A Song In The Front Yard Poem Analysis

When a poet chooses the right word or collection of words, the reader is carried away into the world they are trying to create. The use of figurative language and imagery are elements of literature that give poets the opportunity to open doorways in the minds of those reading their literary works. They paint the picture, bring back the smells, and give the quiet pages sound. Such is true in the poems “The Lanyard” by Billy Collins and “A Song in the Front Yard” by Gwendolyn Brooks. These poets allow the reader to feel and see the thoughts of the speakers through their descriptive verses. The speakers of these works are of different ages, one an adult and one a child. The common bond between the two are childhood. The speakers of the …show more content…
A simple red and white lanyard he constructed while in summer camp. The memory floods him as he notices the word “Lanyard” in the “L” section of a dictionary. Collins brings the reader into the poem by opening with the speaker moving about a blue room like a sluggish moving bullet: “The other day I was ricocheting slowly / off the blue walls of this room / moving as if underwater from typewriter to piano” (lines 1-3). There is a visualization of an unhurried man plundering through a room, possibly his library, but not really searching for a particular item. Then his thoughts turn back in time as he focuses in on the childhood memory of the …show more content…
According to the child in the poem, she is tired of the calm, boring life she is living in the front yard. She expresses her boredom with the perfection by saying, “A girl gets sick of a rose” (line 4). Her frustration with her sheltered existence and lack of freedom is apparent
Brooks uses the front yard as a representation of the protected life of the young girl while the back yard represents the lives of the people nearby. She uses imagery to illustrate the metaphor of the two yards for her readers. The speaker feels and wants the reader to feel as though “the grass is always greener on the other side,” even though Brooks never actually uses this figure of speech. Writers such as Collins and Brooks use imagery and figurative language to give their poems life and appeal to our senses. As the reader, our imaginations thrive through the words used by the poets and we depend on this to pull us into what we are reading. The reminiscing by the speaker of “The Lanyard” transports us back in time to summer camp by a lake where the lanyard was plaited, allowing us to peer into the feelings of his childhood. When reading “A Song in the Front Yard,” the reader yearns for a peek into that wild, exciting back yard that Brooks describes and is able to feel the frustration of the trapped child. Both Collins and Brooks,