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The importance of poetry
The importance of poetry
The importance of poetry
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"What is poetry good for?" A challenging academic environment must include science, math, and history in order to fully be complete in educating our society. Many wonder about the importance of poetry included with these other fields of study and if it is really necessary. Obviously math, science, etc. is crucial to understanding the facts and logics that explain our world around us. However, understanding all of these aspects without trying to understand the emotions and feelings that surround life around us seems to diminish why we strive to learn in the first place. Poetry achieves this level of understanding by allowing us to really experience life through the emotions and experiences of others.
In her poem, "The Mother," Gwendolyn Brooks examines the sorrow associated with abortion. The poem is a journey of rationalization for one woman who attempts to come to terms with her own guilt and the ghosts of her unborn children. Though it appears that she does not accomplish this, it is certain she is seeking to make peace with her children. If not for their sake, for her own.
The first line of the poem is the first sign that the poet is suffering from the guilt associated with abortions. Although Brooks is speaking in second person in this first section of the poem, it is clear that she is referring to herself. The weight of her guilt can be felt as she remembers "the damp small pulps with a little or with no hair." She even envisions them grown up as "singers" and "workers" that never had the opportunity to handle the air. She continues in this fashion, picturing in her mind soothing a child who is frightened by ghosts and by also contemplating leaving the child for whatever reason and returning back to them hungry, gobbling them with a mother's eye.
The second portion of the poem becomes more personal as Brooks shifts to first person, appearing to be more able to face the reality of what she has done. The poem also moves from what she has envisioned to what she has actually experienced. "I have heard . . . the voices of my dim killed children" is a gripping line that the poet cannot seem to escape. In the middle of the poem, Brooks begins to speak to her unborn children, which is another reason why the reader is lead to believe that Brooks is suffering from what she did to them.
Gwendolyn Brooks' poem "The mother" tells us about a mother who had many abortions. The speaker is addressing her children in explain to them why child could not have them. The internal conflict reveals that she regret killing her children or "small pups with a little or with no hair." The speaker tells what she will never do with her children that she killed. She will "never neglect", "beat", "silence", "buy with sweet", " scuffle off ghosts that come", "controlling your luscious sigh/ return for a snack", never hear them "giggled", "planned", and "cried." She also wishes she could see their "marriage", "aches", "stilted", play "games", and "deaths." She regrets even not giving them a "name" and "breaths." The mother knows that her decision will not let her forget by using the phrase "Abortions will not let you forget." The external conflict lets us know that she did not acted alone in her decision making. She mentions "believe that even in my deliberateness I was not deliberate" and "whine that the crime was other than mine." The speaker is saying that her decision to have an abortion was not final yet but someone forced her into having it anyway. The external conflict is that she cannot forget the pain on the day of having the abortions. She mentions the "contracted" and "eased" that she felt having abortions.
It sounds like her father’s death made her angrier at the fact that she is not able to get anything from him anymore. There are several times in the poem when she switches emotions on her father. She forgives him and then is angry again. It’s hard for her because she does not know whether or not she can forgive him, considering all the pain and hardships the family was put through. She tries to justify her father’s actions by blaming his father, but is still angry because her father didn’t help the situation. At the same time, the daughter is almost as upset with her mother as she is with her father when she says “you were each other’s bad bargain, not mine” (Line 21). By the end of the poem, she is able to accept the fact that the broken relationship with her father and content relationship with her mother has to remain untouched. She is able to see that she cannot fully blame her father for being the reason why she is not emotionally content with their relationship. There’s nothing she can do about it now since both her parents are dead, but she is able to let go of it at this
This poem is about abortion and the narrator used the mother’s point of view to express her feeling of how she felt after she aborted her unborn child. The mother felt terrible and remorse about what she did. In this poem I think that the Brooks might had experienced of abortion herself so she wrote this poem to let the reader know how terrible it is to have a abortion. So this will reduce to process of having a abortion.
