Narrative Poem Research

The poem I chose is "The Broken-Legg'd Man" by John Mackey Shaw. The length of this poem is relatively short compared to almost all other narrative poems. To be honest, that is one of the reasons why I chose this poem. This poem is organized into five stanzas with five lines in each. The last sentence of all the stanzas are the same, and the first two lines rhyme, while the third and fourth rhyme too. In the third stanza, the third and fourth lines used slant rhyme, while all others used end rhyme. I personally admire all the poets that can make perfect rhyming lines because I almost never can do it. I spend so much time going through all the vocabulary in my brain, but often still can't find the right vocabulary to use to make the poem rhyme. There wasn't a controlled meter used in this poem. And the style of this poem is more of a casual tone, like it was purposely designed for children, using easy diction. I don't think that it used good imagery nor figures of speech. The best imagery I could find would be in the last stanza when it talked about how he lost his foot. 

The Broken-Legg'd Man- John Mackey Shaw

I saw the other day when I went shopping in the store

A man I hadn't ever, ever seen in there before,

A man whose leg was broken and who leaned upon a crutch-

I asked him very kindly if it hurt him very much.

"Not at all!" said the broken-legg'd man.

I ran around behind him for I thought that I would see

The broken leg all bandaged up and bent back at the knee;

But I didn't see the leg at all, there wasn't any there,

So I asked him very kindly if he had it hid somewhere.

"Not at all!" said the broken-legg'd man.

"Then where," I asked him, "is it? Did a tiger bite it off?

Or did you get your foot wet when you had a nasty cough?

Did someone jump down on your leg when it was very new?

Or did you simply cut it off because you wanted to?"

"Not at all!" said the broken-legg'd man.  

"What was it then?" I asked him, and this is what he said:

"I crossed a busy crossing when the traffic light was red;

A big black car came whizzing by and knocked me off my feet."

"Of course you looked both ways," I said, "before you crossed the street."

"Not at all!" said the broken-legg'd man.  

"They rushed me to the hospital right quickly, "he went on,

"And when I woke in nice white sheets I saw my leg was gone;

That's why you see me walking now on nothing but a crutch."

"I'm glad," said I, "you told me, and I thank you very much!"

"Not at all!" said the broken-legg'd man.

Life

To most people, they must've compared life to things more optimistically. Normally, I am a optimistic person and believes that life is good no matter how bad things go. I didn't know that one incident of having someone important to you leaving would change the way I look at life this much. From being optimistic normally, I am actually comparing life to hell. I admit that hell is probably a little too exaggerated, since there are those times when you are happy, but I can't think of anything else to describe the feeling that I have towards life now. I think that life is hell because living is always a torture. Look at how hard people are trying to have themselves survive, no matter in their social status, academically, or economically...etc. And no matter how hard some people try, they won't be able to achieve the goal. And even when one does get to the level that they're satisfied with already, it doesn't mean that someone else doesn't have the exact same goal as them, and would try to bring them down no matter what. Look at how many people there are on the world. Having similar goals means to have to fight among each other. Having people trying to drag each other down is like hell. Also, in life, there are those times when you think that you've found your real best friends. And of course, in those moments, you'd feel really happy. But afterwards, when they backstab you, the contrast of the happiness you've had and the pain of knowing that it was all fake would hurt so much, just like in hell. Another thing is how the earth is way too big, and when people leave, it would hurt so bad. Life is so cruel and violent, dragging two people away from each other for hundreds of thousands miles. So, I think that even though there are the happy moments in life, they might not last forever and may be fake. These miserable things of human nature makes me think that life should be compared to hell. 

Seven Ages of Man

Throughout life, people go through many stages. Life isn't long enough to considered as "long", yet normally isn't short enough to be considered "short". In normal people's lives, I think that it can be divided into the seven following stages: Birth, Student, Work, Marriage, Parenting, Retirement, and Death. The first and last one would be birth and death for sure. They mark the beginning and end of a person's life, from being given birth to earth till the day they leave the world, which is death. The second stage is being a student. This takes up a whole lot of a person's life. In life, people learn new things all the time, so this stage actually overlaps with all the other stages other than birth and death. The stage of working is after a student graduates and becomes an adult, having to learn to handle things themselves without having to have their parents backup everything for them. At this stage, they'll grow up and learn  how to earn money themselves and save themselves from being killed by the cruelty of reality. Marriage is the next stage. People in life will fall in love with someone and the majority of people get married. And of course, after marrying is to have a baby to have a feeling of a home. So, it then will be parenting. Retirement goes after parenting, even though it overlaps later on. When parenting a child, you would need income of course to raise the children. And later on, when the child went to the working stage of their lives too, the parents can retire and enjoy the rest of their life, waiting until the last stage, Death, comes. 

