Tones of Poems
It is easy to tell how somebody is feeling just by the tone of there voice during a conversation. If a person is happy or just being funny they usually have a smile on their face, but if they are mad their voice becomes more stern and loud. The author can use different techniques to show emotion in short stories and novels such as exclamation points or italicized words. These techniques make the reader more apt to figure out how the character is feeling. In poems it is harder to figure out the tone. The reader has to actually read the whole poem and not just look at a few words. The tone is made up of many different words. Poets Pat Mora and Anthony Grooms both convey feelings in their pieces, but in one the tone remains the same and the other changes with the setting.
In Pat Mora's "Elena" the person telling the story is from Mexico originally and moved to El Paso, Texas. She tells how her whole life has been changed due to this move. Right from the start you can tell the tone is negative because the speaker says "My Spanish isn't good enough"(L...
Julia Alvarez wrote the novel “How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents”. Alvarez, (a Dominican-American novelist) was born in New York City. Her story is about four sisters (The Garcia family) who were living an established, upper class life in the Dominican Republic. They were forced to flee from the Dominican Republic to the United States due to their father’s opposition to Rafael Leonidas Trujillo’s dictatorship. The Garcia family were forced to face the challenges that came along with being an immigrant family in a foreign land. In her novel “How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents,” Alvarez highlights the challenges of immigration, cultural readjustments and family conflicts.
Julia Alvarez is a Dominican-American writer and poet, the author of “How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accent,” a novel that some critics might say is autobiographical opposed by Alvarez’s opinion of it applying to any culture or background. This story narrates the growing-up ventures the Garcia Girls go through as the family abruptly moves from the Dominican Republic to the United States. Julia Alvarez experiences a similar process of a childhood in the Dominican Republic, being an immigrant in the United States, and finding her identity as an adult between two countries.
To express this Shakespeare uses symbolism, imagery, and tone to craft his poem. Love, Hate, and any other emotions associated with them are tricky and decisive, and authors use many literary techniques to craft their writings to portray them.
...in that person’s life for example the 2 poems I quoted the writers were in prison and depressed yet they show mercy and seek out compassion rather than defeat it takes a lot to show compassion after being in prison for speaking your mind. Make someone want to kill somebody for doing that to you. Can be found everywhere that has a story line basis to it the common method of writing is figuring out if it will be optimistic or pessimistic. In the novel “Fahrenheit 451” it has both it shows a lot of pessimism but does show optimism especially at the end where the city is bombed and everyone dies besides Montag and the professor as well as montags new friends.
In many poems, the use of imagery and sound causes the reader to consider them to be "good" or "bad". Repetition, alliteration, the use of metaphors and images together with rhymes and the text itself work together to create that special feeling or message the poet wants to share. The Romantics believed that poetry should express the poet's feelings or state of mind and should not be worked with or thought through too much, since the original feeling thus would be lost, but in order to share your feelings or ideas to the public, I believe it is important to present them in as good a form as possible.
Tone is a major contributor to the work of the “Hate Poem”. “Tone is an aspect of point of view since it has a great deal to do with the narrator. Tone is the narrator’s predominant attitude toward the subject, whether that subject is a place, event, character or idea” (Writing Essays about Literature, Kelley Griffith page 46). When analyzing the “Hate Poem” by Julie Sheehan, “To understand the tone of the poem, we need to listen to the words, as we might listen to an actual conversation. The key is to hear not only what is being said but also how it is being said.” (Kennedy and Gioia) Her use of several styles of irony help with the tone she is trying to convey. She uses the word hate when it has the ability to actually mean it’s opposite, love. It clearly makes a difference in what the speaker was saying and how people may react to it when exchanging those words. She uses the repetition of the words hate, you, and my which add emotion and emphasize her personal deep down feelings. Without her use of sarcasm this poem would have been good but not great. Her sarcastic wording brought great attention to her poem, and allowed her to convey her message that love and hate are such passionate emotions that are so closely connected and can be intertwined into one another. The use of figurative language is one of the strongest assets of the poems tone. Without the passionate emotion portrayed she would have lost some of the tone and the tone is what enables the speaker to affectively get her meaning of the poem across.
"Compressed emotions," that is the explanation a teacher once gave to the ongoing question, "What is poetry?" He said it was someone's deepest emotions, as if you were reading them right out of that person's mind, which in that case would not consist of any words at all. If someone tells you a story, it is usually like a shell. Rarely are all of the deepest and most personal emotions revealed effectively. A poem of that story would be like the inside of the shell. It personifies situations, and symbolizes and compares emotions with other things in life. Louise Erdrich's poem Indian Boarding School puts the emotions of a person or group of people in a setting around a railroad track. The feelings experienced are compared to things from the setting, which takes on human characteristics.
