The poem I chose to analyze was “Sestina” by Elizabeth Bishop. I chose this poem due to its structure, use of figurative language, repetition and tone. This poem uses vivid imagery to draw the reader in as though they are present at the grandmother’s house on that rainy September afternoon as the grandmother makes tea and the grandchild draws innocently. The poem takes a turn when the reader realizes that the grandmother is crying as though she has lost someone special in her life. The child drawings reflect those emotions as we analyze what her drawings are actually trying to convey. The author uses six words house, grandmother, child, stove, almanac and tears. These six words are important to the development of the poem due to all the words appearing continually throughout the entirety of speech. The title of the poem gives away what type of structure the poem will have. Elizabeth Bishop followed all the guidelines for a traditional Sestina giving her a legitimate reason for naming her poem “Sestina”. A sestina is a poem that is composed of six stanzas with six lines and an envoi , all stanzas having the same six words at the line-ends in six different sequences that follow a fixed pattern, and with all six words …show more content…
Her choice of the word hoovers instead of fly gave a the appearance of the almanac physically hoovering giving the almanac the ability to hover above the grandmother and the grandchild but also the absence of the man in the child’s drawing hovering over the grandmother leaving her in an emotional state. The child is naïve and doesn’t realize the battle the grandmother endures due to the absence of the man in the drawing so it seems that grandmother feels as though she has to stay strong for the child and that responsibility is hovering over the grandmother as
Color drives a significant amount of the meaning in this poem, as the idea is used in
In poems it is essential to be a creative writer. The author uses many techniques from from exposing deep thoughts to giving humorous jokes throughout the sentence. As a human being, we may have difficult times in understanding what is trying to be said. We may agree or disagree depending our viewpoints on life. One of my Favorite poems is “The Ballad of Sue Ellen Westerfield” by Robert Hayden. My favorite poem is the type of poem that has some history and confusion. When getting the audience confused, it makes them want to know more and reread the whole passage again. Hayden’s poem is a fresh new opening that brought an old dimension, his creativity to open the minds of others and look back to the past.
In “La Bamba” by Gary Soto, the symbols in the text point to the theme which is that worrying can cause things to not go as planned but things can take a turn for the better. One of the symbols in this text is how people view Manuel. This is a symbol because throughout the story Manuel constantly worries about how people view him and what people think of him. In the story Manuel worried about not messing up and making sure everything went as planned because he wants to impress people and make people think he is cool. When people used words such as “funny,” “crazy,” and “hilarious” to describe his performance and when people enjoyed it everything took a turn for the better. Even though Manuel thought his performance was bad at first but when other people told him that they liked his performance, he liked it too.
Olds uses imagery in this poem to juxtapose the stages of life the narrator and her daughter are experiencing and to illuminate the effect of age upon the body. She contrasts the daughter’s “brown silken hair” with the narrator’s greying hair
In this stylistic analysis of the lost baby poem written by Lucille Clifton I will deal mainly with two aspects of stylistic: derivation and parallelism features present in the poem. However I will first give a general interpretation of the poem to link more easily the stylistic features with the meaning of the poem itself.
A sestina is a fixed form of six stanzas that end with an envoi, an address to an imagined or real subject. This particular form of “Sestina” by Elizabeth Bishop takes you through one particular afternoon of a grandmother and her grandchild. Though the poem itself is ambiguous, Bishop foreshadows the grandmother’s demise throughout the entirety of the poem. The five words almanac, grandmother, tears, stove, and house are used at the end of each line for the six stanzas and envoi. They are clues as to figuring out the meaning of the poem. However, they are not the only clues as symbolism is the main usage of figurative language. The speaker is assumed to be Elizabeth Bishop but even she has written the poem in a way that reflects that of an outside observer to obscure the poem even further.
As we get older we tend to reflect more on our life and get our priorities together. We tend to realize who and what is important, the people who mean the most to us and the ones we can’t live without. Who would those significant individuals be for us? For most people it would be their parents. In the poems “My Father’s Song” by Simon J. Ortiz, and “My Mother” by Ellen Bryant Voigt, both writers express their emotion towards a parent. The poems are similar in many ways simply because they share a parent child relationship, they are also vastly different. “My Fathers Song” is a poem about a son who lost his father and is grieving and referring back to old memories, reflecting on their past and the wonderful time he had with his father. “My Mother” on the other hand is a poem about a daughter who lost her mother and is having a difficult time coping as she reflects on the decisions she made as a child and how that affected her relationship with her mother. Despite their differences, the two poems share a true connection of love towards their parent. Most notably “My Fathers Song” and “My Mother” differ in the relationship with their parent, the settings in which the memories they hold of their parents take place, and who they are mourning over, yet the two have a strong emphasis on love.
