Jay Gilbert, Ph.D.
eNotes Educator
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14
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90
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About
Oxford graduate with a doctorate in medieval literature and linguistics. I have taught poetry, Shakespeare, and medieval language and literature at many universities and tutored at the high school level.
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Recent Activity
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Answered a Question in A&P
In Updike's short story "A&P," the protagonist, Sammy, quits his job in the A&P as a misguided attempt to gain the interest and devotion of the girls who are walking around the store in... -
Answered a Question in History
The 1960s were a key decade for politics in the United States. A tumultuous decade, it led the American people to view liberalism and conservatism very differently. Some of the most significant... -
Answered a Question in Heart of Darkness
The key critical text on Heart of Darkness from a postcolonial point of view is Chinua Achebe's "An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness." In this essay, Achebe discusses the... -
Answered a Question in There Will Come Soft Rains
It is very easy to confuse simile and metaphor, because both are types of figurative devices which are used to help illuminate a writer's meaning through the use of comparing one thing to something... -
Answered a Question in Philip Larkin
When you are asked a "how" question like this, remember that you are actually being asked two things. The first question here is: what does Philip Larkin say about nature in this poem? However, the... -
Answered a Question in The Adventure of the Speckled Band
Grimsby Roylott is presented as a venerable but frightening figure in this short story. He is first introduced by his stepdaughter as "the last survivor of one of the oldest Saxon families in... -
Answered a Question in The Great Gatsby
There are two elements to this question. The first one is about the distinction between West Egg and East Egg, a distinction that is important in the novel. Jay Gatsby is a wealthy man, but he... -
Answered a Question in The Great Gatsby
Class and upbringing are important in this novel, and the cars people drive seem to relate strongly to the nature and class of the characters themselves. For example, Daisy drives a white car, the... -
Answered a Question in My Papa's Waltz
This poem is often read as representing Roethke's recollections of a father who had violent tendencies. This is supported by many of the words in the poem, which all contribute to a semantic field... -
Answered a Question in Poetry
"Questions! Questions!" is part of a longer work by the Afro-Caribbean poet Marlene Nourbese Philip which asks pointed questions about the experience of the African diaspora. The longer work is... -
Answered a Question in Advice to My Son
This poem by Peter Meinke is an advice poem, part of a long tradition of such poems guiding sons in the way of the world. It is directly addressed to a son ("your," "but son..."), and the way its... -
Answered a Question in Literature
Mishra argues that there are two discrete types of Indian diaspora: the "old" and the "new." The people of the older diaspora are "exclusive," in that they have moved entirely away from India,... -
Answered a Question in Cupid and Psyche
I would argue that the primary theme of this story is the redemptive power of love. It is a story about the love between Cupid and Psyche, but in large part, it is also about how difficult it is to... -
Answered a Question in Sir Thomas Browne
In this treatise, Sir Thomas Browne begins by noting that we actually spend a significant part of our life asleep and that while the things we see during the day are true, the things we see in... -
Answered a Question in Death of a Salesman
The definition of the word spite is a desire to upset, annoy, offend, or hurt another person. In act 2 of this play, Willy tells Biff that he believes he will be undone by spite and that he is... -
Answered a Question in The Aftermath of World War II
Suburbanization is a process by which populations are funneled out of highly concentrated urban areas and into spaces outside of these core cities. In the United States after WWII, various federal... -
Answered a Question in Ghosts
Mrs. Alving is haunted by many ghosts, as alluded to in the title of this play by Henrik Ibsen. The play was widely received as scandalous when it was first performed, largely because of its frank... -
Answered a Question in Two Kinds
The plot of this story, in brief, is that the narrator’s mother has moved from China to the United States and now, raising a daughter in California in the 1950s and 1960s, believes that her child... -
Answered a Question in Romeo and Juliet
Romeo and Juliet is a play about love, but Shakespeare does not simply confine himself to presenting the youthful love of his "star-crossed" lovers, Romeo and Juliet. Nor does he present even this... -
Answered a Question in Romeo and Juliet
The sentence types in Romeo's final soliloquy change over the course of the soliloquy in a very clear manner. At the beginning of the soliloquy, Romeo is clearly in a state of confusion and... -
Answered a Question in King Lear
This is a great question. I think what you're being asked to consider is how far Edgar's own experiences over the course of the play actually contradict his assertion here. Edgar is suggesting that... -
Answered a Question in Washington Irving
The plot of "The Stout Gentleman" by Washington Irving is a slender one. The narrator of the story has been confined indoors due to a fever. He is staying at an inn in Derby, in England, and it is... -
Answered a Question in Nature
Emerson's chief suggestion about the poet's appreciation of the natural world is that the poet's view of nature is one which does not take into account the trappings of modern society, within which... -
Answered a Question in Nature
Emerson actually suggests that there are multiple unremarkable events which could cause him to feel what he calls a "perfect exhilaration." The example he gives is of an occasion when he was... -
Answered a Question in Nature
