Suicide Note

Langston Hughes’s poem, “Suicide’s Note” is incredibly short. I feel that since it is so short, this video has done a pretty good job of increasing effectiveness and mood of the poem. Putting the poem to the song “Tears for Fears” set a somber mood before the three lines and twelve words of the poem are slowly put on the screen. The music choice was excellent for this poem, as it guides the reader toward the sad feeling the poem’s title suggests. While the song does do a great job of setting an appropriate mood for this poem, its lyrics make it difficult to pay attention to the poem itself, and the message is somewhat lost. Also, the effectiveness of the song in this machinima version of this poem was lessened by the use of scenery and characters from the Xbox video game, Halo.
In Family Guy, Season 3, Episode 5, Stewie quotes from Shakespeare’s “Richard III.” Stewie and Brian are having a snowball fight when Stewie ducks behind a tree and comes back with a very large, mechanized snowball cannon. Before firing the cannon at Brian, Stewie says, “Now is the winter of [your] discontent.” This quote happens at the beginning of the episode just as this soliloquy opens Shakespeare’s play. In this situation, this quote was just hilarious. Shakespeare’s Richard was not so much protesting his discontent, as celebrating his family’s recent good fortune. More recently, “winter of discontent” was used to describe the British winter of 1978 – ’79 when strikes were widespread.