Analysis Of The Century Quilt

Many families often have items that they may pass on from generation to generation. Sometimes that item can be a ring, a book, a toy, or in the poem "The Century Quilt" the heirloom would be a quilt. In this poem there may be a sibling that is upset about not receiving the item. The author shows symbolism, theme, and foreshadowing to explain how the narrator in the poem may have felt about her family and the blanket that would be inherited.
Throughout this poem the author uses many forms of symbolism. The author tells a story through different objects that are described in the poem. In the first stanza the poem states " ... how we used to wrap ourselves at play in its folds and be chieftains and princesses." This symbolism shows that there is a sense of dominance over the younger sibling or siblings. In a Native American family, as the family of the narrator in the poem, the chief is the highest power in the tribe and playing "chieftains and princesses" shows that there is some form of order among the siblings. Another form of symbolism is when the younger sibling

In the last stanzas in the poem the narrator is thinking about how her grandmother may have felt and what she may have went through, from what she may have heard, when she was a little girl. In stanza four it states "... as Meema must have, under her blanket, dreamed she was a girl again in Kentucky." She is flashbacking on her grandmother's life as a little girl and wonders how she felt under her blanket with her family in a house where she was not accepted that much. ("among her yellow sisters, their grandfather's white family."). The grandmother may has gone through the things that the young girl is going through now and she is thinking about how her grandmother's family was in her time when her grandmother was a young