A Monument to the Dead Throughout Native Guard by Natasha Trethewey there are themes of death, grief and change. These themes are carried through the collection and are present within the entire collection. These set up the mood that this collection is ultimately about change but change for the reader as well as what happens in the collection. In “Monument” we can see all these changes through a paraphrase of the poem and the sense of elongated time from the from the form and imagery of the poem. A lot can be said by simplifying down all the imagery and diction into what’s happening in the poem with a short paraphrase. A quick paraphrase of “Monument” is: ants slowly build an ant hill as the narrator watches. Their constant movement reminds …show more content…
Ants are representative of many things but a main one is cooperation. It makes sense because they work together to help benefit the whole colony and the colony, as a whole, works cohesively as a unit. All of the ants together, represent a strength and unity that can reshape the world itself. This makes for a strong contrast against the narrator. Throughout the poem she doesn’t really do anything besides watching the ants’ work. She is also visiting her mother’s grave in, what is assumed to be, complete solitude. There are no mentions of others with her or other people present. It just the narrator and the ants. It seems everyone else has moved on, especially since the graveyard is described as being very unkept with “weeds and grass grown up all around” (9). Only the narrator and the ants visit her mother now. There could be many reasons why the narrator keeps coming back, even after everyone else has let go and adjusted to a new life. The ants help bring this reason to the light. The building of their home across the grave of the narrator’s mother is a “reminder of what I haven’t done” (21-22). There is no clear answer of what the narrator hasn’t done. Maybe she’s being reminded of how she needs to move on since everything else in the world has, or that she just has many regrets that she never cleared …show more content…
Even the title is a reference to Trethewey’s mother because Trethewey has stated that “figuratively, the title represents the idea that I am a native guardian to the memory of my mother’s life” (Solomon). Trethewey had such a deep connection with her mom that she felt that she needed to preserve her in the way she knew how, through poetry. She acts as her mother’s guardian by preserving her mother within her poems. Even if everyone else has moved on in “Monument” the narrator is still there to be her mother’s guardian. Even if the world has stopped caring, the narrator is there to remember everything and maybe that’s where the regret comes from. The narrator may feel that what she “hasn’t done” is act as an adequate guardian, that she hasn’t remembered everything that made her mother the mom she knew and loved. That doubt could create the wound she talks about in the last line which
She had someone who took care of her plants, but other than that, the rest of the house was peeling and the once white paint that encircled her house began to turn yellow. The reader could view this as an example of how she feels about the public; she did not care for the town’s opinions of her so she neglected to keep up with the part of the house that they could see. Not only did she give up on her house, but based on the town’s description of her, she also gave up on herself. They described her skeleton as small and spare, which could be
The overall theme of the poem is sacrifice, more specifically, for the people that you love. Throughout the poem color and personification are used to paint a picture in the reader's head. “Fog hanging like old Coats between the trees.” (46) This description is used to create a monochromatic, gloomy, and dismal environment where the poem takes
The poem shows us the struggles of Yusef to suppress his emotions in thinking that he is a stone like the granite memorial. A stone which is a strong and a steady reminder of the past, then he realized that he might be a memory but he is not like the stone because Yusef is a living human being. Through the poem the author shared the darkness, the blackness, with the granite
“Within ninety days of the statue’s dedication, each of the survivors’ lives went its separate way.” (Bradley 188) Bradley’s accounts of life after war of the surviving
Have you ever wondered, if life is important enough for you to be happy and not fear death? The poem “Sing your death song” by Tecumseh is coaxing you to live your life with no fear and regrets. The speaker of the poem, which is Chief Tecumseh, is dedicating his life for his people by fighting for their land. The image that is being portrayed is a warrior who is putting his life on the line for the well being of his people. Figures of speech that are being used are simile and metaphor because it is comparing life and death.
This quote shows that her mom is not only caring but she knows the limit in which Ashley can handle her emotions. Although help was available, she decided to keep her feelings to herself which resulted in a mental breakdown that mentally left a permanent scar throughout her whole life. This reminds of an old friend of mine that had experienced their parents passing away, she also had available help to talk about but decided to bottle those feelings up just as Ashley did. This also resulted in the mental breakdown for my friend which also changed her life in several different ways. This really conveys the importance of reaching out to others about your issues rather than bottling them up to eventually release all at
She recollects an episode in which at the age of 16 or 17 she randomly decided to leave school and walk home, and while she walked, the houses surrounding her suddenly began to appear “very ominous and foreboding”. She began to think that the houses
The use of imagery invokes a sense of discomfort and disgust in the speaker. In “Plums Failing Well”, the only attention they receive is from “ants and birds”. This indicates that humans have absolutely zero respect towards the plums. In fact, the only attention they receive is from the lower class creatures such as “ants”. By using personification, if “only they can breath”, the poet is comparing plums to humans.
