Capital Punishment and Societys Views Essay -- Death Penalty Capital

Capital Punishment and Society's Views â€Å"The question with which we must deal with is not whether a substantial proportion of American citizens would today, if polled, opine that capital punishment is barbarously cruel, but whether they would find it to be so in light of all information presently available.† -U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall According to the American Society of Criminology, each year there are about 250 people added to death row and 35 executed in the United States. The death penalty is the harshest form of punishment enforced in the United Sates today. Once a jury has been convicted of a criminal offense, they go to the second part of the trial, the punishment phase. If the jury recommends the death penalty and the judge agrees, then the criminal will face some form of execution; lethal injection is the most common form used today. Capital punishment is a difficult issue and there are as many different opinions as there are people. In H.L. Mencken’s â€Å"The Penalty of Death†, and Anna Quindlan’s â€Å"Execution†, both sides attempt to persuade the reader to the their viewpoint of capital punishment. However, after reading the two essays, I found Anna Quindlan’s â€Å"Execution† had a stronger argument according to the guidelines in Joseph Trimmer’s â€Å"Writing With A Purpose.† Anna Quindlan had a more classic argument whereas H. L. Mencken’s argument resembled persuasion. Although both authors support the idea of the death penalty, Quindlan is mo...

Cricket History

Cricket, also called the Gentleman's game, is a bat-and-ball team sport that is first documented as being played in southern England in the 16th century. The sport's earliest definite mention was in a 1598 court case which referred to a sport called cricket being played by boys at the Royal Grammar School, Guildford around 1550. It is believed that it was originally a children's game but references around 1610, indicate that adults had started playing it and the earliest reference to inter-parish or village cricket occurs soon afterwards.In 1624, a player called Jasper Vinall was killed when he was struck on the head during a match between two parish teams in Sussex. During the 17th century, numerous references indicate the growth of cricket in the south-east of England and it is believed that the first professionals appeared in the years following the Restoration in 1660. A newspaper report survives of ‘a great cricket match' with eleven players a side that was played for high stakes in Sussex in 1697 and this is the earliest known reference to a cricket match of such importance.The game was prominent in London as early as 1707 and large crowds flocked to matches on the Artillery Ground in Finsbury. The single wicket form of the sport attracted huge crowds and wagers to match. Bowling evolved around 1760 when bowlers began to pitch the ball instead of rolling or skimming it towards the batsman. This caused a revolution in bat design because, to deal with the bouncing ball, it was necessary to introduce the modern straight bat in place of the old ‘hockey stick' shape.The Hambledon Club was founded in the 1760s and, for the next 20 years until the formation of Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC) and the opening of Lord's Old Ground in 1787, Hambledon was both the game's greatest club and its focal point. MCC quickly became the sport's premier club and the custodian of the rules of the game known as the Laws of Cricket. These are maintained by the Internati onal Cricket Council (ICC) and the MCC, which holds the copyright. New Laws introduced in the latter part of the 18th century included the three stump wicket and leg before wicket (lbw).By the end of the 18th century, cricket had become the national sport of England. The 19th century saw underarm bowling replaced by first round-arm and then overarm bowling. Organisation of the game at county level led to the creation of the county clubs, starting with Sussex CCC in 1839, which ultimately formed the official County Championship in 1890. The expansion of the British Empire had been instrumental in spreading the game overseas and by the middle of the 19th century it had become well established in India, North America, the Caribbean, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand.In 1844, the first international cricket match took place between the United States and Canada, although neither has ever been ranked as a Test-playing nation). Today, the game's governing body, the ICC, has 104 membe r countries. With its greatest popularity in the Test playing countries, cricket is the world's second most popular sport after Association football. A cricket match is played on a cricket field at the centre of which is a pitch. The match is contested between two teams of eleven players each.One team bats, trying to score as many runs as possible without being dismissed or getting ‘out' while the other team bowls and fields, trying to dismiss the other team's batsmen and limit the runs being scored. When the batting team has used all its available overs or has no remaining batsmen, the roles become reversed and it is now the fielding team's turn to bat and try to outscore the opposition. There are several variations in the length of a game of cricket. In professional cricket this ranges from a limit of 20 overs per side (Twenty20) to a game played over 5 days (Test cricket).Depending on the form of the match being played, there are different rules that govern how a game is wo n, lost, drawn or tied. Generally, cricket can be divided between matches in which the teams have two innings apiece and those in which they have a single innings each. The former, known as first- class cricket, has a duration of three to five days while the latter, known as limited overs cricket because each team bowls a limit of typically 50 overs, has a planned duration of one day only. Typically, two-innings matches have at least six hours of playing time each day.Limited overs match often last six hours or more. There are usually formal intervals on each day for lunch and tea with brief informal breaks for drinks. There is also a short interval between innings. Test cricket is the highest standard of first-class cricket. A Test match is an international fixture between teams representing those countries that are Full Members of the ICC. Teams in Test cricket, first- class cricket and club cricket wear traditional white uniforms and use red cricket balls.Test matches between two teams are usually played in a group of matches called a â€Å"series†. Matches last up to five days and a series normally consists of three to five matches. Test matches that are not finished within the allotted time are drawn. Test cricket is deemed to have begun with two matches between Australia and England in the 1876-77 Australian season. Subsequently, eight other national teams have achieved Test status: South Africa (1889), West Indies (1928), New Zealand (1929), India (1932), Pakistan (1952), Sri Lanka (1982), Zimbabwe (1992) and Bangladesh (2000).Zimbabwe subsequently suspended its Test status in 2006 due to its inability to compete against other Test teams and has yet to resume playing Test cricket. Welsh players are eligible to play for England, which is in effect an England and Wales team. The West Indies team comprises players from numerous states in the Caribbean, most notably Barbados, Guyana, Jamaica, Trinidad & Tobago, the Leeward Islands and the Windward Is lands. In a one day match, each match is scheduled for completion in a single day.It is the most common form of limited overs cricket played on an international level. Each team plays one innings only and faces a limited number of overs, usually a maximum of 50. Standard limited overs cricket was introduced in England in the 1963 season in the form of a knockout cup contested by the first-class county clubs. The concept was gradually introduced to the other major cricket countries and the first limited overs international was played in 1971. In 1975, the first Cricket World Cup took place in England.Limited overs cricket has seen various innovations including the use of multi-coloured kit and floodlit matches using a white ball. Twenty20 is a new variant of limited overs itself with the purpose being to complete the match within about three hours, usually in an evening session. The original idea, when the concept was introduced in England in 2003, was to provide workers with an even ing entertainment. It has been commercially successful and has been adopted internationally. The inaugural Twenty20 World Championship was held in 2007 and won by India.Subsequently, many domestic Twenty20 leagues were born which include the Indian Cricket League, the Indian Premier League and the Twenty20 Champions League. The International Cricket Council (ICC), which has its headquarters in Dubai, is the international governing body of cricket. It was founded as the Imperial Cricket Conference in 1909 by representatives from England, Australia and South Africa, renamed the International Cricket Conference in 1965, and took up its current name in 1989.The ICC has 104 members: 10 Full Members that play official Test matches, 34 Associate Members, and 60 Affiliate Members. The Full Members are the governing bodies for cricket in a country or associated countries. All Full Member nations are automatically qualified to play ODIs and Twenty20 Internationals. They are Australia, Banglad esh, England, India, New Zealand, Pakistan, South Africa, Sri Lanka, West Indies and Zimbabwe. The associate and affiliate teams who currently hold ODI and T20I status are Afghanistan, Canada, Ireland, Kenya, Netherlands, and Scotland.

