Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol (revised)

Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol is primarily a parable about greed. In the story, the main character, Ebenezer Scrooge, is shown, by the specters of Christmas Past, Present, and Future, where his life and his decisions have led him and where they will soon be leading him: dead and alone; despised and mocked. Charles Dickens makes a very strong statement about the prevalence of greed in society using Ebenezer Scrooge as first, a warning, and then an example for us to follow.

As mentioned before, this story is about greed, on e of the seven deadly sins, and Dickens seems determined to expose it to our eyes which have a tendency to be blind to things we do not wish to see. Ebenezer Scrooge is the essence of greed, selfishness, coldness, and self-centeredness. He is the type of person who will go not one bit beyond their list of duties. He does his job because that is what he is there to do, as should everybody else. This is gathered from the following text:



Oh! But he was a tight- fisted hand at the grindstone, Scrooge. a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner! Hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire; secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster. The cold within him froze his old features, nipped his pointed nose, shriveled his cheek, stiffened his gait; made his eyes red, his thin lips blue; and spoke out shrewdly in his grating voice. A frosty rime was on his head, and on his eyebrows, and his wiry chin. He carried his own low temperature always about with him; he iced his office in the dog-days; and didn't thaw it one degree at Christmas.



At this rather insulting description of Scrooge, we are very much inclined to despise Scrooge for the duration of the story. This fist impression is worsened when we watch Scrooge in action, for example, as he all but bullies his poor clerk, is quite ruse to his exceptionally kind and jovial nephew, and is most uncharitable to the men who come in begging donations for the less fortunate. Little does Scrooge know that his greed and selfishness will come to haunt him later, and in this case, very soon.

Within in the first ghost visit, a marked change occurs in Scrooge and by the end of the third visit, Scrooge changes completely, becoming a beautiful example of how a person should be, not just around Christmas time, but every day of the year. This is exactly what Scrooge does: " I will live in the Present, Past, and Future..... The Spirits of all three shall strive within me." From then on every one notices the change of heart in Scrooge and believes "that he [knew] how to keep Christmas well, if any man alive possessed the knowledge."

The statement Dickens is making about greed is that it has no right to have any sort of place in society. We are far better off without it as we see in Scrooge's case. Greed is a poison to the holder (it is after all, one of the seven DEADLY sins). It slowly deteriorates your social connections and then it begins to eat away the greedy one. For instance, Scrooge had enough money to keep himself well dressed, warm, and well fed but instead he should to be cheap, cold, and feed himself gruel. He lived in a wretch form of simple. He was gradually killing himself with cheapness and neglect. That was not the only thing that was going to kill him; however, the lack of positive human companionship would also kill him. Without someone to look forward to seeing and them seeing us, life truly does start to lose its meaning, and even appeal. If you go around hating the world as much as you claim it hates you, like Scrooge did, you'll soon find that you'll die a sad death all alone and it will no longer be any concern of yours, but it will be your own fault.

The suggestion in this story is to be giving and to celebrate Christmas every day in every way, not just around Christmas time. Dickens suggests that this makes us whole inside. It should make us happier and even complete.

The Harlot's House Analysis

In the poem “The Harlot’s House,” by Oscar Wilde, essentially the speaker is walking around town at night with his Love and he  happens upon a harlot’s house where is almost entranced by what he sees; the harlot’s dancing, laughing, and attempting to sing with their “guests.” His own Love leaves his side and enters the whore-house. There is a change in the mood of the scene as his Love leaves him and the dawn creeps down the same street. The poem draws huge contrasts between two different ways of life, or relationships, and this is emphasized by the inclusion of night and day which usually have connotations that are associated to the morality of the two different ways of feeling for people.  Each “character” in the poem can be read on several levels. For example, the harlots’ guests and the speaker’s Love could represent actual people or the emotional-psychological complex that arises from the existence of harlots and the men who promote their business.

                Of course these are not blind assumptions. These claims come from the text itself. More specifically from the lines:

Like wire-pulled automatons,

Slim silhouetted skeletons

Went sidling through the slow quadrille.

They took each other by the hand,

And danced a stately saraband;

Their laughter echoed thin and shrill.

Sometimes a clockwork puppet pressed

A phantom lover to her breast,

Sometimes they seemed to try to sing.

Sometimes a horrible marionette

Came out, and smoked its cigarette

Upon the steps like   a live thing.

