This year was very fun. As regards literature we saw a lot of new thing and themes that were great. I believe that i could enjoyed it more because we has already passed our IGCSE literature exams.

This year we saw a lot of things, like war poetry or shorts stories. But the thing i liked the more was the poems about melancholy. In class we read two poems named “Rooms” and “Home is So Sad”. I found this poems very interesting because of how they talked about the human memories. I have always been very keen on psychology, and seeing how other authors work with it was very interesting. I saw psychology as something more emotional, and not so pathological.

Also a very good short story was “A lady through a looking glass” by Victoria Woolf. This author mezmerised me. She wrote things that in her times were very controversial, but now a days its common to hear. She spoke a mesaagw of femminism and of equality of men and woman, which was very interestong because she was very advanced for her era.

I hope next year will be as good as this one! And i wish it will be full of new literature to read!

This short story is situated in London after the blitz. If you dont know what the blitz is, it was a series of bombing made by the german army to the city of London in ww2. This bombings made the citizens be obligated to hide on the underground, for protection. So i found a very cool 360º video, which shows what was like to live in the times of the blitz. Here’s the video:

After watching this video, i could relate more to the characters. The kids lived their childhood throughout this period. And i cant imagine how hard it was for them to live underground for that long period of time hiding for their lives. Because of this, i believe that this would have a very big emotional impact on them, being so young. So thats why, maybe, they have such a destructive way of being , because they grew up with violent surroundings, always fearing for their lives, so they learnt that, that situation was normal, when in reality it was not.  That could explain why they only wanted to destruct things, and how they thought that “destruction is a way of creation”.

In this story written by Nathaniel Hawthorne the symbolisms of the number three is very important to the text. In his story Nathaniel uses the number three as a reference to bible. Catholisim believes in the holy trinity and all throughout the text we can see the different signs of the number three showing up, every time they speak about god. 

Also the number three is very linked to past, present and future. In the short story the protagonist wants to see the future to see how his family was affected by her actions in the past, which i found really interesting, because once again, with a different meaning, the symbolism changed drastically. Furthermore the number three was mentioned in the title. The title could be a way of foreshadowing this symbolism, but also of foreshadowing how the protagonist would want to go from the present, to the future to understand the past. 

This is the picture of the symbolism of number three:

Victoria Woolf talks about the mirror being the true reflection of everybody. In this short story we are introduced to a woman called Isabella Tyson which lives alone in a house full of treasures from around the world. Although she has all this very precious things, she is a mystery, nobody knows anything about her. And she acts as someone else, only for people to like her. At the end of the story we realize that her mirror reflects  what she is inside, empty. 

This story made me remember about a song from one of my favorite bands “El cuarteto de Nos”. This song is called “Habla tu Espejo” and Roberto Musso (the author of this song) sings about the perspective of your mirror. He puts himself in the mirrors place, and he sings as if e was it. I love this song because of it lyrics. 

And i could relate it to this story a lot. The lyrics say “Veo en tu cara el barullo que impera en tu cabeza

Veo cuando la culpa supera tu vergüenza”  this lyric portrays how the mirror always knows what you are going through, and i could relate this to when Isabella was so lonely that she had to cover her life with material things to feel better. The mirror saw that, and it made an image of her that she wasnt prepared to see. The mirror knew Isabellas intentions because it watched her everyday. The mirror was the only one who truly knew her. 

Thats why i recommend this song a lot. You should listen to it, and analyses the lyrics, because they make you think a lot!

Here’s the song!

Rooms by charlotte mew is about life, memories and melancholy. Mew portrays rooms as memories, and moments in her life. She says each room represents something about her life. So we could say that her head is a house, full of rooms, full of memories, good ones and bad ones.

Home is so sad, tackles the same themes as rooms. This poem is about melancholy and memories. Larkin talks about leaving his house as sad. Because he has so many memories that he doesn’t want to forget. So in a way his head is his house, and as he grew older he starts losing this memories, which is sad, and it is represented as moving out of the house.

So i decided that i will represent my rooms. My memories in pictures, like charlotte and Philip did.
This is my project. Each of this pictures represents a moment in my life which was important to me, and which represents a room in my house. Instead of writing about my rooms, i decided to photograph them. Each of this pictures represents an important part of my life, which has made an impact in my life deeply.

When we first started analyzing this poem, the only thing I could focus was on the title of the poem. This piece of literature is called an”Ode” which means “a lyric poem, typically one in the form of an address to a particular subject, written in varied or irregular meter.”  This ode talks about melancholy, and how to deal with it. It also talks about suicidal and negative thoughts. We could say John Keats wants to advise the reader about what melancholy can cause.

As I said in the previous paragraph I was
very interested in the title of the poem, and the reason is that I knew a song that is called “Ode to Melancholy” by a band called Twenty One Pilots. This band is very particular because it has a very different sound to a lot of musicians nowadays, and they also tend to address taboo themes in their songs, like mental health issues.

This is the song:

Their song “Ode to Sleep” talks about death and depression. The songwriter of this song, Tyler Joseph, talks about bad thoughts and how when he goes to sleep a lot of his thoughts turn to demons which torment him. In Christianity, it is believed that these bad thoughts are demons. And it is also believed that demons torment people who are a threat to them. So we could say, Tyler has trouble with demons because he is an instrument of good.  
“But I’ll tell them
Why won’t you let me go?
Do I threaten all your plans?
I’m insignificant”
All throughout the song he tells god, he can’t support the torments of these demons, and he questions his existence. “Please tell them you have no plans for me
I will set my soul on fire
What have I become?
I’ll tell them”
And at the end of the song, it ends with an “I’m sorry” so he is telling God he is sorry because he has realized what his purpose in life is. He discovers that he has to spread positivity to everyone, and he has to address this issues for the world to be a better place.

I could relate this song to Keats poem because John is an instrument of good like Tyler. In his poem, Keats addresses melancholy and sadness and he tries to advise the reader how to avoid feeling sad, and how to deal with melancholic thoughts, like Tyler does in a lot of his songs.