Public Police and Private Security

The public police industry has never had a close relationship with the private security profession. Public police officers have typically viewed private security as â€Å"law enforcement wanna-bes† (p. 247, Clifford, 2004). Private security is viewed this way because the training requirements are different and in many ways less extensive than what is required of public police officers (Australian Institute of Criminology, 1998). This has been a controversial issue in the past but in recent years has been changing for the better.Private and public security agencies have begun to bridge the gaps between the two industries. Private security professionals have been given a bad reputation in the past because of the many abuses of power and the misunderstandings of the main goals of private security. Take for example, Allan Pinkerton started his own security firm in the 1800s and was not very well liked by many for the program he devised to protect railroad companies from internal t hreats (Clifford, 2004). Many people thought he and his company were out to get them which brought about negative feelings toward him.This very same feeling that security companies are out to get people is still alive today and some security professionals are even less respected today. Many people view private security in a negative light because they believe them to be minimum wage help and uneducated. This feeling toward private security has led to stereotypes in which they are called â€Å"Rent-a-Cops† and other derogatory names. Currently, many individuals are working to change the negative image that is associated with private security.Police officers also have been given a bad reputation because of the actions of some people who have been on-the-job in the past. Many law suits and uprisings have been a result of the American people’s inability to trust and their dislike of police officers. However, like the security industry, they too, are working to make the ind ustry more professional and regain the trust of the people. There has been an increase in the training as well as the policies and procedure which police officers must follow while performing their duties in order to protect the communities and the constitutional rights of each individual.The two industries have made few attempts to integrate in the past but this fact is changing (Gunter & Kidwell, 2004). There has been a shift toward increasing public and private security cooperation and abilities to work together in recent years which has been increasing the level of safety that both industries have been able to provide. The private security industry has almost unlimited funding has made available resources for new technology which it has begun to share with law enforcement to increase the efficiency of both operations.One example is Bank of America and their security professionals working with government agencies to provide information and resources regarding identity theft inclu ding strategies and training to detect and prevent this crime from happening (White, 2008). Another example, Target has built its own crime labs in an effort to thwart crime against their company which have also made available to local police agencies to aid in the investigation of crime (International Association of Chiefs of Police, 2012).These cooperative efforts are helping to prevent crime as well as bringing the two industries together for a common goal. Public and private policing agencies, however, have different objectives and liabilities in mind with respect to their duties (Li, 2009). Public policing has the safety and security of the public and property in an entire jurisdiction in mind (Li, 2009). They are not focused on just one property in general but all properties and individuals in that particular jurisdiction.Private security on the other hand, is only concerned with the property or area they contracted to protect. The often look out for the interests of the peopl e or businesses that employ them and must remain profitable businesses themselves (Clifford, 2004). Public police are employed by the government and must uphold the Constitution and funding is done with taxpayer money. They have many restrictions which have been derived from the Constitution and they must strictly adhere to the document (Clifford, 2004).Private security companies are not governed by the constitution and are afforded more freedoms when it comes to their policies and procedures (Clifford, 2004). Also, the personnel who employed by the private security industry are not nearly as liable for their actions as public police officers. Public police officers can actually be sued directly for violations of an individual’s constitutional rights. These differences and others have been the differences that have divided the public and private security industry for years. A good cooperative relationship is what the public and private security industry needs.I believe this m ay begin to be achieved by more government regulation on private security companies as far as employee training and education. Many private security firms do not pay their employees well, they do not train them well, and they hire low class individuals. This must stop if the two industries will ever fully be cooperative. Likewise, public policing agencies must work toward involving private security companies in the safety of the community on a regular basis. More interaction between both industries will help develop a relationship of mutual respect between officers and agencies.

Comparative Paper Essay

The welcome table and country lovers share the same theme but are adversely different in many ways, yet in some they are a lot alike. In this paper I will compare and contrast The Welcome table by Alice Walker and Country lovers by Nadine Gordimer. I will address how they both are written in form, context, and style. I will explain different literary elements the author’s used to give detail about the stories. The two stories being compared and contrasted are similar in that they both are written around the same theme, race, and ethnicity. They are also both written in third person. The two writers Alice Walker and Nadine Gordimer were both expressing stories of racial inequality. They also show the reader that when the story was written it was not allowed to have a white person and black person in a relationship. They also express how unequal it was for a white person compared to a black person. In â€Å"The welcome table† a black woman came up to the steps of a white church and the preacher of that church stopped her at the lobby and said â€Å"Auntie, you know this is not your church† (Clangston 2010).† In the story country lovers Thebedi and Paulus, the main characters, had grown up together and ended up having a sexual relationship. When Paulus finds out Thebedi had a light skinned child he kills it because a white and black relationship is not allowed. He is also ashamed about being in a relationship with her and denies all accusations against him. In country lovers the story is about a white male, Paulus Eysendyck, who is the son of a farmer, and Thebedi one of the black female workers on the farm. The story starts off with them as children playing together along with all the other children, but Paulus and Thebedi were closer than the others. As they grow up Paulus goes to school and brings Thebedi gifts and tells her stories about school. They eventually end up having a sexual relationship and Thebedi ends up pregnant. Paulus is away at school when she finds this information out along with finding out she is getting married to Njabulo a black male who also works for the farmer. Thebedi gets married and has the baby. Njabulo knows that the child is not his because it has straight hair and light colored skin, but still raises him as his own. Paulus returns from school and overhears the in house servants talking about the light skinned child. He then goes out to the living quarters to see it. He finds Thebedi and Njabulo’ s house and secretly kills the child. The author uses imagery, character, and third person point of view (bookrags.com) throughout this story. The author paints a very good picture for the reader by using very graphic details describing everything. She uses character to describe the people in the story. Nadine Gordimer writes the story in third person objective. She only speaks as an outsider looking down on the story unfolding. She does not tell the reader what the characters feel throughout the story. Using imagery she makes a visual image of the characters and setting. â€Å"down there hidden by the mesh of old, ant-eaten trees held in place by vigorous ones, wild asparagus bushing up between the trunks, and here and there prickly-pear cactus sinken-skinned and bristly, like an old man’s face, keeping alive sapless until the next rainy season†. (Country lovers Nadine Gordimer). This is one example of what the reader experiences throughout the story. In The welcome table the main theme is also about racial inequality. This story starts out with an old black lady standing on the stairs of a church. She walks into the church and the preacher says â€Å"Auntie, you know this is not your church?† as if one could choose the wrong one. (Clangston 2010). She just walks past him and sits down in the very back row of the church. All the white people sitting inside near the front starred at her in disbelief. The usher came up to her and told her she needed to leave she just waved him off and told him to go away. The white wives told their husbands to get her out of the church also. They acted quickly and went to her and put an arm under hers to pick her up and carried her out. The author told the reader about the smell the men had on their fingers after carrying her out. It was a musty smell from her under arms. While she was standing on the front steps she looked up the road and saw Jesus. She was excited waving her arms so he did not miss her. She started walking with him and talking to him explaining everything even singing at times. At the end of the story they never saw her again. Many people speculated that she had died walking along the road. Many people though she had family on the other side of the river, but no one knew for sure. The incident was never spoken of in the church again. Alice Walker used third person, character and imagery like Nadine Gordimer did also. Alice Walker used third person omniscient allowing you not just to observe the action, but to see inside the thinking of those involved. She described the main character in great detail. She described here clothing â€Å"the missing buttons down the front of her mildewed black dress.