Admission Poem Analysis

In a good poem, the author uses descriptive words and images to convey emotion of characters and objects. A good poet can turn something simple and natural like a flower into a full story. While poetic descriptions can enhance a writer 's ability to convey the feelings of stress and other emotions in a doctor 's life, the poems “Admission: Children 's Unit” and “The Cadaver” do not do a good job of using such descriptions to the advantage of the reader. “Admission”, while following the form of poetry in the sense that it has short stanzas and doesn 't fill up each line on the page, is not poetic, and is unable to use the poetry format to convey meaning or feeling. The “poem” is doused in the motif of smell, and while smell is an interesting way to talk about medicine and diagnosis, it does not really work for the poem. The initial mention of the sense of smell comes in a reference to St. Lawrence, who can supposedly smell sin. In the original story, the lesson is that St. Lawrence should not judge people, but that idea never makes it clearly into “Admission” as more than a side note

“Cadaver” does have one redeeming quote. The author describes how after a lab “Later, you walked to the car, a collection of fragments, disarticulated bones, muscle spindles, vessels an nerves...” (Cadaver 71). In this case, the author describes how the lab makes she and her peers feel. The reader can understand that seeing a bunch of bodies and body parts all in a disarray, or at least in a position that clearly shows their interconnectivity and “partness” as opposed to wholeness as one body, can make a human being question their bodily integrity and wonder how everything – all of those parts – fit together to make one highly functioning organism that acts among and communicates well with a large range of similar beings. Although the whole poem isn 't like this one quote, this quote is a great example of how a poem can use description to amplify the feelings of a