The poem that I chose to read was the poem "Fifth Grade Autobiography" by Rita Dove, on page 13. I read this poem on the page that Dr.D gave us called How To Read a Poem, and it did help me understand the poem better, than when I read it the first time. On the page that Dr.D gave us, it gave us techniques on how to read a poem, and what to notice in the poem to make you understand the poem better. I did like this method of reading poems and will probably do this for every other poem I read.
One technique I saw in the first stanza was the use of consonance with the letter F and S. In the first line it says "I was four in this photograph fishing," and in the fifth and sixth line it says, "sits squared on his head so the raccoon tail flounces down the back of his sailor suit." I think the effect that this consonance gives is the words that have a repetition in certain letters are the things that are important to the author in the poem. The author wants us to know that she was four and the poem is about a picture of her fishing. Then she describes her brothers hat and what he was wearing. She might of used consonance here to describe what her brother was wearing. This was a somewhat easy poem to understand, but the page How to Read a Poem really helped me.
Good interpretation of Dove's use of consonance! Interpreting it to the perspective of the author is an interesting way to look at it.
ReplyDeleteMallory, good job noticing the sound patterns here. But you spend a lot of this post introducing and relatively little of it actually analyzing. When you do draw conclusions about the effect of the author's choices, you are basically just saying that they are what the author was talking about, which makes them not seem like techniques at all but instead just what she happened to write about. I want to discourage this kind of thinking about poems. Poets make very deliberate choices about the words and sounds and types of images to use, and you should look hard to try to see them.
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