Hazel Tells Laverne Analysis

Poetry is an unusual way of telling a story. It can be used to express feeling or some type of moral or lesson. “Hazel tells Laverne”, by Katharyn Machan tells a unique story filled with nonfiction and fun. To combat this story Edwin Arlington Robinson wrote a more serious story based off of a man living in his town. This poem, “Richard Cory” sheds light on how the views of others towards a person can be so far from the truth. Both of these poems are very different but strangely correlate in a few ways. These two poems are filled with irony, exaggeration and fallacies that make them similar yet so different. “Hazel tells Laverne” is a funny poem about a woman who is in a strange situation with a frog. Hazel, a janitor cleaning out the ladies room at the Howard Johnson hotel comes in contact with a talking frog. This frog tells her that if she kisses him she will become a princess. Hazel scoffs at the fact she could become a princess and mockingly jokes about it as she tells her tale. She says he started talking about a ball and requested that she kiss him, “kiss me just kiss me once on the nose well i screams”. (p. 596). She finally flushed the “little green pervert” (p.596) down the toilet and once again laughs at the fact someone would think she could be a princess. Ironically, Hazel was not surprised at the talking frog. This poem is …show more content…
Throughout the first poem Hazel does not become shocked by the frog and only the fact that she could be a princess. In the second poem the townspeople thought Richard Cory had everything but ironically he was so unhappy he took his own life. The third person speaker in this poem also exaggerated about his characteristics so much that it was a false representation of Richard Cory. Hazel also exaggerates when she tells the reader about her experience with the frog when her mouth dropped all the way to the floor and she was dealing with a little green