† She described her personal qualities more in depth. She described her eyes, skin, and smell. â€Å"Aged blue-brown eyes†, â€Å"she was angular and lean and the color of poor gray Georgia earth, beaten by king cotton and the extreme weather. Her elbows were wrinkled and thick, the skin ashen but durable, like the bark of old pines.† (Clangston 2010). She also used similes throughout her story. The author did paint a picture using imagery, but this time it was of the main character, not the setting like Nadine Gordimer did. To compare the two stories both authors used imagery, character, third person point of view, and shared the same theme. The theme of both stories is about racial inequality. Both stories involved a black female as main characters. Life in the days these stories were written was not what it is like now. The story The Welcome Table was written in a collection of stories between 1967 and 1973. (Bradley, D). The story Country Lovers was written in 1975 (Custodio, L). This story also won the literary Nobel Prize in 1991. (nobelprize.org). Life in this time was not equal at all. Blacks were looked at as to be less that white people. In most places blacks and whites could not eat in the same areas or use the same drinking fountains and in most cases as we see in The Welcome Table could not even go to the same church. These were called Jim Crow laws. (nps.gov) In Country lovers we see they definitely could not be in a relationship. Both authors used imagery to let the reader see what was going on in the story. They both used describing details. In the welcome table the author describes to use the frigid cold outside and inside the church. She also tells us about the color and texture of her clothing, even describing the greasy hair stain on the bonnet. She also tells the smell of the underarms of the old lady after the men pick her up to remove her from the church. In Country lovers the author also uses imagery to give the reader a visual image of the story. She describes how Njabulo has built his house, making the reader feel as if they were right there looking at it. â€Å"Thebedi appeared, coming slowly from the hut Njabulo had built in white man’s style, with a tin chimney, and a proper window with glass panes set in straight as walls made of unfired bricks would allow.† (Clangston 2010). Along with telling the reader how the hut was built the author also describes the setting down by the dried up creek with great detail. â€Å" It had always been a good spot for children’s games/ down there hidden by the mesh of old, ant-eaten trees held in place by vigorous ones, wild asparagus bushing up between the trunks, and here and there prickly-pear cactus sunken- skinned and bristly, like an old man’s face, keeping alive sapless until the next rainy season.† (Clangston 2010). Both authors used character in their stories. The characters were involved in racial inequality yet neither author said anything about race or inequality in their stories. In The Welcome Table the old black lady tried to attend a white church. Three different times she was told that she did not belong first by the preacher â€Å"Auntie, you know this is not your church?† (Clangston 2010). The second, by the usher, who had never turned anyone away for church, never thought he would ever have to turn anyone away, and also â€Å"whispered that she should leave† (Clangston 2010). The last time was when the white wives told their husbands to remove her and that they did. They picked her up under her arms as set her back outside. In Country Lovers the main character Thebedi is a worker on the Paulus’ family farm. She is a poor black child whose parents had worked on the farm also. In the beginning Thebedi and Paulus along with all the other children played together and it was ok. As they got older and Paulus went to school he brought Thebedi gifts but, none for the other workers and once again that was ok. It’s when they begin their sexual relationship that problems occur. When Thebedi gets pregnant by Paulus she refuses to tell him. It is when the baby is born and Paulus over hears the in-house servants talking about it that it became a problem for him. Paulus immediately goes down to the hut to see the baby for himself and sees that the baby is light skinned, green-eyed, and straight haired. He then becomes ashamed and says â€Å"I feel like killing myself† (Clangston 2010). The authors chose to write in third person point of view, which to the reader, in these stories, lets them see and get a better understanding of what is happening and also lets the reader form their own opinion of the situation. If Nadine Gordimer would have written her story in first person she would have only let the reader see and understand what Thebedi was seeing and feeling. This would have taken the story in a completely different direction. At the same time if Alice Walker would have told the story in first person the story would have been less â€Å"juicy† with details. To contrast the stories, the stories are written in different types of third person, using imagery the authors describe different parts in the story and the stories plots were completely different. In Country lovers the plot was a love story. In The Welcome Table the plot was an old black lady not being allowed in a white person’s church. The type of point of view used in Alice Walker’s story is third person omniscient which allows the reader to see the action but to know the feelings of those involved. She used this to let the reader feel and know what the main character was thinking and feeling, and at the same time still tell what everyone else is doing around her. By writing in this version of third person the story was more informative. Had she written the way Nadine Gordimer wrote her story the reader would not fully understand what the main character was feeling. The point of view in which Nadine Gordimer wrote her story is first person objective. First person objective is â€Å"an external narrator who takes a detached approach to the action and characters, usually to create a dramatic effect, and does not enter into their minds.† (Clangston 2010). By writing this way she made the story more dramatic and kept the audience guessing until the end. If Country lovers were written like The Welcome Table Paulus would not have been as much of an influence in the story as he is now. Using imagery the authors went two completely different ways. One described qualities of the main character and little about the setting the other described the setting at multiple times. Nadine Gordimer wanted the reader to be standing next to the characters, seeing and almost being able to feel the setting throughout the story. Alice Walker on the other hand, wanted the reader to see the qualities of the old lady. She wanted the reader to be able to visualize every wrinkle and weather beaten inch of the old lady’s body. Other items the authors did differently were similes and character names. The only character named in The Welcome Table was Jesus. In country lovers almost every character in the story was named. By doing this the author makes the reader create a picture of the characters and it helps them understand the story line better. The Welcome Table used more similes than Country lovers. Nadine Gordimer wrote the story as if it were unfolding in front of the reader’s eyes. Alice Walker wrote in a past tense type of way. She put different selections of words in to make it seem as if she was there and was telling it to a school class trying to make them think. Both of the literary works are short stories. The way they write involves setting and specific details. They do not use a lot of dialog between characters, which would be indicative of a play. Short stories are close to the being written like a play would. A play is written with multiple characters. They all have multiple lines that describe what the story is supposed to be betraying. There are multiple set or setting changes throughout plays. The setting changes coincide with acts. Acts break up a play into many different parts. They will lead the audience into the next set of events that is about to happen. Inside each act is a scene, multiple scene makes up one act. The way plays are written compared to the way short stories are written are very different yet close in some parts. When a play is written it almost like reading a conversation between the characters with some describing lines to give a setting. Both The welcome table and Country lovers are written in the same form as compared to a play. They both do not use acts or scenes in the stories. With that being said Country Lovers could be turned into a play with the details and characters used throughout it. The lack of dialog and setting details in The Welcome Table would make it very hard to be turned into a play. In Country Lovers the author describes the setting very well. This helps the reader visualize what is happening and what the characters are doing and how they are acting. In this paper I compared and contrasted many different ways of writing between Country Lovers by Nadine Gordimer and The Welcome Table by Alice Walker. Both writers used the same theme, race and inequality. They also used many of the same literary terms. Some of which were the same however most of which were not. They taught us that there is not a specific way every term or type of writing had to be written, there are many different ways to write the same thing. The welcome table and country lovers share the same theme but are adversely different in many ways, yet in some they are a lot alike. Some examples I explained were imagery, point of view, and character. The theme may be the same but Country lovers and The Welcome Table do not share the same plot or story line. Every story paints a picture, yet some paint in different ways. I also described how the forms of the short stories are written compared to a play. Country Lovers was written in great detail of the characters and the setting. The Welcome table on the other hand lacks the qualities and elements that Country Lovers have. Which would make Country lovers much easier to turn into a play compared to The welcome table. References http://leecustodio.hubpages.com/hub/Country-Lovers-an-Analysis Explore  » Books, Literature, and Writing (105,185)  »Books and Novels (16,746) Clangston, R. W. (2010). Journey into literature. San Diego, California: Bridgepoint Education, Inc. https://content.ashford.edu/books Bradley, David (1984). The New York Times. New York Times Company http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/10/04/specials/walker-story.html â€Å"Nadine Gordimer – Nobel Lecture: Writing and Being†. Nobelprize.org. 14 Aug 2012 http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1991/gordimer-lecture.html http://www.nps.gov/malu/forteachers/jim_crow_laws.htm The Welcome Table from BookRags and Gale’s For Students Series.  ©2005-2006 Thomson Gale, a part of the Thomson Corporation. All rights reserved.

