D.C. Berry's On Reading Poems to a Senior Class at South High
In "On Reading Poems to a Senior Class at South High" by D.C. Berry, the author vividly portrays the interactive experience of a poetry reading between a senior high school class and its teacher. The event is compared to a school of fish excitedly swimming around an aquarium until a sudden rupture in the aquarium causes everyone to "leak out." Berry uses form, sound devices, and poetic devices to enhance the different levels of excitement and interaction throughout the poetry reading.
The nontraditional form of the poem with regard to stanzas, capitalization and punctuation, and rhyme scheme and meter, helps create a sensation of free-flowing water within a somewhat structured environment. The lengths of the stanzas reflect the changing pace of running water and the running monologue of the teacher. The first two stanzas are of average length because the water and speech have just begun to flow. The water rushes at a very fast pace as the students begin to show interest; this is reflected in an eight-lined stanza, the longest one in the poem. The highest level of interaction between the teacher and the students is in the fourth stanza which describes "thirty tails whacking words;" however, this stanza is cut short as the bell interrupts the teacher's speech. The water feebly drips in the fifth and sixth stanzas as the teacher no longer speaks, and all the excitement is gone. Finally, the last four-lined stanza restores the teacher to his original position because it is equal in length to the second stanza when the teacher begins his reading.
Nonstandard capitalization and punctuation further enhance the easy flow of the words with few ...
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... also be seen as examples of metonymy within the context of describing the students as fish. In the first simile, the students are specifically referred to as the gills of a fish (instead of the whole fish) to emphasize their dependency on water. In the second simile, the class and the teacher are characterized as the tails of a fish to emphasize their active movement within the water and their interaction with the other fish.
Therefore, the poetry reading is vividly portrayed as a school of fish actively and eagerly exploring their aquatic environment. This characterization of the students is a pun because there is an implied play on words between a high school class and a school of fish. Elements of form, sound devices, and poetic devices are essential to achieving this unique depiction of the poetry reading as an exciting and stimulating experience.
...r’.” Poetry for students. Ed. Sara Constantakis. Vol. 43 Detroit: Gale, 2013. Literature Resource Center. Web. 30 Mar. 2014. http://go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?>.
... to understand one another. Furthermore, while both poets encase aspects of the fish into their poems, Bishop’s interpretation of the fish places it at a distance because her block of text loaded with descriptions is how she sees the fish, which gives the image that she just feels pity for the fish but doesn’t really feel the need to delve deeper in understanding the essence of the fish. By contrast, Oliver’s interpretation of the fish embodies its’ essence because she does not rely on its appearance to understand it but rather when she consumes the fish, its’ spiritual aura merges within herself. Oliver captures the soul of the fish within her poetic writing as evidenced by the constant alliteration with “f” letter words including, “first fish”, “flailed” , “flesh”, “fall”, “feed”, and “feverish”, which give the image that the poem is alive and is the fish.
In this poem called “Creatures” by the author Billy Collins there is a literary device called a metaphor when the reader is reading this poem. A metaphor is a comparison of two unlike things without using the words like or as. In lines one (1) through...
It starts when Rainbow Fish, the most beautiful fish in the ocean is asked to share his shimmering scales, but he angrily denies them and turns all the fish reject him. All the other fish want nothing to do with him, nor do they want to befriend him. (As the story states) “From then on, no one would have anything to do with the Rainbow Fish. They turned away when he swam by” (Pfister 5). The author’s intention is to reveal to the audience how the other fish were not friends with Rainbow Fish due to his egocentric behavior. Rainbow fish was self-centered and believed to be better than all the other fish. He valued beauty, something that was of little value over his happiness. He then suffered consequences of those beliefs by being lonely.
Initially the reader is bombarded with an intense image of the fish; he is "tremendous," "battered," "venerable," and "homely." The reader is sympathetic with the fish's situation, and can relate because everyone has been fishing. Next, Bishop compares the fish to familiar household objects: "here and there / his brown skin hung in strips / like ancient wallpaper, / and its pattern of darker brown / was like wallpaper;" she uses two similes with common objects to create sympathy for the captive. Bishop then goes on to clearly illustrate what she means by "wallpaper": "shapes like full-blown roses / stained and lost through age." She uses another simile here paired with descriptive phrases, and these effectively depict a personal image of the fish. She uses the familiar "wallpaper" comparison because it is something the readers can relate to their own lives. Also the "ancient wallpaper" analogy can refer to the fish's age. Although faded and aged he withstood the test of time, like the wallpaper. Bishop uses highly descriptive words like "speckled" and "infested" to create an even clearer mental picture. The word "terrible" is used to describe oxygen, and this is ironic because oxygen is usually beneficial, but in the case of the fish it is detrimental. The use of "terrible" allows the reader to visualize the fish gasping for breaths and fighting against the "terrible oxygen," permitting us to see the fish's predicament on his level. The word frightening does essentially the same thing in the next phrase, "the frightening gills." It creates a negative image of something (gills) usually considered favorable, producing an intense visual with minimal words. Another simile is used to help the reader picture the fish's struggle: "coarse white flesh packed in like feathers." This wording intensifies the reader's initial view of the fish, and creates a visual, again, on the reader's level.
