Using Emerson’s “Self-Reliance,” analyze “My Kinsman, Major Molineaux.” Use three specific examples from “My Kinsman, Major Molineaux” to support your position.

Before answering this question, you need to have an understanding of what Emerson actually stands for and what he's arguing in "Self-Reliance." Your task then becomes a project of applying those ideas to Hawthorne's short story and seeing how the two relate.
Ultimately, I would start by noting that "Self-Reliance" is an essay largely concerned with conformity, something which Emerson identifies as a very deep problem. People tend to be conformist, and society tends to encourage us in this. Emerson's vision, by contrast, is a fiercely individualistic one, which is itself grounded in his own particular reading of Christianity, championing individual agency, and one's ability to actually hold faith with one's own values and beliefs. To do anything less than this is, to Emerson, a betrayal, both of one's own humanity and of the divine spark which Christians hold is present in the creation of man.
So, with that in mind, how do we apply this philosophy to Hawthorne's text? (And do note, "Self-Reliance" is a long essay. There's a lot more covered within it than the short treatment I gave in the paragraph above. Be aware, there's a lot more to be mined from Emerson's work.) Well, I'd start by looking at the basic storyline of Hawthorne's text. It follows an eighteen-year-old man by the name of Robin as he comes to a colonial town seeking out his kinsman, Major Molineux. What follows are a series of encounters as Robin wanders through the colonial streets, trying to get information on just where he could find the man he's searching for.
So, taking the analysis given of Emerson above, do we see themes from "Self-Reliance" reflected in the text by Hawthorne? How are the townsfolk portrayed, both collectively and individualistically? Do we see a conformity as a major theme, and is this treated as a positive or negative? With this in mind, I'd suggest you look towards the various encounters Robin has with various people he meets, as well as the scene at the end of the story where we see Mr. Molineux himself (and pay attention to how Molineux himself is treated in this scene). Finally, think about the character of Robin himself. How has he grown and changed by the end of the story?
In thinking about these kind of questions as you apply them to Hawthorne's text, you should be able to better draw connections between the two works in question.

Who is Cassius most loyal to in Julius Ceasar?

One could argue that Cassius is most loyal to himself in Shakespeare's classic play Julius Caesar. He is the leader of the conspirators who plot and execute Caesar's assassination. Cassius is depicted as a shrewd politician, who is completely selfish and conniving. Unlike Brutus, who agrees to join the conspirators in order to protect the Roman populace from Caesar's potential tyranny, Cassius views Caesar's death as a way to advance his social status and increase his political authority. Once Julius Caesar is dead, Cassius immediately begins selling political offices and taking bribes, which leads to a heated argument with Brutus before the Battle of Philippi.
One could also argue that Cassius is most loyal to Brutus. Cassius chooses to align himself with Brutus and demonstrates his love for Brutus following their heated argument. Despite being selfish and conniving, Cassius listens to Brutus's advice, even when he is wrong, and does not abandon him during the final battle.

How does Descartes find certainty in the Meditations?

Recall that Descartes’ epistemological goal in the Meditations was to secure a new, solid foundation on which all knowledge could ultimately rest. And he believed that only philosophical inquiry (a proclaimed reliable method) could secure such a foundation. Descartes believed that by assuming the role of a radical skeptic, that is, by rejecting all of his uncertain and possibly false beliefs, he could discover absolute certainty, a single, solid truth on which all knowledge could be built. In essence, the aim of Descartes' methodology is to doubt his way toward certainty.
In a relatively short yet brilliant book entitled Discourse on Method, Descartes articulates his method on how to sort out the kind of beliefs to accept from those beliefs that can be rejected. Although he formulates several rules that would aid him in his quest, Descartes is well-known for one particular rule which states the following: only accept what is clearly and distinctly perceived: do not accept as true anything that can reasonably be doubted.
Descartes’ starting point in the Meditations is his collection of beliefs, many of which he suspects to be uncertain if not false. According to his criterion of truth, he must therefore accept only those beliefs that are “clear and distinct”. Any belief that can reasonably be doubted must be set aside.
It is in virtue of this unique, philosophical method that Descartes is able to "find certainty."

