Discuss how symbolism in “Station” and “The White Knight” contributes to the development of the main idea in both passages. Please make sure quotes are available and properly formatted plea
INSTRUCTIONS: In a coherent, unified, multi-paragraph (3 or more paragraphs) composition of approximately 300 words, answer the question below. The mark for your answer will be based on the appropriateness of the examples you use as well as the adequacy of your explanation and the quality of your written expression. You must refer to the two passages in your essay.
Discuss how symbolism in “Station” and “The White Knight” contributes to the development of the main idea in both passages.
Please make sure quotes are available and properly formatted please and that there is enough information that is written with quality and explanation.
Here are the short stories:
The White Knight by Eric Nichol
Once upon a time there was a knight who lived in a little castle on the edge of the forest of
Life. One day this knight looked in the mirror and saw that he was a White Knight.
“Lo!” he cried. “I am a White Knight and therefore represent good. I am the champion of
virtue and honour and justice, and I must ride into the forest and slay the Black Knight, who
is evil.”
So the White Knight mounted his snow-white horse and rode into the forest to find the Black
Knight and slay him in single combat.
Many miles he rode the first day, without so much as a glimpse of the Black Knight. The
second day he rode even farther, still without sighting the ebony armour of mischief. Day
after day he rode, deeper and deeper into the forest of Life, searching thicket and gulley
and even the tree-tops. The Black Knight was nowhere to be seen.
Yet the White Knight found many signs of the Black Knight’s presence. Again and again he
passed a village in which the Black Knight had struck – a baker’s shop robbed, a horse
stolen, an innkeeper’s daughter ravished. But always he just missed catching the doer of
these deeds.
At last the White Knight had spent all his gold in the cause of his search. He was tired and
hungry. Feeling his strength ebbing, he was forced to steal some buns from a bakeshop.
His horse went lame, so that he was forced to replace it, silently and by darkness, with
another white horse in somebody’s stable. And when he stumbled, faint and exhausted, into
an inn, the innkeeper’s daughter gave him her bed, and because he was the White Knight in
shining armour, she gave him her love, and when he was strong enough to leave the inn
she cried bitterly because she could not understand that he had to go and find the Black
Knight and slay him.
Through many months, under hot sun, over frosty paths, the White Knight pressed on his
search, yet all the knights he met in the forest were, like himself, fairly white. They were
knights of varying shades of whiteness, depending on how long they, too, had been hunting
the Black Knight.
Some were sparkling white. They had just started hunting that day and irritated the White
Knight by innocently asking directions to the nearest Black Knight.
Others were tattle-tale grey. And still others were so grubby, horse and rider, that the mirror
in their castle would never have recognized them.
Yet the White Knight was shocked the day a knight of gleaming whiteness confronted him
suddenly in the forest and with a wild whoop thundered towards him with levelled lance. The
White Knight barely had time to draw his sword and, ducking under the deadly steel, plunge
it into the attacker’s breast.
The White Knight dismounted and kneeled beside his mortally wounded assailant, whose
visor had fallen back to reveal blond curls and a youthful face. He heard the words,
whispered in anguish: “Is evil then triumphant?” And holding the dead knight in his arms he
saw that beside the bright armour of the youth his own, besmirched by the long quest,
looked black in the darkness of the forest.
His heart heavy with horror and grief, the White Knight who was white no more buried the
boy, then slowly stripped off his own soiled mail, turned his grimy horse free to the forest,
and stood naked and alone in the quiet dusk.
Before him lay a path which he slowly took, which led him to his castle on the edge of the
forest. He went into the castle and closed the door behind him. He went to the mirror and
saw that it no more gave back the White Knight, but only a middle-aged, naked man, a man
who had stolen and ravished and killed in pursuit of evil.
Thereafter when he walked abroad from his castle he wore a coat of simple colours, a
cheerful motley, and never looked for more than he could see. And his hair grew slowly
white, as did his fine, full beard, and the people all around him called him the Good White
Knight.
Station by Eamon Grennan
1 We are saying goodbye
on the platform. In silence
the huge train waits, crowding the station
with aftermath and longing
5 and all we’ve never said
to one another. He
shoulders his black bag and shifts
from foot to foot, restless to be off, his eyes
wandering over tinted windows where he’ll sit
10 staring out at the Hudson’s[i] platinum dazzle.
I want to tell him he’s entering into the light
of the world, but it feels like a long tunnel
as he leaves one home, one parent
for another,
15 and we both know it won’t ever
be the same again. what is the air at,
heaping between us, then thinning
to nothing? Or those slategrey birds that
croon to themselves in an iron angle, then
20 take flight, inscribing
huge loops of effortless grace
between this station of shade and the shining water?
When our cheeks rest glancing against each other,
I can feel mine scratchy with beard and stubble, his
25 not quite smooth as a girl’s, harder, a faint fuzz
starting-those silken beginnings I can see
when the light is right, his next life
in bright first touches. what ails our heart? Mine
aching in vain for the words
30 to make sense of our life together, his
fluttering in dread
of my finding the words, feathered syllables
fidgeting in his throat
In a sudden rush of bodies
35 and announcements out of the air, he says
he’s got to be going. One quick touch
and he’s gone. In a minute
the train-ghostly faces behind smoked glassgroans away on wheels and shackles, a slow glide
40 I walk beside, waving
at what I can see no longer. Later,
on his own in the city, he’ll enter the underground
and cross the river, going home
to his mother’s house: I imagine that white face
45 carried along in the dark glass, shining
through shadows that fill the window
and fall away again
before we’re even able to name them.
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