Oranges By Gary Soto Summary

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In the poem, “Oranges”, Gary Soto expresses his narrator's experience through imagery that appeals to the senses. On a particularly Cold evening in December, a twelve-year-old boy left his perch next to the fire and kept his hands in his winter coat. He was going to brave the cold for a special event. His first date. Nervously, he walked five blocks to his girlfriend’s house with a nickel and two oranges weighing down in his worn pockets. The fog was low, but he could still see her yellow porch light glowing brightly. The sight of her gleaming house bathed in light settled his nerves. It was warm and inviting, just like her. So he wanted to impress her, he smoothed his hair and tucked in his shirt. As he looked up, there she was, pulling

Gary Soto Oranges
675 Words | 2 Pages
I chose to do my poem analysis on Oranges by Gary Soto. When I first read the title, I predicted that it was going to simply be about oranges and what characteristics it has. Instead, it was about a young boy who talks about the first time he went on a walk with a girl he liked. They walk to a local drugstore and he buys her a chocolate with everything he has: a nickel and an orange. It ends with them walking hand-in-hand and proceeding to the point where they stop and separately eat the orange and chocolate. In the end, it shows the significance of the title which is that he sacrificed one of his beloved oranges for the girl he admired. Gary Soto is known for being an American poet, novelist, and memoirist. Memoirist definitely shows throughout
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Fruits of Love Revealed in Gary Soto's Oranges
686 Words | 2 Pages
This is the moment Gary Soto captures in his poem "Oranges". The feeling and power of adolescent love is created using tone, contrasting imagery, and symbolism. First, the use of tone in "Oranges" clearly helps to set the theme of the poem. Children often talk with simple sentences that directly state what happened. The speaker's choice of words and raw simplicity in the way he tells his story illustrates his youth and the honesty that comes with it.
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Analysis of Li-Young Lee’s Persimmons
851 Words | 2 Pages
Through the use of “precise” diction, vivid sensory imagery and a natural flowing stanza structure, the speaker in Li-Young Lee’s poem “Persimmons” has literally showed the reader how his attitude has developed over time from confusion, to contentment to deep gratification. The speaker has also helped the reader understand that sometimes in life, the most important things are not things we can “see,” but are rather things we can feel.
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"Oranges" by Gary Soto
660 Words | 2 Pages
Through the use of color, symbolism and imagery you can see why Gary Soto really entitled the poem "Oranges," and why oranges play such an importa...
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A Father's Unfailing Prescence
1009 Words | 3 Pages
The poem “Those Winter Sundays” displays a past relationship between a child and his father. Hayden makes use of past tense phrases such as “I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking” (6) to show the readers that the child is remembering certain events that took place in the past. Although the child’s father did not openly express his love towards him when he was growing up, the child now feels a great amount of guilt for never thanking his father for all the things he actually did for him and his family. This poem proves that love can come in more than one form, and it is not always a completely obvious act.
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Diction In Blackberry-Picking
438 Words | 1 Pages
Seamus Heaney’s poem “Blackberry-Picking” does not merely describe a child’s summer activity of collecting berries for amusement. Rather, it details a stronger motivation, ruled by a more primal urge, guised as a fanciful experience of childhood and its many lessons. This is shown through Heaney’s use of language in the poem, including vibrant diction, intense imagery and powerful metaphor—an uncommon mix coming from a child’s perspective.
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The Poet With His Face In His Hands By Mary Oliver Analysis
991 Words | 2 Pages
Therefore, Oliver’s incorporation of imagery, setting, and mood to control the perspective of her own poem, as well as to further build the contrast she establishes through the speaker, serves a critical role in creating the lesson of the work. Oliver’s poem essentially gives the poet an ultimatum; either he can go to the “cave behind all that / jubilation” (10-11) produced by a waterfall to “drip with despair” (14) without disturbing the world with his misery, or, instead, he can mimic the thrush who sings its poetry from a “green branch” (15) on which the “passing foil of the water” (16) gently brushes its feathers. The contrast between these two images is quite pronounced, and the intention of such description is to persuade the audience by setting their mood towards the two poets to match that of the speaker. The most apparent difference between these two depictions is the gracelessness of the first versus the gracefulness of the second. Within the poem’s content, the setting has been skillfully intertwined with both imagery and mood to create an understanding of the two poets, whose surroundings characterize them. The poet stands alone in a cave “to cry aloud for [his] / mistakes” while the thrush shares its beautiful and lovely music with the world (1-2). As such, the overall function of these three elements within the poem is to portray the
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Analysis Of I Dreamed I Moved Among The Elysian Fields
998 Words | 2 Pages
The speaker begins the poem an ethereal tone masking the violent nature of her subject matter. The poem is set in the Elysian Fields, a paradise where the souls of the heroic and virtuous were sent (cite). Through her use of the words “dreamed”, “sweet women”, “blossoms” and
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Karen Tei Yamashita's Tropic of Orange
2233 Words | 5 Pages
