My next IRJE is on a book I’m currently reading, Emily of New Moon by L.M. Montgomery. The protagonist Emily is a young girl who is orphaned after her father dies of tuberculosis and is taken to live with two of her aunts. She loves nature, has an active imagination, is quite animated, and adores writing, especially writing poems. Emily also doesn’t properly understand the expectations that her aunts have for her behaviour, which often gets her in trouble with her Aunt Elizabeth.
In the following quotation, Emily describes her walk after mailing a letter at the post office.
“She found the walk home very enjoyable. It was a bland day in early April and spring was looking at you round the corners. The Wind Woman was laughing and whistling over the wet sweet fields; freebooting crows held conferences in the tree tops; little pools of sunshine lay in the mossy hollows; the sea was a blaze of sapphire beyond the golden dunes; the maple’s in Lofty John’s bush were talking about red buds. Everything Emily had ever read of dream and myth and legend seemed a part of the charm of that bush. She was filled to her finger-tips with a rapture of living.
‘Oh, I smell spring!’ she cried as she danced along the brook path. Then she began to compose a poem on it” (p. 227).
I chose this quotation because I loved the creative way that the author described Emily’s surroundings. Not only is it very descriptive, which makes the scene easier to visualize, but it connects with Emily’s personality and the way that she would view everything. She is very romantic, in the respect that she is very inclined to romanticize things, and this passage captures that as it claims that she sees all the wonderful things of myth in the bush’s charm. The passage also shows how she is able to entertain herself on her own by writing poems and exploring things in her head. She is very artistic in this way, and it can be recognized in the metaphors and creative language used to describe what she sees and how exhilarated she feels to be there.