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Snapping Beans By Lisa Parker Summary

702 Words3 Pages

In the poem “Snapping Beans”, Lisa Parker uses many different literary devices throughout this poem such as the setting, imagery, symbolism, and exploration of a young person’s experience of moving from home to college life, as well as the difference in the contrast between his or her new point of view and the traditional view that the grandmother has and reflected on in her life. Leaves will fall from being blown from the wind just as people will change, they will grow up and find their own way in life and make it their own. In the first stanza Parker says “I was home for the weekend, from school, from the North” this is suggesting that the setting is in the South (Parker782). The poem is showing the persona of the grandmother and …show more content…

When you snap the bean you are preparing it to cook, can, or freeze and you change the structure and appearance as well. When one goes off to college there is change as well. The grandchild is now becoming an adult and is challenging all the traditional teachings that the grandmother has taught him or her. The grandchild has now found a new, unique and different way of thinking and is still “happy despite it all” (783). The grandchild wants to tell his or her grandmother of the many times that he or she had been “wishing myself home on the evening star” (782). While away at school, the grandchild learns that the evening star is really a planet and wants to tell the grandmother but is not sure if grandmother had enough education to understand the difference between a planet and a star. The conversations between the two doesn’t start till the sunrises which symbolizes the start of something new. In the fifth stanza, the grandchild tell the reader about “the heartsick panels of the quilt”, this shows the reader a connection for the grandchild between the old ways of life and new ways of life, that has been experienced while he or she was away from the grandmother, while being away at college (782). The quilt provides familiarity to the things that he or she has left behind at home while he or she was away at school. The hickory leaf that is

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