In On the Subway, Sharon Olds expresses the differences in a white man’s life as opposed to a black man’s life while riding the train. However, the poem starts off just describing how the main character viewed the black man. Based on his attire and “look” he was profiled to be a mugger; of apparent lower class. While the main character talks about his fur coat and how the “mugger” can easily steal it from him. As the poem progresses the main character change his tone of fear to questioning and insightful; compared to his original thoughts of him amounting to nothing but a mugger, he begins to realize their lives (including their challenges) are different. For example in the poem he acknowledges that the man in front of him could be struggling
In the poem, “35/10” by Sharon Olds, the speaker uses wistful and jealous tones to convey her feeling about her daughter’s coming of age. The speaker, a thirty-five year old woman, realizes that as the door to womanhood is opening for her ten year old daughter, it is starting to close for her. A wistful tone is used when the speaker calls herself, “the silver-haired servant” (4) behind her daughter, indicating that she wishes she was not the servant, but the served. Referring to herself as her daughter’s servant indicates a sense of self-awareness in the speaker. She senses her power is weakening and her daughter’s power is strengthening. It also shows wistfulness for her diminishing youth, and sadness for her advancing years. This
reasons for not telling him anything. One reason can be that the poet can see how the
Abandoned by her mother at three-year-old, married at the age 19, three children at the age of 26, and with only a fifth-grade level education. My mom was in prison for a month after struggling to cross the Mexican border into the United States. My mom came to American seeking a better future where my siblings and I did go hungrier to be able to survive. The poet is describing the word “Migration” that takes a different method in relating what is crossing the border as well as tense perceptive effects that occur when it comes to crossing the border. Rosa Alcala’s poem has persona, metaphor, images and figures speech the author can illustrate the feeling of the poem as attentive vagueness.
October, and analyzes the nature around him. At the end of the poem, he states that
Individuals have been brought to believe that the only way to end their griefs and sorrows is to end their lives. Though suicide has become a detriment and devastating issue, it has not been presumed to be an effortless or painless act. In society, people become their own threats as they tend to isolate themselves from others which often increases this devastating issue of unsubstantial pain and long-suffering. In the poem, Tuesday 9:00 am, by Denver Butson, individuals are unable to speak and move because of their own specific problems which are burdening them and their ability to help others. The poet is enforcing the idea that individuals need to open up their eyes and be aware of others relentless despair and their struggle to reach out.
The woman being described in Maxine’s poem is confident in her own skin, where Maxine says, “The woman I am in my dreams, is taller than I am, she sees the world as she walks” this suggests that the woman always has her head up high and takes in the world as she walks. The woman wears red “spike heels” and “that woman walks only when she feels like not running, not jogging” would suggest the woman is physically capable of both running and walking. The verse “they don’t hide under long skirts; her legs and feet are well” would elude that the woman in the poem isn’t afraid to show off her legs which would support the idea that she is physically able.
In the poem “Passed On” by Carole Satymurti, the speaker tells a story almost as in a novel of their mother and how she left them a box of index cards with advice on life when she died. The speaker’s gender seems to be female. In the poem, the poet presents the theme of growing up and becoming one’s own person through the maturation and acceptance process. She personifies the index cards themselves, comparing them to her mother. They also characterize the speaker and her mother and create a mood of sadness and longing, implying that perhaps the mother has been dead for some time, but the speaker has never truly accepted this.
The 2016 census reported that 14% of the United States population was living below the poverty line. And sometimes, desperate times call for desperate measures. Leading people to go as far as committing a crime just to feed their family. This was the theme of Cage The Elephant’s song, “Ain’t No Rest For The Wicked,” written by Matt Schultz. In the song, Schultz utilizes personal experiences and an emotional appeal to address the issues of poverty to the upper classes and to justify how people in poverty or “the Wicked” handle their situation by the means of crime and immoral ways.
The song, “Hotel California”, by the Eagles, is a very poetic song that uses imagery, and symbolism to bring out the theme in an indirect way of the speaker’s personal issues of life. The Eagles use imagery to set the mood and tone of the song. Along with many aspects of symbolism to input a lot of double meaning throughout the whole song. With both imagery and symbolism incorporated, many fans or people who have heard of this song would believe that the theme of this song is about a lonely traveler trying to break his own temptations.
The poem “A Story” by Li young Lee tells of a young child asking his father for story. The boy simply wants a story that he has never heard, his father is bombarded with panic as he seems to think he is disappointing his son. Through analysis of structure, points of view and metaphors this seemingly simple story is transformed into a deep meaningful poem about a complex relationship between a father and son.
In the poem The Race by Sharon Olds, we have a women who's father is about to die, and she has to overcome obstacles, such as time and her flight being canceled, in order to get to her father as soon as she can. The overall meaning of the poem is that when you have faith and are determined, no matter what obstacles get in your way, you will surpass them and do what you have to do. Parallelism, imagery and run on sentences help convey the meaning of the poem.
Poetry can follow your life all the way through, from the innocence of a child, to the end of your days. The comfort, seduction, education, occasion and hope found in poems are elaborated in Poetry Should Ride the Bus by Ruth Forman. As the poem reads on, you not only travel through the life of a person from adolescence to being elderly through vivid imagery, but also hit on specific genres of poems through the personification of poetry as the characters in the stages of life. This poem’s genres hit on what poetry should do and be, by connecting the life many of us live.
As the poem progresses, the narrator continues to use certain terms that overall portray what he went through.
The Poem “Introduction to Poetry” is by Billy Collins, an English poet, and it is about how teachers often force students to over-analyze poetry and to try decipher every possible meaning portrayed throughout the poem rather than allowing the students to form their own interpretation of the poem based on their own experiences.
These two seemingly opposite tones and moods existing in one poem simultaneously resemble the ambiguity in the speaker that he reveals when he describes his condition very ambiguously. For instance, in the first line, he portrays himself as a “dead man”(1), but in the line immediately after, the dead man is moaning, which is biologically impossible. The unclear subject raises the issue of who the speaker is, if he should not be able to comment on himself because he is already dead. When the speaker uses the same pronouns, “he” and “him” from both the first person and the third person perspectives to refer to himself, this becomes even more puzzling; the readers are no longer sure of who the speaker is and who the subject of the poem is. One possible cause of these uncertainties is the discrepancy between the speaker’s real self and his public self; one that resembles who he