“Who Understands Me, But Me” A poem written by Jimmy Santiago Baca. This poem is about a time when he was in prison living a heinous life. He was left alone with not much but darkness and sadness. He lived a life full of torture, loneliness, and darkness until he was able to leave.
Depressing, that’s what the character narrating the poem is feeling. The speaker seems like a person that got in trouble but didn’t mean to. He seems like he wanted to leave, but was forced to stay in a horror filled room. “I am taken by my failures, astounded by my fears”, the person is sad and shocked at his actions that caused him to end up in prison.
Being sad all the time and having a negative outlook all comes to one word. It’s called stress. The dark, gloomy
One of the ways the author does this is by using enjambment to make the title and the first line of the poem flow into one single line. This symbolizes how when you are in jail there is no real beginning; one day flows to the next. His extensive use of figurative language, allows for the reader to paint a picture in his or her mind. “... to a dark stage, I lie there awake in my prison bunk.” This line can be interpreted literally and figuratively; he is really in prison in his bunk or it feels so much like a dream that it is as if he were on a stage. However, his diction shows that he has does this often. “...through illimitable tun...
This poem is telling a story, perhaps of someone grieving over the loss of someone lose to them, with no happiness nor hope left to have. “Here you sit beside me, Our shadows have outgrown us. The lamp goes out, The joy already came, already went. Our heart will grieve, We’ll sit here melancholy, Like children greatly punished. Here you sit beside me, Our shadows have outgrown us” Earlier within the poem it states “The joy already came, already went” which is meaning there is no joy left as it was once there, just sadness and sorrow left behind. This poem shows that he, and other people he was with, went through a great amount of sadness and loss because the Holocaust took loved ones and family members away and he may have felt as if he didn't have hope left any chance of happiness.
This poem reflects on how when you lose someone you truly care about it affects you mentally. When we lose someone who we're really close to, we tend to hold a grudge and start questioning our love for the world. We lose ourselves when we
The first two lines of the poem set the mood of fear and gloom which is constant throughout the remainder of the poem. The word choice of "black" to describe the speaker's face can convey several messages (502). The most obvious meaning ...
trauma can have on someone, even in adulthood. The speaker of the poem invokes sadness and
In the end, the journey the speaker embarked on throughout the poem was one of learning, especially as the reader was taken through the evolution of the speakers thoughts, demonstrated by the tone, and experienced the images that were seen in the speaker’s nightmare of the personified fear. As the journey commenced, the reader learned how the speaker dealt with the terrors and fears that were accompanied by some experience in the speaker’s life, and optimistically the reader learned just how they themselves deal with the consequences and troubles that are a result of the various situations they face in their
The setting of the poem is a day at the ocean with the family that goes terribly awry. This could be considered an example of irony, in that one would normally view a day at the beach as a happy and carefree time. In “Feared Drowned,” Olds paints a very different scenario, using dark imagery to create the setting: “…suit black as seaweed / Rocks sticks out near shore like heads.” The poem illuminates moments of intense fear, anxiety and the element of a foreseen sense of doom. Written as a direct, free-style verse using the first-person narrative, the poem opens with the narrator suspecting that her husband may have drowned. When Olds writes in her opening line: “Suddenly nobody knows where you are,” this signals to the reader that we are with the narrator as she makes this fearful discovery.
This poem is about a servant that serves other servants. This servant has to clean up after and feed these men, and their work is never done because it is an endless cycle. This servant is of a lower status than the rest of them because the clean up after everyone, and therefore is seen as lowly and is ignored by them all. This servant is at the bottom of the social ladder and is being isolated because they are different. Then this servant goes on to tell the story of their uncle that had a cage built for him because he was crazy. They go on to say that they are glad they got away from that, they had made jokes about the cage being a jail. That even when they were there with the uncle in the attic, they were still happy enough to have a roof over their head. Even though they are deemed as worthless and lowly as the servants servant, that they will stay because they must be kept and it is better than living outside, although that would mean freedom, the roof is better than the ground. The tone of this poem is very casual, the speaker tells this seemingly sad and unfortunate story in a manner that sounds like casual conversation. This poem had a rhythm to it, that I couldn’t quite get in reading it aloud, but it’s obviously there. The rhythm helped the words flow and tell the
In the second stanza, the poet reveals that in the face of death, the criminal will still be unhappy, even though it is was he wanted all along. Line (7) of the poem, the poet means that hangings are a means of curing society, ridding it of pests (criminals).
Mood: apprehension, general discontent, loss of interest, hopelessness, anger, elevated mood, mood swings, apathy, euphoria, sadness, guilt, or inability to feel
Unmanageable stress can cause depression. Never getting a chance to focus on yourself and always being busy may cause you to be over stressed. Taking time to prioritize life’s obligations and allowing time to take care of yourself is a way to prevent feelings of being tired, sad, anxious, or depressed.
I find this poem to be exceptional in its meaning, in fact the verse that comes to mind when thinking of this poem is Psalm 51:17 “the sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, You will not despise.” (Holy Bible, New Testament) I believe that the speaker has meaning behind his words he knows that a complete peace and joy come from the awareness of one’s sin, he also believes in the submission of himself to God and the humility of heart.
In life we all go through experiences that cause our moods to change for better or for worse. There are times that we experience degrees of great joy and happiness just as other times we experience great sadness and despair. These polar emotional opposites can be brought about by a cornucopia of circumstances such as the joy and excitement of getting married or the birth of a child to the deep sadness and grief over the loss of a loved one or one’s employment. Feelings of joy and feelings of sadness are normal parts of human life. Some however are unfortunate enough to be force to cope with these emotions to the extreme and on a regular basis. Some individuals must further cope with an ever present emotion rollercoaster, switching from one emotional extreme to the next with regularity. This personality disorder is known as bipolar disorder.
Major mood disorders are characterized by emotional extremes. The person who only goes “down” emotionally suffers from a major depressive disorder. During major depressive episodes, everything looks bleak and hopeless. The person has feelings of failure, worthlessness, and total despair (Coon, 2013). Essentially it causes a constant sense of hopelessness and despair, and may be difficult to work, study, sleep, eat, and enjoy friends and activities. Depression indeed can be deadly.
Depression is a mood disorder involving disturbances in emotion (excessive sadness), behavior (loss of interest in one’s usual activities), cognition (thoughts of hopelessness), and body function (fatigue and loss of appetite) (Wade, Tavris 567). Most people don’t even know when depression is happening to them. It usually takes friends, family, or even doctors to notice the symptoms of depression within somebody they know. People that are depressed have the tendency to describe their mood as gloomy, miserable, dreary or uneasy. A lot of victims of depression have additional feelings of worthlessness, doubt, emptiness, pointlessness, unreasonable guilt, boredom, despair, and weakness.