Poetry is literary work in which special intensity is given to the expression of feeling and ideas, by the distinctive style and myth. It relies on different devices such as assonance, themes and even the tone to be successful. Even though many poems seems to be different, in some way they have similarities.
American poet Natasha Trethewey, used many of her own personal experiences while writing poetry. Her mother was an African American woman and her father was a Canadian emigrant. This means that Natasha was biracial. Her parents split when she was six years old. She would spend half of the year with her father, then the other half with her mother. By doing so she realized that being biracial was frowned upon. She quickly adjusted. While spending time with her father she completely adopted the “white” side of her. By doing so life was a lot easier for her and she was treated just
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Sad because the little girl has to lie about being African American. Some argue that the poem is not sad because she chooses to lie. However, in line line 14 the little girl says, “I could even keep quiet, quiet as kept, like the time a white girl said( squeezing my hand), Now we have three of us in this class” (Trethewey, 2000). This is sad because she is lying to protect herself from the cruelty of rejection, instead of embracing her heritage. If her white friend or the white community finds out who she really is, they will probably treat her worse than they do the blacks, because the little girl is biracial. In “the mother”, the tone at first is also sadness. The mother sounds like she is in deep regret about her decision to abort her children. However, by the author’s use of words such as “them” and “they”, it makes it clear that the mother has had multiple abortions. To some readers this is where sadness can turn into “hate”. While we understand it happening once, we can’t seem to wrap our heads around twice or even a third
The first four stanzas are a conversation between the mother and daughter. The daughter asks for permission to attend a civil rights march. The child is a unique one who believes that sacrificing something like “play[ing]” for a march that can make a difference will be worthwhile (2). However, the mother understands that the march is not a simple march, but a political movement that can turn violent. The mother refuses the child’s request, which categorizes the poem as a tragedy because it places the child in the chur...
Caucasia is a coming of age novel that is told through the lens of Birdie Lee, a biracial girl who sees herself when she looks at her sister Cole Lee, even though physical difference of both Birdie and Cole were continuingly addressed through out the novel but their affection for one another exist beyond the bounds of physical differences. Birdie and Cole Lee are daughters of a White woman with blonde hair hand blue blooded (Sandy) and an African American political activist father (Deck). The closeness of these two sisters takes many hits and turn because one has the ability to disappear into the black society while the other one can disappear into the black society. Birdie inherits her physical looks mostly from her mother and is welcomed on the first day of school by a boy throwing spitball at her “What are you doin’ in this school? You White?” Of the bat Birdie is seen as white and categorized as white by anybody due to her physical appearance, which her identity is formed and categorized into whiteness.
This leaves it up to us to figure it out for ourselves. The next example of how race influences our characters is very telling. When Twyla’s mother and Roberta’s mother meet, we see not only race influencing the characters but, how the parents can pass it down to the next generation. This takes place when the mothers come to the orphanage for chapel and Twyla describes to the reader Roberta’s mother being “bigger than any man and on her chest was the biggest cross I’d ever seen” (205).
It is very likely that Louise Erdrich experienced some kind of racism or prejudice in her lifetime. Segregation laws were still in use while she was growing up in the fifties, and in the sixties, many of the same people still felt racist, with or without the laws. Boarding schools were not an exception to this fact either. School authorities probably did take advantage of the fact that boarding schools are away from home and not under the watchful eye of any parent. This poem demonstrates the truth of what it really felt and feels like to have lived through such bad treatment. It is disturbing to think that instead of just learning at school, Louise Erdrich, amongst other children, may have learned what it felt like to be hated. At such early ages, they taught these children that the way they were treated was how the world was supposed to be. It displays the painful scars embedded so deeply into a child, from a time that should have been the most nurturing part of his/her life.
Because this woman is a slave, she has no right to her own child, therefore she cannot claim him as her own. No matter how much she loves him or how much joy that he brings into her dreary life, he can never be hers, and her heart breaks when he is taken away from her. Mothers have a very special bond with their children; they feel a love that can be described as much stronger than any other kind of love in the world. This love that is felt by the slave mother in this poem literally changes the tone of the poem when the narrator speaks about the mother and her son. Despite the anguish and despair that she feels, the thought of her child can lift her spirits, only for the child to be taken away from her. Because of her race, she cannot claim any right to love her own child. As a woman, her right to be a mother and raise and love her child was taken away from her. The slave mother had no rights to herself or her own children, and her race and gender are the main causes for
In today’s modern view, poetry has become more than just paragraphs that rhyme at the end of each sentence. If the reader has an open mind and the ability to read in between the lines, they discover more than they have bargained for. Some poems might have stories of suffering or abuse, while others contain happy times and great joy. Regardless of what the poems contains, all poems display an expression. That very moment when the writer begins his mental journey with that pen and paper is where all feelings are let out. As poetry is continues to be written, the reader begins to see patterns within each poem. On the other hand, poems have nothing at all in common with one another. A good example of this is in two poems by a famous writer by the name of Langston Hughes. A well-known writer that still gets credit today for pomes like “ Theme for English B” and “Let American be American Again.”
