The poem “Troll” by Shane Koyczan starts off like a fairy tale about trolls, but then it becomes clear to the reader that it is about something much deeper than a make-believe troll. Although the true meaning of the poem is never stated, by the end of the poem it becomes obvious that it is written about internet trolls and what they’re capable of. The purpose of this poem is to address the dangers of cyber bullies/internet trolls so that more people are educated on what can happen. Koyczan develops the comparison between internet trolls and mythological trolls through a strong use of metaphors and similes.
The circumstance of the poem starts out as a fairy tale and even uses the classic “Once upon a time” (Koyczan 1) line, tracing the date
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all the way back to before the invention of the wheel. Then the tone quickly changes and takes the reader on a very dark journey through the tragic realities of modern day bullying. The speaker makes it very clear that he doesn’t support internet trolls through comparing them to mythological monsters. This poem was written in first person and only focuses on the speaker's point of view. However, the speaker is talking on behalf of all humanity. At the beginning of the poem where Koyczan says “As if an excavation crew were hired to dig up and remove the part of you that let you feel” (4), it is made clear that he doesn’t like them. In saying this I think that the speaker is referring to internet trolls and how they don’t show any form of mercy or empathy for those that they’re torturing through their keyboard. It is very easy to bully someone if you don’t have to see their reaction to it. The speaker has an extremely high level of hatred towards internet trolls. This is proven when he says “as if the only way you could save yourselves was to make the world ugly so no one would notice you hiding in it” (10), which refers to the physically unattractive appearance of mythical trolls, as well as the internal ugliness of bullies. The speaker uses little rhyme but his poem flows smoothly through rhythm and enjambment.
Koyczan uses enjambment powerfully when he says “Even now” (43). Not only does this line completely shift the vibe of the poem, it also grabs the attention of the reader and forces them to keep reading. Although it does not have much significance on its own, it lays the scene for the following lines. The thought that the speaker put into this poem prior to writing it is obvious. He follows the storyline closely and he uses a variety of transition phases between lines to keep the ball rolling. Koyczan’s use of juxtaposition also helps to keep the reader engaged. A prime example of this is when he says “You have praised suffering, waltzed in between tragedies, gracefully dipping misery as if we would somehow be impressed with the dexterity of your animosity”. (39-41). Praising something is often linked to a good connotation and the reader doesn’t expect it to be followed with suffering since suffering has a negative connotation. The waltz is a peaceful dance often associated with happiness and celebration; while a tragedy is a unpleasant disaster. Misery is a feeling of emotional distress so it’s not likely to be graceful, and someone feeling miserable is certainly not likely to be dancing. This piece of juxtaposition helps to show the reader just how evil and immoral internet trolls can
be. To help get his point across Koyczan relies heavily on his use of metaphors and similes. Comparing the issue up for debate with situations that are awful ensures that the reader will understand the severity of the issue and what it is like for those going through it. One of the lines that stand out is when the speaker says “You had fingernails like flint and scraped them along decency hoping we would be the ones to all catch fire” (29). This quote stands out because it uses both metaphor and simile. The speaker uses a simile when he compares fingernails to flint and then uses that for his metaphor. The hidden meaning in this metaphor is that internet trolls use their keyboards to diminish any virtues that their victims might have had. Internet trolls have the mindset that the more cruel they are, the more likely it is for people to take their side. This is also proven when the speaker says “Voice like a firing pin, you spoke in explosions” (32). Explosions are violent and destructive, as are the things that internet trolls say. Shane Koyczan delivers a strong message through his use of metaphors, similes, juxtaposition and enjambment in the poem “Troll”. Internet trolls can be immoral and excessively cruel, bringing down the mood of anyone that they come into contact with online. Society needs to make a stand against internet trolls and push them into extinction so that no one else will know the emotional effects of cyberbullying first hand.
