Isolation In The Poem Elena, By Pat Mora

Imagine, as the social creatures humans are, someone is never able to express feelings, or thoughts, or even just simply communicate. In Pat Mora’s poem “Elena,” she attempts to draw from the experiences of an immigrant losing her ability to communicate effectively with her family to allow readers to feel and grasp this feeling of loneliness. Similarly, Richard Blanco uses the perspective of a gay young man being berated for his personal expression by his very own family. Mora, in her poem “Elena,” utilizes grammar, syntax, and diction to appeal to reader emotion and allows them to fully grasp her thoughts, while Blanco, in his poem “Queer Theory: According to my Grandma,” utilizes isolation and endstop to ridicule the oppression and bluntness

The persona presented is one of a mother of a family who has immigrated to the United States of America, and is slowly losing the ability to talk to her children in Spanish. Pat Mora uses this in order to display the feeling of isolation among someone who can not find a way to communicate with others. So, her use of this persona can allow readers to understand exactly what is trying to be expressed. Similarly, Richard Blanco writes the speaker of his poem “Queer Theory: According to my Grandmother” as recalling the many statements that his grandma states to him. Although they may not be autobiographical stories from the author’s point of view, his LGBTQ+ perspective adds a unique and well warranted side of such a poem. With this, Blanco is able to communicate the meaning of such a poem through this perspective. Overall, the two poems try to critique how others view people with differing

She writes, “My husband frowned, drank more beer” (Mora, 13). She is doing something very interesting here. She uses a grammatically wrong sentence here to emphasize the speaker’s inability to speak correctly, because she canonically does not know English. Similarly, when she uses the word “frowned” she is pointing out the husband’s disappointment for simply attempting to learn English. Mora’s approach here is to shine a light on the speaker’s feelings. The speaker is attempting to learn English to more fully communicate with her husband and children, so to use the word choice of “frowned” really shows how he, firstly, does not care, and secondly, would rather have her not be able to communicate than lose the spanish background. Similarly, she uses syntax, as though she can not properly articulate English grammar, to allow readers to feel as though they also struggle with expressing themselves with the speaker. Both of these devices, syntax and diction, overall emphasize the misunderstanding and isolation feeling this speaker has. Similarly, Blanco begins to list speech implied to have been said by the speaker’s grandmother. He writes, “Never dance alone in your room” (Blanco 55). Here, Blanco utilizes the literary device of endstop to present a quick and snappy thought. Endstop allows for a line to seem as though it is stated plainly without further explanation. In