Hey everyone I am getting ready to go to University next week! I am soo nervous. First year Medicine! Does anyone else do Medicine and can you give me tips or guidance? Much appreciated!
hi good luck and best wishes, i am a doctor working in uk, and would like to advice you to work hard, do your best , and persist in reaching your dream, may god help you in this demanding but rewarding career.
A critical analysis of Kubla Khan by Samuel Taylor Coleridge:
In Xanadu did Kubla KhanA stately pleasure-dome decree :Where Alph, the sacred river, ranThrough caverns measureless to man Down to a sunless sea. So twice five miles of fertile groundWith walls and towers were girdled round :And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree ;And here were forests ancient as the hills,Enfolding sunny spots of greenery. But oh ! that deep romantic chasm which slantedDown the green hill athwart a cedarn cover !A savage place ! as holy and enchantedAs e'er beneath a waning moon was hauntedBy woman wailing for her demon-lover !And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,A mighty fountainmomently was forced :Amid whose swift half-intermitted burstHuge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher's flail :And 'mid these dancing rocks at once and everIt flung up momently the sacred river.Five miles meandering with a mazy motionThrough wood and dale the sacred river ran,Then reached the caverns measureless to man,And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean :And 'mid this tumult Kubla heard from farAncestral voices prophesying war ! The shadow of the dome of pleasureFloated midway on the waves ;Where was heard the mingled measureFrom the fountain and the caves. It was a miracle of rare device,A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice ! A damsel with a dulcimerIn a vision once I saw :It was an Abyssinian maid,And on her dulcimer she played,Singing of Mount Abora. Could I revive within me Her symphony and song, To such a deep delight 'twould win me, That with music loud and long, I would build that dome in air, That sunny dome ! those caves of ice ! And all who heard should see them there, And all should cry, Beware ! Beware !His flashing eyes, his floating hair ! Weave a circle round him thrice, And close your eyes with holy dread, For he on honey-dew hath fed, And drunk the milk of Paradise.
It was long thought that this poem about the famous Mongol warlord was a vision of Coleridge’s in an opium dream. This poem certainly has the dreamy, exotic qualities as it conveys to us an epoch beyond the boundaries of our own, “Alph, the sacred river”, “Xanadu”, “Mount Abora”. In the depths of its sleepy dreaminess, in Xanadu is where this poem begins, lulling the reader with mellifluous monosyllabic and disyllabic words of eastern, rich connotations, “sacred”, “pleasure-dome”, “incense-bearing tree”, intertwined with short, sweet vowel sounds in “Alph”, “ran”, flowing through to “man” and terminating at “sea”. The vowel pattern is echoed in the second sentence of the first stanza with “ground”, “round”, “tree”, terminating at “greenery” which echoes back to “sea”. The sounds in the first stanza ricochet and reflect one another giving us the impression of a distant, dreamy echoing, so typical of Coleridge. Enfolded into this delicate structure is are resonances, almost musical in their quality, of alliterative, liquid “l”s in “stately pleasure” streaming to “measureless” and “sunless”, gushing through “hills” and “rills and “blossomed”. The abstraction and languor is short lived however as “But oh!”, a minor statement, implies a sense of urgency. The mood of the poem becomes uneasy and almost frantic as we know that this dreaminess and perfection will typically end disastrously. The lexical choice of “savage”, “haunted”, wailing”, “seething”, “lifeless” implies this mood. The pace of the poem increases rapidly as like “Alph” the sacred river, it gushes with action through ingenious, well placed verbs such as “vaulted” and expressive personification such as “seething” and “flung up”. The stanza structure also imitates the “mazy motion” of the river with lines being longer and of varying lengths, very different from the first stanza. The repetition of “tumult” also evokes a sense of the force of the river and its power. The power of nature, defeating the power of man. Understanding Kubla Khan is like following the course of a river with many tributaries. At one tributary, it is a moral story of power and corruption, of a person who rises above his mortal position and believes himself to be above the rule of higher moral authority who has offensively fed on the “honey dew” and sinfully “drunk the milk of Paradise”. Another tributary, the poem is a fragment of a dream and the hard hitting reality and the nostalgia after it is over. These tributaries confluence, however. They are all inescapably about man seeking what is not man’s. Kubla Khan seeks godliness and immortality through his pleasure domes, his “gardens with sinuous rills” and his “fertile ground” and they are inevitably destroyed by the very nature which he has exploited. Similarly, the writer seeks immortality through his dreams and fantasies and they are inevitably excised by their very medium, his soul. It is a poem which accentuates the unified endeavour of man to rise above his caste, to be admired, worshipped, immortal, great and thus the river joins its estuary.
well what can i say, im Afnan so i will write a lil bout me and Aya can write bout her self. Me AFNAN is a PROUD LIBYAN unfortunately living in the UK, love libya love my family there. Im a student studyin business i love sports and i love most of all libya and its history, culture, ppl, and its nature(from the sea to the mountains to the rubish on the strrets HEHE (NO JOKE)) GO FOR IT AYA ...
Hey this is Aya. I am a student going into 1st year Medicine in the UK. I have been living here for ages but am adjusted I think. I speak English (duugh), Arabic, French and a jot of Italian. Feel free to speak to me in any of these languages. My passions include painting and poetry, dunno why I am doing medicine. Probably because of the prestige factor!
3 comments:
Eid Mabrouk - yay for more Libyan bloggers
hi good luck and best wishes, i am a doctor working in uk, and would like to advice you to work hard, do your best , and persist in reaching your dream, may god help you in this demanding but rewarding career.
Eidkum saeed inshallah
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