Flowers By Alice Walker

The violets having triggered the persona’s memory, she recalls a similar late afternoon in her early childhood. “The thing I could not grasp or name”, in stanza 3, monosyllabic in language to show youth’s innocence and simplicity, represents time and change and “Where’s morning gone?”, the sorrowful question addressed to her mother after waking from an afternoon nap, serves as Harwood’s address to the reader about the quick passing of youth.

The atmospheric conditions may represent the hardships that the couple had to go through in their relationship, and may also be used contrast the unpredictability of the outside world compared to the steady relationship that the couple have. ‘A Youth Mowing’ is also a poem about relationships, this time it is between a younger couple. The river ‘Isar’ is a symbol of freedom, it represents the way that the men’s lives are. However, this sense of liberty is broken by the ‘swish of the scythe-strokes’ as the girl takes ‘four sharp breaths.’ Sibilance is used to show that there is a sinister undertone to the freedom that the boy has which will be broken by the news that his girlfriend is bringing. She feels guilty for ‘what’s in store,’ as now the boy will have to be committed to spending the rest of his life with her, and paying the price for the fun that they had.

The author shows the reader what she wants them to think, feel, and do with the information through the structure. In the story there is a shift of setting and time. The Flowers begins in a bright morning adventure, but as Myop continues with her adventure, she ends up in a dank part of the woods. This structure is parallel to the story of Eve in the Garden of Eden. Myop is a pure girl who wanders among the vibrant foliage, “...bouncing this way and that way, vaguely keeping an eye out for snakes” (Walker para. 4). Eve is also tempted by a strange plant, an apple, as is Myop. In The Flowers, Walker wrote that Myop was drawn by blue flowers. Such parallels to the snake and apple symbols of the Genesis story will lead the reader to sense that

Eugenia Collier, the author of the short story Marigolds makes great use of literary devices such as imagery, diction, flashback, and juxtaposition in a way that creates a voice for the narrator that conveys both the regret over, and possibly the longing for her childhood. The diction, that is, the vocabulary choice is expertly combined with imagery, or the unique descriptions and sensory details, in order to allow the reader to formulate the experiences and the surroundings of the narrator's childhood in their imaginations. Flashback is used to allow the narrator to not only explain how she viewed the events of her past as a child, but to compare these views with her adult feelings of the same events. Juxtaposition aids in further explaining the connection between the setting and emotions of the main character, creating a better picture of the narrator’s life. These elements all combine to construct a narrative that effectively conveys the coming of age theme.

Set during the Great Depression, a young girl, caught up in the whirlwind of teenage emotions, learns the meaning of compassion and empathy when she destroys a neighbor’s marigolds. Lizabeth, the main character in “Marigolds” by Eugenia Collier, has enough on her hands being an African-American in the Great Depression, and the constant struggle of trying to fit in with her younger friends while acting her age doesn’t help. One day, Lizabeth and some other children decide to go torment Miss Lottie, their neighbor, by throwing stones at her marigolds. Initially, Lizabeth hesitates to join in the fun of gathering stones; nevertheless, she wants the acceptance of her friends and still sees the fun in childish acts, so she succumbs to the peer

Betty Smith 's A Tree Grows in Brooklyn presents the problems of a child growing up, the coming of age when one meets challenges and overcomes obstacles. The protagonist, Francie Nolan, undergoes a self-discovery as she strives to mature living in the Brooklyn slum despite its poverty and privation. Thus, Smith 's thematic treatment of the struggle of maturity has become for the reader an exploration of loneliness, family relationships, the loss of innocence, and death and disease.

In ‘I kneel to pick frail melancholy flowers among ashes and loam’ a tone of loneliness and sadness is established as the persona enters. Harwood describes the violets as ‘frail’ and ‘melancholy’, terms that arn’t usually associated with flowers. This is also explored in the juxtaposition of ‘ashes’ and ‘loam’. Ash is symbolic of death and decay which contradicts the ‘loam’, symbolic of life and birth. The persona’s dark and unpleasant perceptions reveal their uncertainty and state of mind. The present tense indicates the persona’s adulthood and their sense of longing and unsatisfaction conveyed through the nostalgic delivery of

In “Marigolds” a young girl is growing up during the Great Depression. For Lizabeth, the narrator, everyday is a challenge. As she transitions from an innocent, naive child to an aware, yet unsure young woman, the smooth road she’s been traveling on suddenly becomes bumpy and unfamiliar when a fit of anger taken out on her neighbor marks Lizabeth’s growing up. “All the smoldering emotions of that summer swelled in me and burst- the great need for my mother who was never there, the hopelessness of our poverty and degradation, the bewilderment of being neither child nor woman and yet both at once…”, (Collier, “Marigolds”). All of the emotions that Lizabeth has been holding in spill out of her in an audacious, violent action that will exile her childhood; the destroying of Miss Lottie’s prized marigolds.When Lizabeth realizes with remorse what she’s done, she gains the heavy burden of adulthood. “In that humiliating moment I looked beyond myself and into the depths of another person. This was the beginning of compassion, and one cannot have both compassion and innocence”, (Collier, “Marigolds”). When Lizabeth conveys that Miss Lottie had planted marigolds as a show of passion and hope, she becomes compassionate towards Miss Lottie, ridding her of her childish innocence. While “Hard on the Gas” is minimally worded, the meaning of the poem speaks volumes. The poem conveys growing up, and the fact that the road to adulthood is not, in fact, smooth. “Rush, rest, rush, rest”,

