Shifts in Diction, Li-Young Lee Term Paper

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For example, the word "ring" connotes a wedding ring and it also refers more directly to the "ring of boots" at her feet. The word "lifted" also has a double meaning, one literal and one metaphorical. The mother remembers literally lifting her baby boy in the bathtub, but she contemplates how he is being "lifted" or stolen by his fiance. Her baby boy is leaving her. The word "bedded" also connotes two different things, suggesting both sex but also finality as she describes the feeling wedding ring being permanently em-bedded on a person's finger.

6. The first stanza of Agha Shahid Ali's poem "Postcard from Kashmir" is filled with hope and optimism, delivered mainly by the word "neat." Written from a youthful perspective, the word "neat" is often used as slang like the word "cool" is. Moreover, the word "neat" is used to described his humble yet poor home. The narrator notes also "this is home," which also affords hope and optimism. However, the tone of the poem shifts dramatically in the second and third stanzas, when the narrator realizes that his beloved Kashmir is changing while it becomes modernized.

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It will no longer be peaceful and neat but rather "a giant negative" of both black and white, positive and negative, indigenous and colonial experiences.

7. When Elena Mora opens her self-titled poem with the words "My Spanish isn't enough," she imparts the fundamental feeling of language barrier and cultural divide in the United States. Her Spanish isn't enough to earn their respect for her, but it also isn't enough for her to communicate with them on a fundamental level. Because her children attend American public schools, they are growing up with their first language being English, not Spanish. Her tone is melancholic throughout the poem as she reminisces about her children growing up in Mexico when they all spoke the same mother tongue.

8. In the first line of her poem, Kelly Cherry's narrator calls the father a "crazy old man." Alzheimer's disease has in fact made him seem crazy. The narrator has such low regard for her father due to his disease that she assumes he only "pretends to read" a book. Yet even if he is pretending, his "old white-haired" wife….....

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"Shifts In Diction Li-Young Lee" (2008, February 26) Retrieved June 4, 2026, from
https://www.aceyourpaper.com/essays/shifts-diction-li-young-lee-31906

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"Shifts In Diction Li-Young Lee", 26 February 2008, Accessed.4 June. 2026,
https://www.aceyourpaper.com/essays/shifts-diction-li-young-lee-31906
   

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