Time is precious. The more time passes, the more troubling aging and time become. Furthermore, the speaker in the poem “35/10” is ostensibly obsessed with her daughter’s growth into adolescent youth, and moreover, the fact that she, herself, is aging rapidly. Through the juxtaposition of evocative imagery in “35/10”, Sharon Olds portrays the distressing reality of time and age. Age is a recurring theme in the poem. The first line we see, the title “35/10”, is a reference to and a comparison of the age of the speaker and her growing daughter. The speaker introduces tactile and visual imagery of the “daughter’s dark / silken hair” and “the grey gleaming” on her head, identifying herself as “the silver-haired servant”(Olds, 1-4). This juxtaposition of the youthfulness of the daughter and the aging of the (speaker) mother demonstrates how the speaker feels about aging. …show more content…
The word “gleaming” expresses how the speaker negatively views her age; her grey hair puts it on display. Her positive imagery of her daughter’s hair emphasizes the glory and beauty that the speaker sees in youth. Continuing the use of the types of imagery (tactile and visual) mentioned earlier, the speaker reiterates the divergence between the two characters.
The speaker asks why as her generation gets older the younger generation becomes more pleasant looking: “The fold in my neck clarifying as the fine bones of her hips sharpen?” (6-8) Her daughter is becoming a woman, more shapely. She, on the other hand, is becoming heavier and losing her youthful figure. She is deeply troubled by this transformation. She even speaks of the dryness of her skin and contrasts that with comparing her daughter with the beautiful image of a flower blooming from a cactus (8-10). The imagery of the new flower coming from a harsh, prickly object such as a cactus represents the fresh woman blossoming from the roughness of childhood into the grace of the adult world. As her daughter becomes a woman, the speaker is noting the changes the daughter’s body is going through as well as her own bodily changes as she ages. She acknowledges her “last chances to bear a child are falling through (her) body… her purse full of eggs, round
and firm as hard-boiled yolks, is about to snap its clasp.” (10-15) This dynamic visual imagery compares the speaker creeping towards early stages of menopause with the daughter approaching her first menstrual cycle. As the speaker is losing her ability to create children, her own child is about to gain that ability. The visual language in these lines shows some bitterness about how time is progressing. Yet, it also shows the excitement of a mother whose daughter is growing up and will develop the ability to become a mother herself. The strong auditory tone of the word “snap” accentuates how quickly time flies, moreover it gives a sound to a visual image of her adolescence snapping open. This block quotation also gives a visual of the speaker being empty while the daughter is full of youth. Still playing with imagery, before the conclusion to the poem, the speaker injects an olfactory line about her daughter’s “fragrant hair” (16). This fragrance is reaffirming the daughter’s pleasant youth. In the final few lines of the poem, the speaker concludes with the repetition of the term “old” and that she has been telling “the story of replacement” (16-18). This melancholy insight of the speaker reaffirms her ongoing obsession with age; yet, this statement of replacement is more focused with the fleeting nature of time and the cycle of life. As time goes on children grow older, they have children of their own then die, and the cycle repeats. Families are continued through replacing old, dying members with new, young ones. What is distressing to the speaker is that she is nearing the end of her cycle while her daughter’s is only beginning. Through the stark imagery of “35/10”, the speaker reveals that she is not only distressed about how time is getting away from her, but also distressed about her inevitable mortality. Throughout the poem, the speaker uses specific physical examples and exploits the sensations of tactile, olfactory, auditory, and visual prompts within her imagery to illustrate her point.
In Sharon Olds’, My Son the Man, Olds uses the literary device of allusions to illustrate the inevitability of her son growing old by comparing his aging to Houdini, the doubted magician who was able to makes his way out of any restraint. This is evident in lines 1-3 when she writes, “Suddenly his shoulders get a lot wider, the way Houdini would expand his body while people were putting him in chains” (Olds). Since the son is now becoming a man, she compares him to Houdini expanding himself to illustrate the fact that he is growing and able to get out of those chains; in this case, to leave the mother. The allusion strengthens the poem by referencing a man who people doubted which gives the reader a sense of the son’s motives and characteristics.
When writing poetry, there are many descriptive methods an author may employ to communicate an idea or concept to their audience. One of the more effective methods that authors often use is linking devices, such as metaphors and similes. Throughout “The Elder Sister,” Olds uses linking devices effectively in many ways. An effective image Olds uses is that of “the pressure of Mother’s muscles on her brain,” (5) providing a link to the mother’s expectations for her children. She also uses images of water and fluidity to demonstrate the natural progression of a child into womanhood. Another image is that of the speaker’s elder sister as a metaphorical shield, the one who protected her from the mental strain inflicted by their mother.
Olds begins the correlation of the daughter’s haircut and the idea of war early on in the poem. The reader is first exposed to the comparison in the line, “that girl with the hair wispy as a frayed bellpull/ has been to the barber, that knife grinder/ and has had the edge of her hair sharpened.” Olds immediately conjures up a frightful image of a barber viciously attacking her little girl’s hair. The image is enforced with the words Olds has placed carefully within the line. Instead of cutting her daughter’s hair, the barber sharpens it like one would a weapon. This haircut is the daughter’s first weapon in the war between mother and daughter. The haircut will be the first detachment of the daughter from her youth, the former “wispy” haired girl has in essence been murdered by the barber. To further emphasize this horrible image, Olds sneaks ...
