Black And White By Sharon Olds Summary

Sharon Olds shares an experience of different colors and what they meant to her. She narrates the opposites of two colors in particular and the ways they’re distinguished. Her and a boy are wearing two different clothing, one black and the other white, and she had come to realize the many differences in them just from glancing at him. She described the patterns complexities and how molecules work with black and white. From the beginning of the poem, we begin to see what characteristics are shown from what they’re wearing. First, the patterns of black and white are very common but they are two very different colors. Olds says “a couple of molecules stuck in a rod of light rapidly moving through darkness,” showing that there’s a science behind these two colors and that they’re different from how they’re perceived. Imagery is used when Olds talks about the boy wearing red similarly to the inside of our bodies and that she is wearing black fur similar to the skin of an animal. This give us the complex ways of thinking about how these colors

You could feel empathy for her during that situation and her body language clearly made it obvious to the boy that she didn’t compare to him. She went from analyzing who he was from what he was wearing, feeling intimidated against him, and then feeling like she could defeat him despite her being light and him being the darkness. You begin to also see as you reach the end that she accepts the outcomes of her and the boy. In summary, narrator Olds uses many literary and poetic device techniques to help articulate to the readers how she felt during her ride on a subway. Judging from the outcome of the poem, Olds regained her confidence and was ready for whatever murderous darkness has to throw against her from the boy. He was born into the darkness and he was also ready to “thrust up into any available