In The Mediations, Descartes determines he can find certainty if he can clear away everything about which he has doubt. What is left standing at the end of this process, he decides, is what he will be certain about. At the end of the process, he determines that the only thing he can be certain about is his own thought: he has what he calls the "clear and distinct perception" that he thinks. From that insight, he comes to the realization that his sense of being comes from his thoughts. As he puts it in a famous formulation, "I think, therefore I am."
The only thing Descartes is certain of is that he thinks. From there, however, he also finds certainty that there is such a thing as a god or Absolute Being, because he determines that he could not think of such a being (which is greater than he is) if it did not first exist.

Between Ralph and Jack, is there any indication about which character may be advancing more rapidly toward savagery than the others?

Ralph and Jack represent the protagonist-antagonist dynamic clearly in Lord of the Flies. Ralph is level-headed—until he becomes frustrated with Jack and his actions—and practical. Of the two, Jack is the closest to resembling the savagery of humans. He represents the instinctive persona, rather than the intellectual and pragmatic.
Jack creates a hunting party rather than focus on getting help, which becomes a point of contention with Ralph. The dynamic between the two boys also shows the competitive nature between so-called "alpha males." However, Ralph maintains his humane and logical characteristic, whereas Jack becomes a renegade.
When Ralph and Jack have a tense confrontation, there is an indication that the situation could have easily escalated into violence. This illustrates the tribal warfare that is present in all cultures. In the end, the progression towards complete savagery is only stunted by the arrival of the ship.

In What Ways is Amanda an Unlikely Heroine?

Of the various characters in the play, Amanda Wingfield seems to inspire the least respect or sympathy. A silly woman who lives in the past and glories in her romantic memories of Blue Mountain and her days as a Southern belle, Amanda torments her grown children with her impossible expectations and nagging. She seems oblivious to Tom’s and Laura’s feelings, and she refuses to listen when they attempt to express them. For Tom and Laura, life in the Wingfields’ shabby St. Louis apartment is often made unbearable by the force of Amanda’s personality and her unrelenting demands.
Despite Amanda’s silliness and overbearing behavior, however, she should not be dismissed as the villainess of the play. There are traits in Amanda’s character that make her more than a caricature of obstinacy and ignorance. Understanding the emotions that motivate Amanda make it possible to see that she, too, deserves some respect and sympathy.
The primary emotion that dictates Amanda’s behavior is fear—fear of surviving the Depression, fear that Tom will abandon the family as his father had left them, and fear that Laura, unable to make her own way in the world, will somehow be destroyed. Amanda lives in fear, and her fear makes her “hateful” to her children. Moreover, her fears are not imaginary; Amanda denies many realities in her life, but her family’s dire situation during the Depression is a reality she faces every day. In her efforts to control Tom and Laura, Amanda is attempting to engineer the survival of her family. When reality overwhelms her, she escapes into her memories of the past.
There is love and courage in Amanda. Unlike her husband, she did not abandon their children, and although she had been abandoned, she did not hate him; his picture hangs in the Wingfield apartment. Amanda’s concerns for Laura’s future are born of love for her daughter. She refuses to listen when Tom speaks of Laura’s fragile nature and inability to function in life because acknowledging Laura’s condition is to acknowledge the possibility that her daughter can’t be saved. Throughout the play, Amanda is cast as a woman obsessed, with the past and with impossible, ridiculous dreams of the future. In the concluding scene, however, as she is seen speaking to Laura, Tennessee Williams portrays Amanda in a way that reveals the woman who lives within her:
… her silliness is gone and she has dignity and tragic beauty …. Amanda’s gestures are slow and graceful, almost dancelike as she comforts the daughter …. She glances a moment at the father’s picture—then withdraws through the portieres.
Tom is gone, and Amanda’s dreams for Laura have been crushed, but in defeat, Amanda’s ability to love prevails.

How is King James relevant to Macbeth?