In the second half of the poem, a new facet of the speaker's attitude is displayed. In line 17, she wants to improve the ugliness of her "child" by giving him new clothes; however, she is too poor to do so, having "nought save homespun cloth" with which to dress her child. In the final stanza, the speaker reveals poverty as her motive for allowing her book to be sent to a publisher (sending her "child" out into the world) in the first place. This makes her attitude seem to contradict her actions.
ThThe notion of getting older, one day has too frightened me. I wonder what could I have done in the past to change the future. I reminisce of all the things I have done with the people that I love. But, at the end the day, I look forward to getting older. I look forward to the memories that I will make, which one day will be stories told between two friends or family members about their crazy grandmother Gabriella. E.B. White 's essay represents the fears that adults, but mostly parents, face when seeing children grow up and experience life the same way they once did. These nostalgic moments turn to fear of losing their youth. I believe that White 's essay is a manifestation of a mid-life crisis that fails to show what life has to offer after
... to both her ex-lover and the unbearable responsibility of caring for her children. The symbol of time and the depressing imagery demonstrates the destruction of the mother’s personal identity. Harwood’s demonstration of the loss of hope and the figurative and literal points are a sad reminder of the high societal expectations of mothers. Unfortunately, this is a paradigm that mother’s struggle to escape. Harwood recognizes these responsibilities and attempts to offer a sign of thanks for all that mother’s do for their children and in society through her tragic poem of a mother’s distraught identity.
Getting the message on the page without distortion is the vital part. Even Olds finds herself at times trying to create fictional topics, “And very often there will be a long period of hours or days maybe even weeks. When I say, ‘Sharon this is not your subject. You weren’t there you don’t know this’” (“Sharon”). This shows that Olds is very perceptive when it comes to her poetry. She does not make up or write poems in which she does not directly experience or know about. The perceptiveness shows that Olds is able to step back and see when she strays from her views. These poems would be impossible without the many experiences and influences from Olds growing up in 1960’s.
We all have forgotten most of our childhood; after all, most of us will spend more time in our adult lives than our infantile state. In the free verse poem On Turning Ten, by Billy Collins, the readers are reminded of the freedom found only in childhood. The narrator speaks of life leading up to turning ten and all that is left behind with the first decade of life ended. Collins uses relaxed diction, with imagery and simile that evoke a tone of loss and sadness; while simultaneously reminding readers of the boundlessness of childhood possibility.
It's sad to grow old. That by each passing year, something else starts to change. The things that you have become so used to, are not the same anymore. I find that in this poem, Collins describes this imagery so well, when he says; "(his) bicycle never leaned against the garage as it does today, all the dark blue speed drained out of it", this sentence relates to the fact that time is out of our grasp and all that we have left is our
In Billy Collins’s “On Turning Ten”(1995) Collins states that as we get older reality settles in and nothing is simple. Collins is not fond of growing up; all five stanzas of the poem reiterates his negative feeling toward aging. Collins indicates how as he grows older life it is not as nice as he believed it to be. The more he dawns on his past the more heavy hearted he becomes.
...worse than before. For instance, old men and women inject their faces to resemble those in their youth, but they worsen their mental and physical state by executing such actions. To conclude, one should embrace her appearance because aging is inevitable.
Now, the young girl is expressing feelings that are more womanlike, and she is beginning her initiation of a young child into an adult, or more specifically, a woman.
Arguably Herrick’s most famous poem, “To the Virgins to Make Much of Time”, has as similar take, “The age is best which is the first/When youth and blood are warmer;/But being spent, the worse, and worst/Times still succeed the former” (Hesperides. 208. 9-12) here the part of life more biologically invigorated is praised, yet there is no recognition of value which can come with aging. What is also missed is addressing the pain which can occur with a loss of control that occurs with aging, and the jealousy that can occur when a parent- in a later stage of life- witnesses their child enjoying the excitement of beginning life fresh and new. Shakespeare handled the topic of aging much more skillfully in the play King Lear ambiguously posing many questions about old age and loss of control with the character of Lear who is faced with losing his job, his sanity, and his life mainly because he has aged and become senile. With Lear speaking the loss of identity at the hands of aging is expressed beautifully,
In the poetry of William Blake and William Wordsworth, this difference between children and adults and their respective states of mind is articulated and developed. As a person ages, they move undeniably from childhood to adulthood, and their mentality moves with them. On the backs of Blake and Wordsworth, the reader is taken along this journey.
Her twenty third birthday had come and gone, a small celebration between the small moving camp, but it was a celebration nevertheless. She and her mother had gone through pictures, the film only few years old seemed older in the woman’s hands… one particular photograph she saw herself, her mother and her father. She wasn’t sure of the sensation that followed, but it was all wrong. She didn’t feel that sense of change she knew. When you’re sixteen, you feel different from that of when you were thirteen, when you were eighteen, you felt different from that of when you were ...