Do you think the speaker loves her husband as much as she says does?

The question asks for an opinion, meaning there is no right or wrong answer, but such an opinion must be backed with a plausible and supportable argument. I will argue that the speaker does love her husband as much as she says.

Some might argue that in the second stanza of the poem, the speaker uses hyperbole or exaggeration to describe the love she feels for her husband:

I prize my love more than whole...

The question asks for an opinion, meaning there is no right or wrong answer, but such an opinion must be backed with a plausible and supportable argument. I will argue that the speaker does love her husband as much as she says.

Some might argue that in the second stanza of the poem, the speaker uses hyperbole or exaggeration to describe the love she feels for her husband:

I prize my love more than whole mines of gold,

Or all the riches that the East doth hold....

She also says that rivers "cannot quench" her love.

To say that you love your husband more than mines of gold or vast riches or that drinking rivers of water couldn't satisfy your thirst for him is to say you love him very, very much—but is this really implausible? Many of us have loved ones we value more than material wealth. What's more, romantic love is often defined by excess. When we are deeply in love, it does feel bigger and richer than almost anything we can compare it to.

The rest of the poem has a direct and simple sincerity that is convincing; it shows that though deep, the love is also mature. The speaker uses plain words, saying, for instance,

If ever man were loved by wife, then thee. [By thee she means "you," with an implied "are."]

And near the end of the poem, she states:

Thy love is such I can no way repay....

This is the plain language of a woman who has been through a great deal with her husband. We know the poet, Bradstreet, did indeed experience hardships alongside her husband, as she immigrated to America with him and survived with him in harsh conditions. After a bout with smallpox in her youth, Bradstreet was prone to infection and illness. It is completely plausible that Bradstreet, having been through what she suffered, would feel a great outpouring of love and gratitude toward her husband for standing by her. Therefore, I believe she calls it the way she sees it and does love her husband as much she says.

What are Granny's circumstances in the story?

Granny Weatherall is eighty years old and is on her deathbed in her daughter Cornelia's house. She is in and out of consciousness, losing hours here and there in sleep. When she is conscious, she can be tenacious and rude. She recalls significant moments of her life. She recalls the first time she was jilted. This is when she was left at the altar by George. (She would eventually marry a man named Johh, the...

Granny Weatherall is eighty years old and is on her deathbed in her daughter Cornelia's house. She is in and out of consciousness, losing hours here and there in sleep. When she is conscious, she can be tenacious and rude. She recalls significant moments of her life. She recalls the first time she was jilted. This is when she was left at the altar by George. (She would eventually marry a man named Johh, the father of her children.) Even at this point in her life, decades later, the jilting of being left at the altar still stings. Being on her deathbed, old and physically weak, she feels useless. She fondly recalls how her children had always needed her. She longs for those days when she was useful and the children depended upon her for so many things in their lives. So, at the end of her life, she is despondent because she has lost that feeling of being needed. She feels "jilted" again. 

She wants to see her favorite daughter, Hapsy. However, Hapsy does not come to her deathbed. She feels jilted by this as well. Repeatedly, Granny keeps trying to forget George but she can not: 

Again no bridegroom and the priest in the house. She could not remember any other sorrow because this grief wiped them all away. Oh there's nothing more cruel than this--I'll never forgive it. 

The jilting of being left at the altar is the primary grief in her life. The grief of dying and feeling useless reminds her of that primary grief and she unsuccessfully tries to get beyond this grief before she passes on. 

Who attended Gatsby's parties?

Gatsby's parties are attended by a bunch of people who don't know him or care to know him. They care about "chatter and laughter, and casual innuendo and introductions forgotten on the spot, and enthusiastic meetings between women who never knew each other's names." In other words, they are often vapid and usually vain, interested in nothing serious like actually getting to know someone. They seem to come only to have a good time and...