One of the most interesting elements in Macbeth that is often thought of as a loose end by modern audiences is the question of what happened to Banquo's son, Fleance. Having fled the murderers in Act III, he does not reappear at the end of the play, and the sons of Duncan, the king whom Macbeth murdered, are restored to their throne. This would seem to suggest that the prophecy of Banquo's sons becoming kings has not come true—to a modern audience.
A contemporary audience, however, would recognize that this is not what is being implied. The House of Stuart made a concerted effort to ally themselves with the legendary figure of Fleance, who supposedly fled to Wales and there founded the Stuart line. In reality, Fleance almost certainly did not exist, but his existence was very important to the Stuarts' concept of themselves as the rightful kings of Scotland. In the case of King James, the idea of the Stuarts as part of a long-deposed line who were meant to return and become king is especially important because James had recently been made king of England, uniting the Scottish throne to the English one in a move some felt was controversial. By referencing the Fleance line, Shakespeare pays homage to King James by cementing the idea that the Stuarts were always meant to return and rule, much as James had "returned" to England to become king there, too. It is a confirmation of rightful kingship.

In writing Macbeth, Shakespeare wanted to warn his fellow Englishmen of the dangers of a violent handover of power. Although England enjoyed much greater stability under James I than it had for some time, the king's grip on power was by no means secure, as can be seen from the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, when James, along with the entire political establishment, came within an ace of being blown to smithereens.
According to the prevailing wisdom, there was something diabolical about assassinating a monarch. Kings and queens were widely held to be anointed by God, and to remove them from their thrones by force was seen as not just treachery, but outright blasphemy. This attitude towards monarchy is reflected in Macbeth's actively siding with the forces of darkness in his plot to murder Duncan and establish himself on the Scottish throne.

The only surviving source of William Shakespeare’s Macbeth, which seems to have been adapted for a court performance for King James, is centralized around the struggles of different power dynamics. This works well in the context of interpolated compliments to King James and his right to rule.
As a nod towards King James as the rightful ruler of both England and Scotland, Macbeth transfers its power symbolically from Scotland to England. After King Duncan’s murder, his son Malcolm flees to England to ask for help. He is “received/Of the most pious King Edward with such grace/That the malevolence of fortune nothing/Takes from his high respect” (Act 3, Scene 6, Lines 27-9). King Edward is recruiting the English forces to help Scotland get rid of Macbeth, their tyrant king. “Upon his aid,/To wake Northumberland and warlike Siward,/That by the help of these—with Him above/To ratify the work” (Act 2, Scene 6, Lines 30-3). This puts the English king in the position of the divine savior. Scotland is sick, and England has got the cure. At the end, everything is put right by the power of pure England and its divine king. Holding Macbeth’s head, Macduff announces that “the time is free” (Act 5, Scene 8, Line 55). Macbeth’s evil has been swept away out from Scotland and replaced with a rightful ruler. Malcolm says, “My thanes and kinsmen,/Henceforth be earls, the first that ever Scotland/In such an honor named” (Act 5, Scene 8, Lines 63-5). Already, the old Scottish ways are being replaced by the greatness of England. Although Malcolm is crowned at the end rather than Fleance, the witches’ prophecy was known to be true by Shakespeare’s audience, because King James was a descendant of Banquo’s.

What does Tagore's poem "Paper Boats" tell us about the ways of children?

Tagore's poem "Paper Boats" tells us that the ways of children are highly imaginative. In this poem, the child speaker plays with his paper boats. He envisions putting pieces of paper with his name and village written on them in these fragile vessels and setting the boats to sail far away. He hopes that the boats will land in "strange places" and that the people there will become aware of who he is.
The speaker also loads his boats with flowers and sets them off, hoping they will come safely to land. He imagines as well that a friend in the sky sends down the clouds to race with his boats. He also dreams that fairies sail his boats at night.
In addition to showing how imaginative children are, the poem shows how they long for connection with other people and places. Children anthropomorphize nature—the child thinks the clouds are racing his boats—and they believe in the supernatural. All of this blends together in the child's imagination as one harmonious whole.
This magical and optimistic sensibility, open to all possibility, lends this poem its tone of lightness and joy.

A​ $10,000 bond quoted at 103​ 1/2 is selling​ for: A. ​$10,104 B. ​$9,662 C. ​$10,350 D. ​$9,897

A $10,000 bond quoted at 103½% is selling for $10,350. The answer to your question is C. In order to find the answer, you must first convert the percentage (103½%) to a decimal. This also requires you to change the fraction (½) to a decimal. In this case, 103½% converts to 1.035. Then, multiply 1.035 x $10,000 to find your answer. Once you complete these calculations, you will find that the answer is $10,350.
A common mistake in calculating the answer to this question would be to misplace the decimal and calculate the percentage as .1035. Alternatively, one could fail to change the ½ percent correctly, or simply make a calculation error. Making these mistakes might lead you to select the distractor choices (A, B, or D).

