The A Team Figurative Language

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Ed Sheeran is an English singer-songwriter musician. Sheeran produced the song, The A Team, after performing at a women’s shelter when he was 18. The prostitution and drugs stories that he heard encouraged him to compose a song about their struggles. His purpose was to discreetly show the tough lives of these women and the struggles that they face every day because of their addictions. He achieves this through his word choices, which not only suggests the purpose but also creates vivid images. The A Team is filled with figurative language and symbols, the most noticeable of which being the comparison of angels to the women who sell themselves for drugs. These poetic devices are all present in The A Team, making it an excellent choice for the …show more content…

Sheeran uses simple words to express a massive topic so that others might be able to see the lives of female drug addicts. His words are selected from their meanings and also as their connotations. Even the title of the song, The A Team, has a particular song meaning. The song uses examples of drug addiction particularly a “Class A” drug, cocaine/crack, which gives a much stronger expression of what the song is about. When Sheeran says “Go mad for a couple grams,” the actual meaning is grams of cocaine. When he says “We’ll fade out tonight. Straight down the line,” it is taken that he means “We’ll get high snorting a line of cocaine.” The connotations, bring up emotions such as worthlessness, rage, and absurdity. Society shows drug addicts as wild, unreliable, broken people who have misused their potential, instead giving their energy and resources towards feeding an endless addiction. These connotations give the listener a sense of the emotions that the drug user and those around her are feeling. Through his use of carefully chosen vocabulary, Ed Sheeran produces a worthy song choice for the next addition of Form and …show more content…

These poetic devices not only help develop the imagery that Sheeran utilizes, but also gives deeper importance and meaning to the language. With the line, “Her face seems / Slowly sinking, wasting” and simile “Crumbling like pastries,” the listener visualizes a person whose deep, dark circles under her tired weary eyes grow darker each day as she weakens. A person whose whole life is deteriorating around her, and whom spends torturing nights in bed with unknown men just so she can afford to live. Not only does Sheeran reveal them to the hardships may women in the world have to go through but he also asks listeners to feel the emotions they feel and to empathize with them. He further expresses their hardships through his different symbolic images. There are several symbols throughout The A Team. For instance, one of the symbols used is “snowflakes.” When Sheeran sings, “Breathing in snowflakes,” he doesn’t actually mean this. “Snowflakes” is symbolic for crack, the drug that the woman is addicted to in the song. Sheeran’s strong language choices is apparent through his uses of figurative language and symbolism to the song, which would be an excellent choice for the next addition of Form and

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