Ode To Dirt By Sharon Olds

We often overlook the simple pleasures in life, such as waking up feeling healthy or being able to breathe clearly through both nostrils. Sharon Olds' "Ode to Dirt" effectively employs literary techniques, including metaphors and personification to demonstrate the speaker's gradual shift in perspective towards dirt. As a result, the speaker begins to appreciate the true value of dirt. Sharon Olds is able to express the speaker's attitude toward dirt through the use of metaphors. An example of this can be seen in line 2, "I thought you were only the background" (Olds, line 2). In these lines, the speaker uses a metaphor to compare dirt to something as irrelevant as the background with the main characters shining in the front. It shows their initial view of dirt and what they saw it as. Olds was able to produce a feeling of realization where the speaker looks back on how they used to think and this mood we're left with was done with pathos because it has a feeling this type of way. However, later throughout the poem, we see that there's nothing but praise for dirt, which demonstrates the speaker's change in perspective.

Here, Olds has the speaker using a metaphor to compare dirt to the skin of the Earth, showing how they themselves view it. This metaphor is important because it's a very different perspective from how they saw dirt in the beginning, with the "background" metaphor at the start of the poem. The speaker used to view dirt differently, as something that wasn't important, but we see by the end just how much they appreciate it. Olds effectively used metaphors to showcase the speaker's attitude toward dirt, but it wasn't just metaphors