Samson Wong 12.5
Story of Poseidon
In Greek mythology, Poseidon is the God of sea. He is the brother of Zeus. Poseidon is a lustful God. He has sex with many women apart from his own wife. One of Poseidon’s woman is Medusa. Poseidon has sex and sleep with Medusa inside one of an Athena’s temple in Athens.The goodness of intelligence, Athena, disliked Poseidon. They used to fight for the control of Athens, the capital city of Greece. Eventually, Athena won and get the city. This explains why Athena places a brutal punishment on Medusa; Medusa is transformed to an ugly woman with snakes on her head instead of hair.
The poem ‘Medusa‘ has notified Medusa’s husband is a Greek God: ‘perfect man, Greek God. Besides, the Greek God is lascivious as the line says: ‘your girls and your girls.’
Mock IOC on Medusa
Carol Ann Duffy is the poet laureate of the United Kingdom. The famous poet is a well known feminist and aims to express truths about life through her poetry. In the poem, 'Medusa', Duffy’s goal is to enable readers to better understand a woman’s psyche by using Medusa as a metaphor. The poet portrays appearance as being important to a woman. When they are aging, they feel depressed and anxious about how they look since men value beauty in women and are concerned that men may look towards other women once the beauty begins to fade. Medusa herself personifies a woman’s jealousy born from neurosis.
The neuroticism is demonstrated by the varied meter and length of lines. The lines’ lengths are differentiate between three syllables such as ‘spattered down’, to eleven syllables such as ‘which turned the hairs on my head to filthy snakes’, in the poem. This illustrates narrator’s instability of mind as she throws out her thoughts furiously and erratically. Emotion is controlling Medusa; jealousy is taking over Medusa.
The pattern of three in the poem’s first line, ‘A suspicion, a doubt, a jealousy’, shows the rising of Medusa’s emotions. This builds up Medusa’s doubt. The doubt shapes into jealousy at the end of the first line. The third line in the first stanza is the longest in the poem. The length of the line might represent the time taken for the transformation. The poet uses the word ‘snakes’ as the hair tendril recall the snake in the bible, Garden of Eden. The animal that impels Eve to act sinfully. Medusa’s snake hair is the symbol of hissing and spitting of Medusa’s thoughts. The words with sibilant ‘s’ sounds in this stanza create an onomatopoeia of the woman’s angry disgust. One line is shorter than the others in this stanza. This shows Medusa’s mind: she is missing her lover and the peace mind she used to have when she trusted her lover.
The poem speaks about a woman's loss of beauty as time elapses. The poem begins with the word 'bride' (stanza 2, line 1); this is a symbol of youth, purity, beauty, and freshness. However, the next word is ‘soured’. Soured signifies decay. Food becomes sour when it rots. The visual imagery at (stanza 2, line 4), yellow, implies decay again. These images are related to the passage of time. The poet is juxtaposing two images. A bride is brand new; yellow is old. The repetition ‘...foul now mouthed now, foul tongued’ shows Medusa is no longer clean. Her thoughts have contaminated her tongue, mouth and words.
In contrast, Medusa deifies her lover as a Greek god: ‘perfect man, Greek God, my own;’ (stanza 3, line 3) Perfect man and Greek God are synonymous. The poet intentionally capitalizes god in stanza 3 to emphasize the idea that women value men more than themselves. Men’s expectation on women’s appearances are extremely high. Women are dejected by not being able to reach the expectations; they can only meet the expectations for a short period of time during their golden age.
Medusa is concerned her lover will cheat on her. As the poem states:‘but I know you’ll go, betray me, stray from home’ (stanza 3, line 4). The internal rhyme of ‘stray’ and betray’ reinforces the idea. ‘From home’ is separated. It is placed on its own. This reveals Medusa is isolated. She is alone without her lover. The metaphor ‘so better by far for me if you were stone’ (stanza 3, line 6) suggests Medusa wants a sense of security. The lover will never leave her if he cannot move; stone signifying things unchanging. The use of ‘so’ as the beginning of the last line of the stanza emphasizes Medusa’s emotional change. The last line implies Medusa has the determination to seal her lover’s fate. The contrast on the line’s length between line 4 and 5 shows Medusa’s anticlimactic feeling when her lover leaves. The visual imagery, ‘shields in their hearts’ (stanza 7, line 2), shows the lover is immune to Medusa. Just as Perseus is directly responsible for killing Medusa, the poet fears her lover will break her heart. She can’t hook their heart for an everlasting, secure relationship. Medusa feels insecure and hopeless. Her hard feeling is expressed through the harsh imagery of ‘bullet tears.’ The image emphasizes the potential damage cause by the tears. The question at the end of stanza 2 : ‘Are you terrified?’ indicates Medusa is threatening the lover that he should have reason to be afraid. The powerful command: ‘Be terrified.’ stands alone in the first line of stanza 3. It is the response of the question in stanza 2. The two stanzas are connected.
