In the narrative poem “The Race” by Sharon Olds, she describes a woman’s journey at an airport as she tries to see her dying father. The author begins the story with an anxious and breathless tone, and then suddenly changes to a more calm and relieved tone. Her utilization of tone shifts, foreshadowing, repetition, and imagery, greatly conveys her hectic journey. Olds begins the poem with an anxious tone as she discovers that her flight was canceled and shifts over to a breathless tone as she tries to make another flight in seven minutes. As she was in a rush to make it to the second flight, she “jumped off that bus with… bags I had thrown everything into in five minutes, and ran…” proving that she was anxious since the very beginning. She
