Analysis Of To Be Of Use By Marge Piercy

In poems, authors always express their ideas, attitudes, experiences, and emotions throughout their poetry to make the audience focus exactly on the author’s thoughts. Many of these are shown throughout Marge Piercy’s poem, “To Be of Use”. Words such as “hard work” and “heavy labour” may have a negative impact on some people, but in this narrators poem, it is the opposite. The poem demonstrates that satisfaction, enjoyment, and self-fulfillment can be succeeded by using one's ability to serve a useful purpose in life. The narrator uses figurative language/rhetorical devices, reflective tone, and structural devices/sound to develop this idea throughout the poem.

The narrator begins developing the thesis by using a figurative language, imagery, found in the second stanza: “I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart, who pull like a water buffalo, with massive patience, who strain in the mud and the muck to things forward, who do what has to be done, again and again. (8-11)
With this image, the speaker expresses that she wants the readers to experience the literary work. The narrator wants the readers to imagine a water buffalo working hard, then imagining people who work just as hard as the water buffalo. The poet uses this stanza to conveys her messages, ideas and thoughts through. Next, the speaker uses a rhetorical device, metaphor, which is found in stanza two line one: “I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart,” (8). The speaker uses metaphor describing people who work hard, to an ox working hard. With this metaphor, it enhances images described by the speaker by making them more creative and interesting. It also makes the story sounds poetic without writing the story in verses. The last r...

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... using assonance to connect the reader to middle vowel sounds. This way, the reader's attention is directed to where the speaker wants it to go. In conclusion, the speaker develops the theme by getting readers to be focus exactly on her ideas and feelings towards perseverance and hard working people.

Throughout this entire poem, there were many literary devices found, such as; figurative languages/rhetorical devices, reflective tone, and sound/structural devices. In the poem, the poet, Marge Piercy, makes the readers realize that hard work not merely obligation, but rather should offer a fulfilling reward for those who perform it to create something that will be of use. The title of the poem, “To Be of Use,” makes readers think that this poem is about hard work being a negative impact. In this case, it conveys an opposing connotation about the idea of work instead.