Comparison of Nothing's Changed with Two Scavengers in a Truck

Ferlinghetti’s poem Two Scavengers in a Truck Two Beautiful People in a Mercedes portrays social inequality in a very direct way. The poet is narrating two different groups of people in L.A. to show the side effects of democracy in America. Also, in Maya Angelo’s Caged Bird, the poet has experienced the trauma of being black in America. She was born in 1928 when racism was something that black people had to endure. The both poets effectively present their own situations of inequity through the use of language and literary devices, such as imagery, personification and stanza use.

This essay will discuss how women were represented in the portraiture during the Renaissance period. It will explain how the women’s body was pictured in portraiture as; marriage celebrant, husbands beloved, figures of fertility, mothers, display of wealth, paragons of virtues, husband’s passive representative, indication of fashion and more (Brown, 2003). Next, it will include analysis from the two female portraits of Leonardo de Vinci’s Ginerva de’ Benci and Sandro Botticelli’s Portrait of a Lady. First, I will explain what portrait means and then represent my own interpretation of Botticelli’s Portrait of a Lady by referring to instructional “activity dialog” that details how to analyse the body’s subject in the portrait (Mckennee et

As a blue car approaches the speaker, he experiences anxiety to the point that it “made [him] sweat” (18). The speaker in this moment suddenly fears society’s judgment of him, and his judgment comes in the form of two children his age. The children appear to be arrogant toward the speaker, and they “smirk” at his situation and appearance (22). Standing on a roadside with blackberries in hand, the speaker realizes his “unfitness” in the money-driven world, and his ideal childhood setting is disheveled by the “smirk” of strangers (22). At this moment, society jolts the speaker out of his daydreams and into adulthood. Wealth and power seem to be illustrated in the speaker’s view of the passing car, and with the car, the speaker seems to compare his life of berry-picking to that of a comfort-filled automobile. The car, a sign of power in society, brings coldness into the speaker’s life through the portrayal of air-conditioning, and as a result, the speaker no longer “[limbos] between the worlds” of the rich and the poor (17). His mind realizes the children superiority, and he becomes aware of society’s standings at this early age. His place becomes final- just a poor boy selling

The setting of this poem is in a rural part of an unnamed Southern state, off of Highway 96 at Cherrylog Road. It is at the peak of a summer afternoon in a junkyard full of discarded automobiles. This setting affects the reader’s perception of this poem by using a hot southern junkyard with an active sun that is “eating the paint in blisters from a hundred car

Within the second stanza, the symbolism of black smoke, dark streets, and asphalt flowers, prompts the reader to feel smothered by urbanization and industrialization. This was most evident within the juxtaposition of asphalt and flower, which shows urbanization has gone so far whereas its replaced nature

The cars are often compared to bugs in chapter seventeen. Steinbeck says, “The cars...scuttled like bugs to the westward...they clustered like bugs near to shelter and water.” The cars are compared to bugs, and they scuttle and cluster similar to how bugs do. To scuttle means to hurry, so comparing the cars to bugs fabricates a flustered feeling among the migrants. To cluster means to assemble, which is something that many people do, including the migrants, in times of trouble and need for others. Steinbeck gives qualities to the car that it would not necessarily be able to do by themselves, and he compares the cars to bugs to highlight the eeriness in the beginning of chapter seventeen. Again, at the end of chapter seventeen, Steinbeck states, “the cars of the migrant people crawled out like bugs”, which stresses the distress and anxiety among the migrants and even their cars during the Dust Bowl. Though the migrants may be searching for a better life, their lives are still surrounded by darkness and difficulty, and the cars follow along the migrants as if they were living creatures, or bugs. Steinbeck also personifies the sun when he says, “the sun drained the dry rocky country”. Even though the land was already dry, the sun “drained” it, which is a human-like quality. The sentence also emphasizes the dark mood of the time because “drained” is a more negative word, as the sun almost drains the life out of the country because of the heat. The sun and the car serve to complete living creature qualities that are uncanny and crawly, which contribute to the dark mood of the

In the poems Two Scavengers in a Truck, Two Beautiful People in a Mercedes by Lawrence Ferlinghetti and ‘Nothings Changed’ By Tatamkhulu Afrika, both poets present their feelings towards how nothing will change and how unequal our society is through past experiences and observations. Ferlinghetti presents social inequality through his observation of the contrast between two different classes of people in San Francisco during 1950’s. However, Afirka’s presents his idea and feeling of racial inequality through sharp images of what he observes when he goes back to his home in District Six, Cape Town after the Apartheid has ended and the consequences and aftereffects. Both poets effectively contrast and respond to their feelings of social inequality

The woman rejects any motion that she lost her identity due to fear of admitting her fault. Ironically, the woman turns to find comfort in the shallowness and wealth of others even though the upper class values have never made her truly happy. Furthermore, the woman’s “meanings lost in manner” (27) force her to remain “alone in brilliant circles” (28). The woman desires to find some happiness and comfort in the rest of her life, but she’s only accustom to finding it in trivial wealth. Through imagery, the reader understands that the woman has completely lost her personal value in the manners of the upper class and remains in the lifestyle that beckons her with its material, flashy