In poetry, we can vent our frustration and interpretations of the world around us on paper. Poets make their points using metaphors or little stories to bring them out. When reading poetry, I always put myself in the shoes of the first or third person to better understand what is trying to be put across in the words of the sonnets. Most poems can mean anything to anybody. There are many cases in which you see people finding beauty in things they don't even understand, such as an Italian Opera or Ancient Hieroglyphics painted on a pyramid wall. Poetry can be silly, cheesy, boring or down right appealing and consuming to the readers eyes.
Poetry is the most compressed form of literature, which should be read slowly and savored attentively. Poets employ different poetic techniques to convey their ideas, opinions, and express their feelings. Some poems can be understood easily while others seam vague. But whatever they are, they all contain some common elements of poetry such as theme, figurative language, and tone, etc. ¡§Constantly risking absurdity and death¡¨ and ¡§betting on the muse¡¨ are two poems which are written by two different poets. By comparing and contrasting these two poems, the full beauty of the poems can be greatly appreciated and their theme can be deeply explored.
Natasha Trethewey is an accomplished poet who is currently serving as United States Poet Laureate appointed by the Library of Congress and won the Pulitzer Prize for her collection of poems, Native Guard in 2007. She grew up mixed race, black and white, in Gulfport, Mississippi, and when her parent’s divorced she moved with her mother to Atlanta. Her mother, Gwen, remarried and at a young age Natasha was a eyewitness in the physical and psychological abuse that her new stepfather hurled upon her mother. After graduating from high school, Natasha set off to go to school in Athens, Georgia at the University of Georgia. During Trethewey’s freshman year, her mother was murdered by her stepfather and she works through her grief by writing poetry
Mama, as a member of an older generation, represents the suffering that has always been a part of this world. She spent her life coexisting with the struggle in some approximation to harmony. Mama knew the futility of trying to escape the pain inherent in living, she knew about "the darkness outside," but she challenged herself to survive proudly despite it all (419). Mama took on the pain in her family in order to strengthen herself as a support for those who could not cope with their own grief. Allowing her husband to cry for his dead brother gave her a strength and purpose that would have been hard to attain outside her family sphere. She was a poor black woman in Harlem, yet she was able to give her husband permission for weakness, a gift that he feared to ask for in others. She gave him the right to a secret, personal bitterness toward the white man that he could not show to anyone else. She allowed him to survive. She marveled at his strength, and acknowledged her part in it, "But if he hadn't had...
In the poem “White Lies” the language of the poem creates an image of a young girl who is ashamed of her background.The language used in some parts of the poem point to the girl being biracial as well as a very light skinned biracial who appears to be white “light-bright” “near-white” “high-yellow”, and about how she tends to lie to the white people in order to not feel judged. She says she lives in uptown but she actually lives in a roughly built part of town “not in that pink and green shanty-fied shotgun section along the tracks.”. As she describes how easy it is for her to tell about where she lives “I could easily tell the white folks…” the image created is that people truly think she is white and their acceptance of her lies only makes her feel more apart of them so she keeps doing it.
Brooks writes, "the damp small pulps with little or no hair." In the last half of the poem (lines 20 to 33), she changes who she is addressing. Instead of telling the mother what she is missing she is now talking to the "child". When she does this it expresses other emotions. These new emotions are ones of sorrow, love, searching for forgiveness, etc.
According to Webster's Dictionary, poetry is defined as "writing that formulates a concentrated imaginative awareness of experience in language chosen and arranged to create a specific emotional response through meaning, sound, and rhythm." While this is the technical definition of poetry many writers attempted to further describe what poetry is. There are many contradicting views and no one can agree what is the essence of poetry. Some poets think that poetry is the expression of emotions and rules do not matter, while other poets suggest the poetry is all about the rules and the rhythm that must be followed. The perfect mix to define poetry is somewhere in between.
In conclusion, I feel poets mainly write poems to express feelings, thoughts, and messages to the world. It’s an easy approach for them to use this writing technique as a way to articulate different aspects which could be improved in this world. I think what attracts people to poetry is writing which relates to each person in their everyday life no matter how it could be portrayed by. For some people poetry could be a relaxing thing or it could be something which cheers someone up, but people look to poetry to get a deeper thinking in life rather than a simpler thinking. This is clearly evident through authors, William Wordsworth and William Blake, and their poems “The World is too Much with Us” and “The Tyger.” Both poems related to one another one way or another, and they depicted different messages and themes which do relate to real life situations.
There are many forms of telling stories and illustrating points in literature. These literary works are meant to convey the author’s thoughts and emotions. One of the most common and easily recognized literary works is, “the poem.” There are many elements that can be used to assemble a poem. For example, in Maya Angelou’s, “Still I Rise,” she utilizes the elements of repetition, figurative language, and rhyme scheme to advocate rebellion and resilience when faced with life’s trials and tribulations, as well as in opposition to her oppressors.