Charles Baudelaire

Born in Paris in 1821, Charles Baudelaire has long been recognized as not only one of the greatest poets of the nineteenth century but also a forefather of modern art. Baudelaire lived during a tumultuous time in French history and his work was impacted by a number of political events. However, his personal life was also turbulent: One of the most scarring episodes of his life was the death of his father in 1827 and his mother's hasty remarriage to a general in the French army. Baudelaire detested his stepfather both personally and as a symbol of the corrupt July monarchy established following the 1830 Revolution.He went to great lengths to upset his stepfather, squandering his inheritance and living a bohemian lifestyle. Worried about his behavior, his family sent him on a trip across the Mediterranean, whose exotic beauty left a lasting impression on the young poet. Shortly after Baudelaire's return to Paris, the 1848 Revolution overthrew the July monarch and established a republic in France for the first time in more than fifty years. Baudelaire greeted the revolution with enthusiasm, fighting among the barricades and openly defying his stepfather in public.However, his joy soon turned to disenchantment when Louis Napoleon, the original Napoleon's nephew, overthrew the Second Republic in 1851. Louis Napoleon's coup d'etat instituted the Second Empire, ending the hopes for a republican form of government that men like Baudelaire favored. His disenchantment then turned to despair when Louis Napoleon began an intense rebuilding and public works project aimed at modernizing Paris. Baudelaire was horrified with the destruction of the ancient and medieval sections of Paris that he had called his home. His longing for the â€Å"old† Paris would play a major role in his poetry.Baudelaire's disgust with politics led to a rejection of reality in favor of an obsessive fantasy world inspired by drugs, the exotic beauty of the Mediterranean, and the search for lov e. He was strongly influenced in this regard not only by his experiences along the Mediterranean but also by Edgar Allen Poe, whose writings he translated into French. Baudelaire was fascinated by Poe's evocation of the dark side of the imagination, and he found a comparably sinister seductiveness in the paintings of Eugene Delacroix and Edouard Manet, as well as the music of Wagner. These themes and influences play a redominant role in Baudelaire's 1857 collection of poetry, The Flowers of Evil, which juxtaposed the negative themes of exile, decay, and death with an ideal universe of happiness. Baudelaire's exotic themes quickly caught the attention of the government, which condemned The Flowers of Evil for immorality. Unlike his friend, Gustave Flaubert, whose Madame Bovary was also put on trial, Baudelaire lost his case, had to pay a fine, and was forced to remove some poems from the collection. Baudelaire was devastated by this rejection of his work, which he attributed to the h ypocrisy of a bourgeoisie incapable of understanding artistic innovation.Yet at the same time, he saw the condemnation of his work as the culmination of the different themes and events that had shaped his artistic talent since his youth: no achievement of beauty could be unaccompanied by bitterness and disappointments. Indeed, with this philosophy, Baudelaire shifted the attention of the art world to the darker side of life, inspiring contemporary and future artists to new levels of perception and provocation. Analysis A confession of hopes, dreams, failures, and sins, The Flowers of Evil attempts to extract beauty from the malignant.Unlike traditional poetry that relied on the serene beauty of the natural world to convey emotions, Baudelaire felt that modern poetry must evoke the artificial and paradoxical aspects of life. He thought that beauty could evolve on its own, irrespective of nature and even fueled by sin. The result is a clear opposition between two worlds, â€Å"spleen † and the â€Å"ideal. † Spleen signifies everything that is wrong with the world: death, despair, solitude, murder, and disease. (The spleen, an organ that removes disease-causing agents from the bloodstream, was traditionally associated with malaise; â€Å"spleen† is a synonym for â€Å"ill-temper. ) In contrast, the ideal represents a transcendence over the harsh reality of spleen, where love is possible and the senses are united in ecstasy. The ideal is primarily an escape of reality through wine, opium, travel, and passion. Dulling the harsh impact of one's failure and regrets, the ideal is an imagined state of happiness, ecstasy, and voluptuousness where time and death have no place. Baudelaire often uses erotic imagery to convey the impassioned feeling of the ideal. However, the speaker is consistently disappointed as spleen again takes up its reign. Read also Edgar Allan Poe DrugsHe is endlessly confronted with the fear of death, the failure of his will, and the suffocation of his spirit. Yet even as the poem's speaker is thwarted by spleen, Baudelaire himself never desists in his attempt to make the bizarre beautiful, an attempt perfectly expressed by the juxtaposition of his two worlds. As in the poem â€Å"Carrion,† the decomposing flesh has not only artistic value but inspires the poet to render it beautifully. Women are Baudelaire's main source of symbolism, often serving as an intermediary between the ideal and spleen.Thus, while the speaker must run his hands through a woman's hair in order to conjure up his ideal world, he later compares his lover to a decomposing animal, reminding her that one day she will be kissing worms instead of him. His lover is both his muse, providing ephemeral perfection, and a curse, condemning him to unrequited love and an early death. Women, thus, embody both what Baudelaire called th e elevation toward God and what he referred to as the gradual descent toward Satan: They are luminous guides of his imagination but also monstrous vampires that intensify his sense of spleen, or ill temper.The result is a moderate misogyny: Baudelaire associates women with nature; thus, his attempt to capture the poetry of the artificial necessarily denied women a positive role in his artistic vision. Baudelaire's poetry also obsessively evokes the presence of death. In â€Å"To a Passerby,† a possible love interest turns out to be a menacing death. Female demons, vampires, and monsters also consistently remind the speaker of his mortality. However, the passing of time, especially in the form of a newly remodeled Paris, isolates the speaker and makes him feel alienated from society.This theme of alienation leaves the speaker alone to the horrific contemplation of himself and the hopes of a consoling death. Baudelaire further emphasizes the proximity of death through his relia nce on religious imagery and fantasy. He earnestly believes that Satan controls his everyday actions, making sin a depressing reminder of his lack of free will and eventual death. Finally, elements of fantastical horror–from ghosts to bats to black cats– amplify the destructive force of the spleen on the mind.Baudelaire was inspired by Edgar Allen Poe's Tales of Mystery and Imagination, and he saw Poe's use of fantasy as a way of emphasizing the mystery and tragedy of human existence. For example, Baudelaire's three different poems about black cats express what he saw as the taunting ambiguity of women. Moreover, the presence of tortured demons and phantoms make the possibility of death more immediate to the speaker, prefiguring the fear and isolation death will bring. Summary Baudelaire famously begins The Flowers of Evil by personally addressing his reader as a partner in the creation of his poetry: â€Å"Hypocrite reader–my likeness–my brother! In â⠂¬Å"To the Reader,† the speaker evokes a world filled with decay, sin, and hypocrisy, and dominated by Satan. He claims that it is the Devil and not God who controls our actions with puppet strings, â€Å"vaporizing† our free will. Instinctively drawn toward hell, humans are nothing but instruments of death, â€Å"more ugly, evil, and fouler† than any monster or demon. The speaker claims that he and the reader complete this image of humanity: One side of humanity (the reader) reaches for fantasy and false honesty, while the other (the speaker) exposes the boredom of modern life.The speaker continues to rely on contradictions between beauty and unsightliness in â€Å"The Albatross. † This poem relates how sailors enjoy trapping and mocking giant albatrosses that are too weak to escape. Calling these birds â€Å"captive kings,† the speaker marvels at their ugly awkwardness on land compared to their graceful command of the skies. Just as in the introdu ctory poem, the speaker compares himself to the fallen image of the albatross, observing that poets are likewise exiled and ridiculed on earth. The beauty they have seen in the sky makes no sense to the teasing crowd: â€Å"Their giant wings keep them from walking. Many other poems also address the role of the poet. In â€Å"Benediction,† he says: â€Å"I know that You hold a place for the Poet / In the ranks of