In Billy Collins’s “On Turning Ten”(1995) Collins states that as we get older reality settles in and nothing is simple. Collins is not fond of growing up; all five stanzas of the poem reiterates his negative feeling toward aging. Collins indicates how as he grows older life it is not as nice as he believed it to be. The more he dawns on his past the more heavy hearted he becomes. In the first stanza, Collins mentions how he feels sick when even thinking about turning ten. He compares aging to some of the worst physical illnesses happening to a person mentally. Collins says it is worse than measles, mumps, and chickenpox of the soul. This clearly show the reader his negative feelings toward aging in the poem immediately. The second stanza starts
With the use of irony and a free rhyme scheme, Collins’ poem vocalizes his opinion on how lying to children about significant facts can only serve to make them ignorant. The way he communicates this to us is by ironically emphasizing events by understating them. He shows how important an event is by mocking the teacher’s portrayal of the event. One example of how he does this is how the teacher tells his students that the ice age was just the “chilly age, a period of a million years when everyone had to wear sweaters.”(3-4). Collins does this several times with other important events in history, such as the Spanish Inquisition, where “[It] was nothing more than an outbreak of questions.”(7-8). The teacher’s interpretation of events, when compared to the actual events themselves creates a sense of unease, as the lies stray far away from what actually happened, and brings up the question of whether or not these lies should be told. Collins uses events that involve death and destruction to accentuate how big the contrast between the teacher’s explanation and reality is. After the class ends, the children leave the classroom to “torment the weak and the smart” (15-16), while the teacher is oblivious to it all. Note that Collins puts “and the smart” (16) on a separate line from “torment the weak” (15). The children in the class aren’t smart because they did not learn about the true events in history. This distinction emphasized the ignorance of the children. This contrasts with Wilbur’s poem, as the lie told there served to soothe a child’s fear, rather than breed ignorance. The rhyme scheme is different as well. Collins’ free rhyme scheme is used to create a sense of unease, whereas Wilbur’s rhyme scheme creates a child-like feeling to his poem. Unlike the parents in “A Barred Owl”, the teacher is portrayed as an ignorant man, unaware of what happens around
As mentioned, the parents’ pains, negative emotions and hatred are presented in the first part. Even from the first few lines from the poem: “Ulcerated tooth keeps me...
The overall theme of the poem shows sadness and humor. The boy in the poem is very depressed about getting older, but there is some irony in the sadness that the boy is experiencing. He acts like getting older is a sickness. "The whole idea of it makes me feel like im coming down with somthing" (1-2). Collins does acknowledge that is hard for anyone to leave their childhood, and that it is not an enjoyable experience. However, Collins was not turning ten when he was writing the poem. Its seems as though he is making fun of how depressed the boy feels because he still has his whole life ahead of him. The little guy is not even close to being mature, and thats what is so ironic about the boy being sad. He acts like he will never have fun again, and that life will never be the same. Others would most likely agree with Collins that the boy is being over dramatic.
When our lives begin, we are innocent and life is beautiful, but as we grow older and time slowly and quickly passes we discover that not everything about life is quite so pleasing. Along with the joys and happiness we experience there is also pain, sadness and loneliness. Hemingway's "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place," and Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" both tell us about older men who are experiencing these dreadful emotions.
trauma can have on someone, even in adulthood. The speaker of the poem invokes sadness and
... ‘You’re not even old enough to know how hard life gets,’ he tells her. ‘Obviously, doctor,’ she says, ‘you’ve never been a 13-year-old girl.’ No, but his profession and every adult life is to some degree a search for the happiness she does not even know she has.” (Ebert).
Morrie remembered the days when he was a teacher and having his students come in and out complaining how miserable and how hard their lives are and some even thinking about doing suicide and also when people are young they’re not wise and they really don’t know what's happening around them in their lives and it just miserable so Morrie likes aging actually Morrie embraces aging. ¨If you're always battling against getting older, you're always going to be unhappy, because it will happen anyhow.¨(Albom #118-119). Everything has a positive and a negative and I don’t mind aging but at the same time don’t want to get older I want to be a kid again and not have to worry about trying to get into college, or to get a job and what I’m going to do as a living in the future and other things that make life just a bit harder like this dumb essay but thinking about being younger and happy when everything was a lot much simpler and easier doesn’t help but I need to think about the positive and also stay positive and just embrace aging like Morrie because who knows thing might turn out better than expected. Everything has a positive and a negative and I don’t mind aging but at the same time don’t want to get older I want to be a kid again and not have to worry about trying to get into college, or to get a job and what I’m going to do as a living in the future and other things that make
become older, and how they look back at their youth. Without similes like this, the
Many of life’s experience colour the way we look at ourselves and society in which we live. The novel Montana 1948 by Larry Watson is indeed all about the tragic event of David Hayden’s twelfth summer, which irrevocably changed him. These events help us understand the idea of coming of age and how childhood experiences change us and affect how we define ourselves as adults.
The Trouble with Poetry mainly focuses on time, whether it's actual time like; day and night or describing the atmosphere that is in his surroundings. Collins begins his poem with "walked along a beach.. cold Florida sand.." and ends with "poet of San Francisco.. treacherous halls of high school.." Possibly describing a time he has lived. His tone rotates throughout the poem expressing the pros and cons about poetry itself. He expresses sorrow in lines 1-24 wanting poetry to stop spreading almost like an act of selfishness, but his emotions shift in lines 25-47 to a positive tone referring to poetry being something he can escape to.
He feels that growing old is not tied in with a negative context of falling apart physically, but about the positive aspects of growing emotionally and spiritually. From my perspective, this quote signifies that the person you are at the end of life is an accumulation of all the years compressed together, continuing to flourish with the knowledge of life’s experiences. Only with personal experiences come wisdom and
Williams, R. H., & Wirths, C. G. (1965). Lives through the years: Styles of life and successful aging.
The article I chose for this assignment included two passages from the book, The Gift of Years, by Joan D. Chittister (1936). Chittister wrote this book when she was 81 years old and it is a particularly poignant read because the book provides a realistic and an optimistic view about how we grow old.
... Therefore, instead of losing mental stability because of old memories, one should try to embrace sanity and perpetuate it in life. Moreover, the poem emulates society because people fantasize about looking a certain way and feeling a certain way; however, they are meddling with their natural beauty and sometimes end up looking worse than before. For instance, old men and women inject their faces to resemble those in their youth, but they worsen their mental and physical state by executing such actions. To conclude, one should embrace her appearance because aging is inevitable.
One of our greatest fears is the fear of death. Immortality is something any of us would take in a heartbeat, so we do not have to face death. But this is something that we cannot run away from. Mortality is an unpleasant thought that sits in the back of our minds form our day to day lives. Yet, this fear is something that is developed more over time as we grow older. Children believe that the world is such a wonderful place, they fell invincible. They also have wonderful creative skills and imaginations which is often revealed to us when they can play one game for hours at one time. Yet, as a child ages, this imagination and creativity can disappear. This is what William Wordsworth is terrified of. Wordsworth is an English poet as well as his colleague Samuel Taylor Coleridge published the first edition of Lyrical Ballads and it changed everything as mentioned Evelyn Toynton, “In early 1798, Coleridge and a little-known poet named William Wordsworth decided to publish a joint volume of their poems.” (Toynton, Evelyn). William expressed this fear of premature mortality of the imagination in each of his works, Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, The Prelude, The World is Too Much with Us, and London, 1802.