The Chimney Sweeper and the Road Not Taken free essay sample

Also, Tom Dacre dreamed of â€Å"thousands of sweepers, Dick, Joe, Ned, and Jack, were all of them lock’d up in coffins of black† (Blake, 1789/2007). â€Å"Though his [the speaker] few years seniority have given him a protective sense of responsibility, they have robbed him of little of his innocence† (Harrison, 1978). The speaker retells Tom’s dreams sincerely and reports on certain lines as if he believes them completely. †Tom may weep more readily; Tom may dream of liberating angels more readily; but the speaker reports Tom’s visions as Tom told it to him, wholly without irony† (Harrison, 1978). The Road Not Taken can also be interpreted as telling about a loss of innocence although; it is more about how the choices made shape lives. Those choices, however, can lead to a loss of innocence. The choices not only affect the person that made the choice but also the people close to them including their spouse, children, parents, and siblings. We will write a custom essay sample on The Chimney Sweeper and the Road Not Taken or any similar topic specifically for you Do Not WasteYour Time HIRE WRITER Only 13.90 / page †[Because,] in the poems stated intimation of the truth about human existence, as stated by Frost, is the idea of rut [the track carved out by wheels from the surface over which they travel] in its relationship to the ego† (Cervo, 1989). Each choice a person makes leads them down a different path and the effect of that choice could be a loss of innocence. â€Å"The poem’s persona is no â€Å"spiritual drifter†; the persona is an individual has opposed to a â€Å"loner’† courageous and self-reliant, searching for his destiny† (Bassett, 1981). It is in this way that the interpretations of both The Chimney Sweeper and The Road Not Taken are similar. The Road Not Taken is about the choices each of us makes in life and the direction each of those choices takes us. Each choice a person makes shapes who that person is and who they will become. Each path in The Road Not Taken represents a choice. Most people want to be individual and hope to make different choices from everyone else. The difficult thing about that is â€Å" both that morning equally lay and leaves no step had trodden black† (Frost, 1915/2007) meaning, all paths or choices have been taken before. Each choice changes lives and leads to more choices. The Chimney Sweeper tells about the loss of innocence that happens to everyone. Normally, it happens slowly, over many years as a person grows to an adult. Unfortunately, this is not always the case and sometimes, circumstances or events cause the process to be sped up or slowed down. This seems to be the case in The Chimney Sweeper. The speaker seems to have experienced events that caused an early loss of innocence whereas; with Tom the process seems to be about normal. â€Å"There’s little Tom Dacre, who cried when his head, that curled like a lamb’s back, was shaved† (Blake, 1789/2007). Both the speaker and Tom are children that have been made to work as chimney sweepers. Each poet has different life experiences and those experiences shaped their writings. Surely, William Blake’s experiences shaped his writing of The Chimney Sweeper as well as, Robert Frost’s shaped his writing of The Road Not Traveled. From an early age, William Blake is said to have spoken of having visions. † At four he saw God† put his head to the window†; around the age nine, while walking three the countryside, he saw a tree filled with angels† (Academy of American Poets, 2012). When his brother, Robert, passed away from an illness in the winter of 1787, Blake was said to have seen his brother’s spirit rise up through the ceiling. He believed that Robert’s spirit visited him throughout his life and claimed that through a dream Robert taught him the printing method he used in Songs of Innocence. Similarly, Robert Frost’s life and the events of it affected his writings, although in different ways. † Frost drifted through a string of occupations after leaving school, working as a teacher, cobbler, and editor of the Lawrence Sentinel† (Academy of American Poets, 2012). He spent most of his youth in New England, where The Road Not Traveled seems to be set but, during his adult life also lived in several other places. Each of the different places he lived and visited, as well as the people he met, had some type of impact on his life. Everything around a writer has some impact or influence on their writing. The meanings and thoughts behind The Chimney Sweeper and The Road Not Traveled may never be truly known but there are several possibilities behind William Blake’s writing of The Chimney Sweeper and Robert Frost’s writing of The Road Not Taken. It is believed by many experts and people that knew him, that Blake had a mental illness. Many types of mental illnesses can change the way a person thinks and perceives the world around them. It is also known that William Blake did research on mental disorders and it is thought that many of his theories were incorporated into his writings. †[However,] William Blake theorized about cognitive dysfunction like no other poet of his time and his ideas challenged the prevailing Zeitgeist of opinion† (Ryan, 2011). Similarly, there are several possibilities behind Robert Frost’s writing The Road Not Taken. It has been noted by many critics that Frost was a loner that preferred living in the country (Bassett, 1981). It is also thought that he felt purposeless, uncertain, and possibly depressed. These would be understandable feelings considering the losses during his life. His father, mother, younger sister, wife, Elinor, and four of his children preceded him in death, most at young ages. With all of these things going on in their real life, death, loneliness, and mental disorders, it is no wonder that William Blake and Robert Frost wrote about choices and the loss of innocence within The Chimney Sweeper and The Road Not Taken. It is difficult to know exactly what the writer was thinking while creating each different piece because each person has different experiences that help them create their works. A person’s experiences never end, and each new experience changes that person, just a little. Each person that reads a written work uses their own life experiences and knowledge in order to interpret that work. This creates an innumerable amount of different interpretations, none of which are necessarily right or wrong, just different. What they were thinking that prompted them to write these works and as they were writing will never be known, so all that can be done is speculate upon their intended meaning. Bibliography Academy of American Poets. (2012). Robert Frost.

