In The Longhouse Oneida Museum By Roberta Hill Summary

Marissa Goeller English 11 Literature Analysis May 22, 2024 Personification and Culture Have you ever wondered about the connection that literature has with place? Place has had a large place in writing from authors and poets for centuries. Roberta Hill is a poet who uses a familiar connection between a location and her culture to create strength in her poetry. Some background behind her poem “In the Longhouse, Oneida Museum”, is on the Oneida tribe, the Native American tribe that resided across the Northern United States in the early 1800s. That was until they were forced to sell large portions of their land to the state of New York and white land spectators. Relating to this history, Hill uses figurative language, notably personification, to help the readers grasp the history of the speaker’s culture. She does this by bringing the housing

Using personification, the longhouse is revived from its forgotten place in history by describing it as if it were alive or dead. In Hill’s words, “Those nights when the throat of the furnace wheezed and rattled its regular death” (Hill, 513), it is obvious that a furnace cannot wheeze, but it gives the reader a way to visualize some of the sounds and objects in the longhouse. So not only does personification give the house life, but also character. Hill’s use of personification is also provided in a context that implies her connection to the history and culture of the longhouse. This becomes clear when the speaker remembers the house’s “...roof curving its singing mouth above me”(Hill, 513). The personification is the statement that the roof of the longhouse has a mouth, which is a human quality rather than a building’s. The connection this quote has to culture and heritage, however, is that this is a memory of the poet herself dating back to her childhood and the history of the