The first pages of this work quickly establishes this extremely effective stylistic imagery and quickly captures the readers attention, making it a chore to be diverted from reading this famous work. She begins with the metaphor, which likens writing this novel to better herself "as when you paint your portrait for a friend," (Longman p. 1863; l. 5) and it continues to connect the past and present for that friend. The imagery is so real that the reader quickly becomes completely enthralled within the world Browning is describing. Just twelve lines into the work, she masterfully creates a tender and calming scene of an infant smiling in its sleep, due to its understanding of the infinite nature of life. Then broadening the view of the scene to include the watchful mother outside the nursery, calming the household to insure the continued peaceful rest of the infan...
Although the little girl doesn’t listen to the mother the first time she eventually listens in the end. For example, in stanzas 1-4, the little girl asks if she can go to the Freedom March not once, but twice even after her mother had already denied her the first time. These stanzas show how the daughter is a little disobedient at first, but then is able to respect her mother’s wishes. In stanzas 5 and 6, as the little girl is getting ready the mother is happy and smiling because she knows that her little girl is going to be safe, or so she thinks. By these stanzas the reader is able to tell how happy the mother was because she thought her daughter would be safe by listening to her and not going to the March. The last two stanzas, 7 and 8, show that the mother senses something is wrong, she runs to the church to find nothing, but her daughter’s shoe. At this moment she realizes that her baby is gone. These stanzas symbolize that even though her daughter listened to her she still wasn’t safe and is now dead. The Shoe symbolizes the loss the mother is going through and her loss of hope as well. This poem shows how elastic the bond between the daughter and her mother is because the daughter respected her mother’s wish by not going to the March and although the daughter is now dead her mother will always have her in her heart. By her having her
Through diction, the tone of the poem is developed as one that is downtrodden and regretful, while at the same time informative for those who hear her story. Phrases such as, “you are going to do bad things to children…,” “you are going to suffer… ,” and “her pitiful beautiful untouched body…” depict the tone of the speaker as desperate for wanting to stop her parents. Olds wrote many poems that contained a speaker who is contemplating the past of both her life and her parent’s life. In the poem “The Victims,” the speaker is again trying to find acceptance in the divorce and avoidance of her father, “When Mother divorced you, we were glad/ … She kicked you out, suddenly, and her/ kids loved it… ” (Olds 990). Through the remorseful and gloomy tone, we see that the speaker in both poems struggles with a relationship between her parents, and is also struggling to understand the pain of her
The horrors in the mind of the mother just couldn’t be explained to the child through words. When her daughter, whom she had killed, comes back to her as a spirit, Sethe thinks “I 'll tell Beloved about that; she 'll understand. She my daughter” (Morrison 114). But communication is not so easy. Beloved does not understand her mother; she hardly even hears her. What Beloved feels is rage for being taken away, rage for her mother acting rashly against her own will. Ex-slave mothers have experienced many things, but the experiences of slavery don’t necessarily apply to children who will never be in that position. Beloved doesn’t understand because Sethe was acting for herself, not for her child. Hughes portrays a similar interaction through poetry. A mother tells her son, “Don’t you fall now--/ For I’se still goin’, honey,/ I’se still climbin’,/ And life for me ain’t been no crystal stair” (Hughes, “Mother to Son” 17-20). The mother tells her son that she has struggled, and that because she has gone through so many things her son is obligated to carry on. This message to children that they have an obligation to their parents because of their struggles before having children often fell as flat as they did with Beloved. Hughes gives the mother clunky diction and makes her argument of “life for me ain’t been no crystal stair” feel somewhat disconnected from the rest of the poem by its length and its vagueness. He does this to show that even if the mother is right, she doesn’t have a compelling argument to give her children; she is merely playing to her own authority earned through suffering. This difficulty in passing on information that will apply to their children’s new realities was one of the hardest problems (besides material difficulty) that ex-slave parents
While studying new criticism and reader response we were told to read the poem “The Mother” by Gwendolyn Brooks. Throughout this essay I will be applying what I have learned in class to help dissect that experience to clearly differentiate both. First I will talk about new criticism and what it was like reading “The Mother” through that style. Then I will continue on to reader response and share the journey through our reading with that style. After that I will compare the similarities between both styles. Finally, to conclude I will briefly discuss which one I preferred more.
