In “Useless Boys” the writer, Barry Dempster, creates a strong feeling of disappointment and shame in himself and society as he looks back on his youth to when him and a friend made a promise to each other to “not be like their fathers”. Dempster expresses a sort of disgust for the capitalist society his world seems to be built around, a life where even if you’re doing something you initially enjoyed you end up feeling trapped in it. The poem is a reflective piece, where he thinks back on how he truly believed he would end up happy if he chose a different path than that of his parents. The author uses simple diction and syntax, but it’s evident that each idea has a much deeper meaning, which assisted in setting a reflective/introspective mood. …show more content…
Everyone wants to fill the void within themselves, and most humans try to accomplish this by finding jobs they enjoy, but it seems that most of them ultimately fail. When you are younger you look to your parents to show you the way, but as you approach adulthood you start to feel more of a sense of rebellion toward them instead of the admiration you once had. The writer makes the poem universal by saying he didn’t want to end up like his father, something most children in north america could relate to. It’s also easily linked to our society in north america because of the way our schooling system is set up, in a way that you must commit to what you’re going to do for the rest of your life when you’re still too young to vote, and our system being this way makes it easy to end up regretting what you choose. Humans in modern society are expected to make many commitments for a range of things- relationships or sports teams, even major life decisions, and it’s obvious that our natural need for commitment is prevalent in our everyday life. Consequently, this need for making commitments can end up leaving people making poor decisions or at least taking a route you’ll end up wanting to renounce in the
Take note of how the father approached the mistakes made by his son. "I fouled up some screens once, You broke them out with a chair" I feel showed the negative feeling I got when I read the poem. That also makes me believe that it was an apprenticeship. To me parents even if they get upset at something you do, don't go about things in that matter. The son was trying to learn something from his father and rather than explaining and showing the son how to do it correctly or the mistakes he made the father destroys the work. ...
As depicted in the poem "Kicking the Habit", The role of the English language in the life of the writer, Lawson Fusao Inada, is heavily inherent. As articulated between the lines 4 and 9, English is not just solely a linguistic device to the author, but heightened to a point where he considers it rather as a paradigm or state of mind. To the author, English is the most commonly trodden path when it comes to being human, it represents conformity, mutual assurance and understanding within the population. Something of which he admits to doing before pulling off the highway road.
Currently in the United States, many of us are afraid of the future. There have been many recent events that have stirred up fear in this country, especially tensions regarding human rights. In Carolyn Forché’s “The Colonel,” the speaker tells us her story of when she had to deal with the mistreatment of others. The speaker is telling us her story of meeting the colonel to show us the horrible things that have happened in the fight for justice and to encourage us to speak up. She tells us this story because she does not want others to end up the way that the ears did. The speaker wants us to stay strong and fight for justice when we begin to live in a state of constant fear.
The death camp was a terrible place where people where killed. Hitler is who created the death camp for Jews. The death camp was used for extermination on Jews. This occurred on 1939 – 1945. The death camps were in the country of Europe. Hitler did all this because he didn’t like Jews and the religions. The book Night is a autobiography written by Elie Wiesel. The poem called First they came for the communist written by Martin Neimoller is a autobiography.
middle of paper ... ... Her actions of comparing herself as a son in her family, failing to recognize the importance of hard work, and discovering her own happiness symbolizes a person who fails to acknowledge that perfection is not as important than being satisfied with her accomplishments of attending to college, passing all her classes, and receiving family support. To emphasize, if the speaker had realized that getting a perfect grade point average is not what defines her as a person, then she would have comprehended that grades are just a way to motivate her to not forfeit on herself. Therefore, if the speaker desires to find her personal satisfaction, she should look at all the hard work that she has achieved in her classes and comprehend that life is not all about getting a perfect grade point average and perfection.
In the end, the poem is looking to show what actions can do in the long run. It teaches us to be very cautious with everything we do since it can affect the people around us. It can have good or bad
Humans are all different in nature. We think deeply about issues and then react according to our values and beliefs. This helps us pick the best possible course of action. In “Useless Boys” the narrator doesn’t want to make the commitment because he believes that it does more harm than good to a person. He also states that he has had a problem with others keeping their commitment, for example, his father, who is never around.
