Poe

What walks on 4 legs in the morning 2 legs in the noon and 3 legs at night?

Answer: Humans.

Brett Zimmerman’s essay spoke of various interpretations of the “The Masque of the Red Death,” in one of those interpretations the colors of the rooms symbolizes the stages of life. Each color represents a particular stage: the first 20 years of a person’s life (referring to their youth), adulthood and the ending years with the approach of death.  When I first read this it reminded me of the similarities it had with the poem “The Bells” which was my prime source for my diagnostic paper. In my paper I explained how the different bells described in the poem represents the stages of life. In the poem there was mention of four different bells that evoked four different emotions which were happiness, joy, fright and melancholy.  Happiness referring to the beginning of life, Joy referring to the stress less years of adolescent-hood, fright referring to the stressful years of adulthood, and melancholy resonating with death. Similarly, according to Zimmerman’s essay the seven rooms which are colored in 7 different colors each have their reference to the stages of life.  The blue and refers to  life and paradise. The green, orange, and white refer to struggle, adversity and sinful stages, and the violet and the black refers to death.  It’s interesting to see how Poe can write multiple stories about similar topics using different symbolism. So far from what I have observed with this class Poe has an infatuation with death and is consistent with the way he approaches his ideology of death and how it is inevitable. I feel like that through his writing he is constantly reminding us of the inevitable. He doesn’t want us to lose sight of what is going to eventually occur. When thinking about the stages of life the riddle that is mentioned above is what came to my mind, which uses the time of day another type of reference making the same connotation. It’s like the stages of life can be inferred by multiple things from daily life. Another popular reference to the stages of life is the four seasons. Spring being the birth of life, summer being the joyous adolescent-hood, fall being the start of a struggle, and winter being the end. Are there any other references to the stages of life that you can think about?  

Marilyn S.

[Great post that develops ideas from your diagnostic—you may be on your way to a research paper topic.—Derek]