Then, turning to my love, I said,

"The dead are dancing with the dead,

The dust is whirling with the dust."

But she--she heard the violin,

And left my side, and entered in:

Love passed into the house of lust.

Literally read, this section of the poem can be about an experience the speaker had one night while walking with his love. The speaker explains that he and his Love happen upon a harlot’s house. He hears music from within. Against the shades he sees the harlots and their dance partners dancing, as seen in the lines “Like wire-pulled automatons, / Slim silhouetted skeletons/ Went sidling through the slow quadrille…” “Automatons” appears to be how the speaker views harlots. “Slim silhouetted skeletons” is how he views the men who are enjoying themselves there. It is obvious that the speaker disapproves of these "phantoms" and “puppets” as e continually dehumanizes them. His attitude displays his thoughts to be highly condescending.  The speaker verifies this when he turns to his Love and says “the dead are dancing with the dead.” Even though the speaker tries to discount the brothel, his Love enters anyway and is no more what he, the speaker, thought his love was.

                Beyond a primary understanding of the poem lay deeper meaning that are a bit stronger and resonate more with today’s societal vices. One of these deeper meanings could be that the author represents the differences between out emotional or psychological states regarding love, life, and relationships through each character in and around the brothel scene. All throughout the poem, the harlots are called automatons, clockwork puppets, or mechanical. This can easily be understood as a representation of the harlots’ emotional condition. They are robotic. “Escorting” “gentlemen” is their trade, their job. Being used for another man’s physical gratification cannot be a highly desirable profession. In fact, it cannot be desirable at all, even though it is easy money. Money is exactly why these women degrade themselves and their dignity by selling their “wares.” For some women, prostitution becomes a monetary necessity. So, when they are copulating or what have you, it is hard to imagine that they feel anything for their “employers.” If they feel anything at all, it is probably a heavier purse. The men are called even worse. The speaker repeatedly calls them ghostly, phantoms, not live. How could they be alive? They are devoid of a living human’s morals or compassion. Men like this subject women like the harlots to where they are in life- in the gutter with the rats and roaches of society. By promoting such an unhealthy business, they cannot be truly human- perhaps selfish or a little sociopathic in their not caring or how those women are treated. There is no love in a brothel, only lust. The speaker says this to his Love and still his Love leaves him and enters into Lust. This can represent how lust is often masked by love at first but it is always unmasked sooner or later.

                This poem, section of the poem, if read on another in depth level takes a stand on prostitution itself versus the way you and I live (assuming we are not prostitutes). The author calls the prostitutes all but robotic many times. This is how he is trying to say that prostitution is robotic, or unfeeling. From the outside looking in, those women seem to be functional people but they are empty inside. Prostitution is not a very good lifestyle. The author calls the male participants dead, ghostly, and phantoms. This alludes to the type of men who support this practice. They too are not among the rest of normal society. They cannot partake in a normal human life experience, or want more than their society-dictated share of it, and so they turn to the people who are also not on the same moral standing with the rest of society. The author also shows that Love can be like a pair of rose-colored glasses. It covers up less palatable truths.

In each understanding of the poem, the brothel scene comes to an end when the speaker's Love enters the brothel and the dawn creeps down the street. On a literal level, the coming f the dawn and the shutting down of the brothel shows that the night is for the things we wish to hide from society and the day is when they ids and moral beings are free to roam. In bother of the deeper meanings, the coming of the dawn shows that the light creeping down the street is like a knowing now that the speaker sees his Love for what it is. That one action sheds light on the whole situation and the brothel is not so fascinating anymore.

Overall, this poem on each of the three levels is very anti-prostitution and points out that it needs to be remedied. The author could b suggesting that the way to fix this is look at things for what they are. It is possible that his is suggesting to recognize lust and not to lust but love.

"The World Is Too Much With Us" Analysis

William Wordsworth’s poem “The World Is Too Much With Us” is a rather simple poem. This does not mean, however, that a deeper meaning cannot be found in a deeper understanding and reading of the poem. The second level of understanding, so to speak, is very similar to the literal reading. The implications to be understood from a more critical analysis of “The World Is Too Much With Us” reveals the depth of Wordsworth’s message.