During Montag's run from the law in Fahrenheit 451, how are light and dark used ironically?

The dichotomy between light and dark is a motif that is used fairly consistently throughout Fahrenheit 451. Light is symbolically paired with fire, and Montag frequently associates it, particularly at the beginning of the story, with fond memories and interactions. He finds a particular comfort in the light of candles, and even compares the warmth of Clarisse's face to that of candlelight. At the end of the story, this dichotomy becomes ironic because, as Montag flees from the mechanical hound, the significance of these symbols becomes completely reversed. In this situation, light becomes a sign of sure capture and death, and Montag must avoid it at all costs. Montag knows that his pursuers are consequence oriented, being only concerned with making it seem as though he has been killed. He realizes that if he can just escape far enough into the obscuring darkness, he will be able to survive the ordeal. In this sense, darkness has ironically become Montag's salvation and existential light.

What problems did colonists face in Plymouth?

The Plymouth settlers faced a number of serious problems upon arrival in the New World. For one thing, they were the victims of bad timing. They arrived in winter and so were unable to do much in the way of planting crops to harvest. Instead, they had to rely on the limited food supplies they'd brought with them on the Mayflower. These supplies soon ran out, leading to hunger and starvation.
The winter weather also made it impossible to establish any kind of shelter on land. Once again, the settlers had to remain on board ship instead of venturing outside. The harsher the conditions, the longer it would take to get any kind of settlement up and running.
In addition to all the other challenges, the Plymouth colonists were forced to endure outbreaks of serious illness and disease, such as scurvy. Without a supply of fresh fruit containing Vitamin C, the settlers were vulnerable to this potentially fatal disease.

Was it Locarno treaties that made Europe peaceful by the end of the 1920s?

The Locarno Pact of 1925 was an agreement signed by Britain, France, Belgium, Italy, and Germany to keep the peace in Europe. Overall, the Pact had three aims: to secure the borders of the nations of Europe, to ensure the permanent demilitarization of the Rhineland, and to begin negotiations that would allow Germany to be admitted to the League of Nations. There were high hopes for the Pact, not least among the members of the German government, who believed that it provided a map toward Germany's eventual re-admittance to the international family of nations.
In the short term, the Locarno Pact contributed greatly to the general peace and stability of Europe. At the same time, however, it overlooked the volatile domestic political situation that existed in Germany at the time. To the Weimar Republic's many enemies on the Right, the Locarno Pact was a humiliating deal that merely confirmed the so-called "betrayal of Versailles" six years previously. In particular, the German Right was scathing of the provision for the demilitarization of the Rhineland, which they felt was an insult to national honor.
The Locarno Pact, whatever its short-term value and however well received it may have been in the international community, gave the Weimar Republic's enemies a huge propaganda gift, which they would use to further undermine the stability of the already fragile German political system, thus endangering the long-term peace of Europe.

What major events happen in chapter 2 of The Outsiders?

In chapter 2 of The Outsiders, several major events take place that move the plot of the novel forward.
First of all, Dally, Ponyboy, and Johnny go to the Dingo for the Nightly Double. This drive-in movie theater has a bad reputation, but it is a greaser hang-out, so the three friends know lots of people there.
While watching the movie, Dally insults Cherry Valance, and she stands up to him. Even though their moment of connection is characterized by hostility, there is no doubt that Dally makes a deep impression on Cherry; she later unexpectedly admits to Ponyboy that she admires Dally, revealing a depth of character that surprises Ponyboy.
After Dally leaves, Ponyboy and Johnny sit with Cherry and Marcia and make friends with them. This moment is important because Cherry and Marcia are Socs, and the two groups rarely intersect in such a peaceful and friendly way.
While at the concessions stand together, Ponyboy tells Cherry about what happened to Johnny that made him so nervous. Cherry defends the Socs who jumped Johnny, explaining that "things are rough all over," expressing a theme of the novel in clearcut terms to Ponyboy, who is skeptical but open to Cherry's worldview.

Discuss the issues and problems that faced A Philip Randolph preparing for the March on Washington.

