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Joni Mitchell's ballad "Woodstock," is a song/poem about a touchstone event in the lives of a generation of American youth that makes a theme of the journey through life, innocence and experience, and the yearning for core experience and truth. The symbol of the Garden, familiar to most of us through the biblical story of creation described in Genesis, recurs in the poem's refrain:
We are stardust
We are golden
And we've got to get ourselves
Back to the garden. (lines 9-12)
Perhaps we are transported to the biblical Garden of Eden, the first world of Adam and Eve, according to the Old Testament. But what does the garden suggest, as symbol, to us today? What kind of relationship(s) do we maintain with the natural world, with each other? The subject is one that strikes to the core of our existence. Often we speak of heaven and hell, metaphorically, to describe states of being, not literal places, and thus the images evoked are always open to investigation and interpretation, as are our experiences and states of being. Figurative language–symbol, metaphor, personification-allows us to link the known with the unknown, and to discover through implied comparison or identity the nature of our experience.
"I wandered lonely as a cloud," writes William Wordsworth. Literal and figurative language reflects the actual world of our senses and mind, our sensations and and responses to them: "It is the East, and Juliet is the Sun!" cries Romeo, and we understand how she blazes forth from darkness, just as does the familiar sun.
Identify some of the figurative devices that appeal to you and think about how you might organize an essay on the rich resource that figurative language provides in several literary pieces.
See an outline of Joseph Campbell's description of the Hero's Journey here: http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/smc/journey/ref/summary.html
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