Rita Dove Literary Analysis

Rita Dove: Literary Analysis

Rita Dove has written many different kinds of poetry. She also wrote books, short stories plays and all types of literature. This essay will focus on specifics of her writing by analyzing three pieces of poetry that Rita Dove has written. The works we will be looking at are In the Old Neighborhood, My Mother Enters the Work Force, and The Bistro Styx. Through these three works you will see examples of Rita Dove’s use of home in her poetry, her use of figurative devices such as similes and metaphors, and you will see Dove’s view on children coming of age in different ways.

By looking at the poem “In the Old Neighborhood'; we can deduce a number of things from the overall poem. Dove seems to go back in time to view her home as a child from a newly shifting and surreal location. The speakers in Dove’s poems are not usually at ease with their surroundings, and they tend to look upon scenes of home as seen through a distant and dispassionate eye. Dove’s home seems alien to her. Even the flowers are strangers there. Analyzing the poem farther we can see that Dove uses her views on home to further alienate from our familiar picture of that typical suburban home. She seems to be talking about the house in a manner that would indicate it is a photographic negative; this emphasizes race as an alienating factor. Dove’s writing usually charts a sense of displacement and this seems to be the case in “The Old Neighborhood';. In My Mother Enters the Work Force Dove does not use her home theme, but in The Bistro Styx, which is a small excerpt from a works entitled Mother Love, Dove does make references to home. This poem is a recasting of the story of Demeter and Persephone from ancient Greek mythology. In short, Hades kidnaps Persephone from her home, and Demeter, her mother goes insane trying to get her back. Demeter is able to go after Persephone only to find that too late Persephone has already “adapted'; to life in the underworld, and must remain there because she ate the fruit of the dead. Dove’s version is much the same and takes place in Paris. It deals with loss of home and a home coming that was not to be. Many of Rita Dove’s works deal, approach, define, or scrutinize the i...

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...he mother, is insanely worried about her daughter. Persephone is unmindful of her mother’s fear and is off having a great time partying in Paris. Although Persephone is having a great time, what she doesn’t realize is that she can never really return home. The end of the poem symbolizes the mother realizing her daughter’s sexual awakening, and with that the realization that things are out of her control. Dove delves deep into these kinds of relationships in many of her poems, not just the examples given.

The works we looked at were In the Old Neighborhood, My Mother Enters the Work Force, and The Bistro Styx. Through these three works we saw examples of Rita Dove’s use of home in her poetry, her use of figurative devices such as similes and metaphors, and her views and themes on children coming of age in different ways. These three elements do not fully encompass all that is Rita Dove. In fact, with a poet as diverse as she is it is hard to pick three main ideas when really they aren’t as main as you might think. Rita Dove is a complex and fascinating individual who will continue to write her style of poetry for many years to come.