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An essay about a poem about personification
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As you begin to read “The Hate Poem” by Julie Sheehan your first impression will probably be that the speaker loathes the person that they are writing about. However, as you continue to read the poem and look deeper into its meanings you may find that they may not be as crystal clear as they first appeared. The hate that is spoken of again and again may not be hate at all. In fact though the speaker never comes out and directly states their hatred they may really be trying to portray the exact opposite The speaker of the poem seems to be a woman judging by the line "My breasts relaxing in their holster from morning to night hate you.” but the gender of the subject remains unknown. This poem is extremely relatable. Almost everyone has experienced the horrible tragic confusion of loving and hating someone at the same time, whether is be a family member, a significant other or a friend. …show more content…
The first thing that pops out in this poem is the obsession that the speaker has with this person who they claim to hate.
“The poem says everything about me hates everything about you.” This shows how infatuated the speaker is with this person. Everything about them is consumed by this passion. They are constantly thinking about them.The speaker also illustrates their obsession by describing their hate in terms of small things. For example “the way I hold my pencil hates you.” and “My breasts relaxing in their holster from morning to night hate you.” There are many examples like this throughout the poem. These proclamations of hate use personification to grab the readers attention. The way someone holds their pencil cannot really feel hate. It is the speaker who feels the hate in everything that they do and see. These small things that bring forth the speakers head symbolize that they cannot get this person out of their head. The smallest things remind the speaker of the person in
question. The first part of the poem that made me think that maybe the speaker doesn't really hate the person that they are writing about was the first line which is “I hate you truly. Truly I do.” The repetition in this line makes me question who the speaker is trying to make believe her hate for this person, the reader or herself? As the poem goes on more lines crop up that make me question the speakers hate. One of these lines is “You know how when I’m sleepy I nuzzle my head under your arm? Hate.” The words nuzzle and sleepy have a very pleasant and comfortable connotation. This shows that the speaker is comfortable with the person that they are writing about. Though she may hate the fact that she is in love with them perhaps she has become accustom to a routine that this person is essential to and they give her a feeling of being safe and at home. The second to last line says “My lungs, duplicitous twins, expand with the utter validity of my hate, which can never have enough of you.” Though the speakers lungs hate their lover they need them to keep going. They “can never have enough.” This line basically compares the subject of the poem to air. Every breath she breathes she is thinking of this person. Though she may hate them she knows that she needs them and will never cease to need them. One of the most overwhelming messages in this poem is the mixture of hate and love. In every line the word hate could easily be replaced with the word love and in most cases it even flows better with the context. Once again returning to the first line as an example “I hate you truly. Truly I do.” Truly is not usually coupled with the word hate it is more often used with the word love “I love you truly. Truly I do.” The words “I do.” are also often associated with marriage which is a union formed in honor of love. Though love and hate are in some ways complete opposites they are in other ways very similar. They are both passionate and uncontrollable. They can both consume you completely and are perhaps even confusable. Though the speaker may hate the person she talks about she also loves them with everything that she has. Both of these feelings are so strong that under certain context they may become confused with one another. Julie Sheehans poems “Hate Poem” delves into the complex relationship between hate and love. They are both complex emotions and can blur together in a confusing whirlwind of emotion. This poem seems to show that sometimes you can love someone so much that you hate them, perhaps you hate them for the way your love for them allows them to control you. One line that shows this is “My hesitation when you invite me for a drive: hate.” Though the speaker hesitates she knows she will give in, in the end because of her love. The repeated use of small everyday things that remind the speaker of the subject show her obsession and her inability to get this person out of her head. The continued use of phrases and words with connotations more associated with love than hate show that though the speaker is saying that they hate the person in question the underlying message of the poem is love.
In Chapter 4, The Cruel Hand, Michelle Alexander does a great job analyzing the issues that many inmates go through when they get out of prison. This chapter was a bit more interesting to read compared to the last one. One passage that stood out to me was when Michelle Alexander stated, “Even if the defendant manages to avoid prison time by accepting a “generous” plea deal, he may discover that the punishment that awaits him outside the courthouse doors is far more severe” (Michelle Alexander Pg. 142). Like I mentioned in the beginning, when inmates are done serving their sentence they usually suffer on the outside world. That is because they’re now being labeled as criminals in our society and corporates/businesses have a little leverage on
Susan Donnelly’s poem “Inoculation” explores the comparison between sin, disease, and slavery, and initially, this connection is nonexistent to one of two characters: Cotton Mather. This piece opens by stating, “Cotton Mather studied small pox for a while, instead of sin,” and automatically there is implanted the idea that disease and sin are independent of each other; this diction is imperative for Donnelly because it gives the vantage point of Mather prior to discussing the small pox outbreak with his slave, Onesimus. The blatant introduction makes it clear by the end of the poem how terribly wrong Mather was in his ideology of a separation between small pox and sin: the topic of his studies does not change, unlike the claim of his first belief.
Personification: 'When Fortune frowns her blackest' is the only example of a personification in this poem. Fortune, which is an inanimate concept, is given the human ability of frowning in this poem. This poetic device is used to capture the attention of the reader and enhance
Dubbed as “The Greatest Country in the World” by god knows who, America is not as awesome and free as some may see. In doing a close reading of Heather Christle’s “Five Poems for America”, we can see how the author uses metaphors to portray a flawed American, specifically within its political system, religion, obsession with technology and basic human rights. Americans have been living with the oppression of these everyday issues, completely oblivious thus creating the America we infamously know today.
