ipl-logo

What Does Billy Collins Symbolize In On Turning Ten

693 Words3 Pages

How do you normally feel on your birthday? What is your favorite part of your birthday? What things do you think about on your birthday? On birthdays people usually think about the fun they have had in the last digit and think about the fun-filled one they will have next. In the story called “Eleven” written by Sandra Cisneros and the poem called “On Turning Ten” by Billy Collins shares what the main characters from the story and the poem think about growing older into a new stage of life. In both authors’ writings to convey the feeling they have about growing up they use key literary elements. In Billy Collins’ poem, the speaker is melancholy about turning ten, while Sandra Cisneros has a more upbeat outlook on growing up. Even though they …show more content…

Collins proposes this theme via his main character. The speaker of the poem is doleful thinking that he will have to leave his childhood imagination and his childish innocence behind because he is growing up. In the text it states, “But now if I fall upon the sidewalks of life,/ I skin my knees. I bleed.” These two lines from the poem symbolize that the speaker is struggling to accept and face reality. The sidewalk symbolizes the reality that he must face and skinning his knees means …show more content…

She shows this through her writing by way of the speaker. When the speaker, Rachel thinks about the macabre occurrences that take place on her eleventh birthday. In the story it says, “Like my little wooden dolls that fit one inside the other, each year inside the next one.” This demonstrates that she feels growing up is just a bunch of years stacked on each other, like the layers of a cake. For her, growing up is not really a grandiose thing. Also, in the text it says, “I want today to be far away already, far away like a runaway balloon,” This shows that she wishes she can run away from the realities of life that she is afraid to face. She knows one day she will have to face them, but she is not ready yet. All in all, Cisneros

Show More
Related

  • On Turning Ten By Billy Collins And Marigolds By Eugenia W. Collier

    369 Words  | 2 Pages

    In the poem “On turning Ten '' by Billy Collins and in the short story “ Marigolds” written by Eugenia W. Collier, both authors talk about how life has changed and the end of their childhood based on situations of their past life. In the poem and the short story, both authors explore the impact of losing innocence by describing their memory and discovering the truth. Both authors show how emotional it was to face the truth and reality based on his and her memories. In “Marigolds”, she starts losing her innocence when she “Never heard a man cry before” (Collier 42) and how she discovered Miss Lottie wasn’t frustrated with the situation at the end but was upset. In “On Turning Ten” he realizes “I skin my knees.

    Read More

  • Compare And Contrast Billy Collins And E. B White

    778 Words  | 4 Pages

    This also proves the theme of man’s inner struggle as White is shown to be facing an identity crisis. Similarly, in “Forgetfulness”, Collins develops the story by describing how he is lost and has nowhere to go because everything he once remembered is “slipping away” (Collin 4). By this, Collins is alluding to death. This meaning that the act of him forgetting his memories foreshadows the fact that his death is near. To demonstrate this point, Collins uses diction that resembles his emotional state of distress as he uses words such as “floated”, “oblivion” and “forgotten”

    Read More

  • Research Paper On Billy Collins

    1439 Words  | 6 Pages

    Stylistically, Collins use of humor and irony, along with the common theme of death is what makes his poems stand out to readers by making a serious topic seem more lighthearted. However, his variety of themes is what ultimately makes him a noteworthy poet. In the poem Forgetfulness, Collins establishes his humorous tone through figurative language such as hyperbole, metaphor, and personification. The exaggeration in the poem is what creates Collins’ witty sense of humor.

    Read More

  • The House On Mango Street Choosing One's Identity

    418 Words  | 2 Pages

    She states, “I want to be like the waves on the sea, like the clouds in the wind, but I’m me. One day I’ll jump. Out of my skin. I’ll shake at the sky like a hundred violins.” (Cisneros 60-61).

    Read More

  • Analysis Of Where The Sidewalk Ends By Shell Silverstien

    447 Words  | 2 Pages

    The poem Where the Sidewalk Ends talks about although the journey may be hard, there are moments that are worth the struggle. In the poem, the author wrote "Let us leave this place where the smoke blows black and the dark street winds and bends. Past the pits where the asphalt flowers grow. We shall walk with a walk that is measured and slow, and watch where the chalk-white arrows go, To the place where the sidewalk ends."

    Read More

  • On Turning Ten By Billy Collins

    493 Words  | 2 Pages

    In Billy Collin’s Poem “On Turning Ten,” the speaker reflects on his past birthdays leading up to the present year. Collins uses literary techniques such as foreshadowing and imagery to convey the speaker’s solemn attitude by illustrating the maturity that he is beginning to show. Foreshadowing is used throughout the beginning and middle of the poem to give insight into the feelings and attitude the speaker has about his birthday. In the second stanza, the speaker reflects back to his earlier birthdays and how innocently blissful they were. He explains that “At four I was an Arabian wizard.

