Is Tracy Smith's Use Of Figurative Language In Life On Mars

Tracy K. Smith is a poet that thinks outside of the box. This poet uses different types of figurative language in just one word or phrase. Tracy K. Smith’s poems in her book Life on Mars allows the reader to use his or her creativity even more so than other poems to figure out meanings of the poems. In the book Life on Mars I chose the poem “Life on Mars” to breakdown different elements and expose Tracy K. Smith’s techniques of writing. Smith very much loved her father. She also honor’s her father with this book of poems called Life on Mars. An analysis reads that, “There is an actual lens at the heart of the book, too: the Hubble telescope, on which Smith’s father worked as an engineer. He died in 2008; Life on Mars is in part an elegy for him” (Chiasson). Tracy K. Smith admired her father by talking about the kind of father he was not in her poem “Life on Mars.”

An articles states, “After telling his own wife that Elisabeth had run away and joined a cult” (Hodge). The father had the mother thinking that her daughter had abandoned the family to becomes something else. Instead, she was locked in a basement right under her feet. The mother thought her daughter had ran far away nut in reality she was just a few feet away right under her feet. “Life on Mars states, “And his wife upstairs, hearing/ Their clamor underfoot, thinking the house must be/ Settling into itself with age” (Smith 2.11-13). The wife was oblivious to what was going on right beneath her feet, or was she? Tracy K. Smith’s choice of words for lines eleven through thirteen leaves room for thought. The choice of words can tie into the theme. The mother may have known about this because she did hear the noises. She had to have noticed her husband going down their everyday. An old screeching house most definitely does not sound like screaming babies, pleading children, rape, or even child