Analysis Of The Poem 'The Names' By Billy Collins

It is evident through both poems that Dawe believes the events in these poems are an injustice and he disagrees with these events; this is heard through the melancholic, sad tone that is apparent in both poems. He uses this sad tone to persuade the reader to disagree with what has happened. The poem “Katrina” uses many metaphors to create imagery, which is also another technique in the poem. One example of the use of metaphor would be “suspended between earth and sky”, this line is a metaphor for life and it signifies the suspense as to whether Katrina will live or die as well as providing imagery to the reader. Similarly, the poem “A Victorian Hangman Tells His Love” in

“Life is fine!” is not what one typically announces if their life really is fine (Hughes l.27). Often, people hide behind masks of being “fine” to hide their true issues, such as depression and despair. The poem “Life is Fine” by Langston Hughes as well as “On Turning Ten” by Billy Collins tackles the topic of depression. While both poems focus on this theme of depression, they greatly differ in their perspectives and outlooks for the future, one with a suicidal adult as narrator, the other a ten year old child.

This poem focuses on the lynching of a African American male. The speaker of the poem appears to console a woman who appears to be distressed due to the events taking place. In the first four lines of stanza 1, the speaker says:

Difficult choices come and go from our life. Like trying to understand who you are as a person and where you come from. In the book The Namesake, a boy named Gogol grows up in a cultural Bengali family while living in a different country with different customs. Gogol is special because he is trying to balance the two cultures. Gogol tries to understand and learn his family's culture but tends to pick and choose things from each culture to fit his lifestyle. His response to his cultural collision is very unique. From this cultural collision Gogol question himself and his life decisions.

The speaker is the voice of the poem, since “I” is used alot in this poem, it is in first person. I imagined the speaker’s

The Dead of September 11 is deep poem that provokes many feelings and thoughts. There are many topics that are rather easy to delve in to. Throughout this essay, three of these literary techniques will be addressed and “delved into”, so to speak. These techniques are: diction, figurative language and tone. Throughout the following essay several large ideas and the theme of this poem will also be addressed, including but not limited to the universality of the poem and the absolute obliteration of falsities and of false intimacy. Tony Morrison has created a complex, captivating piece of literary art that can be viewed and be interpreted in many different ways, with each individual person who examines it

The poem that stood out to me the most from the speaker, and narrative vs lyric unit was “Lorena” by Lucille Clifton. I really enjoyed this poem and it made it easy for me to understand the concept of speakers. Lucille Clifton wrote the poem, but wrote it about a experience Lorena Bobbit went through. It was hard for me to understand how a poem could have a speaker other then the author but this one made me see how sometimes the author is not necessarily the speaker. “I thought about/authority and how it always insisted/on itself” (pg. 57, 2-4). These lines contain the phrase “I”, but when Clifton uses the phrase “I”, she herself is not the individual, Lorena Bobbit is meant to be the speaker. This poem was a narrative, it told a story about the even Lorena actually lived through. It really stood out to me a lot and helped me understand the concept on a deeper level.

Clare does a fair job in capturing how it is to be a lonely, melancholic soul, grieving the loss of friendship in love, all while making it clear that the speaker has a vast knowledge of self awareness. The simplistic seeming set up of the stanzas lends to a much deeper understanding of the human condition. “I Am” is written with precise punctuation, purposeful repetition, as well as a distinct rhyme scheme which helps to create the morose but understanding atmosphere that exists in the speaker 's head.

Veronica Roth openly insisted, “I belong to the people I love, and they belong to me--they, and the love and loyalty I give them, form my identity far more than any word or group ever could”( Allegiant). Veronica examines that the overall influence family has among a person’s character and identity as they grow up and begin to comprehend the world strongly shapes an individual. Due to the overwhelming amount of time childhood and life is spent among family, people begin to pick up the similar habits, characteristics, and feelings as their loved ones. Despite whether the one’s around an individual teach them how they would like to live their life, or what path of life and difficulties they would rather avoid, family always has a major impact on someone’s identity. Although Hyeonseo’s identity in The Girl With Seven Names by Hyeonseo Lee is incessantly evolving throughout all three parts of the novel, her family manipulates her identity significantly more than the remaining parts of her erratic life in Part One as she is growing up and learning about her country, in Part Two as she starts her new daunting life away from her home country, and in Part Three when she is dealing with the consequences of her mother and brother’s perilous escape.

There comes a point in time in an individual’s life in which their name truly becomes a part of their identity. A name is more than just a title to differentiate people; it is a part of the person. In Lost Names: Scenes from a Korean Boyhood by Richard E. Kim, names play a major role on the character’s identities. The absence and importance of the names in the story make the story rich with detail and identity through something as simple as the name of a character. Names are a significant factor affecting the story and the characters throughout the novel Lost Names.

The Japanese and their rabid ethnocentrism have their effect on the narrator’s family. The family is generally happy and well structured. The narrator lives with his mother, father, little sister and grandfather. As mentioned before, the narrator’s family pressures him to be better than the Japanese students. Upon returning home after being beaten, the men of the house invite him to eat with them and drink wine. This is a strong scene that is filled with the proudness of a parent for their son. Simply standing up to a

The main theme of the poem however, is the sadness and misfortune that accompany us on our journey through life. The Wilson River Road, in which the events of the poem take place, is symbolic of the road of life that we all travel upon. The darkness and the setting of the poem point to the seclusion and indecision that we experience when dealing with life’s tragedies. Many people feel as confused as the narrator does when he was “stumbling back of the car” (5, 911) in his attempt to do the right thing. In his moment of decision, though, the only company the narrator had was the silent and unheeding world around him.

An anti-war poem inspired by the events of the Vietnam War, Homecoming inspires us to think about the victims of the war: not only the soldiers who suffered but also the mortuary workers tagging the bodies and the families of those who died in the fighting. The author, Australian poet Bruce Dawe, wrote the poem in response to a news article describing how, at Californian Oaklands Air /Base, at one end of the airport families were farewelling their sons as they left for Vietnam and at the other end the bodies of dead soldiers were being brought home. Additionally, he wrote in response to a photograph, publishes in Newsweek, of American tanks (termed ‘Grants’ in the poem) piled with the bodies of the dead soldiers as they returned to the

The Namesake, written by Jhumpa Lahira, a famous Indian writer who won the Pulitzer Prize for her story collection Interpreter of Maladies, brilliantly illustrates the immigrant experience and the tangled ties between generations. In this novel, the main characters Ashima and her husband, Ashoke, were first generation immigrants in the United States from India. The whole story begins with Ashima's pregnancy and her nostalgia of her hometown, and a sense of melancholy revealed from the first chapter. While Ashima felt insecure and worried about her new life in the United States, her husband Ashoke, rather wanted to settle in and struggle for a new life. All of uncertainty and reluctance of this new-coming couple faded way when their son,

The poem begins with two lines which are repeated throughout the poem which convey what the narrator is thinking, they represent the voice in