Sharon Olds' poem "The Race" is adequately named for it is a race against time that the speaker undertakes in order to see her father one last time while he still lives. In order to convey the meaning of despair in the poem, Sharon Olds creates drastic shifts in both the tone and theme of the poem in order to more profoundly convey the speaker's experience to the reader. To achieve such shifts, Olds utilizes both metaphors and imagery to better illustrate each tone and theme. To begin, the first and greater half of the poem depicts a rushed tone and emphasizes on a theme of persistence. In order to build a rushed tone, the author incorporates repetition of the words “run” and “ran” to show the fast pace of the speaker and of the poem itself.
Readers are aware of this ambiguity. Here the heaviest flashback thoughts and the short-lasting issue set up a continuing contrast throughout the poem, which enchants its effect.
As David Blight says in his novel, Race and Reunion, after the Civil War and emancipation, Americans were faced with the overwhelming task of trying to understand the relationship between “two profound ideas—healing and justice.” While he admits that both had to occur on some level, healing from the war was not the same “proposition” for many whites, especially veterans, as doing justice for the millions of emancipated slaves and their descendants (Blight 3). Blight claims that African Americans did not want an apology for slavery, but instead a helping hand. Thus, after the Civil War, two visions of Civil War memory arose and combined: the reconciliationist vison, which focused on the issue of dealing with the dead from the battlefields, hospitals, and prisons, and the emancipationist vision, which focused on African Americans’ remembrance of their own freedom and in conceptions of the war as the “liberation of [African Americans] to citizenship and Constitutional equality” (Blight 2).
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.
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.
He uses this in the poem to give it rhythm to engage the reader and
The poem progresses from mourning of the deceased to praising of his achievements and fate to die before his glory withered. Therefore, the tone shifts from somber and quiet to upbeat and positive. Such shift of tone is achieved by Housman’s use of sounds. In first two stanzas, Housman describes the funeral procession as he remembers the time when the young athlete was proudly brought home after he won a race. Then, he solaces the mourners by reminding them it is better that the athlete “slip betimes away from fields where glory does not stay” (lines 9 and 10) because the laurel “withers quicker than the rose” (line 12). The soft “s” sound stands out especially in second and third stanza and it creates a sense of calm and quiet tone and evokes an image of townspeople mourning the death of their “hero”; Consonance of “s” sounds is present in words “shoulder, set, threshold, townsman, stiller, smart, slip, betimes, fields, does, stay, grows, withers, and rose.” In addition to consonance, soft sound alliteration in “road all runners” (line 5) helps to create a quiet tone. As the poem progresses into praising of the young athlete in stanzas four through seven, the consonance of hard “c”, “t”, and “f” sound become prominent. Readers can immediately detect
Apart from that, the poem consists of a series of turns that reflect different parts of the speaker’s feelings and the experiences he had. The significance of these turns is made possible through the use of stanza breaks. For example, the first
This poem opens with an extreme and vivid simile, “The bright wire rolls like a porpoise” (line 1). This beginning not only grasps the attention of the audience, but the image intensifying language that Kooser has chosen
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.
The poem’s diction reflects the context and a confident, assertive tone. The speaker expresses a high level of self-respect and assurance. It includes
The poem shifts to the present with the second stanza, which depicts the runner being carried once again “shoulder-high,” however, this time in a casket by pallbearers to his grave (Housman 2013, “Overview” 1). The townspeople come together again, but this time they are “Townsman of a stiller town” (Housman 2013). The poem highlights the theme of early death as the young runner is put to rest for a final time, and Housman makes it clear through his writing of the sorrow that townspeople feel towards the young life being cut short.
On the other hand however he can also speed up the poem “Storm'd at with shot and shell, While horse and hero fell”, to give a sense of frenzy.
This poem that the mother has written for her daughter is better seen as a “guide” to adulthood due to her use of an extremely long run-on sentence and choice of diction. The run-on sentence consists of a list of commands like “this is how you sweep a corner; this is how you sweep a whole house; this is how you sweep a yard" (22-24). Not only does the run-on sentence depict that this is a guide, but so does the constant repetition of “this is how” and “don’t
Style is the special way an author creates his or her work. Gabriela Mistral exploits an informal style in her poem “Ballad”. The poem discusses the poets feelings and is written in first person point of view validating its informality; “My heart’s blood.”-Line17 using ‘my’ and describing her heart confirm this. Diction contributes to style in an extensive way. Repetition is a form of diction that is heavily spread out through the poem. “Saw him pass by.”-Lines 2/6, “He goes loving.../...in bloom”-Lines1-2/11-12, and “He will go.../through eternity.”-Lines 19-20/23-24. The repetition emphasizes the authors style an diction. In this poem diction is displayed through negative connotation. Choosing to describe her emotional state as “,wretched,”-Line 5, instead of sad or unhappy, and by adding a
The author uses a rhyme scheme that mirrors the pace of walking. The pace is moderate using an octameter meter, and each stressed syllable is like each footfall of the narrator. As he walks through the streets near the River Thames, he notices the common distress in the faces of the people he passes along the way. The author uses alliteration in