Gatsby's parties are attended by a bunch of people who don't know him or care to know him. They care about "chatter and laughter, and casual innuendo and introductions forgotten on the spot, and enthusiastic meetings between women who never knew each other's names." In other words, they are often vapid and usually vain, interested in nothing serious like actually getting to know someone. They seem to come only to have a good time and get roaring drunk. This includes a few people from East Egg—the more fashionable of the "Eggs" where the old money set live—and then there are many more people from West Egg: people involved in the film or theater industries, people who came to gamble, and others who seem to have no occupation or even another place to go (Klipspringer seems to live at Gatsby's and is known as "the boarder"). In all, it's a pretty rowdy crowd, mostly people who lack the refinement and manners of East Egg residents like Tom and Daisy. This is a mostly West Egg crowd, and they are unsophisticated and gauche by comparison. However, they are noisy and seem to have a good time, and so Gatsby welcomes them again and again (until Daisy professes her dislike of them and his parties cease altogether).

Fatherhood is a major theme in Fences. Comment on Troy’s childhood and how it has influenced his parenting.

Though Troy does not admit it directly, it becomes clear, through his recollections, that he is repeating the mistakes of his father. These mistakes are a lack of compassion for his son, Cory, and infidelity.

Troy's father was a sharecropper down South. Though Troy makes it clear, in a conversation with Bono, that his father stayed with his family ("My daddy ain't had them walking blues!"). However, "he was just as evil as he could...

Though Troy does not admit it directly, it becomes clear, through his recollections, that he is repeating the mistakes of his father. These mistakes are a lack of compassion for his son, Cory, and infidelity.

Troy's father was a sharecropper down South. Though Troy makes it clear, in a conversation with Bono, that his father stayed with his family ("My daddy ain't had them walking blues!"). However, "he was just as evil as he could be." Troy's mother, he says, couldn't stand him and "all his women run off and left him."

Troy then goes on to tell about how his father disrupted what would have been his son's first sexual encounter with a local girl of fourteen. He does this, Troy recollects, because his father had wanted the girl for himself. His father is thus revealed to be not only a moral reprobate, but also disloyal toward and extremely insensitive toward his son and to Troy's mother.

By having an affair and, later, a child, with Roberta, Troy demonstrates that same disloyalty and insensitivity toward his own family. He, like his own father who had many children with many women, is proud of his virility. However, his code of manhood demands that he also take care of his responsibility. He insists on raising the child that he has with Roberta (though this eventually becomes Rose's responsibility), just as his own father insisted on remaining with his family, in spite of his distaste for commitment.

Arguably, Troy's understanding of what it means to be a father is limited to being a provider. In one of the play's most significant monologues, he responds harshly to Cory's question, "Do you like me?" He insists that he does not have to like his son, but that he takes care of him because it is his responsibility, a matter worked out between him and Rose. Cory is the only child that Troy has made an effort to raise. He left his older son, Lyons, it seems, in order to be with Rose. 

What does the poet mean by saying, "stands about the woodland ride"?

This is old-fashioned language for a cherry tree standing by the side of a road which leads into or through the woods. 

"Stands about" means standing on either side of, or next to. 

The image this should create in your mind is that of a road or path through the woods which, at some point, is lined with cherry trees.  Perhaps the other, taller trees behind the cherries have not yet begun to bloom...

This is old-fashioned language for a cherry tree standing by the side of a road which leads into or through the woods. 

"Stands about" means standing on either side of, or next to. 

The image this should create in your mind is that of a road or path through the woods which, at some point, is lined with cherry trees.  Perhaps the other, taller trees behind the cherries have not yet begun to bloom or put out any leaves, but the cherry trees have already burst into white flower.  They would stand out and be easy to spot.

Although the poem speaks of "the cherry," as if there is only one, the implication is that there are many.  The poet is planning to look at all the cherry trees out there.  This is similar to how we might say, "The bear hibernates through the winter," meaning all bears.  In the last line of the poem,

About the woodlands I will go/To see the cherry hung with snow

it is clear that the poet is planning to take a long ramble all over the woods to enjoy the many cherry trees that he knows are there. 

Why does Atticus sit outside the Maycomb jailhouse in chapter 15 of To Kill a Mockingbird?

The scene in which Atticus waits outside the jailhouse is an important window into the racist undertones of Southern culture in the 1930s. Furthermore, the scene is a potentially confusing one, especially the first time a reader encounters it. Upon subsequent readings, however, it's clear that Atticus sits outside the jailhouse in order to prevent a mob from murdering Tom Robinson. 

