I selected “Ella, In a Square Apron, Along Highway 80” by Judy Grahn, which is a poem about the common woman’s struggle to survive in a harsh world. I found that this poem dealt most poignantly with how the need to survive in a particular environment shapes people, the complexities that inevitably arise within a person, and a pervading sense of alienation. Ella is a waitress who leads a tough existence and whose personality has grown calloused in order to endure it. Her job as a waitress who deals with bawdy truckers, implies that she is a member of the working class or working poor. I believe that her material insecurity contributes to the sense of deprivation in the poem. Ella also experiences extreme deprivation in the social realm. There is no mention of healthy relationships within the poem, instead she …show more content…
must “fend off the pass that passes for affection” (Lines 5-6) and endure having her child taken away from her after being betrayed by a lover.
While on the surface, it may seem understandable that the courts would take away Ella’s child in the wake of her shooting her lover, it actually showcases the cold and impersonal logic upon which the courts operate. Ella’s unforgiving environment stocked with obstacles has forced her to harden herself. She has adapted to an environment that provides her little understanding by hiding any vulnerability or neediness, even to the point that she “turns away the smaller tips, out of pride” (Lines 13-14). Perhaps because of the heavy use of snake imagery, I saw Ella’s struggle to persevere as akin to a wild animal adapting to an unfriendly environment. Ella is a complex character because she can be interpreted in multiple ways, such as “tired and sharp-worded” (Line 2). This poem explores the differences between how a person’s characteristics are viewed with and without understanding
their circumstances. With greater context Ella becomes a well-rounded person who has understandable reasons to lie or turn to alcohol to get through the day. Perhaps hoping to atone for a historical overemphasis on men, Grahn’s choice to specifically represent the common woman and include topics such as sexual harassment indicates feminist consciousness to me. Annotating is something I have never done before, so I was unsure how it would impact my reading experience. I liked the poem when I first read it, but like all poems I have read it seemed light on meaning and length. I found that annotating really helped me to stay with the poem long enough to search for meaning, rather than just moving on to the next poem. Annotating revealed how multifaceted and thought-provoking poetry can be and helped me clarify my own instinctive reactions to the author’s imagery into a call for bringing greater compassion and understanding into my daily life.
The poem I personally chose was called, American Hero I chose this poem because I can relate to this on a personal level coupled with the fact that it was very suspenseful and brought you off of your seat. This particular poem was developed by Essex Hemphill, he was born in 1957 and later passed on in 1995. He began writing in his early years and with all this time he developed 3 volumes of poetry Essex has been active in writing all his life and was a great role model to our future writers. American hero is a successful poem that signifies on self-acceptance and social acceptance, also denial. The poems setting was based at a basketball court with all eyes on the main character, referenced from page 307 stanza 1 the author wrote,’’I have
“Why? Why? The girl gasped, as they lunged down the old deer trail. Behind them they could hear shots, and glass breaking as the men came to the bogged car” (Hood 414). It is at this precise moment Hood’s writing shows the granddaughter’s depletion of her naïve nature, becoming aware of the brutality of the world around her and that it will influence her future. Continuing, Hood doesn’t stop with the men destroying the car; Hood elucidated the plight of the two women; describing how the man shot a fish and continued shooting the fish until it sank, outlining the malicious nature of the pair and their disregard for life and how the granddaughter was the fish had it not been for the grandmother’s past influencing how she lived her life. In that moment, the granddaughter becomes aware of the burden she will bear and how it has influenced her life.
Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself and Alice Fulton’s You Can’t Rhumboogie in a Ball and Chain
Fulfilling the roles of both mother and breadwinner creates an assortment of reactions for the narrator. In the poem’s opening lines, she commences her day in the harried role as a mother, and with “too much to do,” (2) expresses her struggle with balancing priorities. After saying goodbye to her children she rushes out the door, transitioning from both, one role to the next, as well as, one emotion to another. As the day continues, when reflecting on
Hence, the poem's tone contains elements of remorse as well as impassivity. The traveler's detached description of the mother, "...a doe, a recent killing; / she had stiffened already, almost cold" (6-7), and the wistful detail with which he depicts her unborn offspring, "...her fawn lay there waiting...
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.
These final words sum up her feeling of helplessness and emptiness. Her identity is destroyed in a way due to having children. We assume change is always positive and for the greater good but Harwood’s poem challenges that embedding change is negative as the woman has gained something but lost so much in return.
