Sharon Olds Essay

Duc Tran ENGL 111 10/7/2015 Rite of Passage (1983) – Sharon Olds As the guests arrive at my son 's party they gather in the living room-- short men, men in first grade with smooth jaws and chins. Hands in pockets, they stand around jostling, jockeying for place, small fights breaking out and calming. One says to another How old are you? Six. I 'm seven. So? They eye each other, seeing themselves tiny in the other 's pupils. They clear their throats a lot, a room of small bankers, they fold

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

Sharon Olds contrasts the two different worlds of a white lady and black male throughout On the Subway. Olds utilizes plenty imagery, tone and unusual syntax to contrast opposite worlds within the white lady and the black male. Olds first creates imagery within the first couple of lines. “His feet are huge, in black sneakers laced with white in a complex pattern like a set of intentional scars.”Comparing the man’s shoe laces to “intentional scars” is a way she used imagery to develop an idea of the

Sharon Olds was born in San Francisco on November 19, 1942. At age fifteen, she was sent to a boarding school in Massachusetts. Many of her poems focus on difficult childhood and the body. As Olivia Laing, literary critic of several literary novels and publications, says, “The physical body is a document of being, physical experience is the primary mode of forming, and physical contact is the primary human relationship.” Like Whitman, Olds celebrates the body in its pleasures and pains. She is a

In the poem"On the Subway", Sharon Olds uses Caucasians and African-Americans. The Olds uses symbolism and tone, as imagery devices. Olds uses imagery in the first part of the poem by inhansing the differences between the one that is riding the subway, which is a white woman, and an African-American. The poet says how the man's shoes are "laced with white". Olds does this to show reality revolves around whites. Also, she says how the "intentional scars" are left over by the treatment whites bunch

Sharon Olds writes extensively on family and relationships, addressing the many roles of the woman: mother, daughter, and lover – roles and experiences that she addresses candidly in a relatable and near-confessional manner through defamiliarization, candid description, and imagery. Readers take these simple examples to heart, visualizing and understanding each scenario Olds describes, ultimately able to relate. Assuming the narrator of the poems included in Part III of her 1983 collection of poems

In the poem titled “On the Subway” written by Sharon Olds, the author contrasts the different worlds of the white and black population. The narrator is the white woman, who also looks like she comes from the wealthy society. Throughout the poem, she is describing the man sitting in front of her in the subway as a mugger and a dangerous person just because he is black. Through some literary devices, the narrator describes the racial differences with the black population. Even though the woman doesn’t

In “The Victims” by Sharon Olds it describes a divorce through the eyes of the parents’ children. The first section is shown through past tense as the speaker is a child and the last section is shown in present tense with the speaker already being an adult trying to make sense of past events. The word “it” in the first two lines carries a tremendous weight, hinting at the ever so present abuse and mistreatment, but remaining non-specific. The first part generates a negative tone toward the father

Unborn”, and “The Clasp”, Sharon Olds demonstrates her ability to portray real life problems through generalized speech to show family problems that lead to unhappiness. Throughout these poems, she makes the reader empathize with her and feel as if the poem is speaking directly to them instead of it being just the situations that she has gone through. In order to achieve this, Olds uses an honest tone to portray her common theme of pain by aloneness, abuse and loss. Sharon Olds was born on November 19

In the passage, “On The Subway”, Sharon Olds reveals about the character’s qualities. Sharon Olds, the poet of the poem, allows the reader to get to know the character by using literary devices. For example, the poet utilizes metaphors/similes and imagery, to reveal so much about her, the character herself does not know about. First of all, metaphors and similes are when there are different ideas of precise qualities being compared to something else, to represent the value of it. “Black sneakers