At the beginning of the poem, the speaker, a twelve-year-old girl, is instantly gripped by a strong feeling of lust toward this mysterious seventeen-year-old boy: the paperboy. She even goes on to describe him as a “gift. A fluke from God” as if she believes that she and this boy are destined to be together (2). From her vantage point, the girl instantly notices the boy’s physical characteristics, traits which the young girl appears to admire when she describes the boy’s “bicep in the twilight” (3). This intense, love-at-first-sight reaction to the boy’s arm shows how irrational the girl’s feelings are. She seems to simply lust after the idea of him. The girl has “no memory of language” from their nightly encounters, further showing how this “relationship” was merely visual and very one-sided (6). The boy, potentially, never even notices the girl; and if he does, he does not acknowledge her presence, let alone her strong emotions. The only memories the girl has are from “loitering, lingering far past curfew,” times in which she merely stares at the boy while he completes his daily paper route (7). The girl's depictions of her mother "lost in steam, stirring" and her father "asleep beside his Manhattan, the half-read mail" almost puts the reader directly into the house. The girl, meanwhile, lost her in her emotions, wanders around her yard "without knowing what I longed for" (16). The parents, both focused on other activities, leave the twelve-year-old speaker to do as she pleases in the night.

Alicia Walker’s short story, “The Flowers”, gives a darker side on the realities of life. The author walks through the perspective of Myop, who is a ten-year-old girl, having the time of life. Walker uses words such “light”, “warm”, and “beautiful” to illustrate Myop’s life as innocent in her childhood (par. 2). This shows the Paradise which humans seek to have in their lives. However, Walker talks about how Myop chose her own path, searching for flowers in the woods (par. 4). What Walker describes in this scene is the curiosity of a kid searching for answers, farther than her mother took her in the woods. In the woods, Myop experience the dark truth about life. As she gathers flowers and heads home, she steps in the face of a dead man and

Because of her “Myopia”(short-sightedness), she doesn't notice the dead laying in the bushes until she bumps into him. At first, Myop remains innocent and undisturbed; she even proceeds to pick the ink rose that is growing near the dead man. Walker uses visual imagery to focus on the man’s gruesome death; “he’d had large white teeth, all of them cracked or broken,” which indicates that the man had been brutally beaten before his murder. This imagery of decay is further reinforced in the quote, “the buckles of the overalls had turned green.” Through the use of direct visual contrast between “all of his clothes had rotted away” and “the peacefulness of the morning,” conveys that something that was once pure and whole has now been corrupted by the cruelty of the real word.

There was use of ambiguity here, as the artist left room for one to decide what this piece personally meant to one’s self. There was irony used here, forcing the observer to use implication upon seeing the demonstration of the daisies and the light pale colours. Although several possibilities occurred to me, I concluded that it was apparent to me that this piece was about a grieving young girl rape victim. The artist used a sense of defamiliarization here with the use of daisies portraying the loss of innocence in comparison to innocence itself. She used the cherries as a familiar object and turned them into the unfamiliar deeper meaning of the loss of one’s

When compared, both Walker’s and Kawabata’s short stories reflect related themes about childhood and innocence. In “The Flowers” the theme surrounds the subject of childhood by telling a story about a

In the story it describes Myop coming across the corpse of a tall man who is wearing overalls that have been rotted and he has broken and cracked bones. It is inferred by this quote “It was the rotted remains of a noose, a bit of shredding plowline, now blending benignly into the soil” that the man was black because of the setting, the condition in which his bones were and how the use of plowline reflects towards the time period that he was lynched. At the beginning of the story the author uses diction such as lightly, beautiful, keenness, golden, and excited which gives a happy tone. As the story progresses the diction gets more intense and dark such as in the line “She had often been as far before, but the strangeness of the land made it not as pleasant as her usual haunts”. Walker uses words such as strangeness to shift the tone in more of a dark

Instead of allowing that to be a lense to see the text, morrison subverts the connotations of seasons. She shows not the ups and downs of life but the cyclical quality of oppression that once started is passed around from rich white man to poor black man, from poor black man to poor black woman, from poor black woman to her poor black child. This is most clear during the section titled spring which opens with frieda’s molestation and continues by describing the history of Mrs. breedlove and cholly. The contrast between forsythia, milkweed, wild roses, and molestation and abuse magnifies the severity of the horrible events through Toni Morrison use of