¨Those Winter Sundays¨ by Robert Hayden and ¨Snapping Beans¨ by Lisa Parker are two different narrative poems that share the same theme. Similarly both poems consist of a speaker being affected by the relationship they have with their elders. In ¨Those Winter Sundays¨ the speaker tells us about his hardworking father who takes care of his kids even though he may come off as a harsh father. The speaker of ¨Snapping Beans¨ is a granddaughter who discusses about the change that she is going through but is afraid to tell the person that raised her. Therefore this essay compares the two poems with respect to the speaker's feelings and morals.
In the sestina, “Sestina”, by Algernon Charles Swinburne, uses a tone to give the impression of living life to the fullest and seizing the time that is before you. The audience of the author, Swinburne, is to the reader themselves but possibly to those near death as well. It is a rather difficult poem to understand and does use rhyme which is different than a standard sestina. The lexical repetition word choice helps the reader understand the meaning of enjoying and taking advantage of every moment of life; this includes both day time and nighttime as well as your youthful, full of energy, days as well as when you are older, and possibly near death, to always find something in life to concentrate on and enjoy
The second poem is “Home Burial”, by Robert Frost. The poem is about a couple, Amy and her husband, losing their son causing Amy to go through emotional turmoil. Amy is trying to avoid the situation by trying to leave, but her husband is trying to pull her back, so he can figure out what’s wrong with her and as the poem continues the drama increases. The topic of the poem is sadness, which ties into the theme of Amy and her husband’s relationship is on the rock. The theme in this poem is that everyone goes through sadness, but bottling it up doesn’t help the situation. This is due to the death of their son and as the story continues the husband is trying to understand, why Amy is acting the way she is but she receives the message as rude and offensive. Most of the tension is coming from the graveyard, which resigns on their lot that contains their relatives and son. In lines 1-2, it expresses my theme because it has both
In Father and Child, as the persona moves on from childhood, her father becomes elderly and is entertained by simple things in nature, “birds, flowers, shivery-grass.” These symbols of nature remind the persona of the inconsistency of life and the certainty of death, “sunset exalts its known symbols of transience,” where sunset represents time. Both poems are indicative of the impermanence of life and that the persona has managed to mature and grow beyond the initial fearlessness of childhood moving onto a sophisticated understanding of death.
There are many devices used in this poem to emphasize the emotions going through the mind of a parent when sending their child off into the world. Of such device used is imagery, the use of imagery is used abundantly in the
In this research, the researcher discusses the figurative language based on Perrine’s perception. According to Perrine (1977:61-109), figurative language consists of 12 kinds, they are: simile, metaphor, personification, apostrophe, synecdoche, metonymy, symbol, allegory, paradox, hyperbole/overstatement, understatement, and irony.
Linda Pastan made this poem include various forms of figurative language to hide the literal message that it's trying to portray. Figurative language is using figures of speech to make the text be more powerful, persuasive, and meaningful. Figures of speech such as, similes and metaphors, go beyond the literal meanings to give the readers a new way of looking at the text. It can come in multiple ways with different literacy and rhetorical devices such as: alliteration, imageries, onomatopoeias, and etc. With the usage of the literary devices Pastan has used, it introduced the relationship between the mother and the daughter. It shows the memories of how the mother helped her daughter grow from a little girl to a young adult getting ready to go her own way in life.
Although Robert Hayden and Sylvia Plath both use vivid imagery to display their fathers, the way the authors use imagery is different. In Plath’s “Daddy,” she uses imagery to paint a dark picture of a Nazi who holds the title of her father. She uses imagery to compare her father to a black, confining shoe. She compares herself to a foot that has been living in the shoe for thirty years (Plath 290). The shoe metaphor represents her confinement under her father’s rule, but she is finally free. Because freedom from confinement is one of the main themes for “Daddy,” Plath’s use of imagery contributes to the theme of the poem. Conversely, Robert Hayden uses imagery in “Those Winter Sundays” to display his father’s work ethic. He uses works like, “cracked hands,” and “blueblack cold,” to show the conditions that his father went through because of his love for his children (Hayden 288). Hayden’s use of imagery helps to show the theme of “Those Winter Sundays,” regret for being unappreciative of a father’s love, by showing the obstacles that Hayden’s father went through for his son. The authors use of imagery helps display the overall themes of the poems by demonstrating their fathers’ character.