the blessed and the saint's legions, / That You invite him to an eternal festival / Of thrones, of virtues, of dominations. † This divine power is also a dominant theme in â€Å"Elevation,† in which the speaker's godlike ascendancy to the heavens is compared to the poet's omniscient and paradoxical power to understand the silence of flowers and mutes. His privileged position to savor the secrets of the world allows him to create and define beauty.In conveying the â€Å"power of the poet,† the speaker relies on the language of the mythically subli me and on spiritual exoticism. The godlike aviation of the speaker's spirit in â€Å"Elevation† becomes the artistry of Apollo and the fertility of Sybille in â€Å"I love the Naked Ages. † He then travels back in time, rejecting reality and the material world, and conjuring up the spirits of Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Rembrandt, and Hercules in â€Å"The Beacons. † The power of the poet allows the speaker to invoke sensations from the reader that correspond to the works of each artistic figure.Thus, he uses this power–his imagination– to create beacons that, like â€Å"divine opium,† illuminate a mythical world that mortals, â€Å"lost in the wide woods,† cannot usually see. After first evoking the accomplishments of great artists, the speaker proposes a voyage to a mythical world of his own creation. He first summons up â€Å"Languorous Asia and passionate Africa† in the poem â€Å"The Head of Hair. † Running his fingers through a woman's hair allows the speaker to create and travel to an exotic land of freedom and happiness.In â€Å"Exotic Perfume,† a woman's scent allows the speaker to evoke â€Å"A lazy island where nature produces / Singular tress and savory fruits. † The image of the perfect woman is then an intermediary to an ideal world in â€Å"Invitation to a Voyage,† where â€Å"scents of amber† and â€Å"oriental splendor† capture the speaker's imagination. Together with his female companion, the speaker expresses the power of the poet to create an idyllic setting just for them: â€Å"There, all is nothing but beauty and elegance, / Luxury, calm and voluptuousness. † FormBaudelaire was a classically trained poet and as a result, his poems follow traditional poetic structures and rhyme schemes (ABAB or AABB). Yet Baudelaire also wanted to provoke his contemporary readers, breaking with traditional style when it would best suit his poetry's overall effect. For example, in â€Å"Exotic Perfume,† he contrasted traditional meter (which contains a break after every fifth syllable in a ten-syllable line) with enjambment in the first quatrain. The result is an amplified image of light: Baudelaire evokes the ecstasy of this image by juxtaposing it with he calm regularity of the rhythm in the beginning of the poem. Other departures from tradition include Baudelaire's habit of conveying ecstasy with exclamation points, and of expressing the accessibility of happiness with the indicative present and future verb tenses, both of which function to enhance his poetry's expressive tone. Moreover, none of his innovations came at the cost of formal beauty: Baudelaire's poetry has often been described as the most musical and melodious poetry in the French language. Commentary The Flowers of Evil evokes a world of paradox already implicit in the contrast of the title.The word â€Å"evil† (the French word is â€Å"mal,â₠¬  meaning both evil and sickness) comes to signify the pain and misery inflicted on the speaker, which he responds to with melancholy, anxiety, and a fear of death. But for Baudelaire, there is also something seductive about evil. Thus, while writing The Flowers of Evil, Baudelaire often said that his intent was to extract beauty from evil. Unlike traditional poets who had only focused on the simplistically pretty, Baudelaire chose to fuel his language with horror, sin, and the macabre.The speaker describes this duality in the introductory poem, in which he explains that he and the reader form two sides of the same coin. Together, they play out what Baudelaire called the tragedy of man's â€Å"twoness. † He saw existence itself as paradoxical, each man feeling two simultaneous inclinations: one toward the grace and elevation of God, the other an animalistic descent toward Satan. Just like the physical beauty of flowers intertwined with the abstract threat of evil, Baudelair e felt that one extreme could not exist without the other.Baudelaire struggled with his Catholicism his whole life and, thus, made religion a prevalent theme in his poetry. His language is steeped in biblical imagery, from the wrath of Satan, to the crucifixion, to the Fall of Adam and Eve. He was obsessed with Original Sin, lamenting the loss of his free will and projecting his sense of guilt onto images of women. Yet in the first part of the â€Å"Spleen and Ideal† section, Baudelaire emphasizes the harmony and perfection of an ideal world through his special closeness to God: He first compares himself to a divine and martyred creature in â€Å"TheAlbatross† and then gives himself divine powers in â€Å"Elevation,† combining words like â€Å"infinity,† â€Å"immensity,† â€Å"divine,† and â€Å"hover. † The speaker also has an extraordinary power to create, weaving together abstract paradises with powerful human experiences to form an ideal world. For example, in â€Å"Correspondences,† the speaker evokes â€Å"amber, musk, benzoin and incense / That sing, transporting the soul and sense. † He not only has the power to give voice to things that are silent but also relies on images of warmth, luxury, and pleasure to call upon and empower the reader's senses.In â€Å"Exotic Perfume,† the theme of the voyage is made possible by closing one's eyes and â€Å"breathing in the warm scent† of a woman's breasts. In effect, reading Baudelaire means feeling Baudelaire: The profusion of pleasure-inducing representations of heat, sound, and scent suggest that happiness involves a joining of the senses. This first section is devoted exclusively to the â€Å"ideal,† and Baudelaire relies on the abstraction of myth to convey the escape from reality and drift into nostalgia that the ideal represents. This theme recalls the poet's own flight from the corruption of Paris with his trip along the Mediterranean.In â€Å"The Head of Hair,† the speaker indeterminately refers to â€Å"Languorous Africa and passionate Asia,† whose abstract presence further stimulates the reader's imagination with the mythical symbolism of â€Å"sea,† â€Å"ocean,† â€Å"sky,† and â€Å"oasis. † The figure of women further contributes to this ideal world as an intermediary to happiness. The speaker must either breathe in a woman's scent, caress her hair, or otherwise engage with her presence in order to conjure up the paradise he seeks. His fervent ecstasy in this poem derives from the sensual presence of his lover: â€Å"The world†¦ o my love! wims on your fragrance. † Spleen and Ideal, Part I Summary Baudelaire famously begins The Flowers of Evil by personally addressing his reader as a partner in the creation of his poetry: â€Å"Hypocrite reader–my likeness–my brother! † In â€Å"To the Reader,† the speaker evok es a world filled with decay, sin, and hypocrisy, and dominated by Satan. He claims that it is the Devil and not God who controls our actions with puppet strings, â€Å"vaporizing† our free will. Instinctively drawn toward hell, humans are nothing but instruments of death, â€Å"more ugly, evil, and fouler† than any monster or demon.The speaker claims that he and the reader complete this image of humanity: One side of humanity (the reader) reaches for fantasy and false honesty, while the other (the speaker) exposes the boredom of modern life. The speaker continues to rely on contradictions between beauty and unsightliness in â€Å"The Albatross. † This poem relates how sailors enjoy trapping and mocking giant albatrosses that are too weak to escape. Calling these birds â€Å"captive kings,† the speaker marvels at their ugly awkwardness on land compared to their graceful command of the skies.Just as in the introductory poem, the speaker compares himself to the fallen image of the albatross, observing that poets are likewise exiled and ridiculed on earth. The beauty they have seen in the sky makes no sense to the teasing crowd: â€Å"Their giant wings keep them from walking. † Many other poems also address the role of the poet. In â€Å"Benediction,† he says: â€Å"I know that You hold a place for the Poet / In the ranks of the blessed and the saint's legions, / That You invite him to an eternal festival / Of thrones, of virtues, of dominations. This divine power is also a dominant theme in â€Å"Elevation,† in which the speaker's godlike ascendancy to the heavens is compared to the poet's omniscient and paradoxical power to understand the silence of flowers and mutes. His privileged position to savor the secrets of the world allows him to create and define beauty. In conveying the â€Å"power of the poet,† the speaker relies on the language of the mythically sublime and on spiritual exoticism. The godlike aviation of the speaker's spirit in â€Å"Elevation† becomes the artistry of