The poems I Am Learning to Abandon the World by Linda Pastan and Still Life in Landscape by Sharon Olds are relatively similar in context. In both poems, the persona is the author, and the persona communicates directly with the reader. By using personas, the poems do not have to inform the readers about the narrative or the situation the speaker is in. Nonetheless, these poems differ in appearance and length of lines, number of lines and the poems’ entire apparition. Sharon Olds and Linda Pastan employ a similar tone in their poems; they both employ reflective and melancholic tones. These authors present their thoughts using understandable language and a relatively simple diction. The two poems are relatively similar in that they both address important aspects of life (meaning of life and mortality) and also use imagery and similar tones.
Sharon presents Still Life in Landscape on a confessional tone. The speaker of the poem is a kid. The child recounts an accident incident she witnessed; the accident happened to be a result of drunk driving. The poem’s opening line, “It was night, it had rained,” (Olds) informs the reader that the crash occurred on a rainy night. This poem portrays the reality as is in the contemporary society, and it can be explicated and looked at from different
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The poem is structured in 21 lines and one stanza (Padilla). In her poem, Pastan makes use of easy descriptive language and a straightforward diction to present the poem’s theme, just as Sharon did. Pastan employs symbolic figures of speech in poetry such as similes, figurative language and metaphors. In the poem, the word “world” is a metaphor that symbolizes death. She states, “And the world has taken my father, my friends,” (Pastan, lines 6 and 7) implying that she lost her father and friends to