How Does Conolly Create A Sense Of Nostalgia Essay

Nostalgia is an inevitable aspect of growing up and transcending to adulthood, something that helps individuals cope with life’s wearying challenges, and helps us find meaning in our lives. Geraldine Conolly utilizes this feeling in her poem The Summer I Was Sixteen where she recollects her days as a young girl spending her summer at the pool- where adulthood still seems implausible. This entices the reader into a trip to the past, where one can reflect and reminisce. The poet’s language and imagery creates a mood of nostalgia throughout the poem by portraying the carefreeness of youth, shifting the energy in each stanza to mirror the mood swings of teens, and creating a special moment where time is on a stand-still. The sense of nostalgia

The length of the sentences, and the carefree and nonchalant nature of the girls indicates that they are captive to time- neither worrying about the future nor reflecting on the past. An example of this is the recurring enjambment in the stanzas, which creates a steady and easygoing pace in the poem, mirroring the notion the teens have towards the passing of time, and life itself. Another example that builds on this idea is the very last sentence of the poem, when the teens spare a brief moment to think about the future. After sunbathing, Connolly recollects how she and her friends “loosened thin bikini straps and rubbed baby oil with iodine/across sunburned shoulders, tossing a glance/through the chain link at an improbable world.” The phrase “tossing a glance” is very casual, it shows that the future does not worry the girls, especially as it is strung along in the same line as rubbing “baby oil with iodine on sunburnt shoulders.” It shows their sans-souci approach to life and how in the last stretch before adulthood, when time seems to pass slowly, they savor every moment lest worry take away from the delight of youth. When thinking about the world, the girls describe it as “improbable” implying that it’s not even worth thinking about yet. This creates nostalgia because though readers would have related to feeling that way as a teen, many would have grown past it and now feel a bittersweetness that the improbability is now a reality. This last line is especially important as it is the only one where the tone changes to a slightly more somber one, the one time when the girls think of anything but where they are in a moment of time. It hints that adulthood is closer than they think, and is a foreshadowing that this may be one of the best summers of their lives, and that it would soon be in the