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Singapore Explication

Decent Essays

In the poem “Singapore” by Mary Oliver, there is a very important lesson of social acceptance. The poet speaks of encountering a woman in an airport bathroom stall, cleaning an ashtray in the toilet, and the disgust that she first feels towards this woman and her job. The speaker does however, express that she moves past the judgment that she first feels towards the woman in the stall. She imagines parts of nature and wishes to put the woman in a beautiful place in life. In this poem, the poet uses imagery, connotation, metaphor and symbolism to describe what she is really seeing compared to what she is imagining and would like to see. Significantly, the speaker begins the poem by saying, “A darkness was ripped from my eyes” (line 2). …show more content…

The speaker seen the cleaning lady in a different light, she was accepting of her and the beautiful person that she is, her job no longer defined her. In the last stanza the speaker says, “Neither do I mean anything miraculous, but only the light that can shine out of life” (lines 34- 35). She is reminding her readers to keep an open mind. It is a lesson to learn to put aside social standards, and see the real beauty within each person, before casting judgment upon them. In the second stanza, the speaker says, “and I felt, in my pocket, for my ticket” (line 7). This is just a stopping point in the speaker’s trip, and she knows she needs to get going. This also is when the speaker is at a loss for words. “Disgust argued in my stomach” (line 6), and she is reaching for something to say, reaching for something to make sense of this encounter. However, the ticket that she is reaching for cannot be found as easily as “feeling in her pocket”, yet it lies right in front of her, in the face of the woman laboring over the toilet. The lesson the speaker learned from the encounter with the cleaning lady is something that holds such a great value. As strongly as the speaker feels that, “a poem should always have birds in it” (line 8), she also feels that we should have a broader range of social acceptance. The entirety of the encounter symbolizes what the speaker wishes to stand for, as well as what she hopes

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