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A Work Of Artifice

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A Work Of Artifice
There are many people in today’s society who is bound by the limitations set upon them in their early childhood. The phrase “like father like son” portrays the image of what one is expected to be molded to become. Marge Piercy’s “A Work of Artifice” shows a gardener nurturing a bonsai tree to his desires. The gardener restrains the bonsai tree to grow to its full potential, becoming the eighty feet tall tree it could have been. The poem demonstrates the oppression brought upon people at an early age inevitably leading to an already decided fate. In “A Work of Artifice” the gardener cares for the tree grooming it as he sees fit. He sees the tree to be lucky, “ how lucky, little tree, to have a pot to grow in” (Piercy 15-16) but it’s this pot
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