I Remember I Remember Diction

The poem is composed in free verse and it has no rhyme scheme or meter. It is 51 lines long and takes no particular structure with fluctuated line lengths all throughout the work. It is told as story from what can be accepted is a young boys' viewpoint. There are points in the story where it makes it clear the story is being told later on, as in line 8 where it is composed "Even/a quarter century later…." however a significant part of the story is told in the current state. This change makes readers feel as though we are

The poem takes place within the mind of the former boy, reflecting on his time among

The speaker of the poem is a grown man reminiscing because he is describing things from a different perspective than a twelve year old would. When the speaker asks the girl what she wants at the drugstore, the speaker describes the girl as having “...Light in her eyes, a smile starting at the corners of her mouth.” The speaker now reminisces all the details of the girl’s face. This event had a big impact on him, resulting in him remembering such small details. He now has a mature and observant perspective. The original twelve year old would have just been delighted to see that he has made a girl happy and would not care about the details, as he overjoyed with the girl’s happiness. The speaker is definitely a grown man reminiscing his time as a twelve year old because he states “...I was

The poem also uses end rhyme to add a certain rhythm to the poem as a whole. And the scheme he employs: aabbc, aabd, aabbad. End rhyme, in this poem, serves to effectively pull the reader through to the end of the poem. By pairing it with lines restricted to eight syllables. The narrator creates an almost nursery-rhyme like rhythm. In his third stanza however, his last line, cutting short of eight syllables, stands with an emphatic four syllables. Again, in the last stanza, he utilizes the same technique for the last line of the poem. The narrator’s awareness of rhyme and syllable structure provides the perfect bone structure for his poem’s rhythm.

The reflection of each poet's childhood is displayed within these lines helping to build a tone for the memories of each narrator.

The poet conveys the complex relationship through the length of each stanza, Throughout the poem the number of lines in each stanza increases which represents the escalation of varying emotions within the father. The first three stanzas introduce the situation with an average of three lines in each stanza revealing the father’s rise in emotions. As the poem progresses, the father starts to generate an imagination where he loses a relationship with his son due to his disappointment. He has thoughts such as “he thinks the boy will give up on his father,” revealing a sense of lost hope in the father because he can’t recall a single story. Despite the son calling him “Baba,” this emotional connection remains complex because he can only imagine his son leaving. As the narrator’s tone grows in anxiety, the amount of lines in each stanza also increases. The last three stanzas express a steady accumulation of fear and rage and then a transition to a decrease in apprehension. The level of sentiment attached to each stanza lengthened them as each line represented a higher level of emotion causing a new level of intensification within each stanza. The last two stanzas increase from four lines back to five lines because the father becomes less anxious and seems to realize that the complex relationship between him and his son is distinguished by emotions of love in a world with insufficiencies. Cumulatively, the father’s

The poem begins with using “melodies” as an image. In the first phrase, “Like melodies draw it to me softly through the mind,” the word “melodies” seems to be symbolic of thoughts or memories. These melodies are like a tune that you cannot get out of your head, a memory that he is unable to forget.

By adding this phrase in the poem, the persona implies that whatever he is saying in the poem is not his own. However, the lack of quotation marks and the repeated use of the pronoun “I” in the poem implies that the persona “owns” whatever he is saying. Therefore, the persona attempts to own and disown the experiences narrated in the poem at the same time, a paradox. Yes, the persona is the boy. However, as he recalls the time when he first learned English, he tries to separate himself from his experiences during the war. The girl being shot in the last stanza, although the boy wasn’t physically present, is indicative of a turning point in the boy’s life—it ruined the innocence of the boy. And in the poem, this turning point is symbolized by way of the persona’s detachment to what he is narrating; to his former

It brings up the gilded lies that we tell others to make them feel better, but how can telling someone “children are cruel” make a child forget the words that have been told to them? How can they just ignore it when it follows them every day, like an ominous shadow, always there. Within this poem there are multiple stories, bringing out the different victims of the same story, it’s a prime example of how people can affect others, and how words cause more destruction than a fist ever

This can assist the reader to put his/her view in the author's point of view, which he does in those stanzas. This poem is used by both literary devices which makes

The apologetic tone of the poem reflects the regret the speaker felt in the manner he behaved towards his father when he was a child. The poem is written in a past tense. signifying the poem is a reflection of the speakers childhood.In the first and second stanzas of the poem there are two

While reading the poem a second time over the audience notices a very controlled rhyme scheme. The poem consists of a rhyme scheme of A,B,A,B,C,D,C,D … until we reach the last two lines of the poem where Line 13 rhymes directly with Line 14. It is worth to note that the author doesn’t follow through to the end with

Billy Collins uses dark rooms, oceans, hives, color slides and mouse mazes to describe his poem “Introduction to Poetry”, but also a way to analyze poetry in general. Growing up, students are advised by teachers how to analyze poetry. The speaker of Introduction to Poetry, Billy Collins, attempts to guide the readers by teaching them a unique and appropriate way to analyze poetry. The use of personification and imagery, by the author, gives the readers a new perspective to interpret and find the significance in poetry. In this particular poem, the speaker does not want the reader to listen to the teachers of the reader’s past, “tie the poem to a chair with rope and torture a

The poem begins with two lines which are repeated throughout the poem which convey what the narrator is thinking, they represent the voice in

The poem begins with the narrator's describing the poem as a 'dream' that ''was not at all a dream'', which already causes doubt and tension within the reader. The narrator then goes on to talk about