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The Poem 'Sick' By Peggy Ann Mckay

458 Words2 Pages

When you have a genius idea, sometimes, you don’t use it correctly, and it deflates. Shel Silverstein shows this by writing the poem “Sick”, where little Peggy Ann McKay wants to get out of school for the day, by pretending she has lots of illnesses bundled up with injuries. To be convincing, she talks nonstop, uses poetic devices, and lists many things. At the end, however, she’s told that it is Saturday, just as Peggy is listing potentially lethal conditions. She then replies with “I’m going outside with my friends to play,” as if that was all a lie, which it probably was. The theme is if you’re going to make a lie, make sure that it is believable, makes logical sense, and that it will do what you planned. One thing Peggy carelessly did was say she couldn’t hear. But, soon afterward, she clearly heard from her parents say “Today’s Saturday,” and also responded. Normally, if you were deafened by a disease recently, you probably wouldn’t be able to read lips. This shows that the whole “sick” thing didn’t work. Another thing that Peggy did was initially act as if her face green face, but, as she was going outside upon hearing “today’s Saturday”, there were no signs of her feeling embarrassed about the strange look. This probably …show more content…

It is quite hard to determine whether she followed through as she was listing symptoms, but when she goes outside, a number of contradictions arise. The first, with a broken leg, how is it possible to even walk, or, for that matter, down stairs. Secondly, she doesn’t appear to have had any depth perception problems, even though Peggy went blind in her right eye (which is also likely her “dominant” eye). Third, there is an exclamation mark as she says she is going outside, when she quite recently said that she barely made a whisper from talking. Once again, lies can’t contradict themselves too quickly if they are going to

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