Apollo and the fertility of Sybille in â€Å"I love the Naked Ages. He then travels back in time, rejecting reality and the material world, and conjuring up the spirits of Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Rembrandt, and Hercules in â€Å"The Beacons. † The power of the poet allows the speaker to invoke sensations from the reader that correspond to the works of each artistic figure. Thus, he uses this power–his imagination– to create beacons that, like â€Å"divine opium,† illuminate a mythical world that mortals, â€Å"lost in the wide woods,† cannot usually see. After first evoking the accomplishments of great artists, the speaker proposes a voyage to a mythical world of his own creation.He first summons up â€Å"Languorous Asia and passionate Africa† in the poem â€Å"The Head of Hair. † Running his fingers through a woman's hair allows the speaker to create and travel to an exotic land of freedom and happiness. In â€Å"Exotic Perfume,† a woman's scent allows the speaker to evoke â€Å"A lazy island where nature produces / Singular tress and savory fruits. † The image of the perfect woman is then an intermediary to an ideal world in â€Å"Invitation to a Voyage,† where â€Å"scents of amber† and â€Å"oriental splendor† capture the speaker's imagination.Together with his female companion, the speaker expresses the power of the poet to create an idyllic setting just for them: â€Å"There, all is nothing but beauty and elegance, / Luxury, calm and voluptuousness. † Form Baudelaire was a classically trained poet and as a result, his poems follow traditional poetic structures and rhyme schemes (ABAB or AABB). Yet Baudelaire also wanted to provoke his contemporary readers, breaking with traditional style when it would best suit his poetry's overall effect.For example, in â€Å"Exotic Per fume,† he contrasted traditional meter (which contains a break after every fifth syllable in a ten-syllable line) with enjambment in the first quatrain. The result is an amplified image of light: Baudelaire evokes the ecstasy of this image by juxtaposing it with the calm regularity of the rhythm in the beginning of the poem. Other departures from tradition include Baudelaire's habit of conveying ecstasy with exclamation points, and of expressing the accessibility of happiness with the indicative present and future verb tenses, both of which function to enhance his poetry's expressive tone.Moreover, none of his innovations came at the cost of formal beauty: Baudelaire's poetry has often been described as the most musical and melodious poetry in the French language. Commentary The Flowers of Evil evokes a world of paradox already implicit in the contrast of the title. The word â€Å"evil† (the French word is â€Å"mal,† meaning both evil and sickness) comes to sign ify the pain and misery inflicted on the speaker, which he responds to with melancholy, anxiety, and a fear of death.But for Baudelaire, there is also something seductive about evil. Thus, while writing The Flowers of Evil, Baudelaire often said that his intent was to extract beauty from evil. Unlike traditional poets who had only focused on the simplistically pretty, Baudelaire chose to fuel his language with horror, sin, and the macabre. The speaker describes this duality in the introductory poem, in which he explains that he and the reader form two sides of the same coin. Together, they play out what Baudelaire called the tragedy of man's â€Å"twoness. He saw existence itself as paradoxical, each man feeling two simultaneous inclinations: one toward the grace and elevation of God, the other an animalistic descent toward Satan. Just like the physical beauty of flowers intertwined with the abstract threat of evil, Baudelaire felt that one extreme could not exist without the other . Baudelaire struggled with his Catholicism his whole life and, thus, made religion a prevalent theme in his poetry. His language is steeped in biblical imagery, from the wrath of Satan, to the crucifixion, to the Fall of Adam and Eve.He was obsessed with Original Sin, lamenting the loss of his free will and projecting his sense of guilt onto images of women. Yet in the first part of the â€Å"Spleen and Ideal† section, Baudelaire emphasizes the harmony and perfection of an ideal world through his special closeness to God: He first compares himself to a divine and martyred creature in â€Å"The Albatross† and then gives himself divine powers in â€Å"Elevation,† combining words like â€Å"infinity,† â€Å"immensity,† â€Å"divine,† and â€Å"hover. † The speaker also has an extraordinary power to create, weaving together abstract paradises with powerful human experiences to form an ideal world.For example, in â€Å"Correspondences,â €  the speaker evokes â€Å"amber, musk, benzoin and incense / That sing, transporting the soul and sense. † He not only has the power to give voice to things that are silent but also relies on images of warmth, luxury, and pleasure to call upon and empower the reader's senses. In â€Å"Exotic Perfume,† the theme of the voyage is made possible by closing one's eyes and â€Å"breathing in the warm scent† of a woman's breasts. In effect, reading Baudelaire means feeling Baudelaire: The profusion of pleasure-inducing representations of heat, sound, and scent suggest that happiness involves a joining of the senses.This first section is devoted exclusively to the â€Å"ideal,† and Baudelaire relies on the abstraction of myth to convey the escape from reality and drift into nostalgia that the ideal represents. This theme recalls the poet's own flight from the corruption of Paris with his trip along the Mediterranean. In â€Å"The Head of Hair,† the sp eaker indeterminately refers to â€Å"Languorous Africa and passionate Asia,† whose abstract presence further stimulates the reader's imagination with the mythical symbolism of â€Å"sea,† â€Å"ocean,† â€Å"sky,† and â€Å"oasis. † The figure of women further contributes to this ideal world as an intermediary to happiness.The speaker must either breathe in a woman's scent, caress her hair, or otherwise engage with her presence in order to conjure up the paradise he seeks. His fervent ecstasy in this poem derives from the sensual presence of his lover: â€Å"The world†¦ o my love! swims on your fragrance. † Spleen and Ideal, Part II Summary Despite the speaker's preliminary evocation of an ideal world, The Flowers of Evil's inevitable focus is the speaker's â€Å"spleen,† a symbol of fear, agony, melancholy, moral degradation, destruction of the spirit–everything that is wrong with the world. The spleen, an organ that rem oves disease-causing agents from the bloodstream, was traditionally associated with malaise; â€Å"spleen† is a synonym for â€Å"ill-temper. â€Å") Although the soothing ideal world in the first section does remain a significant presence for the speaker, it will now serve primarily as a reminder of his need to escape from a torturous reality. Even â€Å"The Ideal† begins with â€Å"They never will do, these beautiful vignettes. † Baudelaire's juxtaposition of the poem's title (â€Å"The Ideal†) with its content suggests that the ideal is an imagined impossibility.He insists that he cannot find the ideal rose for which he has been looking, declaring that his heart is an empty hole. The comforting, pure, and soothing presence of a woman has also given way to â€Å"Lady Macbeth, mighty soul of crime. † As the speaker acknowledges in â€Å"Earlier Life,† the beautiful majesty of blue waves and voluptuous odors that fill his dreams cannot ful ly obscure â€Å"the painful secret that lets me languish. † Baudelaire uses the theme of love and passion to play out this interaction between the ideal and the spleen.In â€Å"Hymn to Beauty,† he asks a woman: â€Å"Do you come from the deep sky or from the abyss, / O Beauty? Your look, infernal and divine, / Confuses good deeds and crimes. † The speaker projects his anxiety at a disappointing reality onto a woman's body: Her beauty is real but it tempts him to sin. Both angel and siren, this woman brings him close to God but closer to Satan. He then refers to his lover as a witch and demon in â€Å"Sed non Satiata† (â€Å"Still not Satisfied†). The reality of her tortuous presence awakens him from his opium-induced dream, his desire pulling him toward hell.This ambivalence between the ideal and the spleen is also played out with the juxtaposition of the speaker's lover to a decaying corpse in â€Å"Carrion. † While out walking with his lo ver, the speaker discovers rotting carrion infested with worms and maggots, but which releases pleasing music. He compares the carrion (a word for dead and decaying flesh) to a flower, realizing that his lover will also one day be carrion, eaten by worms. Just like the corpse, nothing will be left of their â€Å"decomposed love. † The theme of death inspired by the sight of the carrion plunges the speaker into the anxiety of his spleen.The nostalgic timelessness and soothing heat of the sun are replaced by the fear of death and a sun of ice in â€Å"De Profundis Clamavi† (â€Å"From Profoundest Depths I Cry to You†). The mythical and erotic voyage with a woman in the ideal section is now phantasmagoric