This contrast relates to the theme because it shows how an adult can negatively be affected by materialistic things such as money. In the first stanza there is a strong use of positive imagery- representing a child’s mind. For example, “grass grows soft and white”, gives a floral and peaceful description about the place used in the description. However, in the second stanza there is the use of negative imagery. The imagery used helps to describe a dark and lifeless city, a phrase which influences this would be, “smoke blows black”, which means pollution. Within the second stanza, the narrator introduces personal pronouns. These pronouns influence the reader’s thoughts about the

Lawrence Ferlinghetti writes ‘Two Scavengers In a Truck, Two Beautiful People in a Mercedes’. The poem’s surface meaning is the writer recalling a moment in a life when a garbage truck and a Mercedes were both stopped at traffic lights. It is built

He explains the different forces that bring us (mainly men) to look at others in a way that many would consider demeaning, “What attracts our eyes and rouses our blood is only partly instinctual. Other forces contend in us as well: the voices of books and religions, the images of art and film and advertising, the entire chorus of culture” (Sanders 116). Sanders highlights that the way that a lot of women are portrayed in our culture, is more like and object than a human being, “For the instant of the photograph, they had become their bodies, as a moment of hoisting a barbell, as a ballerina does in the whirl of a pirouette, as we all do in the crisis of making love or dying” (Sanders 117). Although most of the time the author seems to feel somewhat ashamed of his “instinctual desires”, he does highlight others views of people throughout history, “William Carlos Williams tells us on the opening page of his autobiography, (I think that from that arises the drive which empowers us all. Given that drive, a man does with it what his mind directs)” (Sanders 119). Towards the end of the story, the author quotes Simone de Beauvoir. Simone, gives a reason as to why women dress up like dolls, and sometimes wish to be viewed like dolls. Simone says, “The ‘feminine’ woman in making herself prey tries to reduce man, also, to her carnal

A Poetry Comparison of Two Scavengers in a Truck, Two Beautiful People in a Mercedes and Nothing's Changed

The speaker uses the example of the emptiness she sees in homeless people to show how she sees her father. She sees the “underwater / fire of their eyes, ships gone down with the / lanterns lit,” just as she sees her father, a man whose hatred can never be extinguished until he is taken away from his victims, just as fire can be extinguished when the oxygen it uses to stay alive turns to water (21-23). Echoing lines from earlier in the poem, the speaker wonders who “took it and / took it [from the bums] in silence,” just as she did from her father (23-24). The speaker uses imagery of the bums taking away their victims’ humanities to tell how she and her family had given all they had to give to the father and “had nothing / left but this” (25-26). These last lines offer the true meaning of the poem; abusers can only take so much of their victim’s lives before the victims either give in completely or, in the case of the speaker’s family, revolt. The speaker’s family had nothing left to give but to give the father away to the outside world where he could no longer be of harm to anyone but himself. The speaker’s words about the bums she sees wallowing in their “suits of compressed silt,” gives hope that her father too, is now nothing more than a “slug” (19, 20). The abusive father has been turned to trash in the speaker’s mind.

The poem “A Northern Suburb” portrays urbanization as the main proponent of the distress that the lower class are facing. One method Davidson uses to communicate this message is by surrounding urbanization with feeding imagery. It is urbanization’s “whetted fangs” (5) that “devour” (6) the rural suburb, which portrays its change on society as consuming. The lower class is being viewed as food, which further strengthens this idea of hunger. The poor now live in small houses that are described as “Ovens” (16), “Ice-chests” (15) and “cupboards” (14). These descriptions lead to an idea of the community as food living in various parts of a kitchen and with urbanization as the head chef. This consumption imagery leads to a view of the lower class

He explicitly depends on poverty imagery, whereby he describes the way labourers transport and function on a daily basis. These people get on buses while "packing the inside, hanging from the railings, climbing onto the roofs'' (lines 2 and 3-4) and they create an unappealing scene for viewers. The repetition of these respective phrases emphasize that the scene created can be very appalling and the image of those workers as savage, impoverished locals should be engraved in the reader's mind. Furthermore, the narrator makes use of a paradoxical image to contrast the health status and weight of one sector of the population with another. He indicates that the rickshaw-pullers carry a "pyramid of middle-class flesh" (line 21), which is regarded to "some fat man with his fat wife" (lines 21-22). The image created in the reader's mind is that of an undernourished man carrying a fat couple and their shopping bags in a carriage. The images created further aid in portraying the extent of severity in the tough labour experienced by Indian locals. The stylistic devices used in the text depict the reality of rickshaw-pullers and other Indian workers. For instance, the narrator uses a simile when comparing the body of a rich man to that of "like a premium cotton pillow" (line 6), with that pillow being "white and soft and blank" (line 6). The