Ai Ogawa: Poems Literary Elements

The narrator presents the events in the poems from a first person subjective point of view.

The poems have no form and meter since they are modern poems.

An important metaphor appears in the poem Conversations when the narrator talks about the dress everybody wears during their ascent to heaven. In this context, the dress is used as a metaphor to make reference to a person’s true identity and how they are seen by God.

We find alliteration in the line ‘no time for me’.

In the poem Conversations, the narrator asks the dead person to tell her how it is to be dead. Ironically, just seconds later, she changes her mind and tries to make the person stop talking but is too late and the narrator has to listen to the descriptions offered by the dead person.

Most of the poems are elegies.

Most of the poems take place in restricted places such as a single room in a house.

The tone in many of the poems is either childlike or sensual, depending on who the narrator is.

In the poem Grandfather Says, the protagonist is the young girl and the antagonist is the grandfather. In the rest of the poem, there are neither antagonist nor protagonists.

In the poem Conversations, the major conflict is between life and death. In the poem entitled Motherhood, the main conflict is between Peggy’s desire to give in to the man she loves and the social stigma she suffers as a result because she did not obeyed the general social rules.

In the poem Motherhood, the poem reaches its climax when Peggy realizes that the snake was expecting babies as well and when she realizes that she murdered a ‘mother’.

In the poem Grandfather Says, when the narrator recalls how her grandfather made her sit in his hand foreshadows the abuse the narrator will later describe.

When the narrator claims in the poem Woman to Man that she and the narrator do not mix is an understatements as it is later proven that the two had a sexual relationship.

In the poem Motherhood, Peggy compares the man she got pregnant with a common snake found in Arizona. She mentions how he bit her twice, thus alluding that both the unborn child and her three-year old daughter are fathered by the same man.

In the poem Motherhood, the term ‘bite’ is used to make reference to a woman getting pregnant.

N/A

We find a hyperbole in the lines “and boxes of Reeboks and Nikes/to make me fly through the air.”

There is no onomatopoeia in the poems.