Disrespect

I believe that every single person has had the feeling of being disrespected sometime somehow in their life. I remember when I was really little, during summer my parents had work so they sent both my brother and me to a sports camp. In that camp, they focused on basketball. And in case you don't know, the only sport I'm good at is swimming. I'm really not good at any on-land sports, especially those that involve balls. When people pass them to me, I can't catch them, because I close my eyes, feeling afraid that the ball will hurt me. Because when I was little, I was a lot chubbier than I am right now, and I didn't know how to play basketball, unlike my brother and all the other people that went to the camp, the students and teachers didn't respect me. When picking teams, they all tried not the pick me, excluding me, and one person, I remember, even made this "tsktsk" noise when she knew that I was in her team. I really felt disrespected. I know that I have bad basketball skills, and I know that people want skilled people in their teams, but making sounds like that really hurt my feelings and I got angry too. The bad thing, was that I didn't have the guts to say anything to the people that hurt me. I was very angry, and also sad about how I was excluded and embarrassed by my bad basketball skills. 

A Blessing

The poem "A Blessing" by James Wright, talks about the lover of the speaker to two Indian ponies that he saw off the highway to Rochester, Minnesota. The ponies welcomed both the speaker and his / her friend by coming out of the willows and played with them. The speaker described them as they love each other a lot. And one of them, the black and white one, seemed to really like the speaker. Some of the examples of imagery that are used in the poem are "they bow shyly as wet swans". This description shows the way of the ponies bowing and how they love each other. The part that says "She is black and white", this is a very direct description of imagery, directly saying the physical appearance of the pony. Also, "Her mane falls wild on her forehead", shows even more details of the ponies other than simply how she is black and white. The sentences of "And the light breeze moves me to cress her long ear", makes the readers know that there's light wind and the feeling of the pony's ears is soft like the skin of a girl's wrist. 

Turning Point

In my whole life, there wasn't really a big change. I live my own life everyday and enjoy it. The biggest change that I would've done probably was to decide to become a person that would be more "under radar", unlike what I usually am. Before, I socialize and chat too much with many people, but after I've known that our school is actually a "dangerous" place, and if you act too conspicuously in this school, you'll either get backstabbed by people that are "supposed" to be your friends, but secretly dislike you, or unless you have strong supporters behind you, you would be taken down by others. I've realized it early enough since something similar to what I've described happened to me. Even though in a way it's kind of a bad thing that it happened to me, but since I realized early enough, I'm now leaving that role of being conspicuous to the new people that came into our school and knowing that it's better to have little friends, but all of them true, other than having a lot of "friends" that secretly says bad things about you when you don't realize. The turning point would obviously be when I got backstabbed by one of the people that I thought was my best friend. I used to tell her all my secrets, but when she backstabbed me, I realized how scary this place is. If I didn't realize it when that incident happened, I guess I'd be in a very bad condition right now. Probably not having the true friends that I have right now and not even the "friends" that fake a smile in front of you and says bad things about me behind. 

Selfless- Sacrifice

Throughout life, people have to make choices that would either be good for themselves or to others, but not good for both of them at the same time.  A choice I made could probably be when I was spending a lot of time with one of my friends in local school that I met in my cram school. His girlfriend just cheated on him, and since he is a very important friend to me, I had to make this hard decision of whether I should or shouldn't go to yell at the girl since the boy wouldn't do it and the girl didn't think that she did anything wrong. It would benefit the boy, because being cheated on while the girl doesn't even think that she did anything wrong would be totally insulting. If I were him, I wouldn't just hold it down and just say that he's going to let it go just like that. If I really went to go to the girl and list out what bad things she'd done, I would be pretty sure that she'd think that I was being too nosy, poking my head into other people's business, and I might even get misunderstood by other people that I like the guy. But because of how much the boy helped me when I was sad, I couldn't stand someone hurting such a good friend of mine like that. In the end, I didn't care about other people thinking that I'm being nosy or what, I called the girl and yelled at her about what she'd done to my friend. I don't regret making this decision, even though the friends of the girl really are thinking about me the way I've expected, nosy and that I like the boy, but I didn't care. To me, the boy was a very important friend and I wouldn't change how close we are just because of some other people saying things about us behind us. True friends are hard to find, and I'm really glad that I've met one.