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Sharon Olds '' The Race'

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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.

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