Before reading this poem there are many things that have to be taken into consideration such as Young’s background, education, ideology and phraseology. Kevin Young starts off the poem
Imagine yourself lying in the sun, feeling the warmth on your skin, when a cloud cover the sun and you feel the sudden coldness that you can seem to shake? The feeling is similar when you love someone very much but they don’t return the feeling. The band, 5 Seconds of Summer (5SOS), in their song, If You Don’t Know, sings about how a singer is in love with a person. The person seems to not be sure if they are in love with the singer, and the the singer wishes for the person to let them go. The couple that 5SOS wrote about was in love at one time, but the person is slowly falling out of love with the singer.
"Poetry is the revelation of a feeling that the poet believes to be interior and personal [but] which the reader recognizes as his own." (Salvatore Quasimodo). There is something about the human spirit that causes us to rejoice in shared experience. We can connect on a deep level with our fellow man when we believe that somehow someone else understands us as they relate their own joys and hardships; and perhaps nowhere better is this relationship expressed than in that of the poet and his reader. For the current assignment I had the privilege (and challenge) of writing an imitation of William Shakespeare’s "Sonnet 87". This poem touched a place in my heart because I have actually given this sonnet to someone before as it then communicated my thoughts and feelings far better than I could. For this reason, Sonnet 87 was an easy choice for this project, although not quite so easy an undertaking as I endeavored to match Shakespeare’s structure and bring out his themes through similar word choice.
The speaker chooses that he wants to be a writer rather than what his father does since he had “…no spade to follow men like them.” The speaker uses emotion to put himself down while praising his elders. The speaker does not retain the meanings or the cravings to live as his family did and decides to use his pen to write instead. The speaker creates art based on his emotion about his family which allows a connection for the audience to relate
The use of imagery is very commonly used in fictional literary work, especially poems. Imagery according to Crowder Collage Introduction to Literature’s glossary, “The collective set of images in a poem or other literary work,” (1991). The definition of imagery is rather vague by itself. It is very enlightening on the other hand when the term image is defined, “A word or series of words that refers to any sensory experience (usually sight, although also sound smell, touch or taste). An image is a direct or literal recreation of physical experience and adds immediacy to literary language,” (Gioia 1991).The imagery in Chana Bloch’s “Tired Sex” is a wonderfully helpful in communicating the poem’s general theme.
After reading the poem entitled “Youth”, I felt that James Wright was not only describing the life of his father but also the lives of the many other factory workers in the Ohio Valley. Many of these workers had either dropped out of school or went straight to the factories after high school, never really getting a chance to enjoy their lives as young `````adults. I think that has something to do with the title of this poem. It’s clear that Wright knew his father and the other men were not satisfied with their jobs and just chose not to speak about it. These factory workers slaved away and then came home “quiet as the evening” probably because they were content to just be relaxing at home with their families. They knew that this was their way of life and they had to do it, even if they had big dreams to someday get away. I think that Wright was also trying to make a point that these men who worked so hard every day were not valued as much as they should have been. These men did not have the education to get a higher paying job but they did have the proper skills and knowledge to work in the factories. I like that James Wright mentioned Sherwood Anderson in this poem as I enjoy his work. Anderson left his Ohio hometown for Chicago to pursuit bigger and better things because he knew if he stayed in the area, he would be unhappy. However, it is a little ironic that Anderson one day just got up and left in the middle of writing and was said to have a mental breakdown.
Sylvia Plath’s jarring poem ‘Daddy’, is not only the exploration of her bitter and tumultuous relationship with her father, husband and perhaps the male species in general but is also a strong expression of resentment against the oppression of women by men and the violence and tyranny men can and have been held accountable for. Within the piece, the speaker creates a figurative image of her father by using metaphors to describe her relationship with him: “Not God but a Swastika” , he is a “… brute” , even likening him to leader of the Nazi Party; Adolf Hitler: “A man in black with a Meinkampf look .” Overall, the text is a telling recount of her hatred towards her father and her husband of “Seven years” and the tolling affect it has had on
This poem relates to me in many ways because in my life, I was offered many options to choose from and many roads to take. Since it’s my life and my decisions to make, I never regretted a decision I made, I just look at it as, that’s the way it was meant to be. Sure, the decisions weren’t always easy to make, but when you put your mind to it, think, brainstorm, and analyze a little the correct path or road usually will light up and give you guidance. I’m not saying that all my decisions were correct, they where not at all. I’m just saying that when you tried your best it never hurts.