Soto uses repetition and motif to describe how weather can depict the mood of a story and how little things can have great effects on people. Gary Soto includes a motif of weather throughout the poem to illustrate the mood and setting of the poem. Soto begins with “December. Frost cracking,beneath my steps, my breath before me. Her house the one who burned yellow night and day, in any weather” (5-8). This motif describes what is going on in the beginning of the poem and hints what the story will be like based on the mood that it sets. Soto uses the motif throughout the poem and he uses it a second time as he leaves the store “Outside, A few cars hissing past, Fog hanging like old Coats between the trees”(44-47). This time, Soto displayed the …show more content…
To start off the poem, Soto used imagery to set the scene and allow the reader to understand what the poem is all about;"They leap barefoot to the store, sweetness on their tongues"(5-6). This quote is a superb example of imagery because it gives detail in one sentence to let the reader imagine the scene. Using imagery, this quote demonstrates how poor the kids were in the area and the neediness of a plain store that they even have “sweetness on their tongues”(41-44). To convey his meaning, Soto used a metaphor to show how unsatisfied he is with his life. “A brown kid getting across: “he’s like me”, I tell my daughter and she stops her mouth. “He looks both ways and then leaps across the road where riches happen on a red tongue”(34-38). The metaphor used shows how unsatisfied the brown person, the daughter, and the father are in their life. This poem clearly depicts how some people in the world live in poor conditions and have unhappy lives. The poem doesn’t only show hatred and sadness in life in impoverishment, but it also shows how you can get out by perseverance like Gary Soto did in his personal life through literature and hard
Armitage Street by David Hernandez is a short poem that is about a narrator whose’ waiting on a train to leave Armitage Street their favorite childhood street. Both of these authors shows there's no need to have it all just make the best of what you have. Gary shows this through Metaphor and Character actions and David did this through First Person and Description. Both of these text proves life has struggles and things is not always perfect. In the text “Mother and Daughter” Yollie and her mom are both trying to make ends meet they are poor and it’s hard for her mother to get her everything she wants.
The speaker of the poem walks through a reaping setting, alone. Lee uses the image of a bird who flies quickly away before the speaker can catch glimpse of it: “I turn, a cardinal vanishes”. This matches the memory that the speaker rekindles from earlier that morning, when his deceased father’s image seems to appear within the trees, and disappear again just as his child draws near. Lee beautifully uses concrete language to portray the picture, specifically the throbbing emptiness when the vision is substituted by a “shovel…in the flickering, deep green shade” (18-19). The sad, uncanny sensation showed by the event creates the lonely, sorrowful mood of the
In the poem, “Saturday at the Canal” by Gary Soto, the act of irritation, an emotion often found in adolescents, was demonstrated. Through lines of imagery, the narrator who is a 17-year-old in highschool, expressed many variations of irritation. An example of this is when the narrator internally said, ”I was hoping to be happy by seventeen” (Line 1). As soon as the narrator said that they were hoping to be happy by seventeen, an issue many adolescents and highschoolers face got brought up. Adolescents often hope for better opportunities or even freedom when it comes to maturing but, maturing is realizing that not everything goes accordingly.
Cherrylog Road James Dickey’s poem, Cherrylog Road, is clearly an exhilarating, narrative poem. The speaker of this piece is a young man reminiscing of a past love affair that was forbidden. This is a provocative poem, told in the first person and is full of figurative language and symbolism. The setting of this poem is in a rural part of an unnamed Southern state, off of Highway 96 at Cherrylog Road. It is at the peak of a summer afternoon in a junkyard full of discarded cars.
one of the many times he uses imagery throughout this story is when the narrator says, “on his way he would see the cottages and homes with their dark windows, and it was not unequal to walking through a graveyard where only the faintest glimmers of firefly light appeared in flickers behind the windows” (Pg 1). By using imagery to compare walking through the neighborhood as walking through a graveyard shows that it is completely silent and there is no activity in any of the houses. Most people wouldn't describe their neighborhood as a graveyard, this also develops the mood. Another time he uses imagery is when the narrator says, “The street was silent and long and empty, with only his shadow moving like the shadow of a hawk in mid-country” (1). This shows mood because the narrator describes him as a hawk in mid-country, that means that he is all alone in what he feels to be like a barren or abandoned place.
