Sarah Kay Poem Analysis

I hated poetry. I realize that sometimes people have difficulty verbalizing there feelings. That's perfectly fine. I realize that certain words can be symbolic. That's fine as well, however I didn't see the point in any poetry that didn't sound like it came from a Dr. Seuss book. How people were able to identify with certain poets and comprehend the deeper meanings behind their works was beyond me, but who was I to judge? Then one night I discovered a poem about hands, not how hands symbolize some greater meaning in life, just about hands. Hands and love. That night I learned to love poetry, learned to understand how it can convey feeling in ways the verbal descriptions can't. That somehow you can learn all of life's lessons from a …show more content…
Her poetry is scattered with an array of similes, metaphors and personification. Nowhere is this more evident then in the poem Hands. When Kay personifies hands she conveys how they can be used for peace or war, but that they were not meant to be symbols of evil and were instead created for love; the main theme of her poem. Kay portrays the theme of love through symbolically holding her own hands, "Fingers interlocked like a beautiful accordion of flesh" (Hands) or "a zipper of prayer" (Hands). In the poem Forest Fires, Kay uses various examples of personification and metaphors to compare her grandmother’s illness to the flames, as they are both uncontrollable. This is apparent in the quotes "My grandmother's tiny body is a sinking ship on white sheets" (Forest Fires) and "...the flames will paint the Evening News a different shade of orange" (Forest Fires). She uses figurative language relay the themes in her poems in a more effective manner. Kay's poetry style is unique because she uses general examples to describe her feelings and experiences. For example she uses a toothbrush and a bicycle tire to depict a relationship between a man and a woman. The toothbrush symbolizes a loyal woman that is committed to a man who is always on the move, "So maybe one day you’ll grow tired of the road, and roll on back to me" (The Toothbrush to the Bicycle Tire). The use of inanimate …show more content…
All of her poems vary in overall length, sentence structure and spacing. Kay writes poems as they need to be written. She doesn't follow a specific pattern or pretense for writing, she structures them according to the topic and has unique formatting for each poem she writes. For example, in the poem Hands, Kay uses spaces after every four lines and has varying sentence lengths while The Toothbrush to the Bicycle Tire has spaces every two lines and is much shorter in overall length. Kay does use appropriate capitalization and punctuation in all of her poems, however she doesn't force each sentence into one line, but instead separates them to create a specific flow. The majority of Kay's poems are narrative poems which she formats like a short story that has been separated so it reads in a specific way. Her narrative style can be seen exquisitely in this quote "It really goes to show that it doesn't take much with these dry conditions to start a fire, a CalFire spokesman will tell CNN on Sunday" (Forest