Analysis Of The Planned Child By Sharon Olds

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Though “Life and landscape” focuses on the dark side of her fathers and “The planned child” takes a more aggressive dive into how she feels about her mother, both poems employ violent imagery to convey the relationship problems she has with her parents at home.

A poets drive is always a mystery and a story in itself. Many poets throughout the world use many ways to express there emotions and this is exactly what Sharon Olds has done here with the poem “Life and landscape”. Olds uses a very specific way to express her emotions so that that everyone reading can get a first person view of what exactly is happening, this is called violent Imagery. Violent imagery is a source Olds uses in many of her poems to catch the attention of the reader
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Its no surprise here that from her initial poem “The still Landscape” to this one that she has many underlying issues with her parents on different levels. A lot of readers may be able to relate to her expressions and issues with her parents and again being she is an expository writer her way of bringing the reader into her world is very descriptive. “I hated the fact that they had planned me, she had taken a cardboard out of his shirt from the laundry as if sliding the backbone up out of his body (Olds, Sharon).” The expression that starts of the poem is pure animosity towards her mother for planning her birth. Olds feels that her birth should have been spontaneous and from love and inspiration or more of a natural occurrence not a planned “check in the box” child. She expresses how unhappy and how she disagrees with this method. “I would have liked to have been conceived in heat, in haste, by mistake, in love, in sex, not on cardboard (Olds, Sharon).” The animosity towards her mother is brought on by her misunderstanding of what was possibly gong on in her parents life at this time. Feeling this way she had wished possibly that her parents should have conceived her because they were so madly involve instead of thew writing of her ovulation cycle on a piece of cardboard on the wall. “but then you were pouring the wine red as the gritty clay of this earth, or the blood grainy with tiny clots that rides us into this life and you said you could tell I had been a child who was wanted (Olds, Sharon).” Later in the poem she is reminded by her friend that she was a wanted child and not just a helpless mistake from the writing on the cardboard. The animosity towards her mother is still very much alive but the comfort that she was wanted made the fat that she was planned less painful in olds eyes. In both

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