In preparing for the March on Washington, Randolph had to gain the support of other civil rights movement leaders. He invited other civil rights leaders to join in the march, but very few accepted his offer, because they were engaged in other matters related to their organizations. There was also opposition from J. Edgar Hoover, who was against the civil rights movement at the time. He accused Randolph and his team of being communists and secretly driving the communist agenda in the United States. Randolph also faced opposition from Malcolm X, who told his supporters not to take part in the march because he believed it was a joke. Malcolm X believed that the march was political and in no way aimed at fighting for the rights of African Americans. There were also threats from the Ku Klux Clan and the American Nazi Party, who said that they'd interfere if the march actually happened. There was also some opposition from JFK initially, but he allowed the march to happen after the leaders stood their ground. Interestingly, the march ended at Lincoln Memorial instead of Capitol Hill because Randolph and his team didn't want to make the Congress feel as if they were being attacked. They needed Congress to pass laws that would create more freedom for African Americans.
http://www.socialstudies.org/sites/default/files/publications/se/6501/650103.html

https://www.history.com/topics/black-history/march-on-washington

In what ways did the Constitution seek to control the popular will and ensure order?

The primary way in which the Constitution controls popular will and ensures order is through the electoral process. The election of representatives at all levels of the government is the center of popular will. For instance, the presidential election is held through the Electoral College. The Twelfth Amendment to the Constitution clarified the Electoral process from Article 2 of the Preamble. The Constitution also provides ways to enhance, not necessarily control, the popular will with the Fifteenth and Nineteenth Amendments, which gave voting rights to women and minorities.
The Constitution also attempts to ensure order through clearly defining the transition of power. The Twentieth Amendment identifies the days and times in which the president, vice president, and congresspeople shall assume their roles in the government. Moreover, it outlines the process of a vacancy in the presidency.
http://constitutionus.com/

How does Shakespeare produce a memorable dramatic and linguistic effect in the opening scene of Hamlet?

This is a great question, because memory is one of the themes of this scene. The Ghost urges Hamlet to remember him, and Hamlet promises to do so. One of the key ways that Shakespeare makes this scene memorable is through repetition, which, after all, is one of the best ways to memorize something. For example, the Ghost repeats "swear" over and over, even though Marcellus and Horatio have already agreed to swear silence. This effect is both memorable and dramatic, since the repetition also increases the urgency of the Ghost's desire for secrecy and gets Hamlet even more worked up. Another line that uses repetition is "that one may smile, and smile, and be a villain." This line is very famous because it is insightful, but also because the repetition makes it memorable for an audience member or reader. Repetition is also an important linguistic tool, so you might seek out other instances of repetition in the scene to help you fulfill your assignment.

What was dinner with the Wakatsuki family like before they went to the camp at Manzanar?

Dinner was always a joyous occasion at Jeanne's house. Her family's huge round wooden dining table was the biggest piece of furniture they owned, big enough to seat twelve or thirteen people. And at each mealtime, the family would sit down together, laughing, joking, sometimes arguing, as they helped themselves to generous portions of rice, fish, and home-grown vegetables.
The dining table is a symbol of happier times, before Jeanne and her family were taken away and imprisoned in an internment camp. In captivity, mealtimes are completely different. People are forced to eat standing up and in shifts. The quality of food is bad, often causing the inmates to get sick. The basic elements of family life, such as eating dinner together around a table, were always such an immense source of joy to Jeanne but are impossible in such a harsh environment.

What is Wes Moore's reason for writing the book The Other Wes Moore?

The coincidence of two men from the same neighborhood in the same city sharing the same name is not extreme. What initially caught the attention of the author is that within a short period, his hometown newspaper, the Baltimore Sun, published an article about him and a series that included the "other Wes Moore." The author had finished his undergraduate education at Johns Hopkins University and been awarded a Rhodes Scholarship to study in England. The young man who shares his name had participated in an armed robbery that resulted in his brother killing off-duty police officer Bruce Prothero.
The vast disparity in their experiences and the future to which they would lead—as the other man, once convicted, would likely be incarcerated forever—would not leave the author alone. The differences that led him down one path and the other man down another are, the author claims, very small. He hopes that his analysis of their two stories will show how alike they are despite their separate lives:

The tragedy is that my story could have been his. Our stories are obviously specific to our two lives, but I hope they will illuminate the crucial inflection points in every life, the sudden moments of decision where our paths diverge and our fates are sealed.

