Summary Of One Boy Told Me By Naomi Shihab Nye

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Naomi Shihab Nye’s poem “One Boy Told Me” uses the innocence and imagination of a young child to convey important life messages to adults. The sense of wonder and “not taking things to seriously” in the poem captures the way children look at the world. Her poem includes stylistic choices that reflect the way a child would talk and think, including anthropomorphism and repetition, which makes the poem all the more believable and relatable. While many phrases in the poem are humorous in their apparent nonsense, they contain important pieces of childlike wisdom. Early in the poem there is a stanza that reads, “grown-ups keep their feet on the ground when they swing. I hate that”. This stanza is applicable to much more than swinging. What Shihab Nye is trying to convey, through the eyes of a child, is how adults are apprehensive to take …show more content…

I’ll be like this always, small.”. In this stanza, the child anthropomorphizes the “stopper” in his arm, by saying that it will not let him grow any bigger. To say that a stopper would be keeping the child from doing something is personifying an inanimate object. However, the real “childlike wisdom” in this stanza comes from the last line when the child says he will always be small. Adults know that a child does not stay a child, they grow older and change over time. The child is reminding the adult to hold on to their true self as they grow older. The child does not want to grow any older because he likes the way he is, young and carefree. This is another important point from the child, which is that adults should appreciate and love themselves at the point which they are already at. Adults, preoccupied with reaching new successes, do not appreciate who they already are; in contrast, children, so content with who they are, do not want to move beyond the state they are already

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