Duffy describes Medusa’s experience of transforming animals to stone in stanza 4 and 5. Medusa is portrayed with a physical form and showing inner emotional state. Stone is the feeling for not being loved. The first victim is the bee. Duffy uses onomatopoeia to portray the sound of bee: ‘buzzing’ (stanza 4 line 1) The sound recalls the sounds of animals in childhood. Hence, Medusa’s brutal treatment on the innocent bee seems all the more horrible.The shortened length of the line signals the bee gradually falling clean out of the sky. The alliteration of ‘grey...ground...glanced‘ sounds dissonant. This highlights Medusa’s cruelty. The next target is a bird. Duffy uses a positive word - ‘singing‘ emphasizes the bird is doing its daily activity unaware of the evil nearby. Suddenly, Medusa glances at the bird and turns it to stone. The next line is a picturesque image of a ‘ginger’ cat drinking milk until Medusa petrifies it. This leads to the smashing of the bowl that the cat used to drink milk. Abstract feelings such as jealousy and betrayal are vividly present in the physical objects: ‘housebrick‘ and ‘boulder.‘ The transformation of creatures demonstrates the destructive power of her feelings. The poet does not transpose the nouns ‘housebrick’ and ‘boulder‘ into adjectives. This reflects Medusa’s intention to needlessly ruin lives by turning them into solid objects.
The last two stanzas of the poem is the literal reflection of Medusa in the mirror. She sorrowfully ponders her ‘love gone bad’ (stanza 6, line 2). She sees herself as a ‘Gorgon’, the named monster for which she became. Medusa no longer believes she is a gorgeous woman. The mirror reflects Medusa’s gruesome anger. Hence, the poet chose a dragon, the strong figure, to express Medusa’s feeling. The ‘Fire spewed from the mouth of a mountain’ (stanza 6, line 5-6) suggests that is the dragon’s last breath before it turns to stone. Dragon’s enormous size demonstrates the size of Medusa’s exasperation. Medusa turns animals to stone from bee to bird to cat to pig to dragon--her anger is rising. The animals, one by one, are leading Medusa towards a larger, more strapping target. Medusa seems unstoppable.
The man’s name is not mentioned in the last stanza. Duffy implies that everyone can be the ‘man’. He is merely ‘you’. Medusa’s lover’s tongue is metaphorically compared to a sword. Tongue is a weapon that he use either to charm or use against Medusa to strike her down. The repetition of ‘your girls’ emphasizes Medusa is jealous of those girls who may occupy her lover’s heart. In addition, the repetition shows Medusa’s lover’s faithlessness, and inability to be satisfied by one woman. Medusa is only one of the girls who fulfill her lover’s lust. There are two rhetorical questions at the end of the stanza. Medusa is comparing her previous glory and her current situation. She used to be ‘beautiful...fragrant...young’. She feels these things are robbed by her lover. This leads to her current situation of being the Gorgon. The final line of the poem is placed alone. This reinforces Medusa accepts and faces the truth: ‘Look at me now.’ Medusa is blaming her lover for turning her into a wreck. Her tone is despairing. Additionally, it is a challenge to the reader to look at Medusa’s wretched state. Readers know what happen if they look in Medusa’s eyes. Medusa is probing the readers. Out of fear, the reader will turn to stone when looking into Medusa’s eyes. They are petrified in Medusa’s imagination.
In the poem ‘Medusa’, the poet laureate of the United Kingdom expresses that women are overly concerned about losing their lover due to loss of beauty and youth. Therefore, they are jealous of girls who are young and more beautiful. Women worry their lovers will be taken away by these girls. Medusa has the power to turn living things to stone. She wants to change her lover to stone; she wants things to be unchanged. Ironically, she is the one who is changing.
Society places an unrealistic burden on women to keep beautiful and youthful. As a result, it causes women to become irrationally anxious and obsessed with appearances. Jealousy is a predictable symptom of this neurosis and leads to a downward spiral of self-deprecation, further fueling their anxiety, distrust, and jealousy. Duffy tries to convey is that most women are deeply unhappy with who they are because they are defined by unattainable standards—they feel like a monster, a Medusa.
