Did I Miss Anything Tom Wayman Analysis

My considered response is on the poem, “Did I Miss Anything?” by Tom Wayman. This poem is about a teacher that is answering the question, “did I miss anything”. The teacher does answer the question; however they do it in a roundabout, overly sarcastic and exaggerated manner. The teacher shifts from saying they did nothing while the student was absent to saying that they did everything in the next stanza. In my considered response I will explain the poetic devices I found in the poem. Secondly I will explain the characters in the poem, and lastly I will explain the shifts in the poem. Some of the poetic symbols I found in the poem were diction and hyperboles. For diction, the author used the words, “nothing” and “everything” interchangeably. He started off the first stanza with the word

An example was the shifts between “nothing” and “everything”. The first stanza started with the word “nothing” and was basically the speaker saying how they did nothing while the student was absent. The next stanza the starts the word “everything”, and exaggerates how the student missed a very important event. This pattern continues on until the last two stanzas. The second last stanza is a break from the sarcastic tone of the rest of the stanza as the classroom is described as a microcosm, and is an area for the students to “query and examine and ponder”, and “it was not the only place”. This is an accurate description of a classroom, as this is what you do in a classroom. The last stanza is also a break from the sarcastic tone of the poem. It is more serious, and is perhaps used as a way to make the student feel guilty, as until then, the tone of the poem had been more sarcastic and less serious, however the last sentence, “and you weren’t here”, is used to emphasize the point that the student missed something, and, by having the last sentence and second last stanza be more serious, it makes the student feel guilty on being