..., a loss that everyone can either sympathize or empathize. However, instead of focusing on the pain and heartbreak of not having a mother, the narrator instead takes strength in the fact that her mother is connected to nature. Although her mother is not physically in her life, her body has, instead, been buried in the ground like a seed. This brings the narrator solace because at least her mother’s essence will always be present as long as there are trees, grass, and animals.
Katherine Philips gained a lot of attention as a poet after writing “On the Death of My Dearest Child, Hector Philips”. This poem was written in a way to give readers an emotional account of a mother mourning the experience of losing her child. Philips expressed deep emotions from a maternal standpoint in the elegy. Unlike Jonson, Philips had the unspoken right of claiming a deep maternal connection with her son through pregnancy and childbirth. Philips’ approach to writing “On the Death of My Dearest Child” illustrates that the pain of losing her son, Hector, was enough for her to never write another verse again.
But her use of pathos and description shows that even she can’t handle the dark moments that experience with young pregnant women. She describes the process of abortion, the way she feels as well as the pregnant victims. Tisdale wants people to be educated in this area, so less abortion have to be performed. As she narrates her stories of teenagers receiving abortions, she believes that in some circumstances abortion is necessary, but it can also be a cruel, and tragic thing to be a part of, and could easily be avoided if people were more educated in the matter. “Soon I am talking to an eighteen-year-old women pregnant for the fourth time” (Tisdale 650). Tisdale’s use of pathos does not help her in this case. As she describes in detail what goes on during abortion, readers come to realizes how terrible and dark it really is. Tisdale describes the emotion pregnant women feel as they are having their child ripped away from them.
All the incidents that I mentioned in the previous paragraph are among the many vivid images in this work. Brooks obviously either had experience with abortions or she felt very strongly about the issue. The feelings of sadness, remorse, longing, and unfulfilled destinies were arranged so that even someone with no experience or opinion on this issue, really felt strong emotions when reading "The Mother" .One image that is so vivid that it stayed with me through the entire poem was within the third line. Brooks writes, " the damp small pulps with little or no hair" .
When reading or listening to poetry, the main objective for me is to feel moved. Happiness, longing, sadness are some of the feelings that can be achieved just by listening to others’ words. It is within these words that creates another world, or separates us from our own. Words all have a certain kind of attachment to them, so if used properly an author can stimulate a reader beyond belief.
When we first started the poetry unit, I felt that I would hate reading and creating poetry. When I heard we had to read poetry I was very disappointed. Every other year we did poetry units, I hated it. I hated every part of it. I dreaded reading poetry and answering the questions. I mostly felt this way because I am a factual person. I always have to have one right answer. I do not like when there are more than one answer choices that are correct. Poetry always has more than one interpretation.This year, however, hearing poetry and writing my own poetry has changed my opinion on poetry. Although I still hate answering questions on the poems I love to listen to poetry and write my own poetry. But, even when you read the poems that I write they are very straightforward and there are usually no other ways to interpret it.
Poetry must be music in the form of words. Some poets believe the definition of poetry is in the music it creates. "Smooth or rough, with them, is right or wrong." Alexander Pope believed that a poem must be pleasant to the ear. A poem must follow certain rules. A poem can never "ring round the same unvaried chimes" and "[drag] its slow length along." Poems must "[whisper] through the trees" to please the reader's ear. For a poem to create music the poem must follow certain rules. What is the usefulness of a poem if it doesn't communicate any emotions to the reader in the end? It is nice to hear pleasant sounds but the goal of a poem cannot just be to produce pleasant sounds.