Analysis of “Night Waitress” by Lynda Hull
In Lynda Hull’s poem “Night Waitress,” a women describes her feelings while she covers her usual night shift at a diner. There is a definite struggle within the speaker. The first struggle the speaker leads the reader to is that she is not very religious. The speaker addresses her mother saying “praying to her god of sorrow and visions who’s not here tonight…”(6-8). The reader gets a sense that the speaker is also rather lonely. The speaker address a man in the diner who catches her eye. She then explains to the readers that she wouldn’t mind letting him touch her. However, it seems as though the man st the jukebox who the speaker notices is looking for something more serious. The songs of “risky”(17-18) love he plays on the jukebox do not please her. The poet Lynda Hull gives the speaker a sense of hope for what she longs for. The speaker seems to be happy however it seems she also has a struggle with the way she looks. She speaks about countless body parts, her face being the most important. Within the first lines she says, “I’m telling myself my face has character, not beauty” (3-4). Readers will get a sense that the speaker seems to be reserved in public in hopes that someone will
…show more content…
notice her even though she makes no effort.
The waitress is a dreamer who takers herself out of her work mind and says she “...want[s] a song that rolls through the night like a big Cadillac past factories to
the refineries squatting on the bay…” (24-27). The speaker also makes it seem that she is more bold in her private life and knows how to express what she is feeling in multiple ways. Lynda Hull’s “Night Waitress” gives readers the inside look at an unnoteworthy day of a waitress who longs for more than what she has. Which in a sense, causes the readers to sympathize with her. This could even make the reader compare and contrast their life to the waitresses. Lynda Hull may have tried to draw a picture for the readers of the carbon copy task that everyday people do and what emotions are drawn out when doing these task. The waitress is attentive to a job where she has little hope to go forward and wants to break free but finds herself stuck doing the same thing daily. Hull uses countless forms of imagery, symbolism, and metaphors in the writing to engage the reader. It is almost as if Hull wants the reader to see an mechanical clockwork of how one can move on but still be trapped. The theme of “Night Waitress” can be conveyed as an endless life cycle that forever revolves but stays in the same state. The waitress can want more in life but at the end of the night she is too tired to notice anything. If she continues to never notice different things in life she will stay in the same place never moving forward.
Night Waitress by Lynda Hull is a poem that describes the feelings of a waitress that works the night shift of a diner Reflection of “Night Waitress” “Night Waitress” by Lynda Hull is a poem that describes the feelings of a waitress that works the night shift of a diner. The speaker obviously belongs to a lower social class, in the way of income and her occupation. Much like the character in this poem, the speaker in “The Chimney Sweeper” by William Blake works long, hard hours as a chimneysweeper. These two characters are both related in their ways of life and their classes in our society.
Jan Beatty's waitress teaches us that no amount of money can make up for poor character. The poem "A Waitress's Instructions on Tipping or Get the Cash Up and Don't Waste My Time" is a plea from a waitress, tired and overworked, to us, her customers. Throughout the first twenty-nine lines, she gives commands on how to tip and stresses the importance of money in the relationship between waitress and customer. At the end of line 29, we would describe the waitress as cold, materialistic, and unattached from her customers. Then, in the final line, she tells us, "If you're miserable, there's not enough money in the world." After reading this final line, we realize that the entire poem exists just to prepare the reader for the climax of that last line. To show the importance of a person's character, she builds up the importance of money throughout the entire poem, and then says that character is more important.
Clifton’s usage of large hips to represent women gives the reader a clear mental image of something large and demanding more space just like women of today. Her style choice of free form breaks the traditional poetry forms, which accompanies her message about women needing to break tradition in today’s patriarchal society in order to better their lives. The imagery in the poem coney’s the strength and the determination of women breaking free from societies shackles and stereotypes. In concluding her poem, Clifton wants the reader to be left feeling empowered and hopeful with her decision to shift a tone about the advantage that comes from the unique qualities of women that men do not possess. If women do not take heed to the message of Lucille Clifton in this poem about the urgency and need for gender equality, the problem women face will only progress. The destruction of gender discrimination will not be immediate or easy, but through this poem, Lucille Clifton hopes to encourage other women to join the
The ocean is mysterious to mankind. The unfathomable vastness of the ocean intrigues humanity into exploring it. In life, the immense possibilities that lie in the future compel us to reach for the stars. In the poem “The Story” by Karen Connelly, an individual willingly swims into deep waters even though they are fearful of what may exist in the waters. The swimmer later finds out that their fears were foolish, which illustrates the human tendency to venture into the unknown. The theme conveyed in this poem is that life is like a rough, uncertain, uncontrollable ocean that we must find get through with experience.