Even when the structure of both poems are the same (no stanza breaks), the differences in the speaker’s voice and diction play an enormous part in building the poem’s plot and setting. And though Komunyakaa employs the same techniques in both poems, the end result is so different from the other through meticulous attention to the connotative quality of specific words and phrases that “Blue Light Lounge Sutra” perfectly depicts the thrall of performance through the seductive references of the properties of jazz and lounge music. On other the hand, “Thanks” is a subtle but powerful depiction of the violence seen in the Vietnam War due to its address of personal experience juxtaposed with an extreme outside environment that most readers have never encountered. Each break in a sentence artistically elevates the colloquial voice of speaker and produces an underlying poetic element that emphasizes its content, namely the distinction between the use of the abstract and the concrete. Both pieces are dependent on the reader’s ability to perceive the central theme of the content, but through attentive and purposeful use of linguistic and stylistic techniques, the differences apparent in each poem create an individual voice to that truly brings out the author’s
In ‘Education for Leisure’ the narrator uses enjambment to makes it feels as if we are having a normal conversation with the narrator. At the start of the poem the narrator talks abou...
Using form, Wislawa Syzmborska conveys the message through a serious of parallelism, stanzas, and lines in her unconventional poem. Examples of parallelism are found in the 2nd and 3rd stanza where the poet is emphasizing “because” and “luckily” to show the reader that because of these situations the victim survived and that the victim was extremely lucky to have all these materials provided to hide and protect the victim which adds to the message. The poem begins with a breathless response to some disaster, as if the speaker is processing as we listen. Therefore, the mood is rushed and fast paced. The parallelism keeps the poem moving and at a quicker pace while sustaining the mood. The poem itself is in an unconventional form. With the different lined stanzas and different line lengths, she uses them to represent different situations and with the different situations and circumstances, it comes out to be successful, into a meaningful poem, which correlates to the whole message. With the different turns the victim took by chance, that person survived. Form is used, in this poem, to gather together ideas and unify the poem.
The next poem that follows the theme “the world is not often as it appears” is “Nellie Clark”. Nellie Clark was raped when she was eight years old. Her father tried to kill the boy who did it. She could not forget what happened to her. Then she
Despite its prevalence, suffering is always seen an intrusion, a personal attack on its victims. However, without its presence, there would never be anyway to differentiate between happiness and sadness, nor good and evil. It is encoded into the daily lives people lead, and cannot be avoided, much like the prophecies described in Antigone. Upon finding out that he’d murdered his father and married his mother,
... sentences creates an air of perplexity that the poet can express to the reader. While these fluctuations and lack of organization causes confusion and anger that the reader might not enjoy, it also lucratively allows the reader to three-dimensionally understand the poet’s mood. By paralleling two separate symbols throughout the poem, Nemerov was also able to eloquently compare and contrast his feelings for his wife and his lifestyle as a widower throughout the poem until the last three words, where he welds the two ideas into one image. Over all, The Vacuum is a noteworthy poem that is very effective in articulating the poet’s emotions to the readers. However, others who read the poem might become frustrated and too overwhelmed with the emotions conveyed through the poem and the lack of structural organization, preventing the poem to become an overall great poem.
In her article “How the Internet Has Changed Bullying”, Maria Konnikova explained how bullying has reached technology, and in the workplaces of many adults. The Internet has made it harder to escape from bullying, and easier for bullies to escape from confronting their victims. Furthermore, the author stresses that cyberbullying not only targets high schoolers, but it’s affecting the lives of college students as well (Konnikova 1). Cyberbullying takes place in the Internet world where is easier for a bully to gossip and humiliate multiple of victims in a faster pace. The studies have shown that cyberbullying is making a greater impact in the victims’ and the bullies’ lives more than the traditional bullying and many people are not aware of it; therefore the schools, witnesses, and employers should work together to fight against cyberbullying and provide help to the victims and bullies.
Literature often explores the questions raised in life: Who are we? What does it mean to die? What kind of world do we live in? Throughout this course, there seems to have been an underlying theme in most of the works that have been read, concerning human misery. It seems that most of those who experience tremendous suffering, actually allow it to happen to themselves. If one chooses to look at the losses in life, one may never find true happiness, but if one chooses to perceive those losses as an opportunity for growth, one may find the "perfect world" right here.
