The Mosque Poem

Poetry is a powerful tool in that it enables a poet to express his or her ideas and feelings in a unique manner depending on the poetic style and device he or she employs. Poems can cover a myriad of topics from personal encounters to one’s reactions to experiences; through these narratives one can reflect his or her own ethnic identity or another the ethnic identity of another person. Ethnical identity refers to one’s belong to a group a due to common connections such as culture, language, or religion. In my poem, “The Mosque” I narrate my feelings and perspective while touring a mosque for my world religion class shortly after a string of ISIS supported terrorist attacks; I strived to convey the anxiety and uncertainty that I felt due

Dove’s poem is a free verse poem meaning that it does not have a set structure, meter, or rhyme scheme. Writing the poem in free verse enables Dove to focus the poem on the entrapment that the women in the poem fells as a result of her material role and how she yearns to escape the environment, if even just for a brief period of time. I choose to write my poem in free verse also because I wished to mimic the effect that it develops in the poem. I wanted to clearly emphasize the nervousness and uncomfortableness that I felt prior to touring the mosque due to ignorance to the truth and acceptance of popular Islamic stereotypes. I believe that using a set structure, rhyme scheme, and meter would have been a distraction from the central focus of the poem. Moreover, I believe that using a set rhyme scheme would have matched the mood of the poem and would have caused it to lose the sincerity that I would trying to develop throughout the

In her poem “Daystar”, Dove does employ some visual imagery however, she does not utilize any specific poetic device such as similes, metaphors, or hyperboles. Primarily, I utilized similes and metaphors as they allowed me to strengthen the imagery of the line by comparisons two unlike things and in doing so emphasize a particular characteristic and mannerism that the two seemingly very different objects share. For example, the line that says I was “shaking with fear like a twig in the wind” as the tour began combines a simile with a hyperbole in order to emphasize the amount of fear and uncertainty that I was experience at that point in the experience (Tarbrake 7). Additionally, in the last line I write: to break the chain tethering her to all those misguiding stereotypes about Islam (Tarbrake 21). In this metaphor, I compare my lack of understanding of the Islamic religion to a chain to stress how dangerous ignorance in that it can tether one down and cause him or her to be afraid to explore the unknown. Furthermore, I utilize a hyperbole when I say “she spent infinite hours searching the web” in order to stress the amount of time spent researching further into the religion and by using this hyperbole I emphasize how interest I have become in actually learning the religion and not just relying on the