Without reading between the lines, it is clear that Wordsworth is upset with the contemporary society and how materialistic it has become. This can be seen in the lines “Getting and spending, we lay waste to our powers” and “We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon.” Here, Wordsworth is speaking of how people want more and more and thus give away their hearts to not the One he thinks they should, but to the gods and goddesses of consumerism. Wordsworth says “For this, for everything, we are out of tune.” He means that materialism takes us away from achieving a sense of harmony with nature because we take time away from appreciating it by shopping or only being concerned with getting things. Wordsworth is so upset, he says that he wishes he were raised a Pagan so all he could see, all he could know, was the wonder and majesty of nature. This, he says, would make him happier, to see “Proteus rising from the sea” and to “hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.”

The main idea that Wordsworth was trying to present to his readers was that the materialistic mindset threw society out of harmony with nature, or the universe. It wasn’t right or normal. He called it a “sordid boon.” Sordid, by definition can mean morally ignoble. So, throughout this simple poem on the topic of the sins of society, deeper meanings are planted by the context of the poem. Wordsworth says “we lay waste to our powers,” powers meaning our ability to see, feel, sense, be, imagine, and even appreciate. Instead of partaking what Wordsworth believes to be the right thing to do, we waste our time on possessions that will not be with us in people’s memories or in our pocket books when we’ve passed on. He suggests that we should spend more time respecting nature because nature is no longer important to anyone: “It moves us not.” He also says that “Little we see in nature that is ours.” The reason people have left nature at the wayside is that you cannot possess nature. It belongs to no one, to everyone. You cannot buy the earth, the sea, the trees, or the flowers or the sky. Because of this, it had no dollar value which is what people at that time and even now put all their focus on. This age of Materialism and Industrialism is what puts everyone out of tune, “For this, for everything, we are out of tune.” People no longer see nature for what they should see it as. The environment suffered because of the industrial Revolution but no one really stopped it because “the ends justified the means.” This, I believe is the root of his anger. In his anger, Wordsworth makes a slightly defamatory exclamation: “Great God! I’d rather be/ A pagan…” in this line, Wordsworth declares he would rather have been raised a pagan. He says that being a pagan is better than knowing a life where God, or spirituality, has been eradicated, discounted, disrespected, or even laughed at. This statement is very emphatic especially for his time.

The most outstanding problem suggested in this poem is, unsurprisingly, materialism and its vices coupled with God’s apparent fall from favor. With the socio-economic movement called the Industrial Revolution came a psychological to accompany it: Materialism. Goods were being made faster and cheaper and more affordable. Now that more people could have more, that’s exactly what they wanted. As a slightly indirect consequence, people slowly turned away from God and spirituality in general. Praying didn’t put food on the table nor did it pay the rent. Work, entrepreneurship, and business did. Before long, spirituality went out the door. People didn’t have time for it or they blamed God for their troubles. Ironically, it wasn’t God society clung to in tough times, it was material things. The Bible tells us to relinquish our earthly possessions and to follow Christ by serving others. Well, people are selfish and serving others before oneself seems like a silly thing to do.

This was important to me because of the irony of the situation. I am in no way a firm believer. I do, however, defend God in this case. Society’s problems were self inflicted and they blame God. I cannot help but feel that seeing it in that way is utterly imbecilic. Moreover, contrary to my current status of believing, I tend to agree with Wordsworth. I, too, would rather have been raised a pagan so I could see the magnificence of nature and not the dollar value stamped across it by society. The more I learned about society and all its evils, some of which are necessities, the more I wish I didn’t know because sometimes, ignorance is bliss.

Midterm- Analysis of Rime of the Ancient Mariner

          For the Romantic poet Samuel T. Coleridge, the role of imagination is very important in his works. For example, his poems “Kubla Khan” and more specifically, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” are extremely imaginative. Although they are extremely imaginative, they are still grounded in reality, which is where the human imagination is rooted. Heavy symbolism is also very prevalent in his poetry. In fact, in “Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” the symbolism is rather allegorical. A deeper meaning can be extracted from beneath the surface. Because of the extensive symbolism and the real-world grounded imagination, readers can come to a profound understanding of the human condition, or, rather, the human experience.  

As mentioned before, “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” can be read in more than one way. To discover the deeper meanings of the poem, it is necessary to work through the literal reading of the poem. On a literal level, the poem begins with a wizened old mariner stopping a guest in a way to a wedding. As we find out, as much as the mariner is compelled to tell his tale, the detained wedding guest is very much compelled to listen to the story, “Yet he cannot choose but hear; And thus spake on that Ancient man.” Here, we see that the wedding guest is enthralled by the story and cannot get up to leave.

