Dusting by julia alvarez analysis

Poetry Essay/ The Topic--Explain How The Figurative Language In Two Poems Contributes To Their Overall Meaning Or Impact.

Write an essay (approx. 700-1000 words) on one of the given topics. To support your ideas, provide plenty of specific evidence, including correctly introduced and documented quotations. Use any two of these four poems. Read the following poems from Good Poems for Hard Times (hint: pay particular attention to issues of memory and the ways the poems treat the daily and quotidian; the small moments and the “ordinary”:o Lisel Mueller, “Things” p. 104o Maria Mazziotti Gillan, After School on Ordinary Days” p. 135o Noel Coward, “Nothing is Lost” p. 208o Patricia Hampl, "This is How Memory Works" p. 236•

Your essay should include the following:

An intro paragraph with a clear and arguable thesis statement
Limited summary throughout your paper and a focus on analysis instead
A quote in each body paragraph with a citation
See sample Essay below:
Former EH 102 Class

Dr. Kathryn Locey

EH 102

22 April 2010

Signatures and Apples: Children Claiming Identity

A young girl and boy take their first steps toward forging their identities. In Julia Alvarez’s “Dusting,” a girl decides that she wants to be more than a diligent housekeeper like her mother. In Alberto Rios’s “In Second Grade Miss Lee I Promised Never to Forget You and I Never Did,” a boy catches his first glimpse of romantic love by listening to his unconventional teacher. Both of these children learn important lessons about life from significant adults. And both Alvarez and Rios use strong figurative language to convey their feelings about these important formational moments from childhood.

Alvarez uses personification and hyperbole to describe the mother’s cleaning. The speaker saw “[m]y name was swallowed in the towel . . .” (line 13), expressing the way her mom wiped away her name with the dust-cloth. This example of personification reveals how the speaker feels threatened with a loss of significance. Her mom cleaning and wiping away her name seems to take away the unique individual she is. The towel being capable of swallowing makes it seem hungry to devour her identity. Another description involves hyperbole: “[T]he pine grew luminous” (16) exaggerates the way the furniture shines after being dusted. It also exaggerates the mother’s extent of cleaning. Cleaning becomes the mother’s identity in the poem. As she wipes away her daughter’s attempts to use dust in a creative way, she is staying true to who she is. The mother has accepted that her role of simply contributing to the beauty of the pine furniture is the proper one.

Simile is used to represent the development of the child’s identity. As the girl plays in the dust “[p]racticing signatures like scales” (5), she is expressing her growth as an individual. Her signing her name in the dust gives her a separation from what she views her mother to stand for, which is cleaning and no fun. By writing her name in the dust, the girl is showing a playful side that is the opposite of what her mother shows, thus developing her own identity. And the practicing “like scales” gives foresight into her potential future as a literary artistbecause a musician must practice scales before she can play more difficult compositions.

Rios also uses figurative language when he describes Miss Lee as an influential person in the speaker’s life. She had a positive influence that the young school boy has never forgotten. To this day he still remembers her looking not like a typical teacher but “like a real movie star” (22). This simile suggests the glamour Miss Lee introduced into his second-grade life. He also uses the metonymy “if she would have just combed herself more” (23) to explain that she was always a little wild, not as conventional as the other grown-up women he observed.Furthermore, this reference to her “uncombed” nature admits that, at some level, he recognized that she was not quite appropriate.

Still, the word apples is repeated to emphasize the teacher’s strong influence on the boy’s life. The apples bring in the idea of love as romantic by alluding to the Garden of Eden and Adam and Eve as the first couple. They also suggest forbidden knowledge—the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. When Miss Lee tells the story of the French lovers, which he is too young to even understand, the young boy develops a passionate love for her that continues throughout his life. He states, “I would keep apples / [f]or you” (24-25), meaning that he will never forget the type of love she introduced into his life, and he will cherish the time he had with her in class. He makes an allusion to the tradition of students bringing an apple to the teacher, but these apples he keeps are not literal: they representhis profound gratitude to her for opening up his world.

Just as the dusting mother and the flamboyant Miss Lee affected the children in their charge, these two poems affect their readers on more than a literal level. The poems appeal to us not only through depicting memorable events in the lives of their speakers but by describing these events through figurative language. Personification, hyperbole, simile, metonymy and allusion help us to empathize with a young girl’s decision to claim her identity and a young boy’s awakening into romantic possibility.

Works Cited

Alvarez, Julia. “Dusting.” Madden 262.

Madden, Frank, ed. Exploring Literature. 4th ed. New York: Pearson-Longman, 2009. Print.