Story of Poseidon
In Greek mythology, Poseidon is the God of sea. He is the brother of Zeus. Poseidon is a lustful God. He has sex with many women apart from his own wife. One of Poseidon’s woman is Medusa. Poseidon has sex and sleep with Medusa inside one of an Athena’s temple in Athens.The goodness of intelligence, Athena, disliked Poseidon. They used to fight for the control of Athens, the capital city of Greece. Eventually, Athena won and get the city. This explains why Athena places a brutal punishment on Medusa; Medusa is transformed to an ugly woman with snakes on her head instead of hair.
The poem ‘Medusa‘ has notified Medusa’s husband is a Greek God: ‘perfect man, Greek God. Besides, the Greek God is lascivious as the line says: ‘your girls and your girls.’
Mock IOC on Medusa
Carol Ann Duffy is the poet laureate of the United Kingdom. The famous poet is a well known feminist and aims to express truths about life through her poetry. In the poem, 'Medusa', Duffy’s goal is to enable readers to better understand a woman’s psyche by using Medusa as a metaphor. The poet portrays appearance as being important to a woman. When they are aging, they feel depressed and anxious about how they look since men value beauty in women and are concerned that men may look towards other women once the beauty begins to fade. Medusa herself personifies a woman’s jealousy born from neurosis.
The neuroticism is demonstrated by the varied meter and length of lines. The lines’ lengths are differentiate between three syllables such as ‘spattered down’, to eleven syllables such as ‘which turned the hairs on my head to filthy snakes’, in the poem. This illustrates narrator’s instability of mind as she throws out her thoughts furiously and erratically. Emotion is controlling Medusa; jealousy is taking over Medusa.
The pattern of three in the poem’s first line, ‘A suspicion, a doubt, a jealousy’, shows the rising of Medusa’s emotions. This builds up Medusa’s doubt. The doubt shapes into jealousy at the end of the first line. The third line in the first stanza is the longest in the poem. The length of the line might represent the time taken for the transformation. The poet uses the word ‘snakes’ as the hair tendril recall the snake in the bible, Garden of Eden. The animal that impels Eve to act sinfully. Medusa’s snake hair is the symbol of hissing and spitting of Medusa’s thoughts. The words with sibilant ‘s’ sounds in this stanza create an onomatopoeia of the woman’s angry disgust. One line is shorter than the others in this stanza. This shows Medusa’s mind: she is missing her lover and the peace mind she used to have when she trusted her lover.
The poem speaks about a woman's loss of beauty as time elapses. The poem begins with the word 'bride' (stanza 2, line 1); this is a symbol of youth, purity, beauty, and freshness. However, the next word is ‘soured’. Soured signifies decay. Food becomes sour when it rots. The visual imagery at (stanza 2, line 4), yellow, implies decay again. These images are related to the passage of time. The poet is juxtaposing two images. A bride is brand new; yellow is old. The repetition ‘...foul now mouthed now, foul tongued’ shows Medusa is no longer clean. Her thoughts have contaminated her tongue, mouth and words.
In contrast, Medusa deifies her lover as a Greek god: ‘perfect man, Greek God, my own;’ (stanza 3, line 3) Perfect man and Greek God are synonymous. The poet intentionally capitalizes god in stanza 3 to emphasize the idea that women value men more than themselves. Men’s expectation on women’s appearances are extremely high. Women are dejected by not being able to reach the expectations; they can only meet the expectations for a short period of time during their golden age.
Medusa is concerned her lover will cheat on her. As the poem states:‘but I know you’ll go, betray me, stray from home’ (stanza 3, line 4). The internal rhyme of ‘stray’ and betray’ reinforces the idea. ‘From home’ is separated. It is placed on its own. This reveals Medusa is isolated. She is alone without her lover. The metaphor ‘so better by far for me if you were stone’ (stanza 3, line 6) suggests Medusa wants a sense of security. The lover will never leave her if he cannot move; stone signifying things unchanging. The use of ‘so’ as the beginning of the last line of the stanza emphasizes Medusa’s emotional change. The last line implies Medusa has the determination to seal her lover’s fate. The contrast on the line’s length between line 4 and 5 shows Medusa’s anticlimactic feeling when her lover leaves. The visual imagery, ‘shields in their hearts’ (stanza 7, line 2), shows the lover is immune to Medusa. Just as Perseus is directly responsible for killing Medusa, the poet fears her lover will break her heart. She can’t hook their heart for an everlasting, secure relationship. Medusa feels insecure and hopeless. Her hard feeling is expressed through the harsh imagery of ‘bullet tears.’ The image emphasizes the potential damage cause by the tears. The question at the end of stanza 2 : ‘Are you terrified?’ indicates Medusa is threatening the lover that he should have reason to be afraid. The powerful command: ‘Be terrified.’ stands alone in the first line of stanza 3. It is the response of the question in stanza 2. The two stanzas are connected.
