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  • Essay / A fight for freedom in the light of the poems of Hughes and Larkin

    “Man is born free; and everywhere he is chained” is a quote from Rousseau taken from his book The Social Contract. The opening lines were meant to address individual freedom restricted by the government, however, the quote is perhaps very famous due to its applicability to other perspectives as well. For example, man is chained to the duties of leading his family and even before that he is chained to competing with the world for knowledge. Additionally, Rushdie points out in his essay "Commonwealth Literature Does Not Exist" that society cannot help but categorize that which it cannot recognize or explain for itself, and therefore, man is chained to the boxes in which his literature is perhaps classified. In addition to exploring the platforms of war and existentialism in post-World War II literature, authors also began to explore the platform of sex and gender-related topics, as the Man is in fact also chained to his sexual impulses so that his race can multiply. However, the concept of sex is not simply limited to the importance of love and reproduction. The intention of this article is to focus on how the authors, Hughes and Larkin, attempt in their poems to contrastingly describe "freedom" through God's way of creating humanity and humanity defying the divine ways in the new world. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned"?Get the original essay "A Childish Prank" is part of Hughes' fourth volume Crow, published in 1970, or as Brandes put it noted, to be “the most dark and disturbing volume” (513). Hughes had begun work on this volume shortly after Sylvia Plath's death, when he had entered a rather devastating place. He explores the darkest parts of his mind and tells the biblical stories of the creation of humanity. In another poem by Crow called "The Crow's First Lesson", the character of the raven is seen as being loved like his own child. Therefore, God tries to teach the raven to say words like mothers would to their children. God says to the raven, “Say, love” (line 2), however, the raven opens its mouth to only spit out creatures that can symbolize danger and death in today's world. First a white shark, then an African tsetse fly, and finally the creation of man and woman, leaving them all in the same category. In the same way that Blake questions through Songs of Innocence and of Experience how the same world and its humanity full of innocent happiness could simultaneously contain death and destruction, Hughes perhaps also questions creation of humanity by creating its own myth based on the song of the crow. perspective of coping with the loss of a loved one. The creation of man and woman was only partial, which is why we see in "A Childish Prank" that God considers his almost complete creation as a very important piece of the puzzle that is missing "the soul » (line 1). ). “The trouble was so great that it dragged him to sleep” (line 4) and while God slept the raven began his mischief unlike “The Raven's First Lesson” where the raven flew away guilty because of his creations in the name of love. In "Paradise Lost", Milton also paints a picture of Satan's occasional guilt over retaliation against the son of God, such as when he witnesses a glimpse of the fascinating Garden of Eden, but soon remembers of his mission to turn Adam and Eve away from innocence. and lead themto punishment by eating the forbidden fruit. If the raven is like Satan, then perhaps the forbidden fruit is the sexual urges of a man and a woman, for the raven cuts the worm in two and transfers it inside the man and woman. woman in such a way that they feel the need to complete each other. The “crow continued to laugh” (line 20) as if aware of the mischievous and impure act that had been directed, yet it is such an act that holds the crow responsible for the creation of the rest of the humanity. In her article, however, Maity states that "the Raven, although the originator of sex, did not single-handedly bring about the sexual instincts in man and woman – he needed the help of the only son of God, the Worm (Serpent). The Serpent, which is traditionally the symbol of death, here becomes the phallic symbol of life” (32). The question remains: who is the raven and what is its purpose? Earlier in her article, Maity perceives the crow (despite being a trickster character) as a symbol of hope because it is a creature with wings and further states that "the crow 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 a person's sexual urges, or indeed their missing "soul", in order to keep humanity alive in the form of the birth of a new generation. Hence Hughes's perspective on the struggle for freedom: on the one hand, man and woman are slaves to their sexual urges, but in a broader perspective, the act of reproduction liberates humanity from its extinction of the surface of the earth. dealing with sexual urges, Philip Larkin leads his readers to visualize a time when the new generation had gained more freedom when it came to engaging in physical relationships, compared to the times of Larkin's youth when the chances were slim. His collection of poems, High Windows, was published in 1974 and he talks about that very era in his poem "High Windows" and many others about how it perhaps became easier for young people to approach sex and avoiding pregnancy by “taking pills or wearing clothes”. a diaphragm” (line 3). With these new inventions, Larkin described the new generation as living in “heaven” (line 4). Although most readers can understand when Larkin makes such a 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 God. Eden. According to the original myth and story told in "Paradise Lost", after consuming the forbidden fruit, Adam and Eve were sent to Earth with responsibilities as a form of punishment which included childbirth for the wife and breadwinner for man. But how would these punishments make sense if the forbidden fruit was not actually the discovery of genitals or 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" may be freeing themselves from the punishment that was supposed to establish humanity, not the sexual urges themselves, through the use of contraceptives. God was absent in "Paradise Lost" when the serpent lured Eve to her fall, God fell asleep in "A Child's Prank" when he saw a problem between man and 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", however, we see Larkin,.