Rios, Alberto. “In Second Grade Miss Lee I Promised Never to Forget You and I Never Did.”

​Madden 512-13.

"Read the following poems from

Good Poems for Hard Times by Garrison Keillor

(Hint: pay particular attention to issues of memory and the ways the poems treat the daily and quotidian; the small moments and the “ordinary”:

Lisel Mueller, “Things” p. 104

Maria Mazziotti Gillan, After School on Ordinary Days” p. 135

Noel Coward, “Nothing is Lost” p. 208

Patricia Hampl, "This is How Memory Works" p. 236"

Things

By Lisel Mueller

What happened is, we grew lonely

Living among the things,

So we gave the clock a face,

The chair a back, the table four stout legs

which will never suffer fatigue.

We fitted our shoes with tongues

As smooth as our own

And hung tongues inside bells

So we could listen

To their emotional language,

and because we loved graceful profiles

the pitcher received a lip,

the bottle a long, slender neck.

Even what was beyond us was recast in our image,

we gave the country a heart, the storm an eye,

the cave a mouth

so we could pass into safety.

After School on Ordinary Days

By Maria Mazziotto Gillan

After school on ordinary days we listened

to The Shadow and The Lone Ranger

as we gathered around the tabletop radio

that was always kept on the china cabinet

built into the wall in that tenement kitchen,

a china cabinet that held no china, except

thick and white and utilitarian,

cups and saucers, poor people’s cups

from the 5 & 10 cent store.

My mother was always home

from Ferraro’s Coat factory

by the time we walked in the door

after school on ordinary days,

and she’d give us milk with Bosco in it

and cookies she’d made that weekend.

The three of us would crowd around the radio,

listening to the voices that brought a wider world

into our Paterson apartment. Later we’d have supper at the kitchen table,

the house loud with our arguments

and laughter. After suffer on ordinary days, our homework finished, we’d play

monopoly or gin rummy, the kitchen

warmed by the huge coal stove, the wind

outside rattling the loose old windows,

we inside, tucked in, warm and together,

on ordinary days that we didn’t know

until we looked back across a distance

of forty years would glow and shimmer

in memory’s flickering light.

Nothing Is Lost

By Noel Coward

Deep in our sub-conscious, we are told

lie all our memories, lie all the notes

Of all the music we have ever heard

And all the phrases those we loved have spoken,

Sorrows and losses time has since consoled,

Family jokes, out-moded anecdotes

Each sentimental souvenir and token

Everything seen, experienced, each word

Addressed to us in infancy, before

Before we could even know or understand

The implications of our wonderland.

There they all are, the legendary lies

The birthday treats, the sights, the sounds, the tears

Forgotten debris of forgotten years

Waiting to be recalled, waiting to rise

Before our world dissolves before our eyes

Waiting for some small, intimate reminder,

A word, a tune, a known familiar scent

An echo from the past when, innocent

We looked upon the present with delight

And never knew the loneliness of night.

Things Is How Memory Works

By Patricia Hampl

You are stepping off a train.

A wet blank night, the smell of cinders.

A gust of steam from the engine swirls

Around the hem of your topcoat, around

The hand that, a moment ago, slicked back

The hair and then put on the fedora

In front of the mirror with the beveled

Edges in the cherrywood compartment.

The girl standing on the platform

in the Forties dress

has curled her hair, she has

nylon stockings___no, silk stockings still.

Her shoulders are touchingly military,

Squared by those shoulder pads

and sweet faith in the Allies.

She is waiting for you.

She can be wearing a hat, if you like.

"Read the following poems from

Good Poems for Hard Times

by Garrison Keillor

(

Hint

: pay particular attention to issues of memory and the ways the poems treat

the daily and quotidian;

the small moments and the “ordinary”:

Lisel Mueller, “Things” p. 104

Maria Mazziotti Gillan, After School on Ordinary Days” p. 135

Noel Coward, “Nothing is Lost” p. 208

Patricia Hampl, "This is How Memory Works" p. 236"

Things

By Lisel Mueller

What happened is, we grew lonely

Living among the things,

So we gave the clo

ck a face,

The chair a back, the table four stout legs

which will never suffer fatigue.

We fitted our shoes with tongues

As smooth as our own

And hung tongues inside bells

So we could listen

To their emotional language,

and because we loved graceful

profiles

the pitcher received a lip,

the bottle a long, slender neck.

Even what was beyond us was recast in our image,

we gave the country a heart, the storm an eye,

the cave a mouth

so we could pass into safety.

After School on Ordinary Days