisy Miller”, who is “young, fresh, direct, open, naïve, and flirtatious” and to make it more obvious it’s spring her name is Daisy Miller (Foster 177).

Summer is blunt. You think of summer with “adulthood and romance and fulfillment and passion” since you’re completely free of school work and etc (Foster 178). For example you hear many songs about summer dealing with, if not all, but at least one of those ideas; The Beachy Boys made a living out of creating songs about summer.

“We'll all be planning that routeWe're gonna take real soonWe're waxing down our surfboardsWe can't wait for JuneWe'll all be gone for the summerWe're on surfari to stayTell the teacher we're surfin'Surfin' U. S. A.” Surfin’ U.S.A. The Beachy Boys

In W.H. Auden’s elegy, “In Memory of W.B. Yeats”, “emphasizes the coldness” surrounding Yeats’ death (Foster 179).Through this poem you feel that it’s with “old age and resentment and death” of how the poet used word choice (Foster 178).

“He disappeared in the dead of winter: The brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted, The snow disfigured the public statues; The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day. What instruments we have agree The day of his death was a dark cold day.Far from his illness The wolves ran on through the evergreen forests, The peasant river was untempted by the fashionable quays; By mourning tongues The death of the poet was kept from his poems…” In Memory of W.B. Yeats W.H. Auden

*An elegy is a poem with a mournful feel to it.

Foster mentions fall with “decline and middle age and tiredness but also harvests” and what they mean by harvests are agriculture or personal harvests, meaning finding yourself (Foster 178). Robert Frost’s “After Apple Picking” explains just that shown in the snippet of the poem.

“And I keep hearing from the cellar binThe rumbling soundOf load on load of apples coming in.For I have had too muchOf apple-picking: I am overtiredOf the great harvest I myself desired.There were ten thousand thousand fruit to touch,Cherish in hand, lift down, and not let fall.For all…” After Apple Picking Robert Frost

Foster points out that names, titles, settings and key words help make the mental scene. In Shakespeare’s sonnet 73 he says

“That time of year thou mayst in me behold

When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang

Upon those boughs which shake against the cold:

Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.”

Foster’s reaction to reading that was “November in the bones”, and by that he means, he can feel that it’s Fall but Winter is approaching slowly (Foster 176). So without any descriptions a scene wouldn’t be made.

Chapter 4 in Great Expectations is the Christmas dinner. When you think of Christmas you automatically think of a billion happy thoughts. But for Pip it’s kind of just another day full of torture from Mrs. Gargery. Although, Mrs. Gargery is hard at work Pip says she was “uncommonly lively on the present occasion” being surrounded by family, or fake ones in this case (Dickens 25). So the seasons also effect characters as well.

When I think of summer, I can’t help but think complete freedom, and fun with friends. During spring, the celebration of Easter. Autumn; school and, I think, the best weather of the year. With winter; cold harsh environments along with Christmas. With every season you may feel a different emotion than the person next to you and that’s what makes “seasonal symbolism fresh and interesting” (Foster 180).

Dickens, Charles, and Radhika Jones. Great expectations. New York: Barnes And Noble, 2004. Print.

Foster, Thomas C. How to Read Literature Like a Professor. New York: Harper- Collins Publishers, Inc., 2003. Print.