Analysis Of You Were You Are Elegy By Mary Joe Bang

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“You Were You Are Elegy” written by Mary Joe Bang is an elegy which dedicated to her son who passed away from overdosed of sedatives. Apostrophe is figure of speech that the poet uses in this poem because there is only one speaker and addresses to absent person. This poem is free verse seeing that there are no pattern such as iambic or rhyme scheme to follow, the poet just expresses her sadness by using colloquial language.
This elegy is full of senses of lament, grief, love, and motherhood and also guilty which can be seen as concept of self-accusation in line 34-36, “Everything Was My Fault / Has been the theme of song I’ve been singing”. The first four lines is the definition of child which is every child have to grow up and die one day as a mortal in order to imply that her son has already passed away because she does not mention it directly throughout the poem. From line 5 to 20, the poet describe that she is sitting on a chair and thinking about his good which she …show more content…

I believe the chair refers to life which need an action to perform living, in the poem it is sitting – the poet describes herself sitting and thinking about her son who does not sit beside her because he is already dead – while, in line 22, the chair is experience. In my opinion, life is a huge collection of experiences and it can shape oneself and behavior because everyone learns from their own experience. Thus, the experience is shaped into the chair and that it would support us when to live our lives. Another repetition that very important to this poem is “you were you are”, the name of this elegy, I believe the poet repeats these words in order to describe her son that he is one of rarely beauty, the brightest things in her life, he is always best for her no matter what he have done and to tell him that he always be

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