What advice did Polly give to Jerry?

Polly advises Jerry to follow what's called The Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Polly tells her husband about poor old Dinah Brown. She's just received a letter informing her of bad news: her mother is dangerously ill. Naturally, Dinah wants to go off and visit her sick mother, but as she lives ten miles away, it would take her a long time to get there. Even if she took the train, she'd still have to walk some considerable distance. Polly doesn't think that would be fair given Dinah's weakened condition.
So she asks Jerry if it'll be alright for him to take Dinah in his cab. At first, Jerry's quite reluctant; Sunday's a very special day to this deeply religious man, and driving Dinah all the way to her mother's house will take the better part of half a day. That's when Polly reminds Jerry of The Golden Rule. As Polly's managed to convince Jerry that he won't break the Sabbath by driving Dinah to her mother's house, he agrees to take her.

Is cloning moral and useful in The House of the Scorpion?

On the whole, you'd have to say no. In The House of the Scorpion, cloning allows a notorious drug lord to extend his natural life, which of its very nature cannot be anything other than morally indefensible. If that weren't bad enough, this highly dubious procedure creates an entire group of people deliberately handicapped from the start of their lives and who will never be able to reach their full potential.
Cloning may be useful in the sense that it keeps a reliable partner of the United States government alive. But in moral terms, the continued renewal of El Patron's life is problematic, to say the least. For as long as he is alive, the vast opium fields of Dreamland will continue to be cultivated, thus leading to even more drug addiction, with all its attendant miseries, for millions of people across the globe.

What terrified the pirates?

In Chapter 32 of Treasure Island the pirates are absolutely terrified by the sound of a strange voice singing "Fifteen men on a dead man's chest/Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum." They think it's a ghost. Even the normally fearless Long John Silver's pretty spooked out by the weird-sounding voice. But he stands firm, nonetheless, and refuses to let his petrified crew turn back, not even when he hears the strange voice call out Flint's last words "Fetch aft the rum, Darby." Silver tells his men that the voice can't be a ghost's because it's echoing and ghosts' voices don't echo. They soon realize that the voice doesn't sound like Flint after all; it sounds more like Ben Gunn, and Silver's men aren't afraid of him.

Identify the metaphor and connotation in the poem "Those Winter Sundays."

A metaphor is a direct comparison between two unlike things for effect. Connotation is the meaning suggested by text, in contrast to denotation, which is its immediate or literal meaning.
The speaker refers to “hearing” the cold “splintering, breaking,” which gives cold a metaphorical usage; it cannot be heard. Cold here stands for the objects that are thus affected by it, such as tree branches. In his making the fire, having “driven out the cold” metaphorically represents his father’s love.
The connotations in the poem include those of individual words or passages and the large meaning of the poem as a whole. The weather has connotations of emotion. Cold is contrasted to warmth as an emotional tone. Before the fire is lit, the house is cold, but after it warms up, the speaker mentions “the chronic angers of that house.” Warmth thus connotes anger. At the end of stanza 1, the speaker says “No one ever thanked him.” The connotation of this can be gained from the beginning of the last stanza: “Speaking indifferently…” This implies that the speaker is that “no one,” the person who never thanked his father—until now, with this poem.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46461/those-winter-sundays

Many of the words in this poem have very negative connotations: "blueblack cold," "cracked hands," and "ached," from the first stanza, for example, seem to convey the pain that the narrator's father endured. Also, "splintering, breaking," "fearing," and "chronic angers" from the second stanza are all quite negative. The narrator's father essentially tries to protect his family from these harsh and negative experiences of the cold; this is why he gets up early, even on Sundays, to make up the fires so that his family can wait until it's warm to get out of their warm beds. The words that have positive connotations, like "banked fires blaze" or "warm," are the effects of the father's work, the way he seems to show his love. It does not seem as though the narrator's father is very affectionate or loving in a warm and obvious way; instead, he shows his love by making his family more comfortable, by enduring the cold so that they do not have to.
The narrator says, "I'd wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking." Cold describes the temperature, and cold itself cannot splinter or break, so we know that this line must be figurative. What does splinter? Wood splinters, especially when it is burning in a fire like those fires the father has made. Therefore, the cold that is breaking up, as a result of the fires the narrator's father made, is being compared to the wood that is breaking up in the fires themselves.

