life help: this is a compare and contrast essay I’m writing for my - Help.com

this is a compare and contrast essay I’m writing for

my college english class and i was wondering if anyone would like to edit it or give their input about it just to help, i just wanted some feedback, thanks :)

The Death of the Mississippi
The essay “Two Views of The Mississippi” by Mark Twain describes the river from two perspectives exploring the river’s mystic and majesty. In Virginia Woolf’s essay “The Death of The Moth,” she is watching a moth gracefully fly around when suddenly it starts to struggle and stumble eventually dying. The two writers grew up in vastly different cultures and circumstances. Mark Twain was born 1835 in the United States 47 years before Virginia Woolf was born 1882 in England. Both authors went through much tragedy that shaped them into who they were and had many people close to them die, Virginia’s hardships were in her younger years, while most of Twain’s in his later days. The two essays being explored here seem incomparable, but with a closer look they have more in common than not.
Twain’s essay explores the view of the Mississippi from the eyes of a passenger uneducated in the ways of steam boating. This passenger sees intricate beauty and mystic. Mark explains, “I still keep in mind a certain wonderful sunset which I witnessed when steam boating was new to me. A broad expanse of river was turned to blood; in the middle distance the red hue brightened into gold, through which a solitary log came floating black and conspicuous….” This is how he saw the river when he was young and did not know what he was seeing. Before the actual Death of The Moth, the creature is content, happy, at ease, and flying gracefully. The pure beauty of it, this graceful life, at times seems so odd, so strange, yet it is everywhere. The moth was ignorantly flying around, blissfully doing whatever, not thinking, and just doing.
When death hit the moth he was suddenly aware, aware that he was dying, fighting for his life, wanting to fly freely, not wanting to die, denying reality. When death took the river, it was not how it took the moth, it was taking life from Mark’s eyes as he writes,
Now when I had mastered the language of this water and had come to know every trifling feature that bordered the great river as familiarly as I knew the letters of the alphabet, I had made a valuable acquisition. But I had lost something, too. All the grace, the beauty, the poetry, had gone out of the majestic river!…a day came when I began to cease from noting the glories and the charms which the moon and sun and the twilight wrought upon the river’s face, another day came when I ceased altogether to note them.
Twain now understood the river, he now knew what he was seeing. When death took the moth it panicked, but the moth now knew death, too. He was aware that life was not just about flying around, he realized that death was inevitable so he accepted it, he stopped fighting and let it take control(it’s toll). Death is life(life is death), it is all around, it is everywhere, but it is always strange, out of the ordinary, mysterious. (never ready for it when it hits).
The feel of Twain’s essay feels a bit lighter than Woolf’s, but is still quite negative. After reading Twain’s essay one might feel that no matter what is known about something it can still be beautiful, maybe it could be learned that even though Mark could not still see the beauty it is there. But maybe what someone could get, is that education ruins beauty and life and maybe that is what Twain was trying to say. Or maybe it is an inevitability that some must sacrifice beauty of life for others to enjoy it. The feel of Virginia’s essay is much darker, though it can be taken very differently. In one eye’s view it has a positive conclusion, the moth is faced with death and he accepts it. But it is not the end for him, with death comes a new life full of mystery and wonder. Through the other eye when Virginia watches the moth die maybe she was really watching what was going on inside herself, when she chose not to help the moth because she knew he would die anyway, she knew she was dying inside, that there was no helping her. Then when the moth dies and accepts it’s fate, she does too, “O yes, I seemed to say, death is stronger than I am.”

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virginia, mississippi, death, Eye, red, River, life, Fly, Beauty, Day, writing, Virginia Woolf, Mark Twain (How Tags Affect Reciprocity)

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