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Analyzing The Poem 'The Juggler'

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In the Poem, “The Juggler” the speaker develops a very exciting tone which eventually evolves into a very solemn and serious poem through the uses of very strong diction and sophisticated use of personification that helps develop a shift in the tone. Throughout the beginning of the poem, the speaker personifies the balls and uses positive diction which creates a very light hearted and joyful atmosphere to start off the poem. For example, phrases such as “our hearts from brilliance” and “Whee, in the air” helps develop a positive attitude towards juggling for a group of people. The speaker enjoys making “brilliance” with his skillful abilities and just wouldn’t sacrifice that for anything. Meanwhile, the speaker also gives the balls human characteristics which emphasizes the …show more content…

The poem is contained of five equal stanzas and each stanza has six lines. Nevertheless, at the end of the second stanza the speaker uses a strong shifting phrase, “ But a heaven is easier made of nothing at all” this indicates that the speaker is switching towards a serious, heavy hearted standpoint. The speaker switched attitudes because of the lack of energy he has doing all this juggling and just doesn’t have the will to “ shake our gravity up” anymore. The image of him switching the “five red balls” for the “broom, a plate, a table” empathizes the fact that the juggler has no ambition or purpose in creating “brilliance” any longer. Even so, towards the end of the poem in the last stanza the speaker states “the juggler is tired now,” this helps support that serious tone the speaker wants to input onto the audience. Throughout the last half of the poem this tone shift makes the audience take the poem seriously and to not make it a “light-hearted

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In Richard Wilbur’s ‘The Juggler,’ the speaker describes the juggler as someone who is attempting to lift the spirits of his audience with his talent to distract them from their tedious and arduous daily lives. Through this description, the speaker reveals about themselves that they too are suffering from a tedious and arduous daily life. The description of the juggler and what it reveals about the speaker are expressed in each stanza through the use of diction, figurative language and tone. The opening lines of the poem demonstrate personification, saying, “[The ball is not]

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“Home Court,” by Jose Olivarez, is a poem that emphasizes the pain and suffering that all the kids had, after the loss of Cesar and Oscar’s dad. They play basketball to get out their anger and heal their suffering. The poem uses different forms of figurative language. One form of figurative language is a simile, it is used to express the grief of the children. One example is “we held the ball like rosary beads and prayed with our hands.”

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Toward the end of the poem the tone changes and becomes an at ease or comfortable feeling. A quote that illustrates this is “And I tell them in Spanish/ how beautiful they are./ And they are more beautiful and lovely/ than all the white women in the world” (Olivarez 60-63). This quote shows a change in the author’s thinking.

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This causes the speaker to eventually start reading at a fast tone, which eventually shows the urgency the author is trying to portray. As the reader reads faster and faster, one can sense the author’s frustration. While the speaker reads the poem aloud, one can sense the violence and anger the author would like to portray about the issue and how it affects them. The tone of the poem also helps to set the emotional appeal that occurs, and as the speaker reads the poem and the frustration occurs to them while reading, they can relate the Earl’s frustration.

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    In the poem, the speaker analyzes the juggler very diligently and specifically. Throughout the poem, the speaker examines various aspects of the juggler’s performance. For example, the lines, “Grazing his finger ends, cling to their courses there,” provide poetic imagery to the readers which allow them to vividly witness the balls leaving his hands and maintaining their directed course. The speaker also utilizes a suspenseful tone, as seen in lines nineteen through twenty-one, to highlight the difficult task that the juggler places on himself with the addition of tables, brooms, and plates to his juggling routine. Also the use of personification in line three shows how the materials he juggles are always

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I have interpreted these lines in one way, yet there are a million different possibilities. The author puts the words onto the paper, but the reader’s job is to interpret their own emotion, memory or belief and actually apply it to the poet’s words in order to create an

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The fact that the rhyme scheme is so peculiar shows that the things that the things the juggler does are also anomalous. In a normal rhyming poem, the scheme is usually a traditional abababab or aabbccdd or at most abcabcabc. But the rhyming scheme this poem has with abcbac is very abnormal. Just like the things the juggler does. Rhyming when you least imagine, the juggler does things with the balls and brooms when you least expect.

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Moreover, poems aren’t usually serious especially by Shel Silverstein. This book of poems is paradoxical to serious, it is all for comedy and has multiple reasons to support. Firstly, one poem called Falling up is unrealistic. The first and second stanza was “I tripped on my shoelace and I fell up---”

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The ball is not able to feel, but Updike uses personification to relay to the reader the connection that Flick seemed to have with basketball. Updike also personifies the Necco wafers, Nibs, and Juju beads, explaining that these candies are the "bright applauding tiers" that Flick now imagines are his fans. Updike uses a single simile in the poem. When the narrator states "His hands were like wild birds", he is comparing the speed, the agility and the freeness of Flicks hands while playing basketball to the freeness of wild birds. The style that Updike chooses for his poem is free verse.

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The poem ,“Jungler” by Richard Wilbur is not your usual poem, but in it the speaker utilizes many different elements to describe this juggler. The poem, itself, encounters an another form of entertainment through a deeper view. Additionally, Wilbur uses tone to convey to the reader what a sight this Juggler truly is. He is very descriptive and makes sure that every detail is carefully placed in the poem. I think that the poem is really a symbol and topped with a little imagery, conveying the excitement of the crowd and figurative language.

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One of the main things catches the reader’s attention is how they the man from Ironbark reacted to the joke played on him. This poem was chosen because of its lively and enjoyable rhythm. This makes the reader feel a mixture of feelings such as anger when the barber pulls the joke, but humour from the reaction of the man from Ironbark finds out it was actually a joke. Overall it was a very enjoyable and

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The tone that was build up in the beginning was formal and made it seem like having sex without any pleasure is a beautiful act because the poet uses images like “beautiful dancers” and “ice skaters” who “glide”. This kind of confuses the reader, but this aspect of the poem means that even if there is no love between the two people, the act of sex is a beautiful thing in general. To the poet sex feels like “beautiful dancers” and “ice skaters” who “glide”.   “How do they do it, the ones who make love without love? Beautiful as dancers, gliding over each other like ice-skaters over the ice, fingers hooked inside each other's bodies, faces red as steak, wine, wet as the children at birth whose

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In stanza three the ball is personified to lay emphasis on flicks skill, and a simile likens Flick’s hands to wild birds. Yet irrelevant, the lug wrench is personified in the next stanza we jumped back to the present. While “the ball loved flick” (Updike) the lug is indifferent to Flick’s skill. In the last stanza, a metaphor depicts flick as standing “kind of coiled”, signifying the old basketball player within flick is still ready to spring. The last two lines liken the town of candy to former applauding audiences in the seats.

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When the author rhymes the story to give the poetic flow, readers are able to see what the author is trying to show. The rhyming may not be literal, but that way, readers can imagine what the poem trys to tell. In the last section,the goal is finally achieved. We can tell that the characters had to push themselves to reach this goal because it says “Hoping an inch of Good is worth a pound of

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Then when the author changes the tone at the end of the poem in the last stanza to hopeful tone the reader can feel the hope and happiness that a person feels when they are down and they are given kindness.

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