Jabberwocky Figurative Language

In “A Barred Owl”, Wilbur uses certain words and phrases to convey a dark, then humorous tone in the first stanza, then transitions back in the second stanza. The poem begins with a

Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun? Or fester like a sore– And then run?" (Langston Hughes). It is important to never lose sight of one’s dream. Dreams are what keep people moving in life, but if they are ignored, they may morph and lose their prevailing form. This is evident in Lorraine Hansberry’s "A Raisin in the Sun", as Walter’s, Beneatha’s, and Mama’s dreams become delayed, distorted, and blurred.

In “A Barred Owl,” Wilbur adopts a playful tone through rhyming: “We tell the wakened child that all she heard/ Was an odd question from a forest bird” (3, 4). The rhyme imitates the style of nursery rhymes, creating a joking tone. The playful tone avoids seriousness and weakens the horror of the owl, which contributes to the poem’s style like a nursery rhyme. Wilbur also euphemizes the owl to help create a nursery style. He does not represent the horrible creature of an owl as a carnivore with sharp claws that hunts during the night, but euphemizes it as a “forest bird” (Wilbur 4). The owl’s representation as a safe forest bird refers its figure to the enthusiastic birds with heavenly sounds in cartoons and story books, which often help the protagonist to overcome difficulties and dangers. Referring to nursery imageries of birds, the euphemism contributes to the poem’s style as a nursery rhyme. Creating a playful tone and a nursery style, Wilbur uses rhymes and euphemism to “domesticate fear” (Wilbur

She admits that a “lapsed pacifist” such as herself can be filled with “Darwinian pieties” to murder, specifically referencing the woodchucks destroying the landscape. Though the narrator may seem to simply realize her obsession with killing the woodchucks, her overall connotation leads readers to consider the possibility of a preoccupation to execute humans as well. This theme continues throughout the remaining stanzas in the poem, as the speaker utilizes phrases such as “the murderer inside me” and “if only they’d consented to die unseen.” These lines insinuate that the speaker represents one who murders people rather than a hunter of rodents. The use of violent, personified vocabulary throughout the entire poem also signifies the speaker’s focus on human violence. The strand of harsh and sometimes humanized words such as “beheading,” “gassing,” “nipping,” “killing,” and “bullets” inflict a negative connotation for the narrator’s actions. These words are not always used when referring to the woodchucks; the “beheading” refers to a patch of carrots, which signifies that this violent connotation is intentional. If the speaker simply aims to reflect an innocent woodchuck hunt, she should not use such violent or personal vocabulary. Therefore, the incorporation of this strand of words along with the narrator’s description of her own actions signifies the overall personification of the rodents in the speaker’s

Repeated onomatopoeic terms again set the scene. We are told that a hunt is in progress, and it is described in descriptive detail. Anderson does not romanticise the scene as the duckling cowers from a ‘fearfully big dog’.

In both Wilbur's and Collins’ poems, they convey a protective tone to maintain the idea that children must remain pure. In “A Barred Owl”, Wilbur talks of lying to the child that the owl was asking “Who cooks for you?” rather than a scary animal call. The protective tone conveys the message of the poem in that malicious sounds are concealed by childish phrases. The author hints at keeping the child pure and unafraid by changing the meaning of the words. Later, Wilbur tells how words “can also thus

Tone- Jabberwocky appears to have a somewhat humorous tone, considering the nonsensical words used, the brevity of the story, and lack of moral. There is no issue or theme addressed that can be applied as an allegory, unlike The Lorax. However, the entire story of the Lorax is rather darker and more applicable in real life, and the tone is both a call to action for the readers and also rather accusatory towards large factories and companies. However, the Jabberwocky appears to have no clear accusations or calls to action and is a vivid contrast to the dark tone of The Lorax. The Jabberwocky poem’s tone is rather ironic, because it presents a usually serious topic (Defeating a vicious beast) with nonsensical baby words, which makes the author’s intent rather humorous. The quote below showcases an action scene with these nonsense words, which changes the tone from serious too rather humorous.