“Visualize Child Protective Services (CPS) walking up to your home to take your children away from you. Now picture this, picture what the children feel like escorted away from their parents left to wonder where they will end up.” Says Larry in the beginning of our interview. “Many children experience these thoughts as they walk out the front door of what they call home.” What can we do to ease the anxiety of these young children taken away from parents? Kinship care is one viable option that can ease the worry for children. However, kinship care is not the only placement for children who are taken away from their homes. Other out-of-home placements include group homes, residential treatments, private child welfare institutions, shelters, and even correctional facilities. “Children need a stable and healthy environment” says Larry the Vietnam Veteran. Kinship care is safe and can help many children by preparing them for a successful future. In this essay, I will have two main sections interviewing a Veteran friend of mine named Larry Pearson, whom served in the Vietnam War. The first section of this essay will be titled “Crabs”, which will discuss how all things came together in Larry’s life just as the critters all came together in the home in Mexico in the book “Tropic of Orange.” Many people made their way to the plot, just as many people were placed in Larry’s life, and this has played a major part in my life as well. The second section will be titled “Orange”. The orange in the book “Tropic of Orange” symbolized magic and dreams, so in this section of my paper I will discuss the great benefits of Larry’s decision to serve in Vietnam War. I will use Larry’s life to explain how I have linked together with variations of people ...
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The Big Orange Thing Research Paper
444 Words | 1 Pages
There once was a Big Orange Thing, it was the only thing. The Big Orange Thing lived it’s life in solitude for there was nothing else, absolutely nothing. One day the Big Orange Thing had enough, it didn't want to be alone anymore so it created things. It created a giant yellow thing that radiated a brilliant yellow glow, smaller more abstract versions of said yellow things were created as well.
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Spring and Fall
1764 Words | 4 Pages
I first came across “Spring and Fall”—as I did a similar poem, Frost’s “Nothing Gold Can Say”—through two teen movies of the 1980’s. The Frost poem was featured in Copola’s adaptation of the popular S.E. Hinton young adult novel, The Outsiders, and Hopkins’ in Vision Quest, a forgettable movie about a young man searching to find himself by taking on the unbeatable state champion in a wrestling match. (Our hero beats him!) In both films, the themes of the pains and triumphs of growing up are presented in familiar formulas, and the poems lend a sense of gravity to that theme. In any case, lots of my friends in high school, who never would have read poetry otherwise, knew these poems and could recognize them, having heard them in a movie. (The same can be said of my generation in terms of another Victorian poem in our reading, “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” recited in class memorably by Alfalfa in one of the “Our Gang” comedies.) That said, hearing these poems in contexts outside of an academic setting really made them stick with me, and I’d like to use this paper as an opportunity to examine precisely what lends “Spring and Fall” in particular its haunting power.
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Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening, by Robert Frost
1396 Words | 3 Pages
...fall of snow and the unremitting “sweep” of “easy wind” appear tragically indifferent to life, in turn stressing the value of Poirier’s assessment of the poem. Frost uses metaphor in a way that gives meaning to simple actions, perhaps exploring his own insecurities before nature by setting the poem amongst a tempest of “dark” sentiments. Like a metaphor for the workings of the human mind, the pull between the “promises” the traveller should keep and the lure of death remains palpably relevant to modern life. The multitudes of readings opened up through the ambiguity of metaphor allows for a setting of pronounced liminality; between life and death, “night and day, storm and heath, nature and culture, individual and group, freedom and responsibility,” Frost challenges his readers to delve deep into the subtlety of tone and come to a very personal conclusion.
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Conflict In Oranges By Gary Soto
174 Words | 1 Pages
The conflict in the poem Oranges is when the girl wants a chocolate bar that costs more than what the narrator has. This conflict is resolved by the lines, "I took the nickel from My pocket, then an orange, And set them quietly on The counter" (Soto 35-38). In these few lines from the poem, the narrator pays for the girl's chocolate with an extra orange that he has because he does not have enough to pay with regular money. This reveals that the speaker of the story is willing to pay extra to please the girl because he enjoys spending time with her. The lines, "The lady's eyes met mine, And held them, knowing Very well what it was all About" (Soto 39-42). These lines from the poem Oranges reveal that the drugstore lady once had a first love
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My Magic River: The Grand Magical River
908 Words | 2 Pages
The night was frozen in a deep silence, but I could still hear the whisper of the distant whoosh of the river getting closer and closer every step we would take into our new lives. I could see the excitement of my little brother and my sister on their faces; their dark chocolate eyes were as big and bright as the moon. The woman next to me held my hand tightly; I could feel the calluses of her hands from all those years of hard work in the fields harvesting the corn, which every morning she would turn in yummy tortillas! I knew she was tired, I could see it through that shiny armor of toughness she would wear every day. “Don’t let go my hand mijos,” she said with a sparkle of a star in her eyes. My sister, my little
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The Snow Man Wallace Stevens Analysis
1008 Words | 3 Pages
“The Snow Man,” by Wallace Stevens, dramatizes a metaphorical “mind of winter”, and introduces the idea that one must have a certain mindset in order to correctly perceive reality. The poet, or rather the Snow Man, is an interpreter of simple and ordinary things; “A cold wind, without interpretation, has no misery” (Poetry Genius). Through the use of imageries and metaphors relating to both wintery landscapes and the Snow Man itself, Stevens illustrates different ideas of human objectivity and the abstract concept of true nothingness. Looking through the eyes of the Snow Man, the readers are given an opportunity to perceive a reality that is free from objectivity; The Snow Man makes it clear that winter can possess qualities of beauty and also emptiness: both “natural wonder, and human misery”. He implies that winter can also be nothing at all: “just a bunch of solid water, dormant plants, and moving air.” (The Wondering Minstrels). “One must
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Oranges By Gary Soto Summary

Gary Soto Oranges

Fruits of Love Revealed in Gary Soto's Oranges

Analysis of Li-Young Lee’s Persimmons