pursuit by cats, snakes, owls, vampires, and ghosts, all of whom closely resemble the speaker's lover. In two separate poems both entitled â€Å"The Cat,† the speaker is horrified to see the eyes of his lover in a black cat whose chilling stare, â€Å"prof ound and cold, cuts and cracks like a sword. In â€Å"The Poison,† the speaker further associates the image of his lover with death. Unlike opium and wine, which help the speaker evade reality, the evasion of his lover's mouth is the kiss of death: â€Å"But all this doesn't equal the poison kiss / Arising in your green eyes. † The section culminates with four poems entitled â€Å"Spleen. † Depressed and â€Å"irritated at the entire town,† the speaker laments the coming of death and his defunct love, as a ghost and the â€Å"meager, mangy body of a cat† evoke the haunting specter of his lover. In the next â€Å"Spleen,† the speaker watches the world around him decompose.He is swallowed up by death, comparing himself to a cemetery, a tomb, and a container for withered roses. Empty physically and spiritually, only the miasma of decay is left for him to smell. In the fourth and final â€Å"Spleen,† the speaker is suffocated by the tradi tionally calming presence of the sky. Devoid of light, â€Å"the earth becomes a damp dungeon, / When hope, like a bat, / Beats the walls with its timid wings / And bumps its head against the rotted beams. † Drenched by rain and sorrow, the bells of a nearby clock cry out, filling the air with phantoms.Horrified and weeping with misery, the speaker surrenders as, â€Å"Anguish, atrocious, despotic, / On my curved skull plants its black flag. † Form Baudelaire uses the structure of his poems to amplify the atmosphere of the speaker's spleen. In â€Å"Spleen† (I) each stanza accumulates different levels of anguish, first beginning with the city, then creatures of nature and nightmare, and finally, other objects. This layered expression of pain represents Baudelaire's attempt to apply stylistic beauty to evil. Moreover, his sentences lose the first-person tense, becoming grammatically errant just as the speaker is morally errant.By beginning the first three stanzas of â€Å"Spleen† (IV) all with the word â€Å"When,† Baudelaire formally mirrors his theme of monotonous boredom and the speaker's surrender to the inexorable regularity and longevity of his spleen. Another aspect of Baudelaire's form is his ironic juxtaposition of opposites within verses and stanzas, such as in â€Å"Carrion,† with â€Å"flower† and â€Å"stink. † Commentary Baudelaire is a poet of contrasts, amplifying the hostility of the speaker's spleen with the failure of his ideal world. Like the abused albatross in the first section, the poet becomes an anxious and suffering soul.It is important to remember that the speaker's spleen is inevitable: It occurs despite his attempts to escape reality. The flowers he hopes to find on a â€Å"lazy island† in â€Å"Exotic Perfume† do not exist: It is the stinking carrion that is the real â€Å"flower† of the world. The failure of his imagination leaves him empty and weak; havi ng searched for petals, he finds their withered versions within himself. The poetry itself suggests a resurgence of the ideal through its soothing images only to encounter the disappointing impossibility of calming the speaker's anxiety.In this sense, the speaker's spleen is also the poet's. Indeed, the gradual climax and terror of the speaker's spleen in â€Å"Spleen† (IV) has often been associated with Baudelaire's own nervous breakdown. The hostile and claustrophobic atmosphere of the speaker's world is most eloquently expressed in the failure of his ability to love. The poet originally intends his love to be a source of escape but is soon reminded of the cruel impossibility of love that characterizes his reality. For him, love is nothing but a decomposing carrion. Instead of life, love reminds him of death: A woman's kiss becomes poisonous.Baudelaire often spoke of love as the traditionally artistic attempt to escape boredom. Yet he never had a successful relationship and as a result, the speaker attributes much of his spleen to images of women, such as Lady Macbeth and Persephone. Cruel and murderous women, such as the monstrous female vampire in â€Å"The Vampire,† are compared to a â€Å"dagger† that slices the speaker's heart. But Baudelaire also finds something perversely seductive in his demoniacal images of women, such as the â€Å"Femme Fatale† in â€Å"Discordant Sky† and the â€Å"bizarre deity† in â€Å"Sed non Satiata. Baudelaire often described his disgust at images of nature and found fault in women for what he saw as their closeness to nature. However, what comes through in the poetry is not so much Baudelaire's misogyny as his avowed weakness and insatiable desire for women. The speaker's spleen involves thoughts of death, either in the form of an eventual suicide or the gradual decay of one's body. Sickness, decomposition, and claustrophobia reduce the expansive paradise of the speaker's ideal to a single city pitted against him.Baudelaire felt alienated from the new Parisian society that emerged after the city's rebuilding period, often walking along the city streets just to look at people and observe their movements. This self-imposed exile perfectly describes the sense of isolation that pervades the four â€Å"Spleen† poems. Yet while the city alienates and isolates, it does not allow for real autonomy of any kind: The speaker's imagination is haunted by images of prison, spiders, ghosts, and bats crashing into walls.Unlike the albatross of the ideal, the bat of the spleen cannot fly. This restriction of space is also a restriction of time, as the speaker feels his death quickly approaching. Baudelaire saw the reality of death as fundamentally opposed to the imagined voyage to paradise; rather, it is a journey toward an unknown and terrible fate. The â€Å"frightful groan† of bells and the â€Å"stubborn moans† of ghosts are horrific warning signs of the impending victory of the speaker's spleen. According to the poet, there are no other sounds. Parisian Landscapes SummaryBaudelaire now turns his attention directly to the city of Paris, evoking the same themes as the previous section. In â€Å"Landscape,† he evokes a living and breathing city. The speaker hears buildings and birds singing, also comparing window lamps to stars. He considers the city a timeless place, passing from season to season with ease. It is also a space of dreams and fantasy, where the speaker finds â€Å"gardens of bronze,† â€Å"blue horizons,† and â€Å"builds fairy castles† during the night. Paris becomes an enchanted city, where even a beggar is a beautiful princess.For example, the speaker admires the erotic beauty of a homeless woman in â€Å"To a Red-headed Beggar Girl,† especially her â€Å"two perfect breasts. † He does not see her rags but, rather, the gown of a queen complete with pearls formed from drop s of water. The speaker then laments the destruction of the old Paris in â€Å"The Swan. † Evoking the grieving image of Andromache, he exclaims: â€Å"My memory teems with pity / As I cross the new Carrousel / Old Paris is no more (the shape of a city /Changes more quickly, alas! than the heart of a mortal). All he sees now is the chaos of the city's rebuilding, from scaffolding to broken columns. Baudelaire then juxtaposes the pure but exiled image of a white swan with the dark, broken image of the city. The swan begs the sky for rain but gets no reply. The speaker forces himself to come to grips with the new city but cannot forget the forlorn figure of the swan as well as the fate of Andromache, who was kidnapped shortly after her husband's murder. The presence of the grieving Andromache evokes the theme of love in the city streets.But in the modern city, love is fleeting–and ultimately impossible– since lovers do not know each other anymore and can only cat ch a glimpse of each other in the streets. In â€Å"To a Passerby,† the speaker conjures up a beautiful woman and tries to express his love with one look: they make eye contact, but it is quickly broken, as they must each head their separate ways. The encounter is tragic because they both feel something (â€Å"O you who I had loved, O you who knew! â€Å") and yet they know that their next meeting will be in the afterlife; a foreboding presence of death looms over the poem's end.Baudelaire continues to expose the dark underside, or spleen, of the city. (The spleen, an organ that removes disease-causing agents from the bloodstream, was traditionally associated with malaise; â€Å"spleen† is a synonym for â€Å"ill-temper. â€Å") In â€Å"Evening Twilight,† he evokes â€Å"cruel diseases,† â€Å"demons,† â€Å"thieves,† â€Å"hospitals,† and â€Å"gambling. † The different aspects of the city are compared to wild beasts and anthills, while â€Å"Prostitution ignites in the streets. † Paris becomes a threatening circus of danger and death where no one is safe.By the end of the section, in â€Å"Morning Twilight,† â€Å"gloomy Paris† rises up to go back to work. Form It is important to note that most of the poems in this section are dedicated to Victor Hugo, who composed long epic