Many poems have concepts that can be hard to grasp due to complex metaphors, figurative language, and forms of diction. Lewis Carroll takes this struggle of comprehension to an entire new level in The Jabberwocky. Although a simple story of a boy slaying a foul creature, it is formatted in a way that traps the reader inside of the nonsensical imagination of Carroll. It does not take close inspection to realize that the word choices throughout are a bit unorthodox. It does, however, take an out-of-the-box mindset to fully appreciate the imagery at work in this poem. It is proven in The Jabberwocky that words do not have to be proper in meaning or pre-existent to portray ideas.

In Langston Hughes poem Harlem, he discuses a “dream deferred” throughout the whole poem. Hughes discuses what happens when people let go or forget about their dreams. In lines two and three, Hughes says “Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?”. He is still talking about the dreams here trying to figure out what actually happened to it. A raisin starts off as a grape. Grapes are known as being juicy and colorful. When becoming a raisin, grapes are set out in the sun to dry out. When raisins dry out, they become brown and shriveled losing all their water. Although both are very nutritious for you, raisins contain no water and are not regarded as a fruit. They look dead. Grapes on the other hand are plumb and filled with water. They are colorful and are seen as alive. Langston Hughes uses a grapes, raisins, and sun symbolically. Grapes refers to peoples dreams, raisins stand for peoples “deferred dreams”, and the sun represents society. During childhood our dreams are colorful and full of life like grapes, but eventually society/reality dries them up like the sun dries up a raisin. The end product is our reality, other wise known as a raisin. During the 1920's, many young African-Americans gave up on their childhood dreams because of society old them they could not do it. Langston Hughes seems frustrated with this and does not understand

From beginning to end, the poem utilizes specific wording to illustrate a certain form of desensitization taking place within the narrator. In the beginning, the narrator wants to eradicate her pests in the most humane way possible, describing her first attempt at extermination as “merciful” and “quick.” This humanitarian view on the extermination soon turns to a “righteously thrilling” hunt for the woodchucks. After shooting the little woodchuck, she watches him die in the rose garden and she is very brief in her description of its death because she is somewhat embarrassed of the fact that she actually pulls the trigger and shoots an innocent creature. In fact,

“in Just-” by E. E. Cummings, certain words are used based on the audial sense they give the reader. For example, when Cummings mentions “eddieandbill” (6), he runs the names together because it gives the reader a sense of how unimportant the actual names are – the point of the phrase is the children, not what they are called. He also uses nonsense words like “puddle-wonderful” (10) and “mud- // luscious” (2-3) to give the reader a sense of childlike innocence. Rather than use descriptors like drenched, soaked, or waterlogged, he uses words that don’t exist, like those made up by a child. These words are not only silly, but somewhat pleasing to the ear. The sense of innocent joy at the call of the balloon-man felt by “eddieandbill” (6) and

Both The Lorax and The Jabberwocky have both a happy and serious mood in some point in the story. They also both have a character in the story as the narrator. The moods in both of these stories can contrast because the

1. I could see the speaker of this poem to be a man telling his son a folklore about the "Jabberwock" around a campfire. I think this because of the intensity of the speaker and how he says, "Beware the Jabberwock, my son!"

In the opening of the poem the speaker uses a visual image that is also a simile to compare a dream deferred to a raisin. "Does it dry up/ like a raisin in the sun?" The simile in the question is comparing a dream deferred to raisin in the sun. Like a raisin, a dream deferred shrivels up

"Wn a bby fst ts 2 kmnikt the wrds snd gibberish. " No one knows what the baby is trying to say. The poem, "Jabberwocky," written by Lewis Carroll, uses meaningless speech to either frustrate or amuse the reader. When trying to pronounce the nonsense words in the poem, the sounds of the words come out as gibberish. The sounds are the important element of the poem. Often, people like to hear poets read in languages they cannot understand. A woman leaving a reading by the Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz said she was glad he'd read some of his work in Polish because the language sounded exciting, like horse hooves over cobblestones.