Some see the ugliness in the most beautiful things but others see the beauty in the most hideous of things. The poem William Street by Kenneth Slessor demonstrates this thesis statement as he talks about how he sees the beauty in the street that is renowned for its ugliness and the unsightly surroundings it is engulfed with. This poem's literary techniques and imagery gives the readers an insight into the environment and the surroundings that are seen vividly even though they are described through the use of foreshadowing. Each stanza gives the readers a different understanding on what is going on during the poem.
Mikaila Heck Burnette AP English 11 10/27/2017 “A Summers Life” Analysis Essay Sin is prevalent in many people's lives, those who sin often feel immense guilt for it. This is true for young Gary Soto. Throughout this narrative, Soto uses many rhetorical devices to convey emotion to the audience. In “A Summers Life”, Soto shifts from a feeling of innocence and youth to one of gut wrenching sin by using powerful imagery, Biblical allusions, and purposeful symbolism to prove that as a child, he succumbed easily to temptation.
The Power of Hope Gary Soto brings the impoverished, crime filled streets of the Mexican-American communities where he grew up to life by “evoking the harsh forces that often shape the life for Chicanos” (“‘Gary Soto’: Poetry Foundation” p. 1). He combines an archetypal young love poem with the concept of poverty to create the powerful poem: “Oranges” (1985). Soto also works with the notion of old age and the importance of life in his somber poem: “The Seventieth Year” (1986).
Drifters by Bruce Dawe “Why have hope?”, is the question raised in the poem “Drifters” by Bruce Dawe. Bruce Dawe’s poem explores how change can damage a family 's relationship and cause them to drift apart. This poem has underlying and straight forward themes depicted about change. Straight forward depiction is the physical movement of the family from place to place and not everyone is in favour of this change. The very first line of the poem, “One day soon he’ll tell her it’s time to start packing”, supports the inevitable change that no one else has a say in except the man.
Culture: the beliefs, customs, art, etc. of a particular society. Being a part of a culture is amazing, diverse, and interesting until the conflict from being a part of more than one culture becomes involved. This type of conflict can even change the way you see your culture. In the poem, “Legal Alien”, by Pat Mora, Pat Mora depicts her culture colliding with another, causing cultural conflict.
The poems Untitled by Emily Dickinson and Acquainted With The Night by Robert Frost both deal with the themes of darkness and night. While on the surface they seem similar, they have very different meanings, which are made clear through devices such as diction, imagery, symbolism and irony. Robert Frost’s poem uses darkness as a metaphor for depression, while Dickinson uses the same symbol to mean ignorance. Both poems are told from a first-person perspective. However, Dickinson favors the pronoun “we” while Frost uses “I” almost to the point of excess.
White Americans are showcased to be misinformed and he strengthens his point on that by showing that not only Mexicans and African Americans are both judged when in reality they are both working twice as hard to survive and attain no befits because they are not registered as an American. Jimmy writes to his audience in a powerful way to contradict those prejudice views. The authors bitterness towards white Americans is because he thinks they are very privileged and unaware of the difficulties the people with these ethnic backgrounds have of living in poverty and having their children suffer. This showcases the reality that Mexicans are having to risk their life to cross the border because they want a better life and are escaping the gruesome factors in their country. This poem reaches a larger demographic of mixed nationalities who are in fact Americans but blindsided by this serious issue.
Carver’s opens his story with a brief, yet detailed imagery describing the weather and comparing it to what’s going on with the family inside. “Early that day the
The agony the writer is feeling about his son 's death, as well as the hint of optimism through planting the tree is powerfully depicted through the devices of diction and imagery throughout the poem. In the first stanza the speaker describes the setting when planting the Sequoia; “Rain blacked the horizon, but cold winds kept it over the Pacific, / And the sky above us stayed the dull gray.” The speaker uses a lexicon of words such as “blackened”, “cold” and “dull gray” which all introduce a harsh and sorrowful tone to the poem. Pathetic fallacy is also used through the imagery of nature;
In the story, the author uses many different types of weather, settings, and seasons, to help communicate the theme of taking pride in the way we look and act, but not looking down upon others. Weather conditions such as the rain, and setting such as the swamp largely impact the story. Within the story, seasons reflect the characters’ emotions and foreshadow future events. In the beginning of the story, the author uses imagery to draw a picture of the time between summer and fall.