Life is not always easy, at some point, people struggle in their life. People who are in the lower class have to struggle for a job every day and people who are in upper class also have their own problems to deal with. These ideas are very clear in Mary Oliver’s “Singapore”, Philip Schultz’s “Greed” and Philip Levine “What Work Is”. In "Singapore" a woman is likely lower class because she works at the airport and her job is to clean the bathroom. In both “Greed” and “What Work Is”, the speakers make the same conclusion about the struggle in the lower class. “Greed” furthermore discusses how Hispanics get a job first before whites and blacks because they take lower wages. All three poems deal with class in term of the society. The shared idea …show more content…
The narrator who saw the woman cleaning in the airport did not like the scene due to the fact that she believes that there are better jobs and options out there. However, we do not know whether or not the lady actually cleaning feels the same way. Oliver states in the poem, “Her beauty and her embarrassment struggled together, and neither could win”. (Line 13). Even though this situation seems to be very sad Oliver tries to turn a sad situation into a hopeful and joyful situation. The speaker sees how the woman is struggling, but she thinks she is beautiful. Furthermore, the perspective of the speaker shows that the cleaning woman has a right to “stand in a happy place”, which means everyone deserves a good job. Oliver mentions, “Yes, a person wants to stand in a happy place, in a poem, but first we must watch her as she stares down at her labor, which is dull enough” (line 16). This quote shows that the narrator dislikes the fact that she is doing such a low job and yet she thinks she is beautiful. The author did not understand her perspective, she has to do this job for a
A big disadvantage that the lower class has compared to the wealthy is a lack of quality education. While serving as a waitress, Ehrenriech learned about many different people. Some of these co-workers were immigrants who had recently come to this country. “I learn that he [George] is not paid by Jerry’s but the ‘agent’ who shipped him over--$5 an hour, with the agent getting the dollar or so difference between that and what Jerry’s pays dishwashers”(38). Their contracts lacked any benefits, and they were paid below minimum wage. People, like George, cannot read their contracts before they sign because they don’t understand the language. The critic would argue, “…They are baffled at the idea of fighting the class struggle of which…Ehrenriech appears to be the only person complaining about the situation…” In Georg...
In her narrative, “Serving in Florida”, she describes life as low income American through her experiences as a hotel maid. Ehrenreich vividly describes the inhumane working conditions in which many Americans must endure in order to survive. Employees are fearful of losing their jobs if they do not meet the certain demands of managers who unfairly exert control on them. In addition, Ehrenreich addresses a common misconception among Americans, that those living in poverty are not hard working people, she proves this to be an unfair portrayal of the underprivileged. Ehrenreich works alongside Maria, a Hispanic woman who is the housekeeping manager and Carla, an African American woman who is also a maid. Carla and Ehrenreich are given nineteen rooms to clean with one half hour break. Carla suffers from joint pain which causes her to move slowly. Ehrenreich notes that Carla’s slow pace will probably result in the loss of her job at the hotel because of the other immigrant workers who are much faster than she. Even Carla is fully aware that she is not valued as an employee, “She broods, too, about all the little evidences of disrespect that come her way, and not only from management. ‘They don’t care about us,’ she tells me of the hotel guests; in fact, they don’t notice us at all unless something gets stolen from a room— ‘then they’re all over you’” (277). Individuals such as Carla are extremely hard working, but despite their strong work ethic, low income citizens are seen as disposable by their employers. Not only are they looked down upon by their employers, but they also are treated with disrespect by the people in which they serve. The guests make automatic assumptions because she is from a lower class standing. They assume that she must degrade herself to theft in order to survive because she is not as fortunate. The
The struggles that many face while experiencing poverty are not like any other. When a person is experiencing poverty, they deal with unbearable hardships as well as numerous tragic events. Diane Gilliam Fisher’s collection of poems teaches readers about labor battles within West Virginian territories, at the beginning of the twentieth century. Some of these battles include the Battle of Matewan and Battle of Blair Mountain. The collection of poems is presented in many different manners, ranging from diary entries to letters to journal entries. These various structures of writing introduce the reader to contrasting images and concepts in an artistic fashion. The reader is able to witness firsthand the hardships and the light and dark times of impoverished people’s lives. He or she also learns about the effects of birth and death on poverty stricken communities. In the collection of poems in Kettle Bottom, Fisher uses imagery and concepts to convey contrast between the positive and negative aspects of the lives of people living in poverty.
Although these poems do not say much about the era that they are in or the social class that these people come from a person could tell a lot just by the poem.
In this essay I am going to discuss two poems. "Woman Work" written by Maya Angelou, is about a woman who works all the time and just wants to rest. The second poem is called "overheard in County Sigo" written by Gillian Clarke which is about a married woman having a conversation with her friend about her life and looking back at what her ambitions were.
