As the narrator, Gary Soto recreates a childhood experience in which he steals a pie from the German Market. Although stealing a single pie might seem insignificant, Gary Soto is able to emphasize the guilt possessed as a young six-year-old boy by using numerous rhetorical devices to recreate this unforgettable memory. In the excerpt from A Summer Life, Gary Soto tries to show that humans are prone to sin.…
“School’s Out for Summer,” written by Anna Quindlen, is a persuasive writing trying to support starvation. The intention of this article is to show how students all over the United States have nothing to eat while family members are gone at work. Anna’s argument is very effective, giving great detail into what it is being done.…
Oliver uses hyperbole in her lyrical and poetic diction to convey her true feelings about nature. She is both in awe of the “palpable… sweetness” (54) of nature and afraid of its “natural[] and abundant…terror” (37-38).…
In the well-written autobiographical narrative A Summer Life (1990), Gary Soto delivers an original assembly of aspects from himself as a six-year-old child. Soto asserts the scary realization of wants triumphing over what is ethical and he uses many examples of imagery, repetition and a chosen vocabulary to sketch out the ignorance that is evident in a child’s mind. Soto’s purpose is to selectively illuminate feelings of morals, paranoia and imagination that play a leading role in the lives of young children in order to adequately contain the audience’s attention and allow them to apply their own emotions. Given the excessive importance to detail and exquisite symbolism with angels, Soto is writing to a very diverse audience that has some sort of religious or spiritual background or knowledge and it seems he may even be reaching to engage parents’ opinions on the matter.…
The dualism of culture as opposed to nature, and the resulting hierarchy of humans believing themselves superior to nature according to Western epistemological paradigms, are criticised through Oliver's nature poems, in particular "Spring" and "Lilies". The first few lines in her poem "Lilies" displays the persona's desire to return to nature, "I have been thinking/ about living/ like the lilies". This introduction is a common element in many of her nature poems, providing an ecological answer of an interrelated community and challenging the old pernicious myth that humans are independent of nature. Through the speaker of the poem, the audience is drawn to the nature of lilies and the simplicity of their existence. When the poem reaches the sixth quatrain the contrast between…
Richard Wilbur presents a peaceful and enchanting image of a meadow going through the natural changes of the autumn season. Not only does he allude to the peacefulness of nature but also the subtle changes a person goes through such as personality, physical, and emotional. Wilbur compares the beautiful changes the meadow undergoes to how “a forest is changed / By a chameleon’s tuning his skin to it,” revealing the uninterrupted natural order of things and the fine tuning people do every day to become the person they want to be. The peaceful connotation brought on by many phrases such as “Queen Anne’s Lace lying like lilies,” “wading,” and “glides,” reveals the unity and accord that nature has and experiences.…
Fairy tales come out of the outer regions of imagination. Creating a bridge between real world themes and ingenious plots is the common ground for all fairy tales. Kelly Link sits perfectly in this category using fairy tale characteristics in her story “The Summer People”. The story begins with Fran’s father leaving her while she is suffering severe flu like symptoms. During the school week Fran’s a classmate Ophelia begins to take care of her. Little does Ophelia know there are peculiar, magical people that Fran takes care of. Kelly Link uses various writing elements that have similarities to fairy tales such as the writings that warns Ophelia or the trinkets that the summer people have created. Link is able to create stories that connect…
The poem “Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota,” by James Wright, expresses the value of a person’s life. The poem is a free-verse of only thirteen lines and it moves with the sparse intensity of a haiku through a subtle but limited accumulation of imagery. Wright using metaphors to creates a reflection of his life and how he feels about it. The poem expresses only in one day, and it thoroughly represent Wright’s entire life. The transition from morning to night represents his life from beginning to end. He reviews his life through pictures, by lying back and observing his surrounding and lives of other around him. Wright begins his life journey with an image of a bronze butterfly, which represented purity and strength, and end with an image of a chicken hawk.…
All Summer in a Day, by Ray Bradbury teaches readers that jealousy can lead you to do horrible things. The other children are jealous of Margot because she remembers what the sun is like, and they don’t. Therefor, the theme of jealousy shows up many times throughout the story. Making it evident that the theme of All Summer in a Day, is that you shouldn’t let jealousy guide you into making poor decisions.…
The poems "Those Winter Sundays" and "How to Change a Frog Into a Prince" show parents trying to learn the process of raising a youth, with one being a reflection from the child and the other during childhood,…
In the passage, “A Summer life” by Gary Soto. He writes an autobiography about his childhood past. One summer day, where he stole a pie from the market. Knowing it was a bad idea, he still did it anyways. In the pie-stealing passage from his autobiography, Gary Soto presents his guilty six-year-old self through descriptions of his guilt, through references to religion, and through his paranoid belief that everyone can see what he has done.…
Gary Soto’s autobiographical narrative “A Summer Life” recreates the feeling of guilt Sota felt after stealing an apple pie. The feeling is recreated through the use of allusions, imagery, and lively diction.…
1. The one aspect of Soto's life that was most interesting is when he had the three chicks. Soto had three chicks in his back yard that he was raising. He seemed fascinated by the way they just pecked around his back yard, blinked rapidly, and slept standing up. The chicks used to crawl on his shoes. He thought it was cute until one of the chicks defecated on his shoe. That angered Gary and he kicked sand in the chicks eyes. He immediately felt bad after what he had just done. This is the part of the story that made me laugh. It made me laugh because as the chapter went on, Gary became very protective of the chicks. When he kicked sand in the chicks eyes, it was very alarming. He seemed not to be a violent person.…
All of the seasons are great. Winter is really fun with Christmas and the snow. Fall is also great because of the leafs and football games. But I would have to say that my favorite season of all is summer. Summer is the best, it is baseball season I love to play baseball I have been playing baseball ever since I was a kid. Baseball is the my second favorite sport (First is football). Baseball is you just play the game and have fun. Even if you are losing it is still great to be out on a baseball field having fun with your friends. For example this year my freshman baseball was pretty good but not the best. There were some games we won and some games we lost. It's always fun to win. But even when you do lose you still have a great time out on a baseball field with your team.…
The flowers, however, represent the extreme of happiness. Through parallelism, Oliver exemplifies the happiness given by the fields of flowers. The flowers have “sweetness, so palpable” that it overwhelms Oliver. She uses phrases continually beginning with “I’m” and then a verb, to show how the fields engulf her like a “river.” She is…