Can you identify imagery, connotations, and figurative language in these poems?
In this lesson you read "Mending Wall" closely, analyzing how Robert Frost explores the ordinary experience of sharing a chore with a neighbor. Hopefully, you observed how the poem's speaker uses words to help you go beyond the simple chore to think about some bigger ideas that the chore could represent.
Try applying that same process to some poems in the anthology Poetry Speaks Who I Am. After reading each poem, identify the experience the poet relates. Then answer the question about the poet's word choices and how they help produce the poem's meaning.
"Caroline" appears on page 10 in the anthology. Its author, Allison Joseph, uses imagery to describe a girl who stood out from her classmates.
Question
What's happening in this poem? What does the imagery in phrases like "her stringy hair, / her flat, pallid face" suggest about how the other students felt about the girl?
The speaker recalls how she and classmates both bullied and protected the only white girl in her class. They pitied her because she was not like them. They thought she was weak. Looking back, the speaker wonders at how she and her classmates could hold such different views of the girl—as someone to mock and as someone who belonged to her group.
Brad Sachs's "A Boy in the Bed in the Dark," on page 67, describes a memory that haunts a child who accidentally hurt his brother.
Question
What's happening in this poem? What does the speaker's figurative language in phrases like "gruesomely compressed" and "milky movie" convey about how he feels as he looks back at this experience?
The word choices suggest that the past event is just as nightmarish when the speaker remembers it as it was when it happened. The passing of time hasn't made the memory less upsetting.
Question
On page 103, Bill Zavatsky's poem "Baseball" describes a suspenseful moment in a boy's life. Reread the stanza that starts "The ball kept climbing." How does the imagery in this stanza help build suspense?
The poem tells about a young baseball player who has to catch a high ball but fears he won't. Years later, he remembers being astonished that he did catch it. In the stanza, the image of the ball going up, up, up and seeming to defy gravity captures how impossibly high it appeared to the boy. You can see why he thinks he "won't catch this one now."
In "How I Discovered Poetry" on page 107, Marilyn Nelson describes a very significant experience for a young girl whose teacher forces her to read a poem aloud. The girl falls in love with poetry when she hears her teacher read. The teacher notices and forces the girl to read an embarrassing poem out loud. The racist language and themes in the poem shame the speaker and her classmates into silence.
Question
Which words and phrases in this poem have connotations that help you understand what the speaker first felt about poetry? What about after her teacher insists, while smiling "harder and harder," that the speaker read a particular poem?
Phrases like "soul-kissing," and "the way the words / filled my mouth" have strong, positive connotations that suggest the speaker was surprised by the beauty of poetry. Even after she is forced to read a poem that mocks black people, the speaker and her classmates are "awed by the power of words." Awe is a word with a strong connotation. It shows that the whole class understood that language can be both inspiring and devastating.
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