In the poem Testimonials, the persona speaking, is a woman. We know that she is a woman because of how delicate and precise her words are. The woman uses words like: “smallest breezes, / filigree, / sweetly, / and lemon sorbet.” She is speaking to a younger generation of men and women. This is a reflective lyric poem because the speaker is reminiscing on times of the past and things she encountered that enlightened her life. The persona is very much like the poet, which is also a woman. It makes it easier for us to interpret and connect with the poem as well. We can determine that the speaker is a wise and seasoned woman. A woman is aged between 65-80. She speaks as though she is talking about the days when she was younger. She reflects on the details of what made her feel special. The line “The world called, and I answered,” shows us how anxious she was to see all that life had to offer her. The woman speaking is happy to share her life and memories. The woman is recounting the little things that led her to where she is now. She takes the audience back to the times that brought her the most joy. The repetitiveness of “back when” in the poem, tells us that this was some time ago. We can determine by the tone in the poem, that the woman is grateful and appreciative for her experiences. She is sharing her knowledge with a younger audience, to teach them to acknowledge the small things in life. The listener is never specified in the poem. If we were to read or listen to the
This poem focuses on the lynching of a African American male. The speaker of the poem appears to console a woman who appears to be distressed due to the events taking place. In the first four lines of stanza 1, the speaker says:
Literally, the persona of the poem is outside when some aspects of the nature around her, like violets and a blackbird, trigger a memory from her childhood. The poem then flashbacks to a childhood memory of the persona as a young girl, which is shown through the indentation of the stanzas, where the girl wakes up in the afternoon thinking it is morning and becomes upset when she
Richard Blanco is a Cuban- American poet who was given the oppurunity to write an inaugaration poem for Barack Obama's second swearing-in. He wrote a poem titled "One Today" that praised the good and unique things about the United States and also the everyday people who's daily routines help to make America the proud country that it is.
Lucille Clifton's poem "Move" deals specifically with an incident that occurred in Philadelphia on May 13, 1985. On that date, Mayor Wilson Goode, Philadelphia's first African American mayor, authorized the use of lethal force against fellow African Americans living at 6221 Osage Avenue. In her introduction to the poem, Clifton says that there had been complaints from neighbors, who were also African American, concerning the "Afrocentric back-to-nature" group that called itself "Move" and had its headquarters at this address (35). The members of this group wore their hair in dreadlocks and they all used their surname of "Africa." Clifton's poem suggests that it was these differences that cost the lives of eleven people, including
The speaker is the voice of the poem, since “I” is used alot in this poem, it is in first person. I imagined the speaker’s
The Poem “Introduction to Poetry” is by Billy Collins, an English poet, and it is about how teachers often force students to over-analyze poetry and to try decipher every possible meaning portrayed throughout the poem rather than allowing the students to form their own interpretation of the poem based on their own experiences.
“Once upon a time there was a wife and mother one too many times” (Godwin 39). This short story begins with the famous opening, once upon a time, which foreshadows that the story line will be similar to a fairy tale. It raises expectations for the story that all will be magical and end happily. A typical modern-day fairy tale is that of a distressed character who overcomes an obstacle, falls in love with prince charming, and they ride off into the sunset; living happily ever after never to be heard from again. Godwin however, puts an unexpected twist on “A Sorrowful Woman”. This short story is a tale about what can happen when everyday roles take over our identity. Ultimately, this short story challenges societal expectations of marriage
Patricia talks about going to a Christian Endeavours Friday nights, and having a pretty normal school life (minus symptoms of her DID; blurry memory, confusions of learning subject or meeting people.) She was a Brownie and participate in the Girls Brigade, similar things that normal girls did growing up then and now (Nobles,2006,43-44). She had friends and played with kids in her neighborhood she was sometimes a ‘normal’ girl. Another thing that rubbed me the wrong way was the part about the vacation to Jersey (Nobles, 2011, 47), the girls knew that their father wasn’t going, but when they get to the station Kim finds out she isn’t going either. I found myself saying the questions she was saying to her self, “why was she not going, what had she done?” Some one that Patricia expresses her love for her is her ‘friend’ Lillian in Chapter 8 who she attended Warlingham, she shares how much she appreciated her later for her patience. Kim was constantly questioning her about school, why she was there, why she couldn’t go home, why her dad brought her back after being sent home for just a few hours (Nobles,2011,132). Her mother had a huge drinking problem and while Patricia also though she had one, I think she was just simply trying to just justify why she was blacking out. She was always asking her self “why don’t I remember anything, why am I always feeling like time is just flying by”. Her mother heavily drank through her entire childhood and into her adult hood it was a big
In the poem, “35/10” by Sharon Olds, the speaker uses wistful and jealous tones to convey her feeling about her daughter’s coming of age. The speaker, a thirty-five year old woman, realizes that as the door to womanhood is opening for her ten year old daughter, it is starting to close for her. A wistful tone is used when the speaker calls herself, “the silver-haired servant” (4) behind her daughter, indicating that she wishes she was not the servant, but the served. Referring to herself as her daughter’s servant indicates a sense of self-awareness in the speaker. She senses her power is weakening and her daughter’s power is strengthening. It also shows wistfulness for her diminishing youth, and sadness for her advancing years. This
In the essay “Me Talk Pretty One Day”, David Sedaris, American humorist and writer, recounts the hysterical/hilarious story about his experience while learning French in France at the age of 41. Sedaris develops his story providing a detailed narrative of what it is to be a foreign student in a French school taught by a very impatient and not so encouraging French teacher. Using comic exaggeration, Sedaris makes his essay not only quirky and bold; but interestingly appealing because it is an entertaining portrayal of his learnings. 4TH sentence: From his hilarious, somewhat painful, everyday experiences learning a new language, the intended audience of this essay is anyone who have learned, or is learning, a foreign language and can relate to the struggles and difficulties that go along with this experience. ADD THESIS STATEMENT HERE?
Reflections Within is a non-traditional stanzaic poem made up of five stanzas containing thirty-four lines that do not form a specific metrical pattern. Rather it is supported by its thematic structure. Each of the five stanzas vary in the amount of lines that each contain. The first stanza is a sestet containing six lines. The same can be observed of the second stanza. The third stanza contains eight lines or an octave. Stanzas four and five are oddly in that their number of lines which are five and nine.
Poets have written love poems for centuries with the first said to be around 1000BC. But what is love? It is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as ‘ to have attachment to and affection for’. However, after studying various love poems, I have found that love is portrayed in many different ways. It can be possessive, hateful and pure and the fact that William Shakespeare said ‘The course of true love never did run smooth’ suggests that love is more complicated than a simple dictionary definition.
The speaker starts the poem in second person then switches to first person point of view to show a change in tone and meaning. At the beginning, the speaker is talking to her aborted child, she says to the child that “[y]ou will never neglect or beat them…” (5). The
"The greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor." [It is] "a sign of real genius, since a good metaphor implies an intuitive perception of the similarity in dissimilars." Aristotle in Poetics.
The knots also symbolized of how patient the persona’s father, it definitely reflects the he tied the box.