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Planting A Sequoia Commentary Essay example

Decent Essays

Planting A Sequoia, written by Dana Gioia, included in her larger work, The Gods of Winter published in 1991. The work is written in first person point of view because the narrator. This poem’s central assertion is remembrance and honoring of the dead with the family and rebirth. The poem is about the a father that plants a sequoia tree in honor of his recently deceased infant son. Gioia uses imagery in the first few stanzas to emphasize the severity of the father and his families’ grief and despair. In these sections he also reveals the setting of the poem which is Sicily and the reason he chose a sequoia tree. The very first stanza of the Gioia’s poem sets the tone for the poem, which was melancholy, with the imagery the author uses. …show more content…

This is significant because it emphasizes the melancholy and mournfulness that he depicts with imagery in the first stanza. Later on in the second stanza, he author describes the tree the narrator would have planted as a “green sapling rising among the twisted apple boughs”. The author uses visual color imagery of the color green to describe the sapling in order to emphasize just how young the newborn was when he died. Later on in the poem, the narrator speaks of himself and his brothers kneeling in front of the newly plated tree. The fact that they are kneeling represents respect for the deceased. When the narrator mentions that the weather is cold it is a reference back to the first stanza when he says “of an old year coming to an end”. Later on in the third stanza the author writes “all that remains above earth of a first born son” which means that the deceased child has been buried. They also compare the child to the size of “a few stray atoms” to emphasize that he was an infant. All of these symbols and comparisons to are significant because they are tied to the central assertion of remembrance and honoring of the dead with the family and rebirth. Furthermore, the last two stanzas are more personal in the sense of how the narrator speaks. The word “we” is used many times in these last two stanzas, more than the first three. In all five of the stanzas, the word “we” was used as the authors way of

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