 The mariner begins to relate his adventure which begins in the south. Ice and mist are all around the ship. After a while, an Albatross comes along and becomes a good omen for the ship and her crew. This assumption is drawn from the lines “The ice did split with a thunder fit; the helmsman steer’d us through!” The bird is a good omen because it leads the ship through the ice and fog without harm. Without warrant, the mariner shoots down the Albatross with his crossbow. At first, his men are angry with him for killing the albatross. They change their minds when the fog lifts. They condone the killing until the wind that had come up when the Albatross was around stops in the absence of the Albatross. They are stuck with no water in blistering sun. The mariner describes how the sea seemed to rot and there are water snakes all around the ship.

 Soon, the universe takes vengeance upon the mariner and all 200 men in his crew die, leaving him alone for seven days and seven nights. Only then does the mariner appreciate the beauty to be found in the water snakes, which, for the record, should be feared more than a harmless seabird. Then the spell begins to break. Spirits inhabit the sailors’ bodies and the mariner is lead back to his home port. His ship begins to sink in a whirlpool as a hermit and a pilot and his son come up to the boat. They rescue the mariner. Once on land, the mariner begs the hermit to shrieve him of his misdeeds so the hermit lets the mariner tell him his story.

Then “the penance of life falls on him.” His penance is to tell his story so as to warn others and to teach them, from his own example, not to make the same mistake he did- not respecting God’s creation. Now that the Mariner has told his story, he feels at ease. The wedding guest, however, “went on like one that hath been stunned.” He had gained knowledge from the mariner’s story and he was a ‘sadder and wiser man” when “he rose the morrow morn.” Quite understandably, the wedding guest was not the same person after he had listened to the mariner.

            The second level of meaning is derived from interpreting some of the elements in the poem in another light. If we allow the albatross to represent mystery- or the magic that life holds like when we are children- the haze to represent innocence, the lifting of the haze as maturity, and the mariner as experience, we can develop a deeper meaning which holds an important life lesson. When we begin our lives, we are innocent. As we go along in life, we want to know. We don’t want to be kept in the dark. What do we do about it? We kill mystery. We kill it with our questioning and curiosity. By doing so, we also kill the magic that life holds. When it is all gone, the fog lifts to show that there is nothing there. We are left with clarity because we now know something we didn’t know before.

After that, life is kind of disappointing. That driving force that keeps us dreaming, like the wind for the mariner’s ship, is gone. We stagnate. Inherently, we are much like the philosophe as described in the lecture “What is Romanticism?” the lecture says that the philosophe congratulates himself in exposing life for what it really is but “ after all the destruction, after the ancient idols fell, and after the dust had cleared, there remained nothing…” (Is this quote not reminiscent of the haze lifting after the albatross is shot down?) When there is something to appreciate or believe in, life is a little easier to deal with. We find it easier to keep going. We aren’t so disappointed.

Experiences such as maturing become part of who we are. They shape how we think and deal with things that happen to us. We cannot forget those kinds of experiences, try as we might. It is our job then, to teach by example how to go through life so that others do not make the same mistakes and do not have to go through any terrible occurrences like we did.

            A third level of interpretation can be made from “Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” This level may also be the bigger picture that Coleridge was trying to create for us to learn from. On this next level of understanding, it is likely that the Mariner represents Coleridge. The story is just a life lesson which is, as one of the side notes indicates, to respect and love all of God’s creations. The penance that the mariner must serve for life, could be Coleridge’s idea of the function of a poet; to relate information and to restore beauty into our world which is supported by the line, “In stepped the Romantics who sought to restore the organic quality of the past” from the Romanticism lecture. The wedding guests are his readers. The inclusion of the many spirits in the poem also follows the characteristics of a Romantic. “The Romantics returned God to nature- the age revived the unseen world, the supernatural, the mysterious.”

 In summary, Coleridge could be trying to say that he functions as a means of repairing the damage done to us by experience and the knowledge gained during the course of our lives. He also is sending us a warning and giving us a lesson, all too often we learn the hard way, without the experience. This is Coleridge’s underlying message; which is found in all three levels of interpretation: we must respect God’s creation.  If we do not do this, vengeance will be exacted upon us. In other words, if we commit a misdeed, karma will come back to bite us in the end.