Explanation:
The poem opens with the poet watching the deserted South Boston Aquarium, which he had visited as a child. The ruined building is symbolic both of his lost childhood and of the decay of Boston, undergoing massive urban renewal, which upsets such milestones as the Statehouse and the sculpture of Colonel Shaw.
The statue causes the poet to think of Shaw, an abolitionist’s son and leader of the first black regiment in the Civil War. Shaw died in the war, and his statue is a monument to the heroic ideals of New England life, which are jeopardized in the present just as the statue itself is shaken by urban renewal.
Images of black children entering segregated schools reveal how the ideals for which Shaw and his men died were neglected after the Civil War. The poem’s final stanzas return to the aquarium. The poet pictures Shaw riding on a fish’s air bubble, breaking free to the surface, but in fact, the aquarium is abandoned and the only fish are fin-tailed cars.
This poem is a brilliant example of Lowell’s ability to link private turmoil to public disturbances. The loss of childhood in the early section of the poem expands to the loss of America’s early ideals, and both are brought together in the last lines to give the poem a public and private intensity.
The poem is organized into unrhymed quatrains of uneven length, allowing a measure of flexibility within a formal structure.
Answer:
C. It causes the characters in the stories to act in their own self-interest.
Explanation:
The book "Once Upon A Time" talks about a large family who are blessed to have material wealth as well as family love but because of a "perceived" threat of burglars by the grandmother, the family takes precaution to prevent burglary by installing alarms, making the walls higher, etc.
They eventually become trapped in the fear of what could happen instead of living in the moment and they lose the togetherness and peace they enjoyed as a family and became prisoners in their own home.
Their fear makes them act in their self interest and build larger walls and iron bars thereby making them prisoners.
In the book "A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings", story is told of a man Pelayo who had an encounter with an old man who couldn't move because of his enormous wings, he was advised to kill the old man but he could not bring himself to do it, instead he locks the old man inside a house with plans of setting him free on a raft but a lot of people troop to the house to see the old man with wings and they pay money to Pelayo and his wife to see the old man with wings. This makes Pelayo and his wife rich in a short time but they do not acknowledge the old man to be an angel because he did not look grand as they expected angels to be.
The community as well acknowledges that he has wings but does not fit into the perception of an angel.
Eventually, the old man with wings fly off.
Pelayo at first wanted to free the old man on a raft but because of his fear of losing the money he was making from people who came to see the old man he acted in his self interest and kept the old man prisoner till he flew away.
