Alberto Rios 'Poem When Giving Is All We Have'

Interpret (tell me why you think the poet wants to use such images)The image of dead leaves in winter weather brings to mind ideas of decay, hopelessness and coldness. The poet wants to highlight how depressing an addiction to drinking metho is.

In “I Am Offering this Poem” by Jimmy Santiago Baca, the speaker reveals his attitude about love, offering a girl a love poem in hopes that she will accept it since he has nothing else to give her. He redefines the meaning of love using imagery and figurative language. For instance, when he says “ Keep it like a warm coat…” (stanza 1) When the speaker says this he is using figurative language, do to the fact that the poem is powerful in meaning. This shows the speaker's love towards her by saying that when she is cold to remember his love and he will keep her warm. Also when he says “... it is a pot full of yellow corn to warm your belly in winter ” (stanza 2) The speaker is offering all the basic needs in life such as a coat,socks,yellow

Jimmy Santiago Baca, writer of “I am offering this poem”, was born in New Mexico in the year 1952.When Baca was only a child, he was abandoned by his parents. He lived with his grandmother for a few years after that and was later placed in an orphanage. However, he ended up living in the streets and was arrested for drug possession when he was twenty-one years old. He then spent six and a half years in prison. This is where he taught himself to read and write. He composed many poems during his time in jail. His style of writing is also heavily influenced by his life experiences. Baca’s poem “ I am offering this poem” has four stanzas and seven lines in each stanza. Each stanza ends in the same verse “I love you”. The entire poem exudes the feeling of yearning and infatuation. Baca is said to have composed this poem during his time in prison, which meant he was unable to reach his loved one. Therefore he was “offering” this poem to his loved one. This

Owen and Frost convey extreme experiences and feelings very powerfully and evoke it in a way for us the reader to imagine clearly. In Disabled, Owen conveys the image of death very vividly with immense use of imagery writing 'He sat in a wheeled chair, waiting for dark,' this darkness is referring to the sense that the soldier's life is interminable to him now. Owen is trying to tell us that this soldier's life has been cut short by the war and that he cannot be the same individual he was perhaps five to ten years earlier. Another example of strong imagery in Disabled which conveys extreme experiences and feelings is the good use of visual imagery where he writes 'Legless, sewn short at the elbow.' This powerful phrase gives us the reader an image of the soldier seated in a wheelchair with no legs as well as part of his arm 'deattached', this image being emphasised by the words 'Legless' and 'sewn short'.

In Father and Child, as the persona moves on from childhood, her father becomes elderly and is entertained by simple things in nature, “birds, flowers, shivery-grass.” These symbols of nature remind the persona of the inconsistency of life and the certainty of death, “sunset exalts its known symbols of transience,” where sunset represents time. Both poems are indicative of the impermanence of life and that the persona has managed to mature and grow beyond the initial fearlessness of childhood moving onto a sophisticated understanding of death.

In the beginning of the short story, as Brother reflects on Doodle’s life, the author uses personification and foreshadowing to create a mood of remorse. As he gazes out of the window into his backyard, Brother states that “the graveyard flowers were blooming. ...speaking softly the names of our dead” (Hurst 1). The flowers provide flashbacks of the past, and foreshadow a loss of life. The loneliness felt by Brother causes readers to consider how they would feel if their loved one was gone. As Brother observes the seasons, it is noted that “summer was dead but autumn had not yet been born” (Hurst 1). The personifications of the seasons as stages in the cycle of life and death creates an unsure and uncertain mood. The shift between seasons creates an idea of change and uncertainty of events to come. Hurst creates a mood of remorse through

In “The Poem You Asked For” by Larry Levis, he is comparing writing a poem by comparing it to a plant, stubborn person, and toad. Larry Levis, a 20th-century writer is well known for his brevity and surprise approach in poetry. This poem magnifies the complications that authors may face while trying to write something of such importance. The speaker uses an abundant amount of figurative language to personify how writing is so difficult, and can lead to many difficulties and dead ends. The author uses figurative language to portray the theme of difficulties in the writing process such as: difficulties prewriting, writers block, and how hard it is to let go of writing as an author.

