Poem Analysis: The Race By Sharon Old

In her poem, "The Race", author Sharon Old's conveys meaning to her audience and poem through the use of imagery, parallelism, and tension, which complement the structure of her poem and add emotion that appeals to her audience.
In order to convey meaning to her poem, Old's utilizes imagery to allow the reader to locate themselves in the poem. Her vivid and descriptive diction add credibility to her imagery. For instance, she writes, "The jet was full, and people's hair was shining, they were smiling, the interior of the plane was filled with a mist of gold endorphin light...". In this part of her poem, Old describes when the women, rushing to see her ill father, finally steps foot into the plane. She describes what the women saw aboard the plane. Her choice in diction here complements her use of imagery as she chose descriptive phrases such as "people's hair was shining", "smiling", and "gold endorphin light". With such imagery, the audience is able to feel the same relief the women felt as she finally boarded the plane and kept an optimistic mind now that she was headed to her destination. Such meaning and emotion would appeal more to an audience who had experienced a
Through her use of imagery, the reader is able to depict and create images of the women rushing through the airport and how she felt and what she saw when she finally arrived to the plane. Her parallelism added meaning to her poem when she repeated action words such as “ran” because this allowed the readers to convey the frantic state of mind the women was in to desperately catch the plane to see her father. Finally use of tension allowed her reader to react to the climax of the situation. Her audience felt the same relief the women felt when she boarded the plane and was finally on her