    Read More

  • On Turning Ten By Billy Collins Tone

    188 Words  | 1 Pages

    In the poem, “On Turning Ten”, Billy Collins uses tone to show the complexity of growing older. He views aging through a lens of hopelessness yet also with nostalgia. In the first stanza, Collins portrays his feelings of hopelessness by listing things he imagined himself as such as wizard and a soldier (Collins 13-16). This shows how before he was carefree and imaginative. In the next stanzas he uses words like “solemnly” and “sadness” (Collins 19 and 24).

    Read More

  • Eleven By Sandra Cisneros Essay

    531 Words  | 3 Pages

    The tone of the story is important in making the story sound like it is being to through the eyes of an eleven year old girl, such phrases like “pennies rattling in a band-aid box” and “my whole head hurts like when you drink milk too fast.” All these are certain phrases that would be used in an eleven year old's life, bandaids for the bumps and scrapes, and the milk that your parents would make you drink. That is the tone Eleven sets, a young girl telling us her humiliating story while she is still a child. Sandra Cisneros does an excellent job at using literary devices to characterize Rachel in “Eleven”. By using imagery, simile, and tone we can see that Rachel is a empathetic, bashful, wise, but still naive in her own ways.

    Read More

  • The Place Where The Sidewalk Ends By Shel Silverstein

    786 Words  | 4 Pages

    Have you ever wondered what it means to be a part of life? In the fiction book Jeremy FInk and The Meaning Of Life, a boy named Jeremy and his friend Lizzy go through a journey to find keys to open Jeremy’s dead dad’s box, which ends up containing a letter. In the fiction poem The Place Where The Sidewalk Ends by Shel Silverstein, the “sidewalk” is the journey of life, and people have to go through bad parts of the sidewalk to get to good parts of the sidewalk. Therefore, Mass and Silverstein use literary devices to suggest that life is about the journey, and the challenges people overcome.

    Read More

  • Comparison Of Billy Collins 'Hanging Fire And' On Turning Ten

    214 Words  | 1 Pages

    It is wholly recurrent to blindly skim through a detailed piece of literature and be unconscious to the likeness it shares with other pieces of literature. I am surely guilty of this ignorant practice, however. As I was reading “Hanging Fire” by Audre Lorde and “On Turning Ten” by Billy Collins, I didn’t truly perceive the connection right away. The obvious was already divulged in my mind; they’re both in the points of views of children. They, however, both have a mutual theme; growing up brings uncertainty and disappointment.

    Read More

  • Billy Collins Schoolsville Analysis

    742 Words  | 3 Pages

    He could imagine his deception of this town “nestled in a paper landscape,” (Collins 534). This image of the speaker shows the first sign of his delusional ideas of the people in his town. Collins create a connection between the speaker’s teacher teaching life and retired life in lines five and six of the poem. These connections are “ chalk dust flurrying down in winter, nights dark as a blackboard,” which compares images that the readers can picture.

    Read More

  • Juxtaposition In Eleven By Sandra Cisneros

    1054 Words  | 5 Pages

    “Eleven” Juxtaposition Analysis Many people do not like getting older and want to restore their youth. In the short story, “Eleven,” the main character, Rachel, struggles with growing up while she still feels like her younger self. Her younger self shows when her teacher does not believe her when she says a sweater is not hers, then makes her put the sweater on. In the short story, “Eleven,” author Sandra Cisneros uses juxtaposition to develop the theme of mental age versus physical age. The author, Sandra Cisneros, uses juxtaposition many times in the story.

    Read More

  • The History Teacher Billy Collins Analysis

    959 Words  | 4 Pages

    He tends to abruptly change his thought and tone, surprising the reader and drawing the individual in. Collins quickly shifts to a serious tone of regret when he states “They wish they could wake in the morning like you/and stand at the window examining the winter trees” (“The Afterlife” 35-36). His stark transition to a grave tone makes his point of his beliefs on life after death more poignant and makes it more understandable to the general public. The stanza makes the moral of the poem evident that “If one has no hope of eternal reward and no fear of damnation, regret and whimsical musing are fitting and proper attitudes” (Pool). Collins’s tone in both of his poems helps to get his moral across and display the underlying meaning of the poems.

    Read More

  • Loose Woman By Sandra Cisneros Analysis

    416 Words  | 2 Pages

    In almost each of her poem Cisneros shows her energetic, crazy personality. One main topic her poems and personality brings light to the topic “Feminism.” For many years, women have been working hard in order to gain equality with man. Through her poems Cisneros 's has put a light to the things that women fear of saying based on the world 's ideology of a woman. She shows that women aren 't just emotional creatures and can be as wild and sexual as a man.

    Read More

  • Analysis Of Eleven By Sandra Cisneros

    700 Words  | 3 Pages

    Sandra Cisneros’ short story “Eleven”, poem “My Wicked Wicked Ways”, and book The House on Mango Street have many similarities and differences in terms of style, tone, theme, character and setting. In the short story “Eleven”, Sandra Cisneros manages to convey a powerful message about growing up from the perspective of an eleven year old. The story starts out with Rachel, the protagonist, who is turning eleven today. It starts out with her at school while she's in math class.

    Read More

More about What Does Billy Collins Symbolize In On Turning Ten

Open Document