A visual interpretation of the text of ‘sir gawain and the green knight’

I wrote the above illustration of text from Sir Gawain and the Green night in the way it is shown here to illustrate that in the first to the fourth lines there is a certain level of revelry and the fete in the text.The first to the fourth lines talk about partying and having fun hence my visual representation of the feeling that these lines conveyed.   Immediately on the fifth and sixth line, I notice a change in tone from the party atmosphere to the more toned down chivalrous tone.Despite the mention of humor and merrymaking in the firth and sixth lines, the presence of ‘Gawain’ and the ‘knight’ in these two lines give them a sense of conservativeness and tradition, so I used a more formal, less ‘noisy’ illustration of the text.   Finally, in the seventh and eighth lines the tone tapers off with the mention of ‘separation’ and the reference to sleeping.   So, from the party atmosphere that I illustrated in the initial lines, the tone of the text moves on to become more muted, and finally to taper off to nothing as everybody takes their leave.In this exercise I realized that there are certain emotions conveyed by the text in ‘Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’.   I believe that this is a quality of many pieces of poetry called imagery – this means that a visual image is conveyed by the text with the use of words.These images come from certain clues in the text that represent an emotion by encapsulating this emotion in a concrete image.   For instance, when a poet wants to convey joy, the poet would use words that would indicate that there is a party, as is the case in the first six lines.   From this exercise I learned to appreciate the value of the specificity of words in poetry – for a poet to convey an accurate emotion, the words used have to be very specific.This means that if the poet would like to convey ‘anger’ he/she cannot simply write ‘angerâ⠂¬â„¢ but categorize the intensity of that anger as well and find the word that best fits the degree of anger that needs to be expressed.In particular, this exercise also makes me realize that literature is not unintentional; all that a writer puts into his work is considered very carefully if not planned to the finest detail.   This is so because one thing that a writer should achieve in his work is to rig it in a way that the audience is led to feel the exact emotion that needs to be conveyed in the words.The same function of words could be used for many other purposes in literature such as revealing something or indicating a change in tone or atmosphere as is illustrated in the above example.However way words are used in literature, the writer should be conscious of what he/she is doing at all times otherwise; the images that a poem or a piece of literature conveys would be faulty or inaccurate.   I believe this particular quality of literature is called organic unity.The flo w of any piece of literature is largely dependent on the proper arrangement and use of the words.   This means that for a writer to succeed in a particular piece of literature he/she has to be able to wield the ability or power of words to cause mental images to form in the reader’s mind.