Young, So Gifted So Old: Term Paper

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As with Lawrence's young protagonist, the burden of excellence becomes too great, and the girl feels she cannot provide for her family -- intellectually, rather than financially. The metaphor of the boy's rocking horse, endlessly rocking back and forth to churn out the names of winners in maddening repetition becomes transformed, in "Suicide Note," into another kind of repetitive metaphor, that of failed flight. The boy, who should have rode on a real horse into his future becomes locked in childhood, madness, and misery, trapped by the adult-sized needs of his family, and the girl, who should have sailed confidently into adulthood dies a failed attempt at flying. The girl is endlessly flapping her invisible wings to take flight but sinks to her death as she jumps to her demise, trying and failing to fly for real. The anonymous speaker of the poem is an adolescent, unlike Lawrence's child, and the tone and more personal style of poem as it is told in a first-person's adolescent voice, lacks the third-person omniscient humor and larger perspective of the Lawrence piece. The plot is simpler, more realistic than fantastic, but no less poignant.

The Cuban Swimmer" by Milcha Sanchez-Scott also structured around a metaphorical context. It is a drama about a young woman named Margarita swimming from Cuba to the United States. Like Lawrence's short story, it is a heightened metaphor and narrative, used to depict a larger truth. The girl's love of displaying her physical gifts becomes an attempt to free her spirit from the oppression of her homeland and the expectations that lie behind her in Cuba. The adolescent girl initially sees her effort in romantic, poetic colors, just as Lawrence's child only dreams of the beauty of horses, before his gift becomes polluted with the financial demands of his parents.

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She will "dive into the Milky Way," says Margarita.

But Margarita's family has practical needs that are sympathetic, initially, but unknown to the girl, of gaining fame and fortune.

More than the other protagonists, the swimming girl brims with confidence, but eventually, when she sees how her desire to swim has been corrupted she becomes disenchanted with her efforts. Although the piece is a drama, and thus offers a more panoramic societal view than "Suicide Note," it is less balanced in its depiction of the other characters than the Lawrence short story, and Margarita's voice emerges as the strongest of all of the characters of the play.

All three works stress that no matter how great the child's gifts or how needy the parents, a child still needs to be a child, and to have a sense of dependence and security on older people. The fantastic sense of the childlike rocking horse, the mournful and elegiac way that the young suicidal girl hates herself, even the joy of the young Cuban swimmer contrasts with the misunderstanding and corruption of the older generation. Even when the older generation is not seen, as in "Suicide Note," or has some sympathetic concerns of its own, as in "The Rocking Horse Winner" and "The Cuban Swimmer," these concerns do not justify the death of childhood in the life of a….....

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