Duffy describes Medusa’s experience of transforming animals to stone in stanza 4 and 5. Medusa is portrayed with a physical form and showing inner emotional state. Stone is the feeling for not being loved. The first victim is the bee. Duffy uses onomatopoeia to portray the sound of bee: ‘buzzing’ (stanza 4 line 1) The sound recalls the sounds of animals in childhood. Hence, Medusa’s brutal treatment on the innocent bee seems all the more horrible.The shortened length of the line signals the bee gradually falling clean out of the sky. The alliteration of ‘grey...ground...glanced‘ sounds dissonant. This highlights Medusa’s cruelty. The next target is a bird. Duffy uses a positive word - ‘singing‘ emphasizes the bird is doing its daily activity unaware of the evil nearby. Suddenly, Medusa glances at the bird and turns it to stone. The next line is a picturesque image of a ‘ginger’ cat drinking milk until Medusa petrifies it. This leads to the smashing of the bowl that the cat used to drink milk. Abstract feelings such as jealousy and betrayal are vividly present in the physical objects: ‘housebrick‘ and ‘boulder.‘ The transformation of creatures demonstrates the destructive power of her feelings. The poet does not transpose the nouns ‘housebrick’ and ‘boulder‘ into adjectives. This reflects Medusa’s intention to needlessly ruin lives by turning them into solid objects.
The last two stanzas of the poem is the literal reflection of Medusa in the mirror. She sorrowfully ponders her ‘love gone bad’ (stanza 6, line 2). She sees herself as a ‘Gorgon’, the named monster for which she became. Medusa no longer believes she is a gorgeous woman. The mirror reflects Medusa’s gruesome anger. Hence, the poet chose a dragon, the strong figure, to express Medusa’s feeling. The ‘Fire spewed from the mouth of a mountain’ (stanza 6, line 5-6) suggests that is the dragon’s last breath before it turns to stone. Dragon’s enormous size demonstrates the size of Medusa’s exasperation. Medusa turns animals to stone from bee to bird to cat to pig to dragon--her anger is rising. The animals, one by one, are leading Medusa towards a larger, more strapping target. Medusa seems unstoppable.
The man’s name is not mentioned in the last stanza. Duffy implies that everyone can be the ‘man’. He is merely ‘you’. Medusa’s lover’s tongue is metaphorically compared to a sword. Tongue is a weapon that he use either to charm or use against Medusa to strike her down. The repetition of ‘your girls’ emphasizes Medusa is jealous of those girls who may occupy her lover’s heart. In addition, the repetition shows Medusa’s lover’s faithlessness, and inability to be satisfied by one woman. Medusa is only one of the girls who fulfill her lover’s lust. There are two rhetorical questions at the end of the stanza. Medusa is comparing her previous glory and her current situation. She used to be ‘beautiful...fragrant...young’. She feels these things are robbed by her lover. This leads to her current situation of being the Gorgon. The final line of the poem is placed alone. This reinforces Medusa accepts and faces the truth: ‘Look at me now.’ Medusa is blaming her lover for turning her into a wreck. Her tone is despairing. Additionally, it is a challenge to the reader to look at Medusa’s wretched state. Readers know what happen if they look in Medusa’s eyes. Medusa is probing the readers. Out of fear, the reader will turn to stone when looking into Medusa’s eyes. They are petrified in Medusa’s imagination.
In the poem ‘Medusa’, the poet laureate of the United Kingdom expresses that women are overly concerned about losing their lover due to loss of beauty and youth. Therefore, they are jealous of girls who are young and more beautiful. Women worry their lovers will be taken away by these girls. Medusa has the power to turn living things to stone. She wants to change her lover to stone; she wants things to be unchanged. Ironically, she is the one who is changing.
Society places an unrealistic burden on women to keep beautiful and youthful. As a result, it causes women to become irrationally anxious and obsessed with appearances. Jealousy is a predictable symptom of this neurosis and leads to a downward spiral of self-deprecation, further fueling their anxiety, distrust, and jealousy. Duffy tries to convey is that most women are deeply unhappy with who they are because they are defined by unattainable standards—they feel like a monster, a Medusa.