What Does Billy Collins Symbolize In On Turning Ten

In the poem “On turning Ten '' by Billy Collins and in the short story “ Marigolds” written by Eugenia W. Collier, both authors talk about how life has changed and the end of their childhood based on situations of their past life. In the poem and the short story, both authors explore the impact of losing innocence by describing their memory and discovering the truth. Both authors show how emotional it was to face the truth and reality based on his and her memories. In “Marigolds”, she starts losing her innocence when she “Never heard a man cry before” (Collier 42) and how she discovered Miss Lottie wasn’t frustrated with the situation at the end but was upset. In “On Turning Ten” he realizes “I skin my knees.

This also proves the theme of man’s inner struggle as White is shown to be facing an identity crisis. Similarly, in “Forgetfulness”, Collins develops the story by describing how he is lost and has nowhere to go because everything he once remembered is “slipping away” (Collin 4). By this, Collins is alluding to death. This meaning that the act of him forgetting his memories foreshadows the fact that his death is near. To demonstrate this point, Collins uses diction that resembles his emotional state of distress as he uses words such as “floated”, “oblivion” and “forgotten”

Stylistically, Collins use of humor and irony, along with the common theme of death is what makes his poems stand out to readers by making a serious topic seem more lighthearted. However, his variety of themes is what ultimately makes him a noteworthy poet. In the poem Forgetfulness, Collins establishes his humorous tone through figurative language such as hyperbole, metaphor, and personification. The exaggeration in the poem is what creates Collins’ witty sense of humor.

She states, “I want to be like the waves on the sea, like the clouds in the wind, but I’m me. One day I’ll jump. Out of my skin. I’ll shake at the sky like a hundred violins.” (Cisneros 60-61).

The poem Where the Sidewalk Ends talks about although the journey may be hard, there are moments that are worth the struggle. In the poem, the author wrote "Let us leave this place where the smoke blows black and the dark street winds and bends. Past the pits where the asphalt flowers grow. We shall walk with a walk that is measured and slow, and watch where the chalk-white arrows go, To the place where the sidewalk ends."

In Billy Collin’s Poem “On Turning Ten,” the speaker reflects on his past birthdays leading up to the present year. Collins uses literary techniques such as foreshadowing and imagery to convey the speaker’s solemn attitude by illustrating the maturity that he is beginning to show. Foreshadowing is used throughout the beginning and middle of the poem to give insight into the feelings and attitude the speaker has about his birthday. In the second stanza, the speaker reflects back to his earlier birthdays and how innocently blissful they were. He explains that “At four I was an Arabian wizard.

In the poem, “On Turning Ten”, Billy Collins uses tone to show the complexity of growing older. He views aging through a lens of hopelessness yet also with nostalgia. In the first stanza, Collins portrays his feelings of hopelessness by listing things he imagined himself as such as wizard and a soldier (Collins 13-16). This shows how before he was carefree and imaginative. In the next stanzas he uses words like “solemnly” and “sadness” (Collins 19 and 24).

The tone of the story is important in making the story sound like it is being to through the eyes of an eleven year old girl, such phrases like “pennies rattling in a band-aid box” and “my whole head hurts like when you drink milk too fast.” All these are certain phrases that would be used in an eleven year old's life, bandaids for the bumps and scrapes, and the milk that your parents would make you drink. That is the tone Eleven sets, a young girl telling us her humiliating story while she is still a child. Sandra Cisneros does an excellent job at using literary devices to characterize Rachel in “Eleven”. By using imagery, simile, and tone we can see that Rachel is a empathetic, bashful, wise, but still naive in her own ways.

Have you ever wondered what it means to be a part of life? In the fiction book Jeremy FInk and The Meaning Of Life, a boy named Jeremy and his friend Lizzy go through a journey to find keys to open Jeremy’s dead dad’s box, which ends up containing a letter. In the fiction poem The Place Where The Sidewalk Ends by Shel Silverstein, the “sidewalk” is the journey of life, and people have to go through bad parts of the sidewalk to get to good parts of the sidewalk. Therefore, Mass and Silverstein use literary devices to suggest that life is about the journey, and the challenges people overcome.

It is wholly recurrent to blindly skim through a detailed piece of literature and be unconscious to the likeness it shares with other pieces of literature. I am surely guilty of this ignorant practice, however. As I was reading “Hanging Fire” by Audre Lorde and “On Turning Ten” by Billy Collins, I didn’t truly perceive the connection right away. The obvious was already divulged in my mind; they’re both in the points of views of children. They, however, both have a mutual theme; growing up brings uncertainty and disappointment.

He could imagine his deception of this town “nestled in a paper landscape,” (Collins 534). This image of the speaker shows the first sign of his delusional ideas of the people in his town. Collins create a connection between the speaker’s teacher teaching life and retired life in lines five and six of the poem. These connections are “ chalk dust flurrying down in winter, nights dark as a blackboard,” which compares images that the readers can picture.

“Eleven” Juxtaposition Analysis Many people do not like getting older and want to restore their youth. In the short story, “Eleven,” the main character, Rachel, struggles with growing up while she still feels like her younger self. Her younger self shows when her teacher does not believe her when she says a sweater is not hers, then makes her put the sweater on. In the short story, “Eleven,” author Sandra Cisneros uses juxtaposition to develop the theme of mental age versus physical age. The author, Sandra Cisneros, uses juxtaposition many times in the story.

He tends to abruptly change his thought and tone, surprising the reader and drawing the individual in. Collins quickly shifts to a serious tone of regret when he states “They wish they could wake in the morning like you/and stand at the window examining the winter trees” (“The Afterlife” 35-36). His stark transition to a grave tone makes his point of his beliefs on life after death more poignant and makes it more understandable to the general public. The stanza makes the moral of the poem evident that “If one has no hope of eternal reward and no fear of damnation, regret and whimsical musing are fitting and proper attitudes” (Pool). Collins’s tone in both of his poems helps to get his moral across and display the underlying meaning of the poems.

In almost each of her poem Cisneros shows her energetic, crazy personality. One main topic her poems and personality brings light to the topic “Feminism.” For many years, women have been working hard in order to gain equality with man. Through her poems Cisneros 's has put a light to the things that women fear of saying based on the world 's ideology of a woman. She shows that women aren 't just emotional creatures and can be as wild and sexual as a man.

Sandra Cisneros’ short story “Eleven”, poem “My Wicked Wicked Ways”, and book The House on Mango Street have many similarities and differences in terms of style, tone, theme, character and setting. In the short story “Eleven”, Sandra Cisneros manages to convey a powerful message about growing up from the perspective of an eleven year old. The story starts out with Rachel, the protagonist, who is turning eleven today. It starts out with her at school while she's in math class.