Topic > A fight for freedom in light of the poems of Hughes and Larkin

"Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains" is a quote by Rousseau from his book The Social Contract. The opening lines were to address individual freedom restricted by government, however, the quote is perhaps most famous for its applicability to other perspectives as well. For example, man is chained to the duty of managing his family and even before that he is chained to competing with the world for knowledge. Furthermore, Rushdie points out in his essay “Commonwealth Literature Does Not Exist” that society cannot help but classify what it cannot recognize or explain itself, so man is chained to the boxes into which perhaps his literature. In addition to exploring the platforms of war and existentialism in post-war literature, the authors also began to explore the platform of sex and themes related to it because man is actually also chained to his sexual impulses so that his race can survive. multiply. However, the idea of ​​sex does not simply address the importance of love and reproduction. The intent of this article is to focus on how the authors, Hughes and Larkin, attempt in their poems to contrastively represent "freedom" through God's way of initiating humanity and humanity defying the ways of God in the new world. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay "A Childish Prank" is part of Hughes' fourth volume entitled Crow, published in 1970, or as Brandes noted to be "the darkest and most disturbing book" (513). Hughes had begun work on this volume shortly after Sylvia Plath's death, when he found himself in a rather devastating situation. He explores the darkest parts of his mind and retells the biblical stories of the creation of humanity of the raven", we see that the character of the raven is loved like a son, so God tries to teach the raven to say the words as mothers would with their children. God says to the raven, "'Say, love'" (line 2), however, the raven opens its mouth to spit out only creatures that could symbolize danger and death in today's world. First a great white shark, then an African tsetse, and finally the creation of man and woman , leaving them all in the same category. Similar to how Blake, through Songs of Innocence and of Experience, questioned how the same world and its humanity full of innocent happiness can simultaneously contain death and destruction, Hughes perhaps also questions the creation of humanity by creating its own myth starting from the raven. perspective on coping with the loss of a loved one. The creation of man and woman was only partial, so we see in "A Childish Prank" that God views his almost complete creation as a very important piece of the puzzle that is missing is the "soul" (line 1). “The trouble was so great, it dragged him to sleep” (line 4) and while God slept, the raven began his mischief unlike in “The Raven's First Lesson” where the raven flew away in guilt because of his creations in the name of love. In "Paradise Lost," Milton also paints a picture of Satan's occasional guilt for retaliating against the son of God, for example, when he witnesses a glimpse of the fascinating Garden of Eden, but soon recalls his mission to divert Adam and Eve from innocence. and lead them towards punishment with the consumption of the forbidden fruit. If the raven resembles Satan, then the forbidden fruit is perhaps the sexual impulse of man and woman because the raven cuts the worm in half and transfers it into man and woman.woman in such a way that they feel the need to complement each other. The “crow continued to laugh” (line 20) as if aware of the mischievous and impure act that had been performed, yet it is this act that holds the crow responsible for the creation of the rest of humanity. In an article, however, Maity states that “The raven, although the initiator of sex, did not alone bring sexual instincts into man and woman: he needed the help of the only son of God, the worm (snake). The Serpent, traditionally a symbol of death, becomes here the phallic symbol of life” (32). The question remains: who is the crow and what is his purpose? At the beginning of her article, Maity perceives the raven (although it is a trickster figure) as a symbol of hope because it is a creature with wings and further states that "the raven was created by Hughes to express the idea that even a life of great pain and suffering might still contain an irreducible force for survival” (32). Here, the irreducible force is one's own sexual impulses, or indeed one's missing "soul", in order to keep humanity going. in the form of the birth of a new generation. Hence Hughes's perspective of a struggle for freedom: on the one hand, man and woman are slaves to their sexual impulses, but in a larger picture, the act of reproduction frees humanity from extinction from the surface of the world to their sexual impulses, Philip Larkin takes his readers to visualize an era in which the new generation had acquired more freedom when it came to engaging in physical relationships, compared to Larkin's youth, when options were limited. His book of poems, High Windows, was published in 1974 and he talks about that era in his poem "High Windows" and in many others about how perhaps it had become easier for young people to approach sex and avoid pregnancy “taking pills or wearing a diaphragm” (line 3). With these new inventions, Larkin portrayed the new generation as living in a “paradise” (line 4). Although most readers may be able to relate when Larkin makes a similar comparison, we see in Hughes' poems the real struggle that takes place through the invention of human genitalia in the paradise we know as the Garden of Eden, and the story told in "Paradise Lost", after having consumed the forbidden fruit, Adam and Eve were sent to Earth with responsibilities as a form of punishment that included childbirth for the woman and sustenance for the man. But what would be the point of these punishments if the forbidden fruit was not the discovery itself genitals or one's sexual urges that would lead to the birth of a child and the formation of a family? However, the young people Larkin addresses in “High Windows” are perhaps freeing themselves from the punishment that was supposed to begin humanity, not from the sexual urges themselves, with the use of contraceptives. God was absent in “Paradise Lost” when the serpent lured Eve into the fall, God fell asleep in “A Childish Prank” when he saw a problem between the man and the woman, almost as if God knew that his absence would lead to the beginning of humanity so that God could return and allow them to proceed in the name of punishment to maintain control over humanity. In “High Windows” we see, however, Larkin look back on his time and wonder if anyone wondered the same thing about young him: “This will be life; No God anymore, or sweat in the darkness [...] And his fate will all go down the long slide Like free bleeding birds. (lines 11-16). In comparison to Hughes' image of God asleep, Larkin says that God is actually not present at all as procreation appears to have passed,.