In her poem, “Adolescence - II,” Rita Dove uses dark and unsettling words to lead the reader into her world of where she grew up, she uses mysterious imagery to show the more uncomfortable sides of teenage years, and describes a brutal scene as a window for the audience to look through. Ultimately, Dove wants the reader to understand the savage and agonizing parts of becoming a grown woman. Dove uses words that don’t sound “pretty” together, and in fact, most of the patterns that are usually found in poetry, are missing - and replaced with a type of discord. She specifically creates this dissonance to emphasize the dark sexual event. Dove writes, “then they come, the three seal men with eyes as round / As dinner plates and eyelashes like
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The finest example of this is near the middle of the poem where Dove says, “[...] one leans against the door. / “Can you feel it yet?” they whisper. / I don't know what to say, again. They chuckle,” (Dove). In other words, the author is writing a conversation as if the audience is in the dark, they can hear what is going on, but they can not understand what is exactly happening. Dove creates tension between the characters in the poem with her use of syntactic breaking of dialogue this way, leaving the reader almost literally in the dark for the event taking place - and thus showing the blindness anyone has with the sexual violence experienced during a young girl's …show more content…
By combining the previous rhetorical devices, and somber vocabulary, the author manages to lay out a dangerous story for the audience. Dove writes, “I clutch at the ragged holes / They leave behind, here at the edge of darkness. / Night rests like a ball of fur on my tongue,” (Dove.) Writing the end of the poem, Dove takes careful consideration in writing actions taken by the character of the poem. She wants to leave the end unsettling and cryptic to show the feelings reflected in the woman she writes about. The author demonstrates the disorder and violence of the poem clearly with her use of words that have negative connotations. For instance, words such as “ragged,” “edge,” and “darkness” have obvious sinister overtones connected to them, but also the imagery of “ragged holes,” and “fur on my tongue” are meant to entice the reader to make knee-jerk reactions, similar to fingernails on a
The finest example of this is near the middle of the poem where Dove says, “[...] one leans against the door. / “Can you feel it yet?” they whisper. / I don't know what to say, again. They chuckle,” (Dove). In other words, the author is writing a conversation as if the audience is in the dark, they can hear what is going on, but they can not understand what is exactly happening. Dove creates tension between the characters in the poem with her use of syntactic breaking of dialogue this way, leaving the reader almost literally in the dark for the event taking place - and thus showing the blindness anyone has with the sexual violence experienced during a young girl's …show more content…
By combining the previous rhetorical devices, and somber vocabulary, the author manages to lay out a dangerous story for the audience. Dove writes, “I clutch at the ragged holes / They leave behind, here at the edge of darkness. / Night rests like a ball of fur on my tongue,” (Dove.) Writing the end of the poem, Dove takes careful consideration in writing actions taken by the character of the poem. She wants to leave the end unsettling and cryptic to show the feelings reflected in the woman she writes about. The author demonstrates the disorder and violence of the poem clearly with her use of words that have negative connotations. For instance, words such as “ragged,” “edge,” and “darkness” have obvious sinister overtones connected to them, but also the imagery of “ragged holes,” and “fur on my tongue” are meant to entice the reader to make knee-jerk reactions, similar to fingernails on a