She’s using it to help her communicate all the violent, horrid things she felt and experienced. For example: “-More like killing, death-grip/holding to life” (Lines13, 14) Once more in lines 16 and 17 “barely moving, more like being closed/ in a great jaw and eaten, and the screaming...” She obviously wasn’t in a jaw being eaten, but because of this terrible and petrifying experience she felt like she was. Rios is using figurative language to describe all the best things that he experienced whereas Olds is using it to make the pain that she felt more

The cracking frost on the ground also adds negative connotation emphasizing the isolation and anxiety of the speaker before he is accompanied by his significant other. The speaker mentions a distinct detail of his lover’s house: the “Porch light burned yellow / Night and day, in any weather” is the first overt example of positive tone(10-11). The hyperbole exaggerates that the home has overflowing happiness and love in any condition. In addition, Soto combines auditory and visual imagery as the ringing of “the tiny bell” and the “narrow aisle of goods” refer to the soft-hearted speaker’s unintentional imagery of a wedding, justifying the predilection towards his relationship(Alliteration). Alternatively, Personification of the “tiny bell / Bringing a saleslady / Down a narrow aisle of goods,” introduces the ‘Symbolic Character’; representing the effects of love towards a person and how society understands the rewards of love(21-24). Besides introducing the character into the poem, the bells that bring the saleslady into the poem can also be interpreted as the wedding bells

His previous “cold reprieve” has been warmed by the leaves that “burn red” before dying in nature. The short but beautiful life of the leaf is a metaphor for what life should be - beautiful regardless of the time given. This juxtaposition of life as a “cold reprieve” changing into the image of a leaf burning “red” shows how the voice’s view on life is changing throughout the poem by the echo’s prompting. Realizing that nature is beautiful in death, he now understands that life is a beautiful journey leading up to death that should be cherished in all of its beauty. Dying is a process that can bring “ecstasy” in its wake. Waiting for death is not so bad when a beautiful life surrounded by joyful experiences is so readily available to all that are willing to think positively. Regardless of the beauty that can come with life, it can seem to become a burden that people suffer through until death. The grief that comes with “life’s long disease” will be resolved in death. Death is not an “enemy” to be feared, but a natural part of life that must be accepted. In contrast, the worst enemy of the voice is himself - his own uncertainty and worry have caused all of his pain. All of the rhetorical questions that he asks display the extent of his worry about the unknown future, but his subconscious begins to soothe his worries and comfort him with the

A poem Until We Could written by Richard Blanco is dedicated to people who are trying to find acceptance in their right to marry each other, the right to love. Through his poem, Blanco expresses his thoughts that same-sex marriage is constitutional person’s right, as any other like freedom of speech or freedom of religion. Same-sex marriage legalization being an enduring issue for a long period of time, even now since all of the states, merely one, agreed to provide legal benefits to gay and lesbian couples in the USA. On June 26, 2015, the US Supreme Court decreed that the US Constitution guarantees the right for same-sex couples to marry in all 50 US states (gaymarriage.procon.org *). Richard Blanco being an advocate for the LGBT community for a several reasons he is not only gay himself but also “… the first gay, Latino, and immigrant inaugural poet, who helped usher in President Obama’s second term with the hopeful ode to

why he stopped, may be he doesn’t know himself. May be, he is comparing the beauty of nature to something, but on a symbolic level, the snow strongly reminds me that the poem is set in winter, and which is also widely represented as the image of death.

The first line of stanza four “Or rather-- He passed Us—“ (l. 13) demonstrates that the speaker is uncertain about her existence in the world. Now she feels that her life symbolized by the sun is passing by. She becomes chilled by the “dews” (l. 14). Lines three and four in this stanza illustrate the reason for her coldness. The speaker is attired in a light “Gown” (l. 15) and cape or “Tippet” made of “Tulle” (l. 16), which is a kind of thin, transparent, open meterial. When people die,

Poems are like snowflakes. While no two are the same, they all have common structures and themes. One prevalent theme in poetry is that of death, which is present in both “Because I Could Not Stop for Death” by Emily Dickinson and “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” by Robert Frost. Dickinson perceives death as a gentleman, while Frost perceives death as loneliness, which provides insight on how the time periods of the poems, the genders of the authors, and the authors’ personal experiences influence literature.

Furthermore, a second poetic device used in both of these poems was personification. In “Reluctance,” Frost personified the parts of his body to explain how torn he was about losing his love: “…The heart is still aching to seek/ But the feet question ‘Whither?’…” (Frost, 17-18). The personification in this stanza made the persona’s uncertainty and pain apparent and contributed to the establishment of the mood. If the persona himself had bluntly said that he wanted to look for his loved one but didn’t know where to look, the impact would not have been nearly as dramatic. Millay also used personification in her poem, “Time Does Not Bring Relief”. Personification was used to communicate the role time played in her life during her loss: “Time does not bring relief; you all have lied/ Who told me time would ease me of my pain…” (Millay, 1-2). The lack of involvement time had in the speaker’s life during her loss made it apparent how deeply grief-stricken she was. Nevertheless, if this poetic device had not been used to convey the theme, it would have turned out less impressive, if not awkward. Millay used an additional personification in her poem which was used to personify the rain: “…I miss him in the weeping of the rain…” (Millay, 3). The