Katherine Philips gained a lot of attention as a poet after writing “On the Death of My Dearest Child, Hector Philips”. This poem was written in a way to give readers an emotional account of a mother mourning the experience of losing her child. Philips expressed deep emotions from a maternal standpoint in the elegy. Unlike Jonson, Philips had the unspoken right of claiming a deep maternal connection with her son through pregnancy and childbirth. Philips’ approach to writing “On the Death of My Dearest Child” illustrates that the pain of losing her son, Hector, was enough for her to never write another verse again.
Each poem is both a system and a pattern of events in which neither of these aspects is wholly consistent. Many of the lyrics deliberately and often outrageously play with literary conventions or sources and by doing so; reflect an aspiring poet's intellect to an equally sophisticated audience. A concern is that of playful exaggeration and shrinking that exposes a clear pattern of perception of social values. (Hannaford) The need to expand and reduce ideas as well as objects is a mode of poetic activity that can offer a vision of self as limited, excising in opposition to larger, external forces, and social perceptions.
In a typical family, there are parents that expected to hear things when their teenager is rebelling against them: slamming the door, shouting at each other, and protests on what they could do or what they should not do. Their little baby is growing up, testing their wings of adulthood; they are not the small child that wanted their mommy to read a book to them or to kiss their hurts away and most probably, they are thinking that anything that their parents told them are certainly could not be right. The poem talks about a conflict between the author and her son when he was in his adolescence. In the first stanza, a misunderstanding about a math problem turns into a family argument that shows the classic rift between the generation of the parent and the teenager. Despite the misunderstandings between the parent and child, there is a loving bond between them. The imagery, contrasting tones, connotative diction, and symbolism in the poem reflect these two sides of the relationship.
She defines her idea of what is right in a relationship by describing how hard and painful it is for her to stray from that ideal in this instance. As the poem evolves, one can begin to see the author having a conflict with values, while simultaneously expressing which values are hers and which are unnatural to her. She accomplishes this accounting of values by personalizing her position in a somewhat unsettling way throughout the poem.
Gwendolyn Brook’s “Ballad of Pearl May Lee” came from her book called Street in Bronzeville. This book exemplifies Brook’s “dual place in American literature” (Smith, 2). It is associated with Modernist poetry, as well as the Harlem Renaissance. This book is known for its theme of victimizing the poor, black woman. “Ballad of Pearl May Lee” is a poem that uses tone to represent the complex mood of the ballad. While tone and mood are often used interchangeably, there are differences even though they often work together in a poem. A poem’s mood refers to the atmosphere or state of mind that the poem takes on. This is often conveyed through the tone, which is the style or manner of expression through writing. In this poem, Brooks uses tone to enhance the mood. This paper will shed light on the idea that the mood of the poem is affected by the tone in several ways in order to make the mood inconsistent. Some of the ways that tone does this is by several episodic shifts in the scene of the poem, the repetition of stanzas at the end of the poem, the use of diction, and the change in the speaker’s stance throughout the poem. These poetic techniques enhance the speaker’s current feeling of self-pity and revengeful satisfaction by her mixed emotions associated with this reflection.
Millay chooses to construct her poems by making the narrative as personal, internal, and articulate as humanly possible for the reader. Her ability to engage the reader in reflecting not only on the characters notion of self, but also their own, is made possible by her realistic and accessible construction of selfhood within her poems. Millay writes about an internal reaction the speaker has when discovering, in a public setting, that her lover has died. The speaker does not show actual emotions as much as she offers up hypothetical ways in which people would most likely expect her to react. Yet, she seems unaffected emotionally. By using the description of common expressions of emotion as examples but not physical actions, Millay may be hinting that an awareness selfhood is an inner understanding...
This lack of action continuously emphasizes the lack of empathy and care of the narrators and highlights to the reader the importance of acting differently from them. Through both of these poems the reader is shown that everyone faces struggles and how important it is to help others in their times of need because they too will face them at some
In conclusion, Wright’s poem uses figurative language to help bring a positive vision to what at times can be seen as a negative experience. Pregnancy and childbirth are revealed as privileged rather than unfortunate and pitiable. As a result, the poem expresses the theme of maternal love as a whole. Maternal love is incomparable and possibly the strongest love that a person, in this case a woman can feel for an individual. Judith Wright undoubtedly illustrates the difficulty and the depth between a woman and her child. Fortunately, the love of a mother can never be replaced because it is true love that goes beyond the physical and emotional meaning of it. The fact that it starts to develop when the child is just a seed, makes it the most sincere and pure out of all.