Poem Analysis: Oranges By Gary Soto

When a person first hears the title “Oranges” by Gary Soto, they might think that it is about a person on an orange farm or someone that newly discovered oranges. In this poem, the speaker talks about how he had met a girl and they walked until they were at a drugstore, they went inside and he bought her chocolate with a nickel and an orange. They were walking, she was eating her chocolate and he was eating an orange, and they were enjoying their time together. Taking chances can often result in good outcomes. Gary Soto uses similes, metaphors, attitude, and varied stanza structure in “Oranges” to highlight the importance of taking chances. In this poem there are many examples of figurative language, such as similes and metaphors. One example of a simile in this poem is when Soto says, “ I turned to the candies / Tiered like bleachers.”(25-26) This is saying how the candy on the racks are perfectly stacked up, just like bleachers. Another example of similes is when Soto says, “Fog hanging like old / Coats between the trees.” This is saying how the fog is just hanging in between the trees like coats on a rack. An example of a metaphor that Gary Soto uses is, “I was making fire in my hands.”(55) The speaker wasn’t actually making fire in his hands, he was just saying that the orange was really bright against the white

There weren’t any major shifts in the poem other than the second part of the poem was more relaxed and less anxious. The structure of the stanzas vary because as soon as you look at the poem without even reading, you can see how the shapes of each stanza are different in sizes. The first stanza of the poem alone is 42 lines but, each line is really short. The second stanza is 14 lines long and the same lengths carry out here as