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The Blue Estuaries Summary

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Books that greet readers at the book store, with their crisp, white pages leading them to extravagant otherworlds, their persuading words within captivating stories luring their readers deeper, are often provokers of reflective and contemplative thought. In Julia Alvarez’s poem, On Not Shoplifting Louise Bogan’s The Blue Estuaries, she tackles the admiration one feels from such unique books and the discovery one makes from them. In this poem, Alvarez uses poetic devices such as metaphors and imagery to portray the main character’s attitude of overpowering awe and inspiration about her discovery of the book, and her love of writing, which convinces her to not keep the book and to develop the love of writing for herself. Imagery is a poetic …show more content…

Here, Alvarez is able to articulate the speaker’s want to take the piece of writing, to own a souvenir of the moment she learned about the joy of poetry. However, the speaker “[saw how] the swans dipped their alphabet necks in the blue black lake” (50-51), and “[the author’s] name blurred underwater, sinking to the bottom” (12-13). Despite being so overwhelmed in awe and inspired by the moment, and desperately wanting to keep it alive with some sort of artifact, Alvarez paints a clear picture: the speaker deeply respects this author, her poetry, and her humble work that is without boast or gloat like the other books on the bookshelf. Then, simply, our speaker “put the book back” (53). Instead of attempting to seize a permanent reminder of the moment, Alvarez uses imagery to convey the speaker’s attitude of awe and inspiration to not take book— which furthers the intensity of deep respect and awe the speaker gains from Louise Bogan, the author, earned inspiring her into her own love of writing. Despite wanting to be a poet likewise, and wanting to keep the book, she puts it back in the end. In sum, Alvarez uses imagery and metaphors to further the speaker’s attitude of her discoveries, one of them being incredible awe and inspiration for the book, then to the happiness she gains from writing— thus inspiring her to become a poet herself. She then experiences humbled awe and inspiration to not commit theft and to respect the one who gave her so much power for her own

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