The poem contains quite a bit of both metaphor and connotation. Consider the way the writer is using associations to describe the combination of cold and warmth in his home growing up. The repeated contrast between the cold of the situation and the warmth of his father's nurturing and care creates an exaggerated sense of a two-fold existence. It suggests a troubled love between the father and the son, because the son can't understand the father's sacrifice. The metaphors help to build this idea: the "blueblack cold," the "cold splintering and breaking," the father "driving out the cold," the "angers of th[e] house," and "love's austere and lonely offices" all contribute the sense that the kid doesn't quite get it. All the difficulties are projected into the house and the weather. He doesn't get his father's sacrifice, because he doesn't see it beyond his own comfort.

Describe the theme of animalism in The Road by Cormac McCarthy.

One of the key themes in Cormac McCarthy's postapocalyptic novel is the thin line that divides human beings from other animals. The man repeatedly assures the boy that they will remain on the right side of this line: "we're the good guys."
Because the unidentified catastrophe has wiped out flora and fauna except for humans, the remaining people eat almost exclusively canned food when they can find it. Other surviving humans, however, have resorted to cannibalism to survive. To the man, this behavior would be worse than death. The boy agrees—if the situation arises and their gun has a bullet—to kill himself rather than eat another person.
Although they escape a close call, escaping from a strange man who grabs the boy, they are elsewhere confronted with gruesome evidence that other people have descended to cannibalistic behaviors. Entering a house to scavenge inside, they discover that cannibals have been using it as a kind of human livestock pen. Rather than kill and eat a whole person, the captors have kept their victims imprisoned and alive, but they have cut off and eaten some of their limbs.
This sort of premeditation and planning show that these predators are all too human, not simply another type of animal that hunts and kills.

What is irony used for in The Importance of Being Earnest?

Oscar Wilde, like many writers of the late 1800s, was an iconoclast bent on the deconstruction of Victorian values. Much of the irony in The Importance of Being Earnest serves this purpose. Wilde said that the philosophy of the play was to "treat all the trivial things of life seriously, and all the serious things of life with sincere and studied triviality." This irony had the effect of satirizing the things that the Victorians held dear.
It's ironic when Gwendolen speaks of the "age of ideals" that they live in and follows that up with her personal ideal "to love someone of the name of Ernest." Much of Lady Bracknell's interview with Jack is ironic: things she should find inappropriate she embraces, and things that shouldn't really matter are deal-breakers for her. She approves of his smoking and the fact that he acknowledges his "natural ignorance," but she heartlessly condemns him for having lost both his parents. This is a way of mocking the high-society method of seeking favorable marriage matches for children.
Wilde doesn't only poke fun at parents. Cecily represents youth, and her ironic fascination with the wayward "Ernest" is a critique of the fickleness of women who should value integrity in men but often don't. Wilde isn't above ridiculing his own profession: Miss Prism switched her three-volume novel with the baby in her care, and both Cecily and Gwendolen keep diaries since "one should always have something sensational to read in the train." The madcap ironies of the false identities of Ernest and Bunbury are a way of exposing the hypocrisy of polite British society.
Wilde uses irony expertly to expose the faults of his society and to question the values of Victorian England.

Irony is created when what one expects is different from what happens in reality. It can be dramatic (when the reader knows more than the character/s), verbal (when someone says the opposite of what they mean), or situational (when what actually happens is different from what we expect to happen). Irony is used in the play in order to create humor and draw attention to the vagaries of the upper class. For example, we know, while Aunt Augusta does not, that Algernon has created his invalid friend, Bunbury, in order to escape precisely the kind of social obligations to which she invites him. We know, while she does not, that Algernon has actually eaten all of the cucumber sandwiches that were prepared for her. It's even ironic that he prevents Jack from enjoying them while Algernon eats them all himself, saying that they were ordered for Aunt Augusta (who never actually gets to have one because Algy eats them all!). These ironies are comedic, certainly, but they also show how, for the upper classes, it is more important to keep up appearances than it is to actually develop relationships that feel meaningful. Lying is preferable to honesty when it permits one to appear proper.