We all have faced challenges that make our lives succeeding difficult, but the way we approach these challenges is what affect us in the long run. In “Annabelle Lee”, by Edgar Allan Poe, “Oranges” by Gary Soto, and “The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost they all feature speakers that deal with hardships that they must overcome. The three poets use literary devices to show how they deal with theses challenges along with the struggles that come with it.
In the second stanza, Piercy describes the girl as healthy, intelligent, and strong (7-8). Yet these positive equalities alone, could not keep people from criticizing her, so the girl feels inferior. “She went to and fro apologizing,” which demonstrates her collapse of confidence with the people she is surrounded with, who kept putting her down (10). She gives in to the hurtful things people say about her: “Everyone [kept] seeing a fat nose on thick legs” (11). The girl thus lets people push her in the direction of society’s standard of beauty, instead of affirming her own unique beauty.
In her poem entitled “The Poet with His Face in His Hands,” Mary Oliver utilizes the voice of her work’s speaker to dismiss and belittle those poets who focus on their own misery in their writings. Although the poem models itself a scolding, Oliver wrote the work as a poem with the purpose of delivering an argument against the usage of depressing, personal subject matters for poetry. Oliver’s intention is to dissuade her fellow poets from promoting misery and personal mistakes in their works, and she accomplishes this task through her speaker’s diction and tone, the imagery, setting, and mood created within the content of the poem itself, and the incorporation of such persuasive structures as enjambment and juxtaposition to bolster the poem’s
The female, adolescent speaker helps the audience realize the prejudice that is present in a “melting-pot” neighborhood in Queens during the year 1983. With the setting placed in the middle of the Civil Rights Movement, the poem allows the audience to examine the experience of a young immigrant girl, and the inequality that is present during this time. Julia Alvarez in “Queens, 1963” employs poetic tools such as diction, figurative language, and irony to teach the reader that even though America is a place founded upon people who were strangers to the land, it is now home to immigrants to claim intolerance for other foreigners, despite the roots of America’s founding.
We see this in lines 25-32 of Elegy; “Oft did the harvest to their sickle yield, their furrow oft the stubborn glebe had broke; how jocund did they drive their team afield! How bowed the woods beneath their sturdy stroke! Let not ambition mock their useful toil, their homely joys and destiny obscure…the short and simple annals of the poor.” Gray is telling the readers to respect the poor because they have to work hard to just make it by, rather than have wealth thrown at them from everywhere. This is still true today; in our modern day society there are a lot of people who are born into wealthy families who don’t know what it’s like to work a day in their lives. These same people also have a very good tendency to judge the people who aren’t as fortunate as they are, but the truth is those less fortunate people have to work harder to survive. It’s easy for us to take things for granted until we no longer have them, rich people take their money for granted and have no idea what it’s like to live in poverty. Gray tells these fortunate people not to think highly of themselves because they have money, he tells them to respect the poor for what they have to do, especially the things they do to help the wealthy. He also touches on the idea that the simple people of the world are better off because
This Pulitzer-Winning comedy uses the concepts of wealth, social class, and happiness as the driving force of the drama hidden within this comedy. The conflict between the families leads to the question of what makes a person wealthy: Is wealth based on what social class we’re in or our level of happiness? The two sides of this coin is presented to the audience through these two families. The Kirby’s represent high social class with lots of money and power, while the Sycamores are in a lower social
Singapore, or the Republic of Singapore, is an island nation located just off the southern coast of Malaysia. This southeastern city-state is separated from its northern neighbor by the Johore Strait. Singapore is separated from Indonesia on the south side by the Singapore Strait (Ho, Winstedt, Leinbach, & Kenndard, 2016). The advanced logistics infrastructure of Singapore supports continued business growth and attraction to the developing country (“Comparing Logistics Infrastructure of Countries in ASEAN,” 2007).
For many years the world has been divided into two distinct classes – the rich and the poor. But does this actually affect the way one notices the world? In the short story “Butterflies”, Patricia Grace portrays the different perspectives opposite classes have towards the world. In order to get her messages across the reader, Patricia Grace uses setting as well as literary devices such as symbolism, irony and metaphors throughout the story.
Burns starts out life in the lower class, but due to the high success of his poems he ends up more in the middle class. This poem is a way for him to show how he feels life was better when he was in the lower class, because he didn’t have to worry about the things he worries about in the upper middle class.
Gabriel García Márquez is arguably Latin America’s most well known writer and socialist with Marxist ideals. His short story, Balthazar’s Marvelous Afternoon, is one that well exemplifies a few ideals of Marxism, without enforcing a political agenda, something only the greatest writers can achieve. One concept of Marxism is that capitalism can only thrive on the exploitation of the working class. This leads to economic conflict which creates class tension, this type of disputation is prevalent within Balthazar’s Marvelous Afternoon. To begin, the setting of the story is not clear, it is assumably in a small town since everyone is familiar with one another and the titles and careers of the characters are exposed in the story. One can also assume