How to Use the Rack Application in Ruby

How to Use the Rack Application in Ruby In the previous article, you learned what Rack is. Now, it’s time to start using Rack and serve up some pages. Hello World First, let’s start with a â€Å"Hello world† application. This application will, no matter what type of request it’s given, return ​with a status code of 200 (which is HTTP-speak for â€Å"OK†) and the string †Hello world† as the body. Before examining the following code, consider again the requirements that any Rack application must meet. A Rack application is any Ruby object that responds to the call method, takes a single hash parameter and returns an array containing the response status code, HTTP response headers and the response body as an array of strings. class HelloWorlddef call(env)return [200, {}, [Hello world!]]endend As you can see, an object of the type HelloWorld will meet all of these requirements. It does so in a very minimal and not terribly useful way, but it does meet all of the requirements. WEBrick That’s pretty simple, now let’s plug it into WEBrick (the HTTP server that comes with Ruby). To do this, we use the Rack::Handler::WEBrick.run method, pass it an instance of HelloWorld and the port to run on. A WEBrick server will now be running, and Rack will be passing requests between the HTTP server and your application. Note, this isn’t an ideal way to launch things with Rack. Its only shown here to get something running before diving into another feature of Rack called Rackup, which is shown below. Using Rack::Handler in this way has a few problems. First, it’s not very configurable. Everything is hard-coded into the script. Second, as you’ll notice if you run the following script, you can’t kill the program. It won’t respond to Ctrl-C. If you run this command, simply close the terminal window and open a new one. #!/usr/bin/env rubyrequire rackclass HelloWorlddef call(env)return [200, {}, [Hello world!]]endendRack::Handler::WEBrick.run(HelloWorld.new,:Port 9000) Rackup While this is quite easy to do, it isn’t how Rack is normally used. Rack is normally used with a tool called rackup. Rackup does more or less what was in the bottom section of the code above, but in a more usable way. Rackup is run from the command-line, and is given a .ru â€Å"Rackup file.† This is just a Ruby script that, among other things, feeds an application to Rackup. A very basic Rackup file for the above would look something like this. class HelloWorlddef call(env)return [200,{Content-Type text/html},[Hello world!]]endendrun HelloWorld.new First, we had to make one tiny change to the HelloWorld class. Rackup is running a middleware app called Rack::Lint that sanity-checks responses. All HTTP responses should have a Content-Type header, so that was added. Then, the last line just creates an instance of the app and passes it to the run method. Ideally, your application shouldn’t be written entirely within the Rackup file, this file should require your application into it and create an instance of it that way. The Rackup file is just â€Å"glue,† no real application code should be there. If you run the command rackup helloworld.ru, it’ll start a server on port 9292. This is the default Rackup port. Rackup has some more useful features. First, things like the port can be changed on the command line, or in a special line in the script. On the command-line, simply pass in a -p port parameter. For example: rackup -p 1337 helloworld.ru. From the script itself, if the first line starts with #\, then it’s parsed just like the command line. So you can define options here as well. If you wanted to run on port 1337, the first line of the Rackup file could read #\ -p 1337.