Holocaust survivor and Nobel Laureate, Elie Wiesel, gave this impassioned speech in the East Room of the White House on April 12, 1999, as part of the Millennium Lecture series, hosted by President Bill Clinton and First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton. In the summer of 1944, as a teenager in Hungary, Elie Wiesel, along with his father, mother and sisters, were deported by the Nazis to Auschwitz extermination camp in occupied Poland. Upon arrival there, Wiesel and his father were selected by SS Dr. Josef Mengele for slave labor and wound up at the nearby Buna rubber factory. Daily life included starvation rations of soup and bread, brutal discipline, and a constant struggle against overwhelming despair. At one point, young Wiesel received 25 lashes of the whip for a minor infraction. In January 1945, as the Russian Army drew near, Wiesel and his father were hurriedly evacuated from Auschwitz by a forced march to Gleiwitz and then via an open train car to Buchenwald in Germany, where his father, mother, and a younger sister eventually died. Wiesel was liberated by American troops in April 1945. After the war, he moved to Paris and became a journalist then later settled in New York. Since 1976, he has been Andrew Mellon Professor in the Humanities at Boston University. He has received numerous awards and honors including the 1986 Nobel Peace Prize and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. He was also the Founding Chair of the United States Holocaust Memorial. Wiesel has written over 40 books including Night, a harrowing chronicle of his Holocaust experience, first published in 1960. At the White House lecture, Wiesel was introduced by Hillary Clinton who stated, "It was more than a year ago that I asked Elie if he would be willing to participate in these Millennium Lectures...I never could have imagined that when the time finally came for him to stand in this spot and to reflect on the past century and the future to come, that we would be seeing children in Kosovo crowded into trains, separated from families, separated from their homes, robbed of their childhoods, their memories, their humanity.
Answer:
Donne uses the extended metaphor of a ‘city’ not only in ‘Holy Sonnet XIV’ but also in ‘Loves War’. In this Elegy which was written in Donne’s youth, he describes a ‘free City’ which ‘thyself allow to anyone’ – a metaphor for how anyone can enter a woman [ii] – and goes onto say how in there he would like to ‘batter, bleeds and dye’. Here, Donne is controlling the ‘city’ and taking over it himself, however, if Donne intended to use this same metaphor in ‘Holy Sonnet XIV’, the roles have changed and it now signifies how it is Donne who needs to be seized by God’s spirit. Furthermore, this represents how Donne’s life and therefore attitude has changed between writing these poems; he used to feel in control but now he is controlled.
The physical verbs that are used immediately sets the violent theme of the octave. The spondaic feet emphasizes Donne’s cry for God to ‘break, blow’ and ‘burn’ his heart so he can become ‘imprisoned’ in God’s power, creating a paradoxical image of a benevolent God acting in a brutal way. He uses a metaphysical conceit to explain how he is ‘like an usurp’d town’ with God’s viceroy (reason) in him. This imagery of warfare that pervades the sonnet symbolises his soul at war with himself; only if God physically ‘overthrow’s’ Donne and ‘batters’ his sinful heart will he be able to ‘divorce’ the devil. It was around the time of writing this poem that Donne renounced his Catholic upbringing which gives evidence to the assumption that the sin he was struggling with began to overpower his Christian beliefs and needed God become as real to him as God was to his respected Catholic parents. Furthermore, in ‘Holy Sonnet XVII’ Donne exclaims how ‘though [he] have found [God], and thou [his] thirst hast fed, a holy thirsty dropsy melts [him] yet. This reveals that Donne feels that even though he has found God, his yearning is not satisfied which gives evidence towards the assumption that he is crying out for spiritual ecstasy. This paradox between freedom and captivity was most frequently written about by most prison poets such as Richard Lovelace [iii] Donne wrote, ‘Except you enthrall me, never shall be free’ which implies the same idea as Loveless in ‘To Althea, From Prison’ that true freedom is internal, not external, symbolising his struggle with sin whilst he is physically free.
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