poems about Paris. In this context, Baudelaire abandons the structure and rhythm of the previous section in order to emulate Hugo's own style. However, in â€Å"To a Passerby,† Baudelaire returns to his original form, using a traditional sonnet structure (two quatrains and two three-line stanzas).As in â€Å"Spleen and Ideal,† he emphasizes the imperfection of the speaker's spleen with imperfections in meter, isolating the words â€Å"Raising† and â€Å"Me† at the beginning of their respective lines. Commentary Baudelaire was deeply affected by the rebuilding of Paris after the r evolution of 1848. Begun by Louis-Napoleon in the 1850s, this rebuilding program widened streets into boulevards and leveled entire sections of the city. Baudelaire responded to the changing face of his beloved Paris by taking refuge in recollections of its mythic greatness but also with a sense of exile and alienation.The swan symbolizes this feeling of isolation, similar to the â€Å"Spleen† poems in which the speaker feels that the entire city is against him. The Swan asks God for rain in order to clean the streets and perhaps return Paris to its antique purity but receives no response. Suddenly, the city itself has become a symbol of death as its rapid metamorphoses remind the speaker of the ruthlessness of time's passage and his own mortality: â€Å"The shape of a city /Changes more quickly, alas! than the heart of a mortal. † The speaker sees Paris as a modern myth in progress, evoking such mythological figures as Andromache and Hector.Even the negative aspects o f city life, ranging from prostitution to gambling, are described as animals, giving Baudelaire's poetry an allegorical quality. For example, in â€Å"Evening Twilight,† the poet evokes â€Å"Dark Night,† which casts its shadow over the ants, worms, and demons, symbolizing Parisian prostitution, theater, and gambling. Together, the city, its vices, and its people form a mythical, â€Å"unhealthy atmosphere,† instructing the reader to learn his or her lesson. Yet Paris is primarily a cemetery of failed love, as described in

Stricter Guidelines for Concussion Testing in High School Athletics Research Paper

Stricter Guidelines for Concussion Testing in High School Athletics - Research Paper Example Concussion results from a blow to the skull and instigates a disorder of working of the nerve cells in the brain. This means that division of the functions of the brain are for the time being 'on hold'. The indications comprise impermanent oblivion,  headache  and, most of the times, a memory loss about the dangerous incident. Nausea and vomiting are also general symptoms. As stated by Michael p. MacClenny â€Å" American athletes suffer 300 000 concussive injuries on a yearly basis and 19% of participants in contact sports such as football and rugby are likely to suffer a mild traumatic brain injury (TBI) during a season†. The rate of recurrence of this injury, with a lack in understanding of scientific healing methods and physiology, has been the reason to augmented consideration from the world of sports medicine. The generally hotly discussed concern in sports concussion circles around efforts to set up a scientifically based guide for going back-to-play restrictions, g iven that a subsequent effect prior to previous one from a first concussion can have harmful effects. According to Hovda DA â€Å"This idea is based on recent animal models which suggest that symptoms of sports concussion are likely related to acute metabolic dysfunction† Post -traumatic hectic glycolysis and simultaneous reduced flow of cerebral blood have been concerned for the reason of this dysfunction. It is assumed that metabolic disorder, unless fully treated, may intensify the neurological susceptibility of the athlete if a following shock (even slight one) is continued. The second controversial influence disorder and less stern, although potentially debilitating post-concussion patterns are two dangers concerned with returning a sportsperson to engage in a physical activity before absolute recovery. According to Collins MW â€Å"Although long-term deficits in the form of post-concussion syndrome have been observed from a single concussive event , it is typically ass umed that proper management of injury should lead to a good prognosis and minimal, if any, long-term neurological deficits.† As a result, the exact supervision of concussion is necessary in protecting athletes from an enduring cognitive injury or else death. The great amount of concussive wounds are experienced at the high school and sophomoric levels of involvement, nonetheless many trainers, athletic coaches and team doctors may possibly be ignorant of the harsh penalties and consequences that can take place in returning an athlete to participate ahead of time. As stated by Taylor and Francis â€Å"Recent studies claim that the average concussion ameliorates within 1 week of onset and many concussion grading scales also clear mildly and moderately injured athletes for participation within 1 week.† It is the hypothesis of the author that an even slight concussion frequently needs more than seven days to entirely treat. Concussions have forever been a component of physi cal sports; however with players turning into stronger and bigger, some steps have to be done to increase consciousness of the seriousness of concussions and what may occur afterward down the road if sportsperson are not allocated the sufficient quantity of time to get well. According to Lindsey Newman â€Å" The National Football League has already put regulations on how long a player has to stay out after

Lab 4 Report Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words

4 - Lab Report Example In other words the more yeast put in the Hydrogen Peroxide the more violent the reaction; therefore, giving off more oxygen. This is because of the reaction theory (the rate of a reaction depends on how often and how hard the reacting particles collide with each other) Response to Question 3 As the concentration f the enzymes decreases, so does the speed and vigor of the reaction. This is evidenced from the low volume of oxygen produced in tube 3 with less enzyme concentration. As the enzyme concentration decreases, the rate of reaction also decreases because there are fewer enzymes present to break down the substrate. Response to Question 4 More enzyme activity is expected if the substrate concentration is decreased. When there are low concentrations of substrate there is a linear relationship between the reaction rate and substrate concentration. In these conditions the relation of catalase enzyme to hydrogen peroxide substrate molecules is high. Experiment 2: Effect of temperature on enzyme activity. Data Table 2: Effect of temperature on the production of gas Tube Temperature ?C Balloon diameter (cm) Refrigerator 6 5.0 Room temperature 23 12.5 Hot water 90 1.0 Response to Question 1 The enzyme in this experiment is catalase enzyme and hydrogen peroxide is the substrate. Response to Question 2 The rate of enzyme catalyzed reaction tends to  increase with the increasing temperature of reaction medium. Enzymes are known to be proteins, they are gradually denatured thus lose their activity at the temperatures beyond their optimum temperature. In this case, catalase enzyme’s maximum activity is around 37? degrees Celsius. At extremely low temperatures, the reactants move around slower because of having less kinetic energy. This means that collisions occurring between the substrate and catalase enzyme active site happen less resulting in reduced enzyme-substrate complexes, therefore, slow down the reaction. An increase in temperature causes the reactants to have more kinetic energy. They, therefore, end up moving around faster and the movements cause more collisions between the substrate and active site of the enzyme. Therefore, there shall be more enzyme-substrate complexes taking place hence speeding up the reaction. Temperatures above the optimum alter the shape of the active site of enzymes. This  causes the temperature to denature the enzyme. In effect, enzyme-substrates would not be created due to the substrate not fitting in the active site. Denaturing the enzyme would mean that the tertiary structure is altered, which would end up causing the reaction process to stop completely. Response to Question 3. Yes plants and animals have the enzymes that breakdown hydrogen peroxide. Response to Question 4 Maintaining an optimum temperature of about 37 degrees Celsius increases the enzyme activity. Response to Question 5. The presence of catalase enzyme in cells catalyses the toxic hydrogen peroxide to non toxic products that incl ude, water and Oxygen. Hydrogen Peroxide ----–catalase enzyme---- Water + Oxygen. Response to Question 6 Experiment to determine the optimal temperature for enzyme function The experiment would be set up as below. First, set up the water bath; secondly, place a thermometer in the water bath so that the proper temperature is maintained. 0-5degrees Celsius: 400mL beaker to be filled with water and ice 20-25 degrees Celsius: No water bath is required to maintain the room