Evaluating Poetic Metaphors

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Billy Collins' poem is a lyric poem because mainly it expresses highly personal emotions and feelings. Many lyric poems involve musical themes or tones, and in fact in Shakespeare's era the word "lyric" meant that the poem was accompanied by a musical instrument (a lyre). But while Collins' poem doesn't give off a musical idea or theme (unless the sound of a fork scratching across a granite table is music), it does use metaphor and achieves a dramatic impact.

The metaphor has two people, presumably married and in a love partnership who have divorced. (It is known that although un-married couples who have been together for a long time and break up are also involved essentially in a "divorce" of their partnership.) The metaphor of "two spoons" shows two people locked together, snuggling would be a good word, in a warm bed. "Tined" means prongs on a fork -- or it means pieces separated by a space, which forks are. So from a spoon (smooth and round) to a fork (sharp with separate prongs) is a very good metaphor for divorce. And on that granite table (which is a cold, hard image) there is nothing more than the forks and knives (knives could be the attorneys they hired to consummate their breakup).

Question #2

The Margaret Atwood poem could well be used as a monologue. It is story-telling in poetic form. There is an ongoing metaphor (the wild river that carries a person on a certain course through life) and the reader knows there is not really a raging river in the line, "the dangerous river of his own birth." The one, "on a landscape stranger than Uranus" brings to mind the poem / song, "Stranger in a strange land." The theme is greatly strengthened by the metaphor because everyone knows that rivers have currents, and when there is heavy rain or a storm of some kind the river's current becomes a dangerous dynamic that takes whatever is in the river exactly where it wants to. A person, or a log, or a boat may die in that out of control river and a young son apparently had an accident and hence he had to be "planted him in the country like a flag" (a cemetery).

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Question #3

How wholly unfair of a teacher to punish an immigrant child for not being sure the meanings of words and their pronunciation. The use of fruit is seemingly simplistic, but it carries a powerful message because the poet took his punishment to a creative end. By describing to the audience exactly how to peel the persimmon, how it smells, how to even "suck it" -- he has poetically placed his teacher in a place where pettiness lives. Making a child stand in a corner and hence being humiliated (people from other cultures are already the subject of bullying, and to add to that dilemma the teacher is cruel and evil) is a terrible way to help learners. But wait, Li-Young Lee abruptly takes the reader to a yard where he can become a real teacher -- by teaching her some of his cultural language. In time the teacher brings in a persimmon to class and the poet, who has been criticized for not knowing the difference between two words, does know that this fruit is not ready to eat.….....

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