ipl-logo

A Step Away From Them

665 Words3 Pages

In his narrative poem, A Step Away from Them, by Frank O'Hara, places the reader in Manhattan during the lunch hour of a typical Thursday work day during the 1950s. Throughout the poem Mr. O'Hara uses visual imagery and motion to describe workers, commerce, and transportation during this era. The poem is four stanzas long and each stanza is connected to the next with a few words that require the reader to pause before moving on to the next stanza. The first and last stanzas are similar in length with second and third stanzas being shorter. The pauses between each stanza are effective in moving the reader on to the next scene as if turning the corner of a busy street. The lines do not rhyme; however, the poem follows a rhythm by placing the emphasis at the end of the line. This rhythm makes effective use of the pauses between stanzas. O'Hara uses all capitals letters when describing several business such as; “JULIET'S CORNER and BULLFIGHT,” (O’Hara) giving the impression of posters or billboards.

His title, A Step Away from Them, suggest the author feels a kinship with the people he encounters. This could be his use of …show more content…

O'Hara often uses color when describing the people he encounters. As when he describes the laborers as feeding, "their dirty glistening torsos" we are left with brown images (O’Hara). He again uses this image seemingly when describing his lunch at Juliet's Corner. Is the chocolate malted a description of Giulietta Masina or the actual malted milkshake? Again a brown image is left with the reader. O'Hara also uses simile to make comparisons as in, the Negro man to the blonde chorus girl, once again using color to bring the contrast of this scene to life. This use of comparison is also used in his description of “laborers drinking coca cola while wearing yellow hard hats” (O’Hara). In his description of “a

Show More
Related
244 Words | 1 Pages

O'Brien utilizes repetition as another means of furthering his book's themes. By repeating certain phrases and ideas

Read More
795 Words | 4 Pages

They show that skin color isn’t what is important and that they should be recognized for what they do instead of how they look. This road to their achievement might not have been smooth, but all that matters is that they succeeded in the end. Through imagery, the author of the poem, Sara Holbrook, portrays a deep meaning about how an individual can cope with tribulations. She writes about new opportunities and the risks that come with taking them. It starts off by saying, “Safely standing on the bank of what-I-know, Unfamiliar water passing in a rush.”

Read More
326 Words | 2 Pages

The passage “Clearing Paths to the Past” and “To Be of Use”, by Marge Piercy, share one common theme, respect for those who work. In the first passage we learn that the narrator shovels snow. He says he’ll never make tomatos like his grandfather did but shoveling the snow will have to suffice. This shows us that he knows how to find content in simpler things. He knows his job is important and he takes pride in that.

Read More
451 Words | 2 Pages

Wright creates and revisits the existence of “a whore’s lipstick” on the trampled grass. The lipstick is red, a color symbolic of passion and rage and bloodshed. The narrator analyzes the lipstick as belonging to a prostitute, due to the fact that the woman in question is concerned about her appearance during a horrific, brutal murder. Makeup is used to change one’s appearance, and the narrator feels an inexplicable rage towards the woman and her lipstick in this context, possibly because the victim of the lynching was killed for his own appearance. The symbol of the discarded lipstick exemplifies the callous nature of the witnesses that the persona is able to interpret from the aftermath of the

Read More
551 Words | 3 Pages

It is set up in a messy structure to display the imagery, but still readable for the audience. The sentence “this is the time of lilly pillies plumping into (fullness)” in the first stanza has a bracket around it to represent the word that takes up the entire line, whereas the word “leaves” in the third stanza represents the line through the middle of a leaf. In the next sentence, the word “falling” has letters in a different line, making it look like the letters are actually falling down. On the next pages, the word “migration” is written with the letters spread out. This is because “migration” is when something moves away, so the letters are moving further away from each other.

