An AP Literature project. We had to do some kind of project that incorporated everything we've read for AP (excluding non epic poems). So I chose to do a poem, comparing books to dimensions. See if you can name the books, plays, and epic poems whose titles are not mentioned. Disclaimer: I don't own any of the literature mentioned.
They say every mind is a world
And that is very true –
We are all gods and goddesses
Of our own personal worlds
However, every novel and every play
And every short story and every poem
Is a portal to a world unknown
Except to the very creator himself
And if we open that portal,
What worlds will we see?
A mystery world set in medieval times
An epic poem of great proportions
Tells the story of the great Geatish hero Beowulf
And the monsters and the dragon he slew
By his fists and by his sword's bloody tip
The hero's name gives title to the poem
Who is the creator of Beowulf and his foes?
Homer may have been the god of creation of his world
But his world is home to Zeus, the gray-eyed Athena,
Kalypso, Hermes, Poseidon, Eos, and Helios who rule Homer's children
Three years spent in perilous journey and seven years spent in violation,
Odysseus is finally freed from the sea nymph's enchantment by divine intervention
And so he sets sail for his home lit by his wife and son's love and loyalty
But tarnished by suitors' greed, lust, and impoliteness
If eyes are the windows to the soul,
Sophocles writes the journey between Oedipus's eyes
And his soul, stained by an unknown secret
And that journey is a pathway of events
Paved by the blood of his father on his hands
And his mother's vaginal lubrication on his penis
So, by his eyes, Oedipus cuts the journey short
Shakespeare's mind is divided into many dimensions
And in one dimension – a very dark one – goes by the title Hamlet
Enter a world where a ghost cannot taste the light of Heaven
Until his own flesh and blood avenges his death caused by blood related kin
By this task, Hamlet dives into his pool of insanity
And Ophelia finds reason to drown in it
Now open wounds and mental scars leave Denmark captive
If a character is an author's child
As Adam and Eve is to God,
Can adoption be legal
In the realms of minds?
John Gardner adopts Grendel from Beowulf
And writes a story to his name
Gardner gives his new son thoughts and feelings
Of existentialism versus nihilism
On the first day of creation, a literary competition was declared
And weeks later, Mary Shelley had a dream
In which later, she reeled it from her subconscious
And molded it onto paper and inside her personal world
And thus, Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus was born
From it, the monster's fire has lead to a great blessing
But Frankenstein's fire has lead to a great curse
A picture's worth a thousand words
But in Oscar Wilde's little world
Written in The Portrait of Dorian Gray
A picture is the reflection of your soul
In which a portrait bears the ugliness of Dorian's sin
While his fair features remain like a Greek statue
Retaining its godlike features despite the sands of time
A doll's house is a jailhouse
For the women and the girls
Their minds are molded by masculine hands
Which also cage their spirits and minds
And toss them out when they become impure
For their husbands' and fathers' sakes
As Henrik Ibsen writes in his play A Doll's House
In Kate Chopin's world, the female sex
Is not Venus's mirror or Yin's teardrop
But a bird waiting to soar above the plains of sexism
And when she does soar, she must remain strong
Or else, she will land with broken wings
Like Edna with her broken bird wings
Who falls into the ocean that gave her freedom
Absurdity sweeps logic away into the wind
But Franz Kafka likes to ground it between words and onto paper
In the world of The Metamorphosis but he does not reveal
The tether that gives reason to Gregor's absurd situation
In which unsettling dreams act as a psychological cocoon,
Transforming a man into a giant vermin
Prompting the metamorphosis of his family
Joyce's world is a real city
Built out of real brick and stone
But the citizens are his own
Story by story, motifs and epiphanies
Sew endings and beginnings together
Into a literary quilt that blankets Joyce's head
And the name of this Irish quilt is Dubliners
Earnest Hemmingway says goodbye
To guns, to violence, to honor perceived in war
And from his soul, he shapes his world
With those beliefs as his foundation
And so A Farewell to Arms is born
In which love woven into the fragility of Catherine's hair
Cannot protect the two lovers from death
But it defies a world torn by two halves
Unlike Kafka, Joseph Heller
Does not ground absurdity
No, he lets it run wild and free
Through his mind and onto paper
Yo-Yo likes to sit naked in a tree
Because of a dying man with a secret in his gut
A cat didn't get Hungry Joe's tongue but his life instead
Toni Morrison rejects the Hollywood ghost
History and her imagination come together
To create a new kind of ghost named Beloved
Beloved is the ghost of Sethe's baby
But she is also the ghost of trauma, the ghost of slavery
The ghost of our dearly beloved –
A eulogy to the "six million and more"
The seams that make up the fabric of Camus's universe
With no heavens above or hells below, no stars who control fate
Care nothing for humankind which has no impact on the seams
So Camus's child Meursault finds life's meaning
In the finality of death and in the indifferent universe
That there is no meaning in life, no beginnings after endings
And that is alright
What frightful world has Orwell created!
1984 – A world of thought control by Big Brother
With an electronic eye that sees all and hears all
And hands that posses the mind and even the heart
"War is Peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is Strength."
A dire warning that these contradictions will become paradoxes
Sprung from Orwell's mind as ideas and onto paper as words
And so each book and each story
Is a world unto their own
Dreams and interests celestially woven
In each author's head to create a world
Now made real by ink on paper
From castles to dystopian societies
From great gods and mythical transformations
To everyday people in very real places
All of this can be seen
If you just open the portal
