Summary:
Explores the literary techniques used by writer Sarah Orne Jewett in her story, "A White Heron." Also examines the central theme of the work.
Gaining knowledge is not something that happens subtly in youth, but rather occurs in shimmering explosions in the origins of the mind - instant mountains of knowledge are created in a mere moment's time, and the discovery of which only calls you away from what is familiar and draws you into the unknown. In Jewett's passage she tells of a "silly girl" who sets her sight on the top of a pine tree in a forest near her home. As the girl beings to climb the tree awakens, at first resistant, then encouraging as it senses the new life on its branches. As it guides her upward she not only ascends from the earth, but gives herself celestial wings that bear her naivity away, and leave her to experience the trees, the sky, and the sea which testify of her new "vast and awesome world."
Half a mile from her home there is a giant pine, seemingly a spiritless land mark of "rough bark" and "dark boughs." The girl leaves her home in the middle of the night to visit the pine. This tree is not inanimate to her, but only "asleep yet in the paling moonlight." She sees it as an opportunity to see something unknown to her, a "ladder reaching up, up, almost to the sky iteslf," and determines to leave the gound and climb the tree.
She begins to climb the nearby oak tree to reach the lower branches of the pine. At the dangerous cross from the oak to the pine, she startles the giant evergreen from its rest, bristling under the prodding of her thin little fingers, the "sharp dry twigs [scratching] her like angry talons." Unabashed, however, the girl continues to climb, amazing the tree with her "determined spark of human spirit." She is unafraid fo the great pine.
Beginning to love its new dependent, the pine holds even the least twigs steady to advantage the girl. When "the last thorny bough was passed," the girl can finally see the majesty of nature aoround her, ornamenting herself as a star on the top of the pine tree, looking over the sparkling sea and the dawning sun. Her childhood is swept away and she is exposed to a new mature world of possibilities. Almost flying over the woodlands, the white villages and church steeples, the girl sweeps the landscape and can finally understand the enormity and beauty of the land around her, and then becomes unified with it.
This is the complete article, containing 413 words
(approx. 1 page at 300 words per page).