“This afternoon was the colour of water falling through sunlight; the trees glittered with the tumbling of leaves; The sidewalks shone like alleys of dropped maple leaves; And the houses ran along them laughing out of square; Open windows” (Lowell 185). This quote, taken out of Amy Lowell’s poem “September 1918,” illustrates the ability of the author to be very descriptive in order to give the reader an image of where she is and what is surrounding her. Through this poem she also give's the reader a sense of being there as well. Another author that resembles Lowell is Emily Dickinson. In Dickinson’s poem "I heard a Fly buzz-when I died" she says, “I heard a Fly buzz-when I died- The Stillness in the Room Was like the stillness in the Air- Between the Heaves of Storm” (Dickinson 1202). Like Lowell, Dickinson describes what she sees surrounding her, and by saying that she was dead in her poem she provides the reader the ability to create a mental image of a person actually dead in a coffin. Also in her poem called “Because I could not Stop for Death” Dickinson says, “Because I could not stop for Death- He kindly stopped for me- The Carriage held just but Ourselves and Immortality” (Dickinson 1206). In Dickinson’s second poem, she describes how death is taking her in its carriage to immortality. Making the reader create a picture of death actually taking her to infinity.
However, I watched a couple videos of Kevin Young reading his poems on YouTube. My favorite reading by Kevin Young is of his poem “Hard Headed Blues.” During his reading, it really struck me how his voice carried the words in the poem with the sounds of the blues. In the video, Kevin Young rocked rhythmically to his words, and carried his voice with words that resembled notes and chords from the blues scale. Consequently, Kevin Young’s reading intensified the sad topic of his poem. This illustrated to me powerful and moving a poem becomes when read aloud. As a matter of fact, Kevin Young read certain poems with a different rhythm and voice. This exposed the idea that when a person reads a poem aloud, he becomes the speaker of the poem. The poem overtakes the reader’s voice and escapes in a specific way to announce its message; I found this to be the real power behind
“Se habla Espanol” wrote by Tanya Maria Barrientos. She is growing up in Texas, but she was born in Guatemala. That causes she cannot speak Spanish like Latina. In the article, she talked about what the feeling as a Lantana without the ability to speak Spanish so well. Her parents give her a few of knowledge about speaking Spanish. Because, she grew up in a special era, which Mexican Americans were considered dangerous radical. Nowadays, this theory is politically incorrect. The author wants to find some people that like her, does not fit in Spanish culture and help them, giving them a big mental supporting. I’m from China, growing and living in different places, which have different language and culture habit.
In her essay “Always Living in Spanish,” Marjorie Agosin justifies her preference for writing in Spanish as surviving to culture shock, a reminder of her childhood, and a vivid experience of her senses. As a member of an immigrant family, Marjorie Agosin deals with the sorrow and pain of leaving behind her native land to migrate from Chile to United States. She illustrates the frustrations of “...one who writes in Spanish and lives in translation” (167). During her teenage years, Agosin discovers writing in Spanish as the only getaway to escape from constant discrimination, because “... [her] poor English and [her] accent were the cause of ridicule and insult” (167). For this reason, in such times of emotional turmoil, the author decides that
...new right away I could relate it since English is my second language. In this poem there is a combination of the two languages I know, English and Spanish, which then converts into a new language Spanglish. Many Latino teenagers and children, like me, speak English at work and school and speak Spanish mostly when they are at home. Therefore, the way we Latino people speak is almost like the way Ms. Valdez wrote this poem. This poem is also a reality in the lives of those who migrate to the United States. Many immigrants see that everything is different and new. They also see that they have to slowly adapt to the new environment. Through Gina’s choice of words and imagery, she makes the Latino audience feel more serene with the American Language and culture. All of the humor, imagery, and similes used in this poem made this poem much more enjoyable and relatable.
When reading or listening to poetry, the main objective for me is to feel moved. Happiness, longing, sadness are some of the feelings that can be achieved just by listening to others’ words. It is within these words that creates another world, or separates us from our own. Words all have a certain kind of attachment to them, so if used properly an author can stimulate a reader beyond belief.
Tone helps set the attitude of a poem that a poet is trying to portray on a specific subject (Kriszner et al. 245). The tone of this poem is celebratory, proud, and confident. One is able to deduce this by paying close attention to the title. Paying attention to the title gives one a hint what this poem may bring and what kind of tone is
In conclusion, I feel poets mainly write poems to express feelings, thoughts, and messages to the world. It’s an easy approach for them to use this writing technique as a way to articulate different aspects which could be improved in this world. I think what attracts people to poetry is writing which relates to each person in their everyday life no matter how it could be portrayed by. For some people poetry could be a relaxing thing or it could be something which cheers someone up, but people look to poetry to get a deeper thinking in life rather than a simpler thinking. This is clearly evident through authors, William Wordsworth and William Blake, and their poems “The World is too Much with Us” and “The Tyger.” Both poems related to one another one way or another, and they depicted different messages and themes which do relate to real life situations.