A Worn Path Compare And Contrast

Maeshal Hijazi

ENG 115-400

4/4/2016

Essay #3 Differences and similarities exist between any two things. Our lives would be boring if they didn’t contain similarities and differences in hobbies, life experiences and opinions. A Worn Path, a short story written by Eudora Welty in 1941, talks about an elderly African-American woman, Phoenix Jackson who walks for many miles from her home in the country to a medical clinic in Natchez, Mississippi, to secure medicine for her grandson. The Chimney Sweeper, a poem written by William Blake in 1789, talks about the ways in which childhood innocence is taken away, ruined, or destroyed by mean old adults. Even though both extracts are written by great writers and share the same theme, they differ in imagery, tone, and diction.

The writer described how chimney sweeps were “locked up in coffins of black” (Blake 706) which illustrates the darkness and blackness of the soot on the children, depicting the daily upheaval the children have to endure. Furthermore, outlining the chimneys as "coffins” (Blake 706) describes them as prison-like environments with a limited ability of movement. In A Worn Path, the author ends the story by describing the old ladies’ slow descent down the stairs. She describes how her “slow step began on the stairs, going down” (Welty 57) thus foreshadowing her near death. Additionally, Welty uses imagery to describe Phoenix’s appearance. The writer described Phoenix wearing “a dark striped dress reaching down to her shoe tops, and an equally long apron of bleached sugar sacks.” (Welty 57)” Her skin had a pattern all its own, of numberless branching wrinkles in the middle of her forehead, but a golden color ran underneath.” When Phoenix talks audibly to herself, it allows the reader to imagine the comical, young, warm spirited side of