Time is precious. The more time passes, the more troubling aging and time become. Furthermore, the speaker in the poem “35/10” is ostensibly obsessed with her daughter’s growth into adolescent youth, and moreover, the fact that she, herself, is aging rapidly. Through the juxtaposition of evocative imagery in “35/10”, Sharon Olds portrays the distressing reality of time and age. Age is a recurring theme in the poem. The first line we see, the title “35/10”, is a reference to and a comparison of the age of the speaker and her growing daughter. The speaker introduces tactile and visual imagery of the “daughter’s dark / silken hair” and “the grey gleaming” on her head, identifying herself as “the silver-haired servant”(Olds, 1-4). This juxtaposition of the youthfulness of the daughter and the aging of the (speaker) mother demonstrates how the speaker feels about aging. …show more content…
The speaker asks why as her generation gets older the younger generation becomes more pleasant looking: “The fold in my neck clarifying as the fine bones of her hips sharpen?” (6-8) Her daughter is becoming a woman, more shapely. She, on the other hand, is becoming heavier and losing her youthful figure. She is deeply troubled by this transformation. She even speaks of the dryness of her skin and contrasts that with comparing her daughter with the beautiful image of a flower blooming from a cactus (8-10). The imagery of the new flower coming from a harsh, prickly object such as a cactus represents the fresh woman blossoming from the roughness of childhood into the grace of the adult world. As her daughter becomes a woman, the speaker is noting the changes the daughter’s body is going through as well as her own bodily changes as she ages. She acknowledges her “last chances to bear a child are falling through (her) body… her purse full of eggs, round
In the poem “What Are Years,” written by Marianne Moore there are two poetic devices being used in order to convey the meaning of the poem. Through the use of different figures of speech and unique forms, she discusses the different life stages a person experiences. The entire poem is based on powerful metaphors used to discuss the emotions and feelings through each of the stages. For example, she states “The very bird/grown taller as he sings, steels/ his form straight up. Though he is captive (20-22).”
Olds begins the correlation of the daughter’s haircut and the idea of war early on in the poem. The reader is first exposed to the comparison in the line, “that girl with the hair wispy as a frayed bellpull/ has been to the barber, that knife grinder/ and has had the edge of her hair sharpened.” Olds immediately conjures up a frightful image of a barber viciously attacking her little girl’s hair. The image is enforced with the words Olds has placed carefully within the line. Instead of cutting her daughter’s hair, the barber sharpens it like one would a weapon. This haircut is the daughter’s first weapon in the war between mother and daughter. The haircut will be the first detachment of the daughter from her youth, the former “wispy” haired girl has in essence been murdered by the barber. To further emphasize this horrible image, Olds sneaks ...
... to both her ex-lover and the unbearable responsibility of caring for her children. The symbol of time and the depressing imagery demonstrates the destruction of the mother’s personal identity. Harwood’s demonstration of the loss of hope and the figurative and literal points are a sad reminder of the high societal expectations of mothers. Unfortunately, this is a paradigm that mother’s struggle to escape. Harwood recognizes these responsibilities and attempts to offer a sign of thanks for all that mother’s do for their children and in society through her tragic poem of a mother’s distraught identity.
Getting the message on the page without distortion is the vital part. Even Olds finds herself at times trying to create fictional topics, “And very often there will be a long period of hours or days maybe even weeks. When I say, ‘Sharon this is not your subject. You weren’t there you don’t know this’” (“Sharon”). This shows that Olds is very perceptive when it comes to her poetry. She does not make up or write poems in which she does not directly experience or know about. The perceptiveness shows that Olds is able to step back and see when she strays from her views. These poems would be impossible without the many experiences and influences from Olds growing up in 1960’s.
