Analysis of the Poem "Move" Essay

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.

After hundreds of years later the negro people still aren’t free. In this part of the story it talks about how over a long period of time that his people still continue to have no freedom what so ever. He developed his plans to change this by peace not using violence. In this part of the story he is using metaphor and and allusion. “100 years later negro still are not free.” (King pg.1) “Negro’s live on the lonely island of poverty.” (King pg.1) “We’ve come here today to dramatize a shameful condition.” (King pg.1)

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.

Alliteration and metaphors are two major elements of this poem. The repetition of consonant sounds and alliteration occurs throughout the poem. All of the lines strongly use the repetition of consonants and alliteration except for lines two and seven. In addition to that, the controlling figure of speech in this poem is a metaphor. It is strongly articulated in the first line, and as the one continues to read, it is amplified and extended throughout the rest of the poem. The metaphor compares mask of Line 1 to the fabricated emotive facades that African-Americans had made use of in order to avert provoking their oppressors.

All their dazzling opportunities, were theirs, not mine…. With other black boys the strife was not so fiercely sunny…. Why did God make me an outcast and a stranger in my own house? The shades of the prison-house closed round about us all: walls strait and stubborn to the whitest, but relentlessly narrow, tall, and unscalable to sons of night who must plod darkly on in resignation, or beat unavailing palms against the stone, or steadily, half hopelessly, watch the streak of blue above.

The beginning of the poem starts off with African Americans going to the North and seeing faces that resemble theirs in Harlem. They are remembered of the hardships in the South but their aim is to get to the North where there is a better life. The key words “cotton and green pastures” show us the escape route that those of color are leaving to get a better life. The poem cites that “Cotton still stuck in their shoes, Zotts ! waiting to be shipped back to green pastures. The idea of escaping and moving away is in the determination to move on even though you are tired and dirty from the cotton stuck in the shoes waiting for many different opportunities.

In the fourth stanza, Clark uses imagery to talk about segregation. She also uses the simile, “I-40 bisected the black community like a tourniquet of concrete,” which means they cut off the flow of traffic and really segregated the black community from everything else. Also in this stanza, the violence of the 60’s was shown through the imagery of the lines stating, “Ambulance siren driving over the house that called 911, diminishing howl in the distance,

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

They looked with hatred at the city Negro who could buy a car as if it were a bottle of whiskey because the one he had was broken. And what's more, who had said so in front of them. He hadn't bothered to say his name, nor ask theirs, had called them "them," and would certainly despise their days, which should have been spent harvesting their own crops, instead of waiting around

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.

Robert Frost takes our imagination to a journey through wintertime with 
his two poems "Desert Places" and "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening". These two poems reflect the beautiful scenery that is present in the snow covered woods and awakens us to new feelings. Even though these poems both have winter settings they contain very different tones. One has a feeling of depressing loneliness and the other a feeling of welcome solitude. They show how the same setting can have totally different impacts on a person depending on 
their mindset at the time. These poems are both made up of simple stanzas and diction but they are not straightforward poems.

In order to occupy her child, the mother dresses her daughter up to go sing in the children’s choir at church in the fifth stanza. She brushes her hair, bathes her, and puts on her gloves and shoes. Randall appeals to the senses in this stanza; he uses a metaphor here to inform the reader a visual that the family is African American. She has “night-dark” hair and small brown hands. She is dressed in white and smells of sweet rose petals. The mother takes the girls mind off of the Freedom March and fixes it on the children’s choir. The tone is one of content. The sixth stanza is a

The angry and aggressive tone displays the attitudes and aggression towards the tenant for being African American. The tenant begs for repairs and his denied by his cruel landlord. The hostility of the poem can be seen in “You ain’t gonna be able to say a word / If I land my fist on you” as the tenant threatens the landlord for not repairing the home(19-20). The landlord is aggressive as well; for instance when he calls the police he says “He’s [the tenant] trying to ruin the government / And overturn the land,” which shows the landlord’s distaste for the tenant (23-14). The excerpt displays the landlord’s thinking that African Americans are ruining the United States and shouldn’t even be part of the

When delving into the song and trying to grasp the meaning, it can be understood that the author really desires to be free and go back home to where he belongs and desires. The author or writer of the song does not like the idea of slavery, nor does he like being a slave himself, his perspective on the topic shows that he is not happy about the current situation and no one should because of how cruel slavery is. The author also uses certain rhetorical strategies, one of them being metaphors. They can be used to explain his sadness and other feelings he has about the topic of slavery. An example of this is,

In the first stanza we find the student, who is also the narrator, having gotten his homework assignment to write a paper, is returning home to Harlem. The school he attends is "on the hill" (line 9), and apparently is in a "better" part of town, so he has to travel through the