Native Speaker

others stand up for one’s personal interest, one must also defend others. Ogden’s poem was written in 1951, in response to a quote by Martin Niemoller, “First they came… No one left to speak out for me.” To help aid his ideal, Ogden creates a nameless speaker who is focused on self-preservation at the expense of other’s, which leads to his ultimate demise. To foreshadow the speaker’s willingness to turn a blind eye…

natural which is infinite” (1095) the voice goes on to talk of its spiritual awakening, and how he is experiencing life almost as a new person expressed in the line “i who have died am alive again today” (1095), the whole poem is a reflection of the speakers…

THE RAINES LAW ROOM, 1:30 AM. There is a light rain settling upon the city, Sebastien is absent. “Love’s an idea, not a feeling. Don’t be so foolish, Ralph.” A drunk and miserable Corinthian spouts, a glass sitting loosely in her right and a cigarette clutched tight between her left hand fingers. “We feel some sort of fictitious… admiration, whereas our mind translates this into some over idealized bullshit…” She pauses. “I-I don’t know where I was going with this.” Ralph sighs, shaking his…

loud. The poem had a strong hook as I imagined the student “with blue hair and a tongued stud…” (1). I automatically assumed the speaker was a rebellious teenager who is privileged. I chuckled slightly when the author mentioned the words “full of shit” (5). I am not used to poets expressing themselves with swear words. I raised my eyebrows curiously when the speaker mentioned his father gushed “not blood but money…” (14). In addition, I rested my neck on my left hand to carefully understand…

Loneliness slowly attacks the speaker at the end of stanza six which the speaker contrasts a bright and songless day which may represent optimism, but the difficulty to move on. Atwood uses a lot of words that are related to fire. As suggested in the previous paragraphs, the fire might be a destructive force…

At the beginning of the poem “Those Winter Sundays” by Robert Hayden, the speaker introduces cold and uncomfortable images to relay the tone of the poem: Regret for not respecting his father. Hayden uses “blueback cold” in the second line, presenting a tone of sadness and loneliness throughout the house that the speaker and his family like in. The word “blueblack” is such an uncommon word that it carries an extremely negative feeling, exemplifying the cold feeling of distance throughout the…

love that exists within each past and direct experience. For instance, in Lee’s poem, the speaker initiates his father’s tenderness and love in removing the frightful “splinter” without integrating more pain into his palm and ending his last line with his beloved father. Thus, emotions aren’t revealed in their…

a strong run followed by a smoother one. 2. It is strange that this poem addresses a “you”? Is this “you” the audience? Or, do you think the speaker’s audience is wider? If the audience is wider, who is the audience or reader? - I think that the speaker is referring to all of us in general. The audience is every person who has achieved something gigantic in his life. The feeling that he has earned that prize is the acknowledgement that they get. I think that is better to die and leave ours…

Is the use of a hand worth the loss of a life? In the poem “Out, Out--” by Robert Frost the speaker tells of a boy who uses a saw to cut stove length sticks of wood for a living. The boy ran his hand into a saw and instead of taking precautions to save his life he demanded that his hand be saved. As a result of these demands the boy not only loses his hand but also dies. Frost uses key imagery, foreshadowing, diction, and irony, to show that in certain circumstances holding onto something can…

“Never Shall I Forget,” by Elie Wiesel is a poem of a passage in Night, that deals with the Holocaust which had occurred during the time of World War 2. The Holocaust is a very delicate matter and Elie Wiesel handles it in a way where he describes and shows the horrors committed by the Nazi’s of Germany. This poem, “Never Shall I Forget,” is written in the first person in which it illustrates the horrible events and tragic effects of the concentration camps where Elie Wiesel and his family were…