Stanza 2) This sections describes how the migrants were trying to belong in the new area they were in where they have been isolated from the outside world by relating to experiences, tradition, nationality, etc. The poet uses techniques such as similes to emphasise this.…
The second stanza is only two lines, "My father told us this, one night,/and then continued eating dinner." This stanza breaks up the chronology of the poem, pushing the previous stanza into the past, and making it disjointed, almost like another poem in itself. The result of the father continuing eating after he tells the story shows how dead he is inside, the recalling of the story no longer affecting him in the same way it does the reader and his own family. It is implied that he is the only one able to eat after telling the story. This short stanza foreshadows the father's personality change.…
Stanza three again shows doubtfulness about the mother's love. We see how the mother locks her child in because she fears the modern world. She sees the world as dangers and especially fears men. Her fear of men is emphasized by the italics used. In the final line of the stanza, the mother puts her son on a plastic pot. This is somewhat symbolic of the consumeristic society i.e. manufactured and cheap.…
The poem begins with the narrator telling herself, “A few more steps, old feet.” (line 1). The old feet she refers to are the ancestor’s feet, that appear to be old and worn out from the rigorous journey they take. The speaker then goes on to say, “In pale tea I’ll see / me with her, tasting wild grapes” (lines 4-5). This shows her reminder of her ancestors in nature. The pale tea is the symbol of the clean, clear simplicity of nature and when the speaker simplifies herself, to the bare nothingness of nature it reveals to her, her ancestors. Then in the following lines, “at dawn, tasting dew / on tender leaves, another year.” (lines 6-7). The dawn represents a new day, a new start where she can again acknowledge her heritage. After, the speaker says, “her hands still guiding me, / at sunset grinding seeds” (lines 11-12). These hands guiding the speaker, are her ancestors leading her through their stories and nature around…
For example the first stanza, lines 1 through 5, tell of her first heartbreak from her husband. the caesura puts expression of sadness,sorrow, and grief. As well, in the fifth line states right out “my exile”.…
17 Every good thing given and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shifting shadow.…
Figurative language and sensory imagery is used in the first stanza to create a tone of grieving, loss and nostalgia, through imagery of a dull ‘cold dusk’ and ‘frail, melancholy flowers among ashes’. The simile ‘the melting west is striped like ice-cream’ creates a sense of transition, reflecting the beginning of the persona’s introspective retreat into her thoughts. The use of an anaphora, which is the repetition of a word at the beginning of lines or sentences, in the line ‘Ambiguous light. Ambiguous sky’ also displays this transience. The symbol of ice-cream also represents childhood and a feeling of nostalgia for that time in the persona’s life. Her attempt at ‘whistling a trill’ may be an attempt to imitate her father’s whistling which is mentioned during the reflection of her memory, suggesting that she is trying to recreate her past experience but can’t properly do so. The persona’s direct speech in the line “Where’s morning gone?” is a rhetorical question that is questioning the…
The first verse of the third stanza - ‘His Polish friends -’ again shows a sense of ownership and belonging by the use of possessive pro noun. It also states a cultural reference and shows how the son feels as if he doesn’t belong. ‘Talking, they reminisced…’ this line reflects how this group of men hold a shared past and highlights the sense of ‘brotherhood’. All of this ‘Did not dull the softness of his blue eyes’, which again signifies the love and admiration the son possesses for his father. Mild and subtle expression is used to symbolise his character through the depiction of his son. Even when…
The composer conveys a strong feeling of grief and pain in the poem. The composer creates an empathy towards the widower, by expressing just how lonely he feels after his wife had died, and he had to stay in the place that they had shared together. Through the use of multiple metaphors, "The Christmas paddocks aching in the heat/The windless trees, the nettles in the yard" , the composer builds a path into how the widower is 'aching' after the grief of losing his wife. 'windless trees' implies the feeling of death, as the trees have no leaves, whilst 'nettles' evokes the pain and burning he is feeling at this difficult time. The reader realises that this might be a difficult time for the widower, and empathises to attempt to feel what he feels.…
The purpose of the first stanza is to paint a picture of scene where the poem is taking place. It starts off like a fairy tale, telling the audience that the story we are about to hear occurred “many a year ago” in a “kingdom by the sea” (Poe1-2). Poe uses repetition to remind his audience of the location in the second line of every stanza because these minute details are significant because the sea and the kingdom are the major images of the poem and it creates a sort of hypnotizing effect on the reader, which Poe is synonymous for. In the next two lines he introduces the main character by the name of Annabel Lee. He calls her a maiden, inferring that she is fairly young and presumably attractive, and it also keeps with the general tone of the poem. In the next two lines Poe reveals his purpose for writing the poem, which is that him and Annabel Lee were deeply and passionately in love, so much so that all they could think about day to day was each other.…
The first thing that is very noticeable is the narrative structure. The speaker provides us with the image of the character’s footsteps through the structure of the poem, which indicates the struggle that he is going through. He uses gaps and indents throughout the poem to express his movement in the swamp and how he moves from one side to the other in order for him to be able to free himself from this struggle. The syntax of the poem cannot be described as stanzas or paragraphs, because the poem itself is one broken stanza which depicts the character’s misery while moving in the swamp.…
In the beginning of the poem, I noticed how the writer introduces a world in which the male figures is known as the “father’s son” which gives off the impression that ancestral heritage from the father’s side was going to be essential in the…
Stanza four is a very interesting part of the poem. It says that the corpse…
more figurative meaning. The third stanza presents what the poem really is about. The poem…
Dana Gioia uses the premise of planting a tree to help the reader explore the connection between the opposing ideas of life and death, hope and loss.…