Louise Gluck The School Children Analysis

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Title: The title of Louise Gluck’s poem, The School Children, generates visuals of a cold and rainy day in September. The leaves are falling, the children climb on their school bus and puddles are being stepped in, a fun and reckless poem. Paraphrase: The kids walk while holding their backpacks. Their mothers worked all morning picking old apples, both red and yellow, like words from a different language. Across to the other shore people wait behind big desks to receive the apples. The nails that the kids hang their coats on are orderly. The teachers teach in silence and the mothers collect all from the orchards to find a way out, bringing to themselves the dead limbs of the trees holding small amounts of ammunition. Speaker: The speaker …show more content…

The speaker is not physically talking, but telling a story, as if their personal opinions are not involved in the tale. This allows the poem to go straight to the point. Shifts: The largest and most significant shift is in fact, the final line of the poem. Beginning with talk of children, teachers and apples, the sudden switch to a gun is unsettling. The final line essentially illustrates the idea that little amounts of apples collected by the mothers are synonymous to an empty gun, quite a shift from the original concept of the poem. Title: After deep analysis, the title The School Children means that these school children are only present because of a detatched system between the teachers and mothers, in which apples are a form of currency for the teachers. The mothers want a better life for their kids, so suddenly they become “school children.” Theme: The theme of The School Children by Louise Gluck is definable by the Tibetan proverb; “a child without education is like a bird without wings.” Even with the distorted education system, the main goal is to educate children. Many schools don’t have an optimal system, but they must aim to educate the young generation, so that brilliance shines on

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