Read More
915 Words | 4 Pages

All day long the gates of the packing houses were besieged by starving and penniless men; they came, literally, by the thousands every single morning, fighting for each other for a chance for life” (Chapter 7, Page 77). This industrial crisis was unveiled by the lack of empathy from higher authorities, who would continue to hire workers on a daily basis despite the current workers dropping like flies, due to the extreme, unsafe, and unsanitary conditions that they experienced. This dehumanized their own self-identity and self-worth, in which the industry made it quite clear that they were just bolts and screws to the machines, and could easily be replaced, due to the influx of immigrants at this time. The dehumanization of the individual worker, and the unimaginable conditions that one needed to work in, led to many socialistic ideologies and aggressive strikes that were prevalent in this novel, another crucial aspect that was portrayed alongside the emphasis on the industrial

Read More
791 Words | 4 Pages

This is a routine walk that occurs every evening; she takes the same path, at the same time, however when she turns into the dark alley—the dim lighting somehow makes it unfamiliar. Brownlee furthers the idea of human complex minds by discussing how we

Read More
389 Words | 2 Pages

The passage, “Always Running” by Luis J. Rodriguez evokes the tone of indifference. Rodriguez demonstrates these tones through imagery. For example, at the beginning of the passage the narrator, Luis gives us background information about his living situation to set up imagery for the rest of the passage. Then, Luis sets the tone of indifference with this sentence “So without ceremony, we started over the tracks, climbing over discarded market carts and tore-up sofas.” This quote uses the literary device of imagery because the narrator is painting a picture of their environment.

Read More
832 Words | 4 Pages

It gives the poem an uneven feeling, as if the lines were incomplete, much like how the soldiers may not feel whole anymore after an over-exposure to the brutality of war. The last word in each line of stanza five: “to-day … move; … eye” and “cave” do not rhyme, showing how a dead man decaying in the open is unusual. This stanza differs from the others since this stanza is the only one to have no rhyming pattern at all. Though the lack of rhyming structure in the fifth stanza would most likely be overlooked, the lack of rhyming happens at the stanza about the soldier’s decaying body. The shift from semi-regular to irregular rhyming exemplifies how the sudden change from normality is meant to create the feeling

Read More
813 Words | 4 Pages

For different people, comparable situations do not always reproduce the same end results or leave the same impressions. Rather, the resulting conclusion is often highly variable. As is the case of two labors featured in the poems, My Father’s Lunch” and “The life of a Digger”. While Erica Funkhouser’s speaker, Henry, experiences injustice and lack of reward for his hard labor in “The Life of a Digger,” Margarita Engle’s speaker experiences prosperity and remuneration for their father’s hard work in “My Father’s Lunch.” Each author uses the setting of a laboring man’s lunch break to demonstrate the ramifications of a hard day’s work and the rewards or lack thereof for their efforts.

Read More
752 Words | 4 Pages

He uses many literary elements that include, rhyming, rhyme scheme, and end rhyme. His poems are also not light hearted and funny but are about more serious matters. In his poem “Toast to Dayton” every other line rhymes. For example in “Toast to Dayton” passion rhymes with fashion which is two lines below it, and know rhymes with flow, and flow is two lines below know. In “The Debt” each line rhymes with the next line making every two lines a couplet.

Read More
601 Words | 3 Pages

In his essay “Here,” Philip Larkin uses many literary devices to convey the speaker’s attitude toward the places he describes. Larkin utilizes imagery and strong diction to depict these feelings of both a large city and the isolated beach surrounding it. In the beginning of the passage, the speaker describes a large town that he passes through while on a train. The people in the town intrigue him, but he is not impressed by the inner-city life.

Read More
989 Words | 4 Pages

The poem A Step Away From Them by Frank O’Hara has five stanzas written in a free verse format with no distinguishable rhyme scheme or meter. The poem uses the following asymmetrical line structure “14-10-9-13-3” while using poetic devices such as enjambment, imagery, and allusion to create each stanza. A Step Away From Them occurs in one place, New York City. We know this because of the lines, “On/ to Times Square, / where the sign/blows smoke over my head” (13-14) and “the Manhattan Storage Warehouse.”

Read More
1225 Words | 5 Pages

is written in iambic pentameter with heroic rhyming couplets. However, there are several instances in which Wheatley deviates from her original rhyme scheme. Naturally, this makes those particular sentences stand out when reading. For instance, Wheatley writes: “And may the charms of each seraphic theme Conduct thy footsteps to immortal fame!” (lines 11-12) and calls Moorhead’s paintings “deathless glories (line 8).

Read More
129 Words | 1 Pages

In the poem, “The Odyssey,” Homer depicts an epic poem which took place in 720 B.C. In the era Homer talks about a man named Odysseus who was in the war of Troy. He has been cursed by the god Poseidon who has kept him from home for twenty years. Odysseus has been trying to get back home to his wife Penelope and his son Telemachus. Although on his journey back home he is unaware that suitors are threatening his home and family.

Read More

More about A Step Away From Them

Related Topics

Open Document