Jeannette Armstrong: Poetry Literary Elements

The poem “The History Lesson” is told from the perspective of a third person objective point of view.

The poem “Indian Woman” is written in an iambic pentameter.

The central metaphor in the poem “Artifacts” are the artifacts, or the various objects unearthed by archeologists. The narrator uses artifacts as a metaphor for deceit, the argument being that artifacts are presented as facts and are used to paint a biased picture.

We find an alliteration in “Indian Woman” in the lines “I am a female/ only in the ability/ to breed/ and to bear”.

In “Indian Woman”, the narrator describes the dehumanizing way in which the Natives were treated and continued to be treated by their white counterparts. The narrator claims she and other people like here were not even considered to be humans and as such were treated in appalling and brutal ways. Ironically, the white people still expected the Natives to perform various tasks and to try and emulate the “white way of life” even though many did not considered the Natives to be capable of such a thing.

The poem “The History Lesson” is a historic and meditative poem.

The action of the poem “Indian Woman” takes place in an unnamed time in what is referred to as being the great plains.

The tone used in the poem “A History Lesson” is an extremely violent one.

The protagonists in “Indian Woman” are the narrator and other women just like her and the antagonists are their white counterparts who refuse to see them as human beings capable of suffering.

The major conflict in “Artifacts” is between truth and deceit.

The poem “Indian Woman” reaches its climax when the narrator adopts the point of view others have about her and does not try to prove them otherwise.

The way in which Indian women will be portrayed in a negative manner in “Indian Woman” is foreshadowed from the first line of the poem when the narrator refers to herself as being a “squaw”.

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In the poem “Artifacts”, the narrator transmits the idea that history should not be trusted. She claims history is biased and was written to present certain people and groups in a positive way while at the same time degrading every person who did not fit into a perfect mold. Thus, the allusion here is that those who are presented in a negative way in history is because they were not the winners and thus they were not the ones who wrote the story.

The construction “red coated knights” mentioned in the poem “A History Lesson” is used in this context to make reference to the Indians Christopher Columbus encountered in the New Land. The way in which the narrator describes these natives transmits the idea that they were noble and kind hearted while Columbus and his men were the savages.

We find a personification in the line “the record talks” in the poem “Artifacts”.

We find a hyperbole in “Indian Woman” in the lines “I am a squaw/ basically a mammal”.

We find onomatopoeia in the poem “Indian Woman” in the line “the body screams”.