Comparing When You Forget To Feed Your Gerbil And Flash Cards?
Sit By and Watch
The poems When You Forget to Feed Your Gerbil and Flash Cards both display the themes of responsibility and, they differ through the context of the speakers in each poem obtaining different feelings from their required tasks. The two poems are similar through the portrayed theme of responsibility. In When You Forget to Feed Your Gerbils, responsibility is shown throughout the poem, but is really given away in the last two lines. The speaker of the poem is a girl, and describes how she must feed the mother gerbil to avoid the eating of her baby gerbils. After the description of the gerbils, she voices “...It’s always your fault when you’re a child taking care of a mother.” The description of the gerbils and the connection to the speaker’s own mother is a metaphor. The girl neglected the gerbil mother because she is taking …show more content…
In When You Forget to Feed Your Gerbil, the girl in the poem feels guilt, while in Flash Cards, the girl in that poem feels anger. The girl in the gerbil poem compares the gerbils to a prison: “When you finally notice, you finally provide with the terror and guilt of a prisoner’s guard, imagining the sound of tin cups like mad scales against her bars.” The girl feels guilty that the gerbils are locked up and can’t do anything to help themselves when she forgets to feed them, because they rely on her responsibilities for survival. In Flash Cards, the girl thinks that life is unfair because she has to work when her dad relaxes. “My father put his feet up after work and relaxed with a highball and The Life of Lincoln.” The girl in this poem is constantly working to achieve her father’s approval, while he just gets to relax after work and receives a break. She never receives a break, so she becomes angry that life is unfair between her and her father. Both poems differ in the sense of feelings for the speaker’s
The poems When You Forget to Feed Your Gerbil and Flash Cards both display the themes of responsibility and, they differ through the context of the speakers in each poem obtaining different feelings from their required tasks. The two poems are similar through the portrayed theme of responsibility. In When You Forget to Feed Your Gerbils, responsibility is shown throughout the poem, but is really given away in the last two lines. The speaker of the poem is a girl, and describes how she must feed the mother gerbil to avoid the eating of her baby gerbils. After the description of the gerbils, she voices “...It’s always your fault when you’re a child taking care of a mother.” The description of the gerbils and the connection to the speaker’s own mother is a metaphor. The girl neglected the gerbil mother because she is taking …show more content…
In When You Forget to Feed Your Gerbil, the girl in the poem feels guilt, while in Flash Cards, the girl in that poem feels anger. The girl in the gerbil poem compares the gerbils to a prison: “When you finally notice, you finally provide with the terror and guilt of a prisoner’s guard, imagining the sound of tin cups like mad scales against her bars.” The girl feels guilty that the gerbils are locked up and can’t do anything to help themselves when she forgets to feed them, because they rely on her responsibilities for survival. In Flash Cards, the girl thinks that life is unfair because she has to work when her dad relaxes. “My father put his feet up after work and relaxed with a highball and The Life of Lincoln.” The girl in this poem is constantly working to achieve her father’s approval, while he just gets to relax after work and receives a break. She never receives a break, so she becomes angry that life is unfair between her and her father. Both poems differ in the sense of feelings for the speaker’s