Summary Of On The Subway By Sharon Olds

The atmospheric conditions may represent the hardships that the couple had to go through in their relationship, and may also be used contrast the unpredictability of the outside world compared to the steady relationship that the couple have. ‘A Youth Mowing’ is also a poem about relationships, this time it is between a younger couple. The river ‘Isar’ is a symbol of freedom, it represents the way that the men’s lives are. However, this sense of liberty is broken by the ‘swish of the scythe-strokes’ as the girl takes ‘four sharp breaths.’ Sibilance is used to show that there is a sinister undertone to the freedom that the boy has which will be broken by the news that his girlfriend is bringing. She feels guilty for ‘what’s in store,’ as now the boy will have to be committed to spending the rest of his life with her, and paying the price for the fun that they had.

Literally, the persona of the poem is outside when some aspects of the nature around her, like violets and a blackbird, trigger a memory from her childhood. The poem then flashbacks to a childhood memory of the persona as a young girl, which is shown through the indentation of the stanzas, where the girl wakes up in the afternoon thinking it is morning and becomes upset when she

In this poem there is a lot of figurative language. One of the biggest types of figurative language used in this poem is irony. The irony in this poem is how the mother wouldn't let her child go to march because she feared her child would get hurt. Instead she sent her child to church because she believed it was a safe and sacred place but ironically the church ended up being bombed. Another piece of figurative language that is very effective in this poem is imagery. The way the poem is written helps me create images in my head for example, "She raced through the streets of Birmingham." I can imagine her running around desperately, looking for her child. The metaphors and hyperboles in this poem also help with the imagery, for example, "...night dark hair," and "…rose-petal sweet." These metaphors make me think of the girls smoothly combed black hair and her fresh and beautiful rosy smell. A hyperbole that had a huge effect on the tone was, "But that smile was the last smile to ever come upon her face." This hyperbole really helps me understand the effect of a tragic moment like this and how it can completely ruin

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.

On the other hand, Rush Hour Tokyo by Joy Kogawa contains simile and assonance. This poem is in one stanza and has no punctuation. The subject matter is that Tokyo is congested and never stops growing in population. The theme of the poem is that you don’t know what you have till its gone.This poem appealed to me because I am half Japanese, but I have not experienced rush hour in Tokyo before, so I wanted to see how Joy Kogawa explained it. After reading this poem, I was glad to have not been in rush hour at Tokyo before, and I also felt strong sympathy for the people who have to go through that every day. After reading this poem, I thought about how grateful and lucky I was not to be shoved on a train and packed like sardines with other strangers. This poem influenced a new perspective of Tokyo by making me think that under all of the beautiful and the iconic landmarks, and technology, Japan still cannot solve the trouble of people suffering everyday just to get on a

The author uses imagery in the poem to enable the reader to see what the speaker sees. For example, in lines 4-11 the speaker describes to us the

There are clues throughout the poem that express the man’s past experiences, leading him to have a hostile tone. The speaker represents his past as “parched years” that he has lived through (7-8) and represents his daughter’s potential future as

The truth behind the poem “Poverty and Wealth” is bone-chilling, almost as if it was meant for a character like Ponyboy Curtis. On the east side of town, there lives

The authors use of imagery makes the words in the stanza stand out as well as gives the reader the impression that the character is almost white.

During the entirety of the poem the speaker uses the contrast of light and dark to illustrate the divide of Caucasian and Native American in her life and the specific wording she uses throughout shows that she is ends up moving away from her white heritage’s side. We first start to see that she is upset with her white roots when she states that her mother left her with “large white breasts” that weigh down her body. This statement is quite important. With the addition of the word “white” and the use of the words “weigh down” the narrator seems to be implying that it is a burden to carry the whiteness. Also, the narrator uses specific wording in this statement in order to disassociate herself from her own white leanings since she refers to her breasts as if they were her mothers and not her own. The next time she mentions the word white comes in the third stanza. The speaker devotes an entire line to the short phrase “and is white” almost as if to single out that word in the poem and signify that being white

Riding the subway to a New York City resident is nothing new. It’s something that many of us New Yorkers have to use as transportation because living in a crowded city with limited space to drive is not very ideal. For the people who do drive, they do so for personal comfort and convenience. But for us commuters, having to not look for parking and worry about traffic takes up less of our time. On the other hand we experience train delays and disturbances in personal space. Nonetheless, the pros outweigh the cons and using the subway has become a part of our daily routines for many of us New Yorkers. Marc Auge states that, “If he draws himself into the field of his ethnological inquiry, it is no less fitting for his readers to broaden the scope of appreciation of the work for riders.” With that in mind, I observed the connections with my experience riding the subway in a city integrated with many different peoples and cultures.

Another example in the poem of the similarities and differences between races is a when the author talks about the finances of Mister Samuel and Sam. ‘Mister Samuel deal wid high finance, Sam deal in a two-bit game; Mister Samuel crashes, Sam goes broke, But deys busted jes’ de same’ (Brown, 220) compares how the finances are much lower of the black man compared to the white man. This stanza continues by providing the similarities between the men. It discusses how both the white man and the black man experience financial downfall as a result.

The first piece of evidence that implies that the speaker was at a crucial stage in her life is within the first line, where she states that she was only twelve years old while her crush was seventeen. The girl was not even a teenager yet, but she fantasized about someone who was almost a legal adult. This suggests that the speaker was at the age where she was just starting to feel these strong sexual desires toward males, and this boy may have been the first person that she had thought of in this way. The first use of imagery that hints that this attraction was more than just a crush for the speaker comes when she describes how realistic the boy’s “bicep in the twilight” looked (3). By admiring the older boy’s muscles, the speaker was expressing her appreciation for his body, which implies a sexual attraction. The speaker’s next use of imagery comes when she describes the setting around her during the late hours that she spent waiting to “accidentally” encounter her love interest. The girl states that she waited in her driveway for the paperboy “as leaf-cindered air turned gray” and as shadows from streetlights “swallowed us from view / . . . dusk / after dusk” (8, 10, 11-12). The speaker uses scenes like outside air changing color and shadows moving to express how persistently she was willing to linger “far past curfew to circle” the paperboy each night (7). Up to this point in the poem, the speaker has only hinted at her true intentions with the older boy at this stage in her life, but this ambiguity is not as prevalent toward the end of the poem.

are hundreds of airports just like this one all around the world. I cannot be intimate with a location that is constantly repeated because it does not exist as an individual place. The structure of the airport does not require individuality in order to function. Its production of repetition and homogeneity is the basis for its efficiency worldwide because it creates an order through which people's movements can be controlled smoothly.” Those places have become spaces of transition, junkspace. They usually don’t carry notions of history of cultures. They don’t contain within themselves enough spirit of quality spaces. People move in and out without experiencing them as meaningful moments to be inhabited. People come to the airport in order to leave. They pass through a series of hall ways in such a hasty pace with anxieties to get to final destinations.

These three lines are perfect examples of the imagery within the poem because they contain an image of a river with its small peeks and waves trembling and glistening in the afternoon sun. All the while it equates the natural beauty of the river to the beauty that the young man sees in the youthful maiden.