I Am Offering This Poem By Jimmy Santiago Baca

Within poetry, poets use poetic structures and a variety of figurative language to help introduce more purpose to the poem. Within poetry, a poet often uses poetic devices and figurative language to convey a feeling. In the poem “I am Offering This Poem”, the author Jimmy Santiago Baca displays the affection he has to protect the reader from the dangers of the outside world by using both poetic structure and figurative language to convey his feelings. Throughout the poem, the poet uses a diversity of poetic structures to signify the importance of all the ideas present in the poem. In between each of the stanzas, the poet uses repetition with the phrase “I love you” to convey the importance of the feeling in the poem. The repetition ties in with the purpose of the poem by showing how much the poet loves and cares for the reader by continuously showing this phrase in the poem. The poet also uses punctuation and poetic structures throughout

For example, the poet uses a personification towards the poem saying to keep it “as a warm coat”, displaying the poet's desire to comfort and bring a warm feeling to the reader. The poet also uses a simile to express the poet’s want to protect the reader and keep them “tucked away like a cabin or hogan in dense trees” to protect them from any worldly dangers that might threaten to harm them. This simile presents the poet’s desire to act as a haven for the reader, and their desire to give the reader all their love because they can’t give any materialistic things. Throughout the poem, the poet presents the reader with lots of imagery to convey images of warm, protected, and comforting feelings. An example of this imagery is the poet welcoming the reader in with “a pot full of yellow corn”, giving the reader an image of coming in from the cold to be embraced with a warm comforting