Throughout the world, there are rudimentary gender characteristics, both physical and psychological, that differentiate a man from a woman. However, some people do not associate themselves with these stereotypical characteristics. Notwithstanding the amount of progress achieved in the past few decades, gender stereotypes are still solemn. Qualities like strength, intellect and sexual deviance are usually associated with men, while qualities like irrational, emotional and insecure are more relevant to women. In Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy” and Dorothy Livesay’s “The Unquiet Bed”, each poet captures the expression of female
...mely carefully chosen rhetoric, she has demonstrated how women can break free of men. She has taken away the fear than many women feel when they want to stand up against the male figure in their life. When women are able to be strong, and use the power that they have always had, they are able to move mountains with that power. They can remove themselves from a man who takes advantage of them or objectifies them, and reduce them to nothing more than the coward that they are. Larcom’s poem painted a clear picture of progress that women have made against men, and how they are tackling the issues set before them. Because of Larcom and her ability to use her voice through writing to portray and strong vision of women, has empowered many others to do the same. They are able to break free from the chains of repression that so many men have restrained women by for so long.
In the second stanza, Piercy describes the girl as healthy, intelligent, and strong (7-8). Yet these positive equalities alone, could not keep people from criticizing her, so the girl feels inferior. “She went to and fro apologizing,” which demonstrates her collapse of confidence with the people she is surrounded with, who kept putting her down (10). She gives in to the hurtful things people say about her: “Everyone [kept] seeing a fat nose on thick legs” (11). The girl thus lets people push her in the direction of society’s standard of beauty, instead of affirming her own unique beauty.
In a subtle way, Brush also makes the wife’s actions selfish. Even though her husband was wrong to react in the way that he did, she was also selfish in her actions. Clearly, her husband has a shy personality because “he was hotly embarrassed” (13) in front of “such few people as there were in the restaurant” (11). Using a couple of this age (“late thirties” (1)), Brush asserts that the wife should have known her husband’s preferences and been sensitive to them. The author also uses the seemingly opposite descriptions the couple: “There was nothing conspicuous about them” (5) and the “big hat” (4) of the woman. The big hat reveals the wife’s desire to be noticed.
" The same refrain is used to end the poem, making a complete circle. This creates, for the reader, a sense of loneliness about the poem as a whole. In the second stanza, Eleanor is introduced as a woman who cannot face the world as her self. She wears the “face” that she keeps in a jar by the door. Literally this can be interpreted as makeup, but symbolically she is hiding herself.
She tells the girl to “walk like a lady” (320), “hem a dress when you see the hem coming down”, and “behave in front of boys you don’t know very well” (321), so as not to “become the slut you are so bent on becoming” (320). The repetition of the word “slut” and the multitude of rules that must be obeyed so as not to be perceived as such, indicates that the suppression of sexual desire is a particularly important aspect of being a proper woman in a patriarchal society. The young girl in this poem must deny her sexual desires, a quality intrinsic to human nature, or she will be reprimanded for being a loose woman. These restrictions do not allow her to experience the freedom that her male counterparts
The man feels abandoned in a corner and he drinks for the sadness he feels. While drinking, he tells himself I do not understand why you left me, if I know she loved me, so if you ever regret your decision he will be waiting for you. Basically, the man feels broken emotionally because the women he loved, left him for no reason. This song to me is not a dancing song, however the song is more about remembering your ex-wife, ex-girlfriend or ex husband and ex-boyfriend. For me personally, this song reminds me of drinking, the title literally means bitter shots of liquor. The way the song shares the hurt the man feels by the women that left him. I could almost picture a man sitting at a bar drinking to his ex saying, “I’m drinking because of you, you caused this”. I could picture that scene in my head because I have seen my friends in Mexico and my cousins in Mexico do
The song “When It’s Sleepy Time Down South”, may possibly portray Holiday’s sadness and experience during the Great Depression. The line “Homesick, tired, all alone in a big city” can be ...
Marianne’s brand of free expression sometimes has little else to recommend it (Intro, I). What is true of Marianne’s classification system is true of her manners in general: In her refusal to place social decorum and propriety above her own impulses and desires, she is absolutely unbending (Intro, II). Marianne is also characterized as being very charming. For example, she believes her poetic effusions to be striking in themselves as well as accurate expressions of her inner life (Intro, VII).
In the second stanza, the poet says that women are the cause that make her write poems because of the stereotypes against them, which give her a strong desire to challenge. Therefore, she takes women’s stories and writes them in poetry. She describes herself as a “seamstress” and without the dresses of women, she would be a seamstress without work, but her friends give her their dresses (their stori...
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