Similarly, given the vagueness of the objects that the narrator “cant quite place” within the second stanza, amplifies the trouble that she does not seem to remember exactly what she’s talking about. She begins to describe “a photograph of somebody I never knew, but knew the name of” perhaps a celebrity or distant family member. The end stop lines portray that there is not a lot of depth to the memories on the tray, that they’re truncated. She then moves on to depict her dream to the reader, and I interpret it almost as if the “drooping heads of flowers” is metaphor about life. Life is transient and in the end, will all she remembers about her own life be milk teeth and a contraceptive? The use of numbers in parenthesis could similarly echo life’s cyclical nature such as the 7 being a reminder of the seven days in a week that repeat over and
In Sharon Olds’, My Son the Man, Olds uses the literary device of allusions to illustrate the inevitability of her son growing old by comparing his aging to Houdini, the doubted magician who was able to makes his way out of any restraint. This is evident in lines 1-3 when she writes, “Suddenly his shoulders get a lot wider, the way Houdini would expand his body while people were putting him in chains” (Olds). Since the son is now becoming a man, she compares him to Houdini expanding himself to illustrate the fact that he is growing and able to get out of those chains; in this case, to leave the mother. The allusion strengthens the poem by referencing a man who people doubted which gives the reader a sense of the son’s motives and characteristics.
We all have forgotten most of our childhood; after all, most of us will spend more time in our adult lives than our infantile state. In the free verse poem On Turning Ten, by Billy Collins, the readers are reminded of the freedom found only in childhood. The narrator speaks of life leading up to turning ten and all that is left behind with the first decade of life ended. Collins uses relaxed diction, with imagery and simile that evoke a tone of loss and sadness; while simultaneously reminding readers of the boundlessness of childhood possibility.
In the poem’s opening lines, she begins her day occupying the harried mother role, and with “too much to do,” (2) expresses her struggle to balance priorities. After saying goodbye to her children, and rushing out the door, she transitions from one role to the next, as well as, one emotion to another. As the day proceeds, when reflecting on her life choices, she wonders “what she might have been as a mother” (23), fantasizing about being around, experiencing more of her children's development and daily life. By deciding to pursue her current situation, she must entrust her children’s wellbeing to another, rather than herself, and as she “feels the quick stab […]” (36) she experiences flashes of guilt. However, knowing she has happy and well cared for children, in spite of it all, creates recognition of the situation’s
It's sad to grow old. That by each passing year, something else starts to change. The things that you have become so used to, are not the same anymore. I find that in this poem, Collins describes this imagery so well, when he says; "(his) bicycle never leaned against the garage as it does today, all the dark blue speed drained out of it", this sentence relates to the fact that time is out of our grasp and all that we have left is our
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.
Now, the young girl is expressing feelings that are more womanlike, and she is beginning her initiation of a young child into an adult, or more specifically, a woman.
In the second half of the poem, a new facet of the speaker's attitude is displayed. In line 17, she wants to improve the ugliness of her "child" by giving him new clothes; however, she is too poor to do so, having "nought save homespun cloth" with which to dress her child. In the final stanza, the speaker reveals poverty as her motive for allowing her book to be sent to a publisher (sending her "child" out into the world) in the first place. This makes her attitude seem to contradict her actions.
Arguably Herrick’s most famous poem, “To the Virgins to Make Much of Time”, has as similar take, “The age is best which is the first/When youth and blood are warmer;/But being spent, the worse, and worst/Times still succeed the former” (Hesperides. 208. 9-12) here the part of life more biologically invigorated is praised, yet there is no recognition of value which can come with aging. What is also missed is addressing the pain which can occur with a loss of control that occurs with aging, and the jealousy that can occur when a parent- in a later stage of life- witnesses their child enjoying the excitement of beginning life fresh and new. Shakespeare handled the topic of aging much more skillfully in the play King Lear ambiguously posing many questions about old age and loss of control with the character of Lear who is faced with losing his job, his sanity, and his life mainly because he has aged and become senile. With Lear speaking the loss of identity at the hands of aging is expressed beautifully,
Her twenty third birthday had come and gone, a small celebration between the small moving camp, but it was a celebration nevertheless. She and her mother had gone through pictures, the film only few years old seemed older in the woman’s hands… one particular photograph she saw herself, her mother and her father. She wasn’t sure of the sensation that followed, but it was all wrong. She didn’t feel that sense of change she knew. When you’re sixteen, you feel different from that of when you were thirteen, when you were eighteen, you felt different from that of when you were ...
In the poetry of William Blake and William Wordsworth, this difference between children and adults and their respective states of mind is articulated and developed. As a person ages, they move undeniably from childhood to adulthood, and their mentality moves with them. On the backs of Blake and Wordsworth, the reader is taken along this journey.