Harper Lee never comes out and says that the strange men are a lynch...

The scene in which Atticus waits outside the jailhouse is an important window into the racist undertones of Southern culture in the 1930s. Furthermore, the scene is a potentially confusing one, especially the first time a reader encounters it. Upon subsequent readings, however, it's clear that Atticus sits outside the jailhouse in order to prevent a mob from murdering Tom Robinson. 

Harper Lee never comes out and says that the strange men are a lynch mob, but the gradual tension of the scene reveals the deadly motive behind their visit. It's apparent that the men are drunk, and that they mean to harm someone. The brilliance of this scene is in the fact that Lee only reveals the mob's murderous intentions afterwards, by making it plain that they aimed to harm Atticus for getting in their way, and by referring to them as "a gang of wild animals" (160). As such, it becomes clear that, though Atticus was perfectly calm when confronting the men at the jailhouse, he was actually being very brave, as his presence (along with the presence of Mr. Underwood and his shotgun) was the only thing standing between Tom Robinson and a grisly end.

What is the summary of Chapter Three of Where Men Win Glory?

The devastation of Kabul did not happen under Soviet rule; instead, it occurred long after, when warring mujahideen factions fought for preeminence. Before departing, the Soviets had installed Mohammed Najibullah, a Pashtun, as the puppet leader of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan (DRA). The Soviets provided crucial military and financial support to prop up Najibullah's brutal dictatorship. 

Seeking to break the Soviet influence, the CIA, in concert with the ISI (Pakistan's intelligence service), threw their support behind the efforts of some ten thousand mujahideen to overthrow Jalalabad, a critical stronghold of Najibullah's brutal DRA regime. During this time, an emerging mujahideen leader, Osama bin Laden, led his own fighters to battle. Yet the March 5, 1989 offensive failed miserably, due in part to infighting among the mujahideen factions.

The local citizens had always placed their hopes in their mujahideen leaders; after all, the government had never had much of an interest in preserving the welfare of Afghans. Citizen and mujahideen alike relied on the opium drug trade to survive. Despite this, the hapless people never enjoyed any sort of security; the fierce mujahideen fought for control over contested territories, the opium trade, and a weapons cache happily supplied by the CIA, Egypt, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia. Due to continual infighting, bin Laden returned to Saudi Arabia.

Progress in breaking Najibullah's stranglehold over Afghanistan did not come about until April 1991, when a contingent led by Jalaluddin Haqqani defeated Najibullah's troops at Khost City. Also, with the eventual dissolution of the Soviet Union later that year, the DRA found itself adrift without financial and military aid. Sensing an opportunity, a DRA turncoat, Abdul Rashid Dostum, appropriated DRA military hardware and troops to join forces with a powerful mujahideen commander, Ahmad Shah Massoud, in the fight for Kabul.

Najibullah appealed for American aid in combating the fundamentalists, but The United States was reluctant to become embroiled in a conflict that clearly held no benefit for American interests. Without crucial aid, Kabul was left open for the taking. In the end, two mujahideen leaders, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and Ahmad Shah Massoud, fought for control of the city. Bin Laden and other leaders tried to broker a peaceful accord between the two commanders but to no avail. Hekmatyar and Massoud fought relentlessly to annihilate the other, plunging Afghanistan into a vicious civil war that was to see the devastation of almost 40% of Kabul's infrastructure. The local citizens found themselves caught in the middle; by the end of 1993, ten thousand civilians were dead.

The remaining people turned to local militia leaders to protect them against Hekmatyar and Massoud. Afghanistan was now a fractured country consisting of fiefdoms ruled by warring mujahideen. It was from this poisonous cauldron of destabilized anarchy that new warriors were birthed to later carry out terrorist attacks against the United States.

On February 26, 1993, a fifteen hundred pound bomb blew a hole in the World Trade Center building, injuring more than a thousand people and killing six. The bomb was built by Ramzi Yousef, under the guidance of one Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the principal architect of the later September 11, 2001, attacks on the same buildings. Ironically, Yousef had learned how to build bombs from a CIA manual while training at a camp at Khost, Afghanistan, in 1991 or 1992.