Analysis Of 'First Love: A Quiz'

Has there ever been a time where you have experienced true love, but everything was not what you expected? You thought everything was at the forefront but there was a deeper meaning to things. Well in the poem “First Love: A Quiz”, A.E. Stallings introduces you to the deeper side of things. This poem doesn’t consist of many literary devices, but Stallings uses her choice of words to make the reader give thought to the text, and to the story being told of Persephone and Hades. The structure of the poem also helps to better understand the actual meaning of the poem. As you read this “quiz” everything gets very abstract and your options become harder and harder to choose from.

A lot of this poems attributes come from the title. When I first read

The fifth line reads: “D. He was my uncle, the one who lived in the half finished basement, and he took me by the hair.”

This line was very unexpected and this line makes the poem what it is. The poem transition from a love poem to a darker more painful story. The tone of the poem also shifts to a more eerie tone. Another thing about the third stanza is that at this moment in the poem, I can connect the poem to the Greek mythological story of Persephone and Hades. The allusion sets up the rest of the poem and gives the poem a lot more meaning. As we move to the fourth stanza, Stalling introduces the first two lines with a simile. She compares the place Hades took Persephone to the darkness of her shut eyes. That comparison is strange because when a person normally compares something to darkness we may say “dark as the midnight sky”, but Stalling takes the atypical approach in her simile. Her approach was very critical at this point in the poem because everything begins to get strange and dark. The second line of the poem reads: “The place he took me to:

B. and where I ate bitter seed and became