The Devil and the Tom Walker certainly is an interesting tale. It's the heartwarming story of a youthful man who makes a deal with the devil, then becomes a religious zealot, and ruins some people's lives, only to finally be carried off into oblivion by the devil himself. This is definitely a fireside poet, as it has all the signs that a fireside poet would show signs of. It certainly describes in great detail the wondrous of nature.
The swamp was thickly grown with great gloomy pines and hemlocks, some of them ninety feet high; which made it dark at noonday, and a retreat for all the owls of the neighbourhood. It was full of pits and quagmires, partly covered with weeds and mosses; where the green surface often betrayed the traveller into a gulf of black smothering mud; there were also dark and stagnant pools, the abodes of the tadpole, the bull-frog, and the water snake, and where trunks of pines and hemlocks lay half drowned, half rotting, looking like alligators, sleeping in the mire.(Irving)
As you can infer from this direct quote, there is a lot of extended description of nature. He seems to strive to explain the landscape of the swampy marsh, and really sets the scene. I could just constantly keep pulling quotes about nature out but I have other points to make so moving on. The story has a great deal of youthful innocence strewn into it like most fireside poems. "Humph!" said Tom Walker, as he gave the skull a kick to shake the dirt from it" (Irving). Only a youthful innocent would so casually kick a skull. Most non youthful innocent people would see the skull and then go out of their way to keep it out of their way, like turning around and walking away, or ignoring it and hoping it goes away. Whatever they would do in this situation they certainly wouldn't touch it. The story has a tad bit of mythology in it. Nothing too mainstream from what I could tell. Mostly just local superstition, and I consider that to be a form of mythology.Any one but he would have felt unwilling to linger in this lonely melancholy place, for the common people had a bad opinion of it from the stories handed down from the time of the Indian wars; when it was asserted that the savages held incantations here and made sacrifices to the evil spirit. (Irving)
Sure theres some christian mythology in here (like making a deal with the devil), but a lot of people don't consider that mythology, and I don't really want to offend any one, but I still feel that this point should be made. The story is similar to the rip van winkle in the sense that wives play an important role in the story, but different in the way that Tom dislikes his wife. "He had a wife as miserly as himself; they were so miserly that they even conspired to cheat each other" (Irving). Oddly enough I can't seem to find a literary criticism for this story in Blooms literary reference, so that is a problem. I'll have to remember to bring this up to pirate DJ Langley some time, but as I'll probably forget Pirate DJ Langley will probably have to bring it up to me.
No comments:
Post a Comment