There are many rights and wrongs in society today. In a book I have read, Belles, by Jen Calonita it shows many of those things that society judges you on. This novel can influence a change in society in in many ways. In Belles, a girl named Izzie, who is about 15, moves in with her long lost dad who is a very famous person. People start writing stories about how he is a horrible man because he ditched his daughter and girlfriend when Izzie was born.
Trethewey immediately uses imagery to set the scene inviting your senses to help illustrate the image she has already relayed. This helped depict a more in-depth image of her poem “elegy”. After reading this poem several times, to build understanding, and break down literary elements; I came to the conclusion that Trethewey emphasizes the struggle to find balance. The balance between metaphor and symbolism, increasing throughout the entire poem showing battle between connotation and detonation. The struggle in which she used to connotation to portray the bigger picture, but also balanced out by denotation to show the subliminal messages of the relationship shared between the narrator’s father and herself.
In “Grass” Sandburg creatively describes the cyclic nature of human to forget past mistakes, and be doomed to repeat them. He does so by describing a scene in which bodies continuously pile up from wars in a chronological order, and each time the bodies pile up the grass “works” in order to cover them, effectively erasing them from our memories, and ensuring another pile of bodies to come. Stafford agrees with the sentiment that we are liable to make the same mistakes over and over if we forget our past, however Stafford relates this idea to monuments, as opposed to Sandburg who describes a lack thereof. “At the Un-National Monument” briefly mentions monuments in the same scope as the rest of the poem; representing them as non-existent in his unfortunately fictitious space of peace and harmony. Thanks to the context of the poem, it can be inferred that Stafford is acknowledging that monuments are a necessary evil, symbolizing suffering, loss of life, and humanity’s lowest points in the hopes that each monument will be the last one that must be erected.
Donald Bruce Dawe’s literature makes society cognisant on the painful realities that are of the raw and dehumanising truth that plague this world. Donald Bruce Dawe, an Australian poet. His literature is predicated unto the dehumanising and defamatory experiences that he, the inditer himself had experienced through his time in the army, the RAAF. Though his literature, he conveys an opinionated point-of-view, urging the audience to optically discern the exploited and flawed practices of the regime. It is the truth obnubilated from society by propaganda and word of mouth, Dawe pushes the theme time and time again that authenticity is a painful experience, and that war is erroneous, wasteful, dehumanising.
Natasha Trethewey’s Native Guard is a collection of poems highlighting the childhood of her life and honoring her mother. Additionally, Trethewey speaks about the racial background of the Deep South where she grew up and one of the first black regiments who were called into service during the Civil War, the Louisiana Native Guards. Trethewey includes sonnets and monuments to express the meaning behind her poetry. Throughout the collection of poems, there are certain poems that are very apparent in expressing the severity of Trethewey and the Native Guard’s struggles. One of the poem’s in Native Guard that truly captivates the story of Trethewey’s childhood and racial struggles is “Photograph: Ice Storm, 1971”.
In Leslie Marmon Silko’s novel Ceremony, the reader follows Tayo’s inner journey to heal the psychological damaged caused by his time in the war. In the beginning of the book, Tayo is introduced in the middle of a night terror. From here, Silko weaves together a story, relatable to the Native American World War II vets, where one must regain balance with the past, present, and future. This close reading is going to explain why Tayo life and Ceremony resemble spider webs. When Tayo return from the war, his ability to exist in reality is limited by his trauma.
There are seven stanzas in this poem and the techniques appeared in the poem are Imagery, Simile, Metaphor, and Alliteration. The imagery is the techniques used all over the seven stanzas in this poem to describe the image of the Death the movement, and the sound which included Auditory, Visual, and Kinetic. The First stanza described the environment in the cemeteries, the heart refers to the dead bodies in the graves and a tunnel could be coffins. The dead bodies sleeping in a tunnel which give the image of the coffin and in this stanza the poet also used a Simile in the last three lines by using word “like” and “as though.”