Therefore, Oliver’s incorporation of imagery, setting, and mood to control the perspective of her own poem, as well as to further build the contrast she establishes through the speaker, serves a critical role in creating the lesson of the work. Oliver’s poem essentially gives the poet an ultimatum; either he can go to the “cave behind all that / jubilation” (10-11) produced by a waterfall to “drip with despair” (14) without disturbing the world with his misery, or, instead, he can mimic the thrush who sings its poetry from a “green branch” (15) on which the “passing foil of the water” (16) gently brushes its feathers. The contrast between these two images is quite pronounced, and the intention of such description is to persuade the audience by setting their mood towards the two poets to match that of the speaker. The most apparent difference between these two depictions is the gracelessness of the first versus the gracefulness of the second. Within the poem’s content, the setting has been skillfully intertwined with both imagery and mood to create an understanding of the two poets, whose surroundings characterize them. The poet stands alone in a cave “to cry aloud for [his] / mistakes” while the thrush shares its beautiful and lovely music with the world (1-2). As such, the overall function of these three elements within the poem is to portray the
The first element to analyze when looking at “The Fish” is figurative language. The reader is drawn to this element because of its heavy emphasis throughout the poem. Elizabeth Bishop profusely uses similes with the intention of heightening the sensation of fishing. She writes:
Not only the words, but the figures of speech and other such elements are important to analyzing the poem. Alliteration is seen throughout the entire poem, as in lines one through four, and seven through eight. The alliteration in one through four (whisky, waltzing, was) flows nicely, contrasting to the negativity of the first stanza, while seven through eight (countenance, could) sound unpleasing to the ear, emphasizing the mother’s disapproval. The imagery of the father beating time on the child’s head with his palm sounds harmful, as well as the image of the father’s bruised hands holding the child’s wrists. It portrays the dad as having an ultimate power over the child, instead of holding his hands, he grabs his wrists.
Sound Devices help convey the poet’s message by appealing to the reader’s ears and dr...
Elizabeth Bishop's use of imagery and diction in "The Fish" is meant to support the themes of observation and the deceptive nature of surface appearance. Throughout the course of the poem these themes lead the narrator to the important realization that aging (as represented by the fish) is not a negative process, and allows for a reverie for all life. Imagery and diction are the cornerstone methods implemented by Bishop in the symbolic nature of this poem.
The narrator speaks about the fish in terms of commercial, where every part of the fish can be sale for different purposes, but as the speaker look in the fish eyes, starts to compare the human life through the existence of the fish. What the speaker found beautiful about the fish is that as the speaker looks into the fish eyes and start looking in a different way to the creature, she starts to identify a living creature instead of a creature that will die imminently. The speaker starts seeing the beauty of the fish when she start to compare the fish to a soldier, when she sees through the eyes of the fish the victories over death that this creature has won, and I believe that the speaker compares her own battles and victories to the one of this creature in order to survive. I believe that the “ personality” of the fish is humble, brave and that this fish have been battling for a long time for his life, that he has been involved in some sort of violence many times in order to exist. I also feel that this fish is tired of fighting and that he is venerable to the speaker
“Billy Collins' “Introduction to Poetry” isn’t an ars poetica poem about writing poetry, but about reading poetry. The speaker is a teacher who tells his students that they should experience a poem, rather than dissect it. The f...
Poetry, Drama, and the Essay. Ed. Joseph Terry. New York: Addison-Wesley Educational Publishers Inc, 2001. 123-154.
The Fish is a narrative monologue composed for 76 free-verse lines. The poem is constructed as one long stanza. The author is the speaker narrating this poem. She narrates a fishing experience. The author is out in a rented boat on a body of water, presumably a lake. She tries to describe the fish to the fullest, which appears to be the purpose of the poem, without saying either the specie or an approximate age. The narration gives the impression that the fish is slightly old. There are a number of reasons as to why that fish got caught by the author, including time of day, the weeds weighing it down, fish’s age, and the fact that it has been previously caught five times.
In relation to structure and style, the poem contains six stanzas of varying lengths. The first, second, and fourth stanzas