7. The personification in the second stanza is that she gives poems the ability to hide and are waiting to be found. The author states that poems are hiding in the bottom of your shoes, and they are the shadows drifting across your ceiling before you wake up. This is personification because she gives the poems traits that only a living organism can possess.
... she is indeed angered and fed up at the fact that there is a stereotype. The way in which she contradicts herself makes it hard for readers to understand the true meaning or point to her poem, the voice was angry and ready for change, yet the actions that the individual was participating in raised questions of whether or not he actually fit the stereotype.
Personification is presented by the author as the only explanation for the narrator’s consumption. “The Blue Estuaries” begins to stir the narrator’s own poems (line 24) until she bores down on the page once more, coming back into what is perceived by the reader as a much more clear state of mind. Then, the narrator claims to have “lost her doubts” for a moment (line 34). This was a turning point in the narrator’s tone- signalling a shift in her thoughts, and was a strikingly out of place claim- especially coming from somebody so preoccupied- making the reader wonder what she had thought about for a moment. The narrator then begins to read once more (Line
The speaker is supposed to be writing a love poem to his wife, but the unmistakable criticism he places on her makes one wonder if this is really love he speaks of. It may not be a "traditional" love story, but he does not need to degrade his wife in this manner. Reading through this poem the first time made us feel defensive and almost angry at the speaker for criticizing his wife so badly. Although it is flattering to be the subject of a poem, we do not think many women would like to be written about in this way.
He uses personifications specifically in this poem to write about what is going on and to describe things. “It's a hard life where the sun looks”(19)...”And its black strip of highway, big eyed/with rabbits that won’t get across ”(2)...”A pot bangs and water runs in the kitchen” (13) None of these are really human body parts on things such as the sun, a pot, or a highway, but they help describe what something does or what something looks like. In the first instance, the sun cannot actually look at something, but it could mean that the sun is visible to the humans, and if humans are out for a long time in the sun, they can get hot and exhausted. For the second line, the big-eyed highway could mean that the highway has many cars with bright headlights that are dangerous for the rabbits, the immigrants, to get across. For the third and final line, pots are not able to bang things on their own, and it could have possibly been a human who made the pot bang, preparing the meal of beans and brown soup that they survive on. There is also a simile in this poem, “Papa's field that wavered like a mirage” (24). This simile could suggest that the wind is moving the grass or crops on his father’s field and looked like an optical illusion. According to Gale Virtual Reference Library, the literary device, “tone” is used to convey the significant change of the author’s feeling in the poem. In the beginning lines, the tone is happy. The poem talks about nostalgia of when he was little, “They leap barefoot to the store. Sweetness on their tongues, red stain of laughter (5-6). (GVRL) These lines illustrate the nostalgia and happy times of Gary Soto’s life when he was probably a child. However, after line 11, the tone becomes more of a negative one. Soto later talks about Farm Laborers and how the job was not a great one. After line 19, a brighter
The film “Anatomy of hate” examines hate and prejudice towards different race or minorities in the modern society, through the examples of multiple groups which have specific ideologies or participate in violent conflicts. The director of the film Michael Ramsdell, spent six years working and filming such groups like: White Supremacist movement, Muslim extremists, the Westboro church Christian fundamentalists, Israeli-Palestinian movement, and US soldiers operating in Iraq.
A couple examples the narrator used are; “He was a big man, says the size of his shoes”, “God-fearing man, says the Bible with a broken back”, and “A women lived with him, says the bedroom wall papered with lilacs.” These items do not really talk but they do describe the family. Personification is an effective way for the narrator to introduce the people to the readers without the family being physically present in the poem. Therefore letting the readers infer traits about the family through the items left
Personification is an important theme throughout this poem. In lines 1-2 it says, “The mountain held the town as in a shadow I saw so much before I slept there once:.” Also in lines 3-4 it says, “I noticed that I missed stars in the west, where its black body cut into the sky.” This is an example of personification. In lines 5-6 it says, Near me it seemed: I felt it like a wall behind which i was sheltered from a wind.” Most of the examples showing personification in this poem, are displayed in the first couple of lines of the poem.
In “All of Me,” there are numerous examples of personification. The first one is, “What would I do without your smart mouth?” He isn't saying that her mouth is smart, but that what comes out of it (her words) is smart. When he says, “What's going on in that beautiful mind,” he is voicing how he thinks her mind is beautiful, further contributing
... feared time. At times he seemed as if he was angry at the fact that time went by too quick and not enough time allowed him to spend summer with his beloved. Other times he spent glorifying how beautiful his beloved one was and how the beauty can’t ever be taken away. It makes it difficult for the audience to take his reason serious at times because at one point in the poem he seems to have contradicted himself. I found out that this poem had a portion of metaphors, similes, and imagery and personification throughout the entire poem. He begins the poem with a simile and ends it with a personification on the poem.
This, in fact, is an example of “dynamic decomposition” of which the speaker claims she understands nothing. The ironic contradiction of form and content underlines the contradiction between the women’s presentation of her outer self and that of her inner self. The poem concludes with the line “’Let us go home she is tired and wants to go to bed.’” which is a statement made by the man. Hence, it “appears to give the last word to the men” but, in reality, it mirrors the poem’s opening lines and emphasises the role the woman assumes on the outside as well as her inner awareness and criticism. This echoes Loy’s proclamation in her “Feminist Manifesto” in which she states that women should “[l]eave off looking to men to find out what [they] are not [but] seek within [themselves] to find out what [they] are”. Therefore, the poem presents a “new woman” confined in the traditional social order but resisting it as she is aware and critical of