poem at thirty nine essay

The poem does not rhyme but the poet has used repetition to slow the poem down and make the reader feel the heaviness of heart that the poet feels. The poet uses similes and metaphors throughout the poem for example when he says ‘I have learned to wear many faces like dresses’ implying different expressions for different occasions. The poet has used a very strong metaphor when he writes that his laugh in the mirror is ‘like a snakes bare fangs’. A snake is commonly used in mythology and fairy tales to describe evil, insincerity and dishonesty. This suggests that when he laughs you see his teeth and smile but his intentions are also insincere and dishonest. The poet Gabriel Okara uses this poem to convey his feelings about the loss of traditional African culture against western influences. The overall theme of this poem is about happier times gone past and hopes for a happy ending, for which the writer longs for, as in a fairy tale and therefore the use of ‘ONCE UPON A TIME’ as the title of this poem. seven stanzas each containing between four and eight lines. The title of this poem ‘Once upon a time’ straight away makes you feel as if you are going back in time, it also makes you feel as if what happened was a fairy tale and it will never happen again. I think that the poet has used this title to make the reader feel as though what he will read i.e. what he experienced will never happen again and when a person reads the title it will make him feel as if he is about to read fairy tale. In stanza one Gabriel Okara writes ‘Once upon a time, son’ , so when he writes son it shows that he is talking to his son or someone who is younger than him likely to be in his childhood days. He then writes ‘they used to laugh with their hearts, and laugh with their eyes’, by saying ‘used to’ shows that it happened in the past and does not happen now and he says that before people would laugh with their hearts and would really laugh out of happiness