In Nature, Ralph Waldo Emerson describes the intensity of nature when one fully understands it. He observes that a person who is properly at one with nature will be filled with a "wild delight"... -
Answered a Question in Paul Revere's Ride
There does not seem to be any particular reason why Henry Wadsworth Longfellow repeats the word tread specifically across these three lines which fall close to each other apart from the fact that... -
Answered a Question in King Lear
The story of Gloucester and his two sons runs in parallel to the main story of Lear and his three daughters: essentially, the Gloucester story is a B-plot which helps to further illuminate the... -
Answered a Question in Dulce et Decorum Est
"Drunk with fatigue" is indeed a metaphor. The soldiers Owen is describing are not literally drunk, and of course it is not literally possible to drink fatigue. However, what Owen is suggesting is... -
Answered a Question in Dulce et Decorum Est
This vivid simile is an interesting one to try to unpack. Owen describes the "hanging" face of a soldier who has been thrown into a wagon. His eyes are "writhing" in his face and his lungs are... -
Answered a Question in Dulce et Decorum Est
"Dulce et Decorum Est" is not a sonnet. A sonnet is a particular type of poem which must demonstrate certain key features. Sonnets are fourteen lines long and adhere to a particular meter and rhyme... -
Answered a Question in Dulce et Decorum Est
Owen describes the soldiers' feet in vivid terms as being "shod" in blood, suggesting that the coating of blood is thick and all-encompassing, like shoes. So, one could argue that this is a... -
Answered a Question in Robert Southey
In his poem "Inchcape Rock," Robert Southey does not describe the rock itself at any great length. He notes simply that it is "perilous," but the story of the poem makes it clear why this is. The... -
Answered a Question in Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802
In this Petrarchan sonnet, Wordsworth describes the view of London from Westminster Bridge on a quiet morning in 1802 before the usually bustling city is awake and moving. When Wordsworth notes... -
Answered a Question in Still I Rise
There are multiple symbols in this poem which contribute to its central meaning. The speaker describes herself as "dust," which she contrasts to the "dirt" into which her detractors would like to... -
Answered a Question in Twenty-seven Wagons Full of Cotton
Tennessee Williams wrote this one-act play in 1946, but he deliberately choses to set it some sixteen years earlier, in 1930. It is a play concerned with a very particular place in time and... -
Answered a Question in The World Is Too Much with Us
In this short poem, Wordsworth is lamenting the extent to which the modern human has fallen out of step with nature and its beauty. He describes the fact that people today are too used to "getting... -
Answered a Question in Strange Meeting
At the very beginning of Wilfred Owen's poem, "Strange Meeting," the speaker describes how he has escaped from battle into a "profound dull tunnel" which has been scooped out of the earth as a... -
Answered a Question in Sharks in the Time of Saviors
Malia and Augie see the night marchers twice in the context of this story. They see them first on the night that Noa is conceived, and although Malia does not know this until afterwards, she... -
Answered a Question in Romeo and Juliet
The word "fatal" is an interesting one in this play. It's connected to another phrase that always brings it to mind: "star-crossed." In modern parlance, the word "fatal" is often used as if it... -
Answered a Question in Oliver Twist
This is quite an interesting question. Dickens's works do tend to adhere to moral codes of the time, so it would have been considered a happy ending for most that Bill Sikes, the criminal, dies at... -
Answered a Question in The Most Dangerous Game
It is strongly implied, although not outright specified, that at the end of "The Most Dangerous Game," Rainsford recognizes that the only way to deal with General Zaroff is to attempt to beat him... -
Answered a Question in The Secret Garden
Mary's initial reaction to meeting Martha is not a positive one. Martha is not at all the sort of servant Mary is used to, and Mary is surprised to find Martha not "obsequious and servile" like the... -
Answered a Question in William Shakespeare
This question does not specify whether it is asking about Shakespeare's Globe, the modern reconstruction of the original Globe Theater in Southwark, London, or the original Globe itself; but both... -
Answered a Question in London
The rhythm, meter and rhyme scheme of this poem are almost deceptively straightforward. The poem comprises four stanzas, with the rhyme scheme: ABAB CDCD EFEF DGDG. There is some element of... -
Answered a Question in Romeo and Juliet
The interactions between Romeo and Friar Laurence in this scene demonstrate the fact that the pair have a close relationship and that they know each other very well. For example, Friar Laurence... -
Answered a Question in Robert Louis Stevenson
This is a poem intended for children, and about children, and this can be heard in the rhyme scheme, meter, and rhythm of it. The poem is evocative of nursery rhymes and is clearly intended to be... -
Answered a Question in Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
We do not know where the speaker in this story is going. We do know that he believes his horse must think it "queer" of him to have stopped in the middle of the woods, where there is no farmhouse... -
Answered a Question in Harrison Bergeron
According to Kurt Vonnegut's "Harrison Bergeron," the idea that everyone could actually be made "equal every which way" is roundly condemned by the story as being something impossible to achieve.... -
Answered a Question in Gulliver's Travels
The unifying theme in Gulliver's Travels is size and how Gulliver encounters people much bigger than him (such as the Brobdingnagians) and much smaller (such as the Lilliputians). The way in which... -
Answered a Question in Othello
Roderigo and Iago, in the opening scene of the play, are hoping to cause trouble by telling Desdemona’s father that his beloved daughter is, even now, having sexual congress with the Moor, Othello....
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