I believe that the structure of this poem allows for the speaker to tell a narrative which further allows him to convey his point. The use of enjambment emphasizes this idea as well as provides a sense of flow throughout the entirety of a poem, giving it the look and feel of reading a story. Overall, I believe this piece is very simplistic when it comes to poetic devices, due to the fact that it is written as a prose poem, this piece lacks many of the common poetic devices such as rhyme, repetition, alliteration, and metaphors. However, the tone, symbolism, allusion and imagery presented in the poem, give way to an extremely deep and complicated
The act of bullying has been present in children’s life throughout time. It has been seen in movies, books, and even real life situations. In recent years there has been in increase in the use of technology and the Internet. As a result a new type of bullying has been introduced to today’s generation of teenagers. This new type of bullying is known as cyberbullying. Cyberbullying has a negative impact on the lives of the teenagers that experience it.
The poem is told in the first person point of view. Being told in this point of view creates a narrative and conversational feeling when reading the poem. In addition, The speaker begins the poem with simple sentences; each sentence contains a subject and a predicate, nothing more. In this part of the poem, there is a nostalgic, reminiscent tone. The speaker remembers back to the days when she was in love with her Meema’s blanket. The speaker looks back to a time when she “planned to inherit / the blanket, how [her and her sister] used to wrap ourselves / at play in its folds” (9-11). The beginning part of the poem, the speaker reflects back on her past, which is represented by simple sentences. However, as the poem progress, the sentence structure shifts. The sentences go from simple sentences to more complex sentences. With each memory, the sentences begin to grow longer; through this transition, clauses and prepositional phrases are included which shift the tone of the poem. The poem shifts from a nostalgic tone to a more dream-like tone. In this section of the poem, the speaker moves on from remembering the past to focussing about the future. In this dream-like trance, the speaker believes that while she is “under this quilt / [she’d] dream of [her]self … within the dream of
The poem is written in iambic pentameter with a clearly defined rhyme scheme throughout, although there are some variations
This is the argument that some values presuppose pain; such as patience and fortitude requiring deprivation and difficulty to flourish (Blackburn, 2001: 174). However people believe they are better off when these virtues are not needed Blackburn, 2001: 170). I feel better off when patience is not needed to get my coffee and surely the coffee shop would not defend their queues by saying patience is a virtue. Moreover, to create suffering for the purposes of ‘teaching these lessons’ seems evil in and of itself. A rebuttal to this argument could be that the scope was too narrow. For example the existence of love and hate is possibly a harder example to refute. Firstly, these types of virtues don’t apply to most cases of suffering, a hurricane hardly creates hate. Moreover it would be difficult to argue that love is contingent on the existence of hate. The feeling of being in love is not caused by a comparison to hate nor is taught by any hard ‘life
As we are living in the age of technology, we are seeing our youth being victimized by a new phenomenon of bullying, called cyberbullying. Cyberbullying is defined as the use of information and communication technologies such as email, cell phones and pager text messages, instant messaging, defamatory personal Web sites, and defamatory online personal polling Web sites, to support deliberate repeated and hostile behavior by an individual or group, which is intended to harm others. Cyberbullying can also employ media such as PDAs, blogs, and social networks (Beckstrom, 2008). This form of bullying is progressive because it can happen instantly due to the technology involved, whereas traditional bullying tends to take longer to evolve and happens
Internet usage in children and adolescents has been increasing in a steadily fashion in the past number of years and with the increase in internet usage, a new form of bullying has developed – Cyber bullying. Cyber bullying can be defined as “the electronic posting of mean-spirited messages about a person,” (Merriam-Webster, 2012). This form of bullying can come through various mediums including but not limited to text messages, emails, videos, and social networking sites. There is an overwhelming amount of information that defines cyber bullying, identifies the demographics of bullies and victims of cyber bullying, and identifies the outcomes of cyber bullying on victims. More focus needs to be placed on who the perpetrators of this form of violence are and how this form of violence is linked to traditional bullying. This will allow researchers and practitioners to move forward with research and implementation preventative methods and intervention once the problem has already occurred.