Love

The Clod and the Pebble

~ stuartl1 ~ 3 Comments

Blake’s poem “The Clod and the pebble” represents two different perspectives on love. The clod and the pebble are two characters in the poem who think they know what love means, and we see that they both have very contradicting ideas. Blake plays with the idea of Heaven and Hell to show his opposite meanings. Heaven is known to be very happy and delightful which represents the clods idea of love. While Hell is known to be depressing and scary which represents the pebbles idea on love. The idea of heaven and hell is to show that love can have two very different extremes, and can sometimes have nothing in common with what another person experience of love is. In the first stanza, Blake speaks of love from the perspective of the clod and he uses very positive and uplifting words. Line three he states “Gives it ease”, ease is another word for peace and he describes it as a very happy feeling. In the last stanza, he speaks of love from the perspective of the pebble and he references hell using negative words such as “another loss of ease”.   

            Most of the engravings are very similar in that they are either all sweet and pretty or all dark and scary. When reading the poem with either the pretty or scary engraving it takes away the idea of having both good and bad love perspectives, and only makes you think of love as the way it is drawn. For example, object 32 looks extremely happy and sunny, so you are only to envision love as having a heavenly feeling. While object 53 is extremely dark so it gives off a depressing hellish feeling.

Sweet Rain by Train

~ grahamd5 ~ Leave a comment

Train’s live performance of their song “Sweet Rain”, which was recorded at the Workplay Theater in Birmingham, Alabama, and included in the album “Train: Alive at Last”, took the mood of the original version of the song and amplified it. In the live performance, lead singer Pat Monahan repeats lines like “come down on me”, and holds notes for a longer period than in the original, which plays on the longing and weight expressed throughout the song. The last verse is also modified in the live version in order to flesh out the speaker’s relationship with his “brother” and the struggles he has had to endure. For example, Some words are more stressed than others, like when pat emphasizes the “love” in “and how I love you” and the way he says “I had to grow in ways I didn’t want to know” with apprehension. Lines that were not in the live version, like “everybody knew that she was just too much for you”, “I know everyone here wants you”, and “I know everybody here thinks they need you” helps the audience focus on the relationship the speaker has with this person instead. Overall, I think that the impact of the live version is greater than the original because of the live crowd. The original version is still sung passionately, but there are empty spaces that hang around the speaker’s words. In the live version, the energy of the crowd is infused into Pat, so the words seem to come alive, and